There are 300,000 child soldiers fighting in more than 30 countries in the world, with most dependent on drugs and their AK-47s. Ishmael Beah was one such teenager. He tells his story to Rosita Boland.
Sierra Leone-born Ishmael Beah is 26, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He sits opposite me in a noisy restaurant in London's SW7, five minutes from Knightsbridge, its proximity signalled by the number of people carrying distinctive green and gold Harrods bags. He's signing my copy of his best-selling book, A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier; a huge confident looping signature that takes up half the flyleaf. It's the first time I've ever knowingly asked a killer to sign a book.
In 1993, when Beah was 12, he left his home village of Mogbwemo in Sierra Leone, a country which was then in the early stages of a horrible civil war, largely the result of internal government corruption. Beah set out to walk 16 miles with his friends for an overnight trip to a talent show in the town of Mattru Jong. They had formed a rap band when they were eight and were now keen to compete in public. Beah said goodbye to his father, his mother, his little brother Ibrahim, to his friends and next-door neighbours. He did not know it as he walked away from Mogbwemo that day, but he would never see any of them alive again.
That afternoon, civil war reached his village, when the rebels came silently out of the forest and decimated it; the news was carried to Beah by the few shocked survivors who arrived in Mattru Jong the next day.
For several months, Beah and his friends lived as feral children, moving through the forest from abandoned village to abandoned village. They ate whatever they could find - mostly coconuts - and tried to avoid being seen by either the advancing rebel army, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), or the government army. They witnessed frequent scenes of death, torture and terror. They were traumatised and often on the point of starvation.
This week, the war-crimes trial finally began in the Hague of Charles Taylor