Children at War

I came across this article today - thought it really interesting and worth posting - touches on so much of the things we all share and need to look into:
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Children at War, by John Burns – The Georgia Straight Vol. 41 (Mar. 15-22 ’07)

Ishmael Beah is a cheerful guy. You can hear it in his voice – even on an echoey cell phone from Brooklyn. And why not? He’s 26, with a political-science degree in his pocket and the world by the tail: he’s been on the cover of the New York Times Magazine and a guest on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. His first book, A Long Way Gone (Douglas & McIntyre, $26.95), debuted on the Times nonfiction list a few weeks back at No. 2. Even Starbucks is distributing it.

He wasn’t always so happy, though. A Long Way Gone tells in a very personal and moving way of his months fleeing rebel forces in his native Sierra Leone, then of his years press-ganged in his country’s army – cranked on coke, with an AK-47 in his hands and fear in his heart. This all before he turned 16.

Beah isn’t interested in judging who was right and who was wrong in the civil war that bloodied his West African national throughout the 1990s – A Long Way Gone indicts both sides of the conflict. Rather, he seems to bring a dispassionate evenhandedness to his first-person depiction of life in a land gone mad with bloodlust, paranoia, and despair. And, as might be expected, his story will both break your heart and horrify you. Beah was only one of the 300,000 child soldiers that the UN believes to be operating at any given moment around the world, but his account draws out the horror of using children in such a profoundly unnatural- and illegal – way. (He’s coming to Vancouver for a free discussion of the issues on Mar 29; for details, visit www.ubc.ca/talkofthetown/.)

His first firefight with rebel soldiers, at age 13, begins: “I have never been so afraid to go anywhere in my life as I was that day … Tears had begun to form in my eyes, but I struggled to hide them and gripped my gun for comfort.” Within just three pages: “I raised my gun and killed a man. Suddenly, as if someone was shooting them inside my brain, all the massacres I had seen since the day I was touched by war began flashing in my head. Every time I stopped shooting to change magazines and saw my two young lifeless friends, I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people. I shot everything that moved, until we were ordered to retreated because we needed another strategy.”

During the course of an hour long conversation, Beah is generous with his memories of that terrible time, and speaks affectingly about his feelings regarding the use of child soldiers around the world, about the impulse that reconciles murderers and their victims’ families, and about the leadership role that the international community and western media could play (but don’t always) in countries like Sierra Leone. He’s also resolutely upbeat. “It was difficult writing this book,” he acknowledges with some understatement. (He’s admitted elsewhere to ongoing nightmares and the need to check a room’s exists.) “And editing it was the worst because I had to relive it every time.” Then he laughs. “But it’s a small price for me to pay to remember, to have this pain. For me, that’s how I look at it. For me, in my life, what I’ve come to learn, it’s people’s passion, people’s commitment to just be nice to me. That’s what made me survive all of this; it’s what made me be who I am. So for me, that inspired me to say, like, ‘You know what? I also have to do something selflessly for people to benefit other people.”

Participating in sorties with assault rifle or rocket propelled grenade launcher, snorting “brown-brown” (a mix of cocaine and gun-powder) and taking mysterious whilte pills “for energy”, giving up on not just safety but freedom of movement and thought too – these were some of the costs Beah paid for falling prey to the Sierra Leone war and spending years in the bush.

Given the daily atrocities, it’s astonishing how much Beah believes in forgiveness. Even after the UNICEF rehabilitation he describes in A Long Way Gone it’s astonishing. Yet forgiveness is the key, he believes, to making sense of his experience and that of all the thousands like him.

“You have to choose what to believe in at some point in your life,” he explains. “You can either believe that there is hope, that some people are capable of changing, or you can believe that we are all doomed, that no one cares. And that’s a choice that everyone has to make. But I feel that if you have a choice of hope – you’re hoping something – then actually you give a chance for things to transform.

“In the context of war, especially in Sierra Leone, there were days and times that it seemed so hopeless you would just stop. And if you just stopped and said, “You know, I’m not running anymore from this war. I’m just going to stand here because there’s no point in going,’ you will die because of this, you know? In the midst of this madness, people always find a shred of hope to hold on to because it is the thing that gives you the strength to carry on, to live through another day.”

This tenacity of spirit is particularly remarkable coming from someone who was so young during the conflict. The use of children as soldiers is endemic throughout Africa, this despite international law. (The recruitment of children became a war crime in 2002; the first charge was brought against Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo in January.) Sierra Leone is signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which bans the practice, yet Sierra Leone’s own Truth and Reconciliation Commission findings report that “The Sierra Leonean conflict, perhaps more than any other conflict, was characterized by the brutal strategy, employed by most of the armed factions, of forcing children into combat … All the armed groups pursued a policy of deliberately targeting children.”

