Dude, where’s my childhood?

I’ve just finished a brilliant book which I can thoroughly recommend: A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. It is the heart-wrenching autobiography of a former child soldier from Sierra Leone, a brutally honest account of how, after being forced to flee his village and losing his family, he is conscripted into the army to defend the country against a rebel uprising.

Putting it mildly, there are parts of the text that are really quite horrific but I was surprised at how easy it was to read and how it improved my understanding of the situation these children find themselves in. I thought it would also be good research since Liberia (which borders Sierra Leone) went through a similarly gruesome civil conflict in which children were often those fighting on the front line. It can be argued that Sierra Leone’s civil war was almost a spill-over effect of Liberia’s and many of those conscripted into the rebellion were in fact Liberian mercenaries.

The lack of a sense of belonging and a thirst to avenge the murder of his family combined with the almost constant shadow of fear and nauseating hunger made it easy for a charismatic lieutenant to persuade Ishmael and his friends to take up arms. Children don’t have the same self-preserving sense of fear as adults, especially when they’re given copious amounts of drugs (mainly brown-brown, a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder) and put into a situation where it’s ‘kill or be killed’. This makes them ideal fighting machines.

One of the most telling lines in the book is when the lieutenant says to Ishmael, as he is packing his bag: “Make sure you take as much ammo as you can carry. Don’t worry about food and water. As long as you have ammo you will have food and water”. It certainly doesn’t seem like the author holds back on many of the gory details. He describes in depth the first time he kills someone on the battlefield and how it makes him feel as well as how he ruthlessly tortured and executed prisoners with the encouragement of his commanders.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book though is when he recounts the rehabilitation process. He is rescued from the army by Unicef and placed in a home together with other child soldiers. At first, chaos ensues. The rehabilitation workers don’t seem to realise that they have put children from both of the warring factions together in the same room. They immediately start fighting and killing each other and attacking members of staff. It is hard for the children to understand why they have been taken away from their regiments and they resent having to obey orders from ‘civilians’ who continuously tell them their behaviour is “not their fault”.

Many of the development projects currently being undertaken in Liberia are linked to this DDRR process (Demobilisation, Disarmament, Rehabilitation and Reintegration). In fact, the proposals I have been working on since I arrived are specifically targeted at young people in rural areas, many of whom are former combatants. The aim is to provide the skills training and inputs necessary for them to feed themselves and earn a living without needing to resort to armed violence.

Ishmael Beah, who is about a year younger than me, now lives in New York City with an adoptive mother and works for the organisation Human Rights Watch. He has given numerous lectures at the UN and across the globe on the issue of children in war. He describes writing the book as a form of therapy that helped him to understand and come to terms with the acts he participated in that robbed him of his childhood.