Ishmael Beah spent his early years playing soccer, listening to hip-hop and attending school in his village of Mogbwemo, Sierra Leone. But by the age of 13, he was fighting alongside other children in a bloody civil war that would claim the lives of thousands.
Last Tuesday, Beah told his story of survival to a packed house at USM’s Abromson Center as a guest speaker for the annual Douglas M. Schair Memorial Lecture on Genocide and Human Rights.
“Children were used to perpetuate violence,” Beah said. “We lost the ability to exhibit any human emotion.”
The civil war that tore the West African nation of Sierra Leone into rival factions in the early 1990’s left many youths parentless and on the run from army groups who recruited young boys to fight for them, controlling them with revenge rhetoric and combinations of powerful narcotics.
Beah’s own life changed forever as fighting broke out in his village and he was forced to flee into the jungle, constantly on the move, trying to stay clear from the bullets that destroyed his family and friends.
“People don’t understand the reality of war,” Beah told the audience, estimated at over 1,000. “If you only see a war in the way the media presents it, you are getting a skewed view.”
Human Rights Watch, the world’s leading non-governmental research group, estimates that currently tens of thousands of children are involuntarily recruited into military service to fight in civil wars across the globe.
Beah’s effort to spread awareness has taken him across the U.S. and to parts of the globe, speaking in front of audiences to show how there is hope for former child soldiers. The popular view that child soldiers will never be able to reintegrate as functioning members of society is a myth that he has been working to disprove.
“It is possible to regain one’s humanity,” Beah said. And he is proof that it is possible to go from being a indoctrinated child soldier, to having a normal, happy life.
His 2007 memoir, “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soldier,” details his harrowing experience of being torn from his family, his escape into the jungle, and his forced integration into the government army.
After being rescued by UNICEF at 16, Beah moved to the U.S. in 1998, finishing his last two years of high school in NYC at the United Nations International School. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2004 and currently lives in New York.
Seven years have passed since the civil war in Sierra Leone ended, yet the effects are still having a dramatic impact on how the country functions. Libby Hoffman, founder and president of Catalyst for Peace, a Portland, ME based foundation that identifies and supports community based peace building around the world, introduced the film “Fambul Tok” – Creole for ‘family talk,” which was shown after Beah spoke.
The film, still in rough-cut, focuses on the work that’s currently being done in Sierra Leone, bringing victims and perpetrators of the war together to reconcile and reunite.
“The idea that there is nothing that can be done for child soldiers is a misconception,” Beah said, “We are not a lost generation.”
More information about Beah and his memoir can be found at: www.alongwaygone.com
To find out more facts about child soldiers in the world, check out the Human Rights Watch web site: www.hrw.org
Catalyst for Peace web site: www.catalystforpeace.org