Former child soldier to speak in Columbia this week

Ishmael Beah has developed storytelling skills to bring about awareness.

By Andrew Denney

Published Feb. 17, 2009

A former child soldier from Sierra Leone, who has since become a storyteller, will make several appearances this week in Columbia to discuss his experiences.

Ishmael Beah, who moved to the U.S. in 1998, will appear with his American adoptive mother, Laura Simms, at story-telling sessions, seminars and film screenings this week to discuss issues of human rights, specifically the conscription of children in the world's trouble spots for the purposes of servitude or soldiering.

Kind Crone Productions Event Coordinator Mary Green, who organized the events with Beah and Simms, said the issue is something activist groups in the U.S., such as Stop the Traffik, have succeeded in bringing to the attention of the public but said the problem has accelerated in recent years.

"A lot of people don't know the extent of the problem," Green said.

According to Human Rights Watch, child soldiers are being used in at least 15 countries and territories, six of which are in Africa. According to a report released by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, children were used as soldiers in 17 armed conflicts throughout the world in 2007.

In his book, "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soldier," Beah tells the story of how, at age 13, he was forced to become a soldier for the Sierra Leone Army. At that time, Sierra Leone was locked in a civil war with a rebel group called the Revolutionary United Front, a conflict that began in 1991 and officially ended in 2002. Beah and other children his age were armed by the government and were forced to take "brown brown," a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder, and they were forced to kill rebels for the army or be killed.

Green said it is an environment in which normal life for these children is impossible.

"They're dealing with survival issues," Green said. "It's not like they have a choice in the matter."

At age 17, Beah was rescued from the army by UNICEF and was rehabilitated. Simms said she met Beah at a UNICEF conference, and spent the next one and a half years trying to bring him to the U.S.

Now at age 28, Beah works as an advocate for child soldiers and serves on the Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Division Advisory Committee. He lives in New York. Simms said, that though Beah is a writer, he is also a "brilliant orator."

"I think he speaks from his heart," she said. "He speaks about his experience with great care."

Simms said Beah's oratory style draws from a long tradition of storytelling in Africa. Beah is fluent in English but also speaks one of Sierra Leone's tribal languages, Mende, which Simms said is a metaphorical and visual language.

Simms said Beah's accounts of war and violence are not sensationalized or romanticized, as many of those types of stories tend to be.

"He tells it from beyond the drama," Simms said. "It's not like a bad B-movie where you leave excited by violence and blood."