Saturday, February 12, 2022

Boy Soldier

 


We ran for hours, deeper into the forest. The path had ended, but we kept running until the sky swallowed the sun and gave birth to the moon...

This must be one of the most harrowing real-life stories I have read so far.

It is about a twelve-year-old boy who loves reggae music, dancing, and hanging out with his friends. All of a sudden his world is turned up side down by an armed gang that attacks his village. The villagers scatter and run for their lives, leaving the boy gets separated from his family. While trying to escape a civil war, he ends up getting forced into becoming a combatant himself - part of a gang of teenage boys wielding machetes and AK-47s, marauding villages, killing innocent people as a form of revenge, or simply for fun - the oppressed becoming oppressors themselves.

I stood holding my gun and felt special because I was part of something that took me seriously and  I was not running from anyone, anymore...We were simply told to follow the path until we received instructions on what to do next. We walked for long hours and stopped only to eat sardines and corned beef with fari, sniff cocaine, brown-brown, and take some white pills...

A few years later, while this war of attrition is still dragging on, a UNICEF vehicles roll into their camp. The younger boys are taken away to a rehab centre where most of the children are just not able to adjust to a life without drugs and guns. Most of them revert back to fighting, but one, somehow escapes because of one dedicated, thoughtful nurse. This is is the story of that one boy - Ishmael.

"None of these things are your fault", she would always say sternly at the end of every conversation. Even though I had heard that phrase from every staff member - and frankly I had always hated it - I began that day to believe it...

Ishmael Beah's memoir, "A Long Way Gone", is centred around Siera Leone of the 1990s. A country with a population of just over 8 million, and an area that covers double the size of Kerala. Here the mistrust between various tribes and political factions boils over into a full blown civil war. 

Mourning the dead wasn't part of the business of killing and trying to stay alive...Little did I know that surviving the war that I was in, or any other kind of war, was not a matter of feeling trained or brave...

This is the story of just one among the 300,000 children across 20 countries who end up as soldiers on the frontlines of war. According to the UN, up to 40 percent of these are girls. Come to think of it,  perhaps it is a miracle that even a few of them manage to get back their childhoods, and return some semblance of a normal life.

This book is a small but vital window opening into a world we do not know much about. A place where brutality is on a loop, and where peace is an aberration, an abnormal state of affairs. 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* UNICEF - Children recruited by armed forces or armed groups - https://www.unicef.org/protection/children-recruited-by-armed-forces

* Sierra Leone on the CIA World Factbook - https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/static/b0a107fb587d45dbfc17e74a6dd39c4f/SL-summary.pdf

* HRW - Child Soldiers -  https://www.hrw.org/topic/childrens-rights/child-soldiers

* UN -  https://www.un.org/youthenvoy/2015/02/4-10-child-soldiers-girls/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Leone

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