Canada is playing a role in the global response to the recruitment of children as soldiers. Romeo Dallaire, the onetime general whose ruinous experience as a UN peacekeeper in Rwanda has been much publicized, has turned his attention to the issue. Dallaire, now a senator, is partnering with international NGOs on a project called Reframing the Dialogue: Eliminating the Use of Children as Soldiers. Dallaire was speaking about the topic as long ago as 2001, when eh told the Hamilton Spectator: “Children kill because they are afraid of others who will kill them, or they have developed a desire to retain the power of the small arms and the weapons they have.” Drunk or drugged, he said, they shoot “beyond any semblance of discipline, any semblance of logic, any semblance of humanness”.

Reframing the Dialogue began last August with a conference in Winnipeg that gathered experts and former child soldiers to give input on a next generation war-games simulation Dallaire is working on. “Most of the simulation systems that are out there are for combat or outright conflict.” He told the Winnipeg Free Press. “Not many of them have the softer dimensions like humanitarian dimensions.” All this to extract children from battle: “If [a leader] is using children, what’s the counter-measure you’re using against the children to reduce their effectiveness?” he asked.

From Beah’s point of view, he lost more than safety when he picked up that AK-47. He lost childhood itself. “To this day, there are a lot of people who are going to be adults who don’t trust adults anymore,” he says, pointing out that children lost faith not just in adults’ authority but in their culture as well. “Like, for example, you were in villages where there were people who were supposed to have some form of magic or kind of way to communicate with their ancestors directly so that they can protect the village. So when the war came to town, people said to them, “How can you not protect us if you have this kind of power?”

For Gernald Caplan, there is a larger cost that such societies must pay, even after the last bullet has been fired. Caplan is a public-policy analyst and academic living in Richmond Hill, Ontario. The principal author of two UNICEF reports on the status of children in Africa and an on-line instructor for the UN’s University of Peace, Caplan is candid in a call to the Straight, questioning how easily the cycle of violence can really be broken. “You’re talking about tens of thousands of people – in this case, children,” he says. “Who can image what’s in their minds? Look at Ishmael. I like saying in speeches that a shooting in a school in Alberta will bring in more counselors than in all of Rwanda or all of Liberia. And I think it’s probably literally true. You bring in 8, 10. How many exist? In Rwanda, they don’t even know how many psychologists they have. How many kids get treated in Sierra Leone when they come in from the rebel movement? And where do they live?

Without adequate follow-up, returning to the killing fields is all too possible, he says. “I’ve always thought that we completely underestimate how attractive it is to become a soldier. If you’re a kid in a poor village in a crummy school and suddenly you get the adventure of a gun, and comrades, and solidarity, and a lot of nice dope, I don’t think it’s a big question what you’re going to do…that’s a very attractive life – until it’s not an attractive life. But for a while it sure seems better than what you had. And that remains a lure when you come out and they allegedly rehabilitate you and you turn in your gun. What have you got? I fear, not much.

“I don’t say this just rhetorically. It’s an astonishing problem that I don’t see an answer to. They have no capacity to create good schools, good teachers, and vaguely meaningful – I don’t even like to use that kid of bullshit liberal word – vaguely fulfilling jobs once you graduate.”
Beah is also familiar with these risks. As he told UNICEF delegates at a conference in Paris in February, “You have to find a way so that they are able to go t school or feel strongly that they can provide for themselves. If not, they know how to use a gun. And there is a conflict next door that is offering $100 a day and all you can loot, and they will go back to that.”

You won’t learn much about the causes of Sierra Leone’s civil war from A Long Way Gone, which makes sense, since Beah was only 12  at the outset. In conversation, he explains: “What I wanted to do was tell the story of where I was at that particular time and how it felt, so in that sense I wanted to bring people to the landscape of Sierra Leone in such a vivid way that they become part of what was going on there – disregarding the context of politics, the context of government, the context of history. Because what happened in my case, and to a lot of people, is that while you were in the war, the people whose lives were touched by the war had nothing to do with politics, had nothing to do with history or any of that stuff. But their lives were severely damaged.” This is abundantly true for Beah, whose family is killed by rebels early in the account and who is forced to choose between signing on with the government forces and being killed himself. It’s a choice he makes quickly, if not easily.

And though western readers might question whether or not they would have been willing and able to fall into the whirlpool of drugs and killing htat overwhelmed Sierra Leone at that time, Beah is adamant that by putting his own story front and centre he’s tapping in a universal instinct for survival: “I wanted to humanize it because these things happen so far away, it’s very easy for people to just dismiss it and say, “Oh, it happened to Africans, it happened to Asians, it happened to Colombians’ – things like that. When you personalize it, when you let people see the humanity of the people who lived there, then I think it tells something, it humanizes it in the sense that it’s not so far away anymore. You know?”

