ISHMAEL BEAH INTERVIEW - Wednesday 8th August, 2007
GEORGE NEGUS: Ishmael and Jo thank you very much for giving us
your time, Ishmael can I ask you this, you were recruited as a child
soldier at 13. You are now 26. Is it really all behind you or is it the
case what you are doing, campaigning against the whole idea of child
soldiers is almost therapy for you. Is it really behind you?
ISHMAEL BEAH, FORMER CHILD SOLDIER: Well I think behind is not
the
thing. I think this experience I have to live with for the rest of my
life in terms of the memories of it. It's what I do with it. There are
a lot of people think of healing as forgetting. You can't put it behind
you in that way. It is therapeutic in a sense because of lack of a
better word, because it allows me to understand the situation more and
to continually know the need for why I need to share my story and for
other people who have survived it need to share the story, so the
people can see the possibilities of recovery as well.
GEORGE NEGUS: For the rest of us who have never been through
what you
have been through, how and why did it happen to you and as we now know,
hundreds of thousands of other children throughout the world?
ISHMAEL BEAH: When war starts, eventually children will get
recruited.
In most of these countries, the large number of the population is youth
and so basically in Sierra Leone particularly that I know of, the war
started because of political corruption which led to people being
extremely poor to the point that a war came along to fix, to rectify
those problems but that didn't work, you know. As often wars start with
good reasons and the reasons get lost along the way. In different
countries it's different, the reasons why wars start and why children
are dragged into war. Generally what happens to children, it's the same
in a way.
GEORGE NEGUS: Could you put your finger on how you became
recruited?
ISHMAEL BEAH: When the war started, you know, in 1991, I
hadn't reached
to my part of the country. Several years after that it came to my part
of the country. My town was destroyed, my family was killed. I started
running away from this war. So, you know, as a young person you are
hopeless, there is nowhere to go. Everything had collapsed and as time
goes on, I was compromised in the sense, I had no choice, it was either
be a part of this group or be killed. Once you are dragged into this
group, as time goes on with the drugs, the trauma, the constant
exposure to violence, your life becomes this reality, that you accept
it fully, that once it was very impossible to do, now you find yourself
capable of doing. You actually come to look at these groups, the
commanders, the squad that your in, as your surrogate family because
you have lost everything that is dear to you.
GEORGE NEGUS: Is it possible to summarise your situation by
saying you
are almost left with a choice between becoming a killer, which you did,
or being killed?
ISHMAEL BEAH: Well that is not much of a choice but, yes, in
short
that's what it is. You either kill or you are killed. Not only that,
not only who did determine the enemy, if you didn't carry out what the
commanders wanted to do, they would kill you. Everyone in your squad
will kill you if you didn't do what you wanted to do.
GEORGE NEGUS: Jo, is the world largely sitting on its hands
where this
issue is concerned? The UN have been involved, you have been involved,
all sorts of bodies and institutions have been making the right noises
about this whole issue. Do we not want to come to grips with the fact
that this horrendous atrocity is occurring on a daily basis in any
number of countries around the world?
JO BECKER, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: There are still 20 countries
where
children are actively fighting and dying in armed conflict. Clearly
it's still a tremendous problem that we have to confront. But at the
same time we are making some real progress. In the last 10 years
treaties have been adopted that prohibit the use of children under the
age of 18 in armed conflict. Today over half of the world's Government
have ratified these treaties. We see child recruiters for the very
first time being prosecuted as war criminals.
GEORGE NEGUS: Ishmael, your commanders, the people who
recruited you
and that you lived and killed with, if you like, for those years, did
you get a sense that they felt they were doing anything wrong or did
they just think that was the order of thing, grabbing children off the
streets literally and turning them into soldiers it was fine?
ISHMAEL BEAH: To them it was fine and I think at that point
when they
are in that mind set, it becomes the reality that is acceptable. One of
the reasons why you know to make a child into a killer, you have to
take everything that there is, destroy their communities and their
families and drug them up. The fact that you have to basically make
them into something else for them to function in that light shows that
of their own volition they can not perform these things. To follow up
on what Jo is saying, I think it is absolutely important, a lot of
people when they think of the use of children in war, they are thinking
of only the internal factors that cause it. That's rightly so, but
there are also external factors. Even though people are being
prosecuted internally, that started the war, there is a need to look at
the external factors and those people who participate in supporting
wars, for those people to be brought to justice. Because together, we
cannot find a holistic solution to this.