Sierra Leone’s bloody war is closer to home than many Vancouverites realize. As the ‘recent film Blood Diamond makes clear, the country’s wealth of resources did nothing to slow the fighting. After the end of the civil war in 2002, Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission ruled that “the exploitation of diamonds was not the cause of the conflict in Sierra Leone, but rather fuelled the conflict as diamonds were used by most of the armed forces to finance and support their war efforts.”  Madelaine Drohan, an Ottawa-based journalist, followed the money trails leading from Sierra Leone’s diamond concessions and found that one of them led to Vancouver’s West End. In her excellent Making a Killing: How and Why Corporations Use Armed Force to Do Business (Random House Canada, 2003), Drohan introduced Rakesh Saxena, an Indian-born financier who agreed to pay up to US $10 million for diamond rights so a private security army could reinstate the Sierra Leone government in exile – all while under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to Thailand on unrelated financial charges.

Drohan’s book makes a compelling case that foreign companies – including Canadian ones – profit from resource extraction in hot spots without contributing to domestic infrastructure; when they leave, countries teeter. Sierra Leone is no exception, though the diamond trade is only one ingredient in the recipe for the slaughter, which the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research described as “one of the nastiest wars the world has witnessed in the last five decades…
The country turned from a ‘stable’, corrupted and mismanaged State into a scene of frightening brutality, one of the great human tragedies of the twentieth century.”

Beah is passionate that the world should learn from the mistake of his country. “If history has taught us anything,” he says, “it’s that when we ignore certain things, they eventually cycle to some extent, it becomes something. America ignored a lot of what was happening in the Middle East, the Arab world, and what happened is it became a problem that they cannot tackle easily.”

The international community needs to play a more aggressive role in monitoring domestic unrest, he feels. “If somebody is doing something terrible and the British government, the prime-minister, stood up somewhere and said: ‘I am directly speaking to this to this rebel leader in so-and-so country,’ or American leader: ‘If you do not stop, I’m telling those people I will be coming after you,’ people will stop because people are afraid of these nations. But you don’t even get that from any of those countries…Warlords and other people have come to believe that no one cares, that people are turning a blind eye to it, so that’s what I’m saying. For example, during the case of Rwanda, America didn’t need to go into Rwanda, they just needed to call to raise the signal at some point. There’s not even enough political will to do something that doesn’t even require very much, because people are so detached from it.”

Policy analyst Caplan is more cynical: “A Canadian journalist in Africa whose name I won’t use but who you will know immediately once wrote me and said, ‘Shouldn’t I write a piece … demanding that [Ugandan president Yoweri] Museveni either stop what’s going on in Acholiland in the north or we will cut off aid?’ I said, You’re telling me you wnt Tony Blair and Bush to act as moral authorities?’ I was furious. I said, ‘So on the one hand, they go out and murder and slaughter. And then the next day they decide they can tell African leaders what they can do’ … I consider the West the problem, right? So I don’t give us the moral authority to go around telling Africans what to do. But then, who will?”

For Beah, international scrutiny can be a good thing, if it’s brought to bear within the full context of Sierra Leone’s particular challenges and history. “Sometimes we focus so much, especially when it comes to Africa … on the negative parts. But the thing I keep saying to people,  “The way people speak about Africa, sometimes it almost seems that no one lives there, because there’s absolutely nothing good happening there.’ For example, in Sierra Leone there are people – and in Rwanda there are people – who live next door to people who have killed their entire family. They have forgiven them; they are friends with them. There are families who have adopted and taken in kids who have massacred part of their family. People don’t speak about these things.

“When Sierra Leone was at the peak of violence, when everything was so bad, that’s when there were so many cameras there. It was newsworthy to be in Sierra Leone because there was, like, the best news theme there. So, “Record the madness that is happening in Africa so far away.” But then the war ends, which is the aftermath, which is the most crucial part, the most important part, and no one is there. Everyone leaves. Because Iraw is the next stop. We’re not exciting anymore. It’s very sickening.”

Beah believes an informed citizenry can put pressure on its government to act with honour, particularly in forcing countries to abide by international law. But, more fundamentally, he recommends we seize for its ephemeral beauty.

“If there’s anything the war taught me, it’s that you never know what’s going to happen in the next move. You know? You never know. This is not to say, “So hope for the worst.” What I’m saying is it could go either way. You could go left, you could go right, you could go up or down – you never know. You never know what’s going to happen the next day. It’s very important to be aware of that, you know? To be really, fully aware of that.”