GEORGE NEGUS: You seem to be saying we are not going to get to
the root
cause or solve the problem until we get to the root cause of the war
situation that children like yourself found themselves in?
JO BECKER: That's part of it. Part of it is also looking at
what
leverage we have against the governments and armed groups using child
soldiers and how we can use that leverage to get them to stop. One
example is that world wide of the 20 countries where child soldiers are
being used, in nine of them, governments are involved, either by
recruiting children into their own forces or by supporting militias or
para-military groups that use children. Of these 9 governments, 8 of
them are receiving military assistance from the United States. So one
initiative, for example, there is a now a bill pending in US Congress
that would actually cut off US military assistance to any Government
that is involved in the recruitment or use of child soldiers and that
is the kind of thing that governments can do to really put pressure on
the perpetrators to make them take a second look at their practises and
take action to stop it.
GEORGE NEGUS: Jo, you have actually described Ishmael
as a perfect
example of how children can come out the other side. Can you explain
what you meant by that?
JO BECKER: I think one of the challenges in dealing with this
issue of
child soldiers is that people look at the horrific experiences that
many child soldiers have gone through and they wonder, you know, is
this a child who can ever recover, is there someone who can become a
productive member of civilian society. There is a dangerous temptation
there, to write-off former child soldiers as irreparable or for ever
damaged and I think one of the really powerful effects that Ishmael has
had on the international public is illustrating to people that no,
former child soldiers are not irredeemable, that it is possible to live
through a horrific experience like that and still reclaim your
humanity.
GEORGE NEGUS: For every Ishmael I imagine that there are a lot
of other
children who don't come out the other side?
JO BECKER: For children who have been used as soldiers, the
challenges
are enormous. Even if they come out of a war situation with their lives
and their health intact, many of them have been deprived of an
education for years, they may not have access to their family, they
need a means to support themselves. For girls, there is an added burden
because many of them have been sexually exploited and may have babies
that have been borne out of forced relationships with their commanders.
What we really need is a stronger commitment on behalf of the
international community to provide that assistance to these children.
GEORGE NEGUS: Ishmael let's talk about that.
ISHMAEL BEAH: If I can interject for a second. Often times
people look
at me and perhaps think there is an Ishmael formula. There is no such
thing. Each child heels differently. I didn't just come out of the war
and came here and wrote a book. It took me many many years. It took me
initially 8 months to even get a foothold to rejoin civilian live.
People need to be aware there is a process that comes with healing.
It's not an emergency step, it's not something you can battle easily.
You cannot bring a child back into civilian life, to regain their
humanity, it requires the undoing of a lot of things that you have been
conditioned to believe, because after that experience you lose trust in
your own humanity and the humanity of other people and other people's
kindness. I was extremely lucky to have people who genuinely cared for
me and look at me as another human being regardless of my experience
and gave me opportunities. Not many get that. A lot of kids go to
rehabilitation and when they are finished, there is nothing they can do
with their lives and they go back to the groups that they came from.
GEORGE NEGUS: You are not worried about the people who are
cynically
suspicious and saying this guy is almost too good to be true?
ISHMAEL BEAH: That is their problem. I have had people like
that asking
questions like: So, why don't you write about these other people. I
wrote about my experience. That's all I can do.
GEORGE NEGUS: Is going back do Sierra Leone out of the
question for
you?
ISHMAEL BEAH: No, it's not out of the question for me at all.
Sierra
Leone is where I am from and the land that I hold dearly. One of the
reason I wrote this book, is to show a lot of people who didn't know
about Sierra Leone during the war. They know it as only a violent place
and it has not always been like that. It will not be like that for
ever. It's a place that I love dearly. I was there last year and I will
go back whenever I get a chance, it is my homeland.
GEORGE NEGUS: Jo, thank you for your time, Ishmael, thank you
for your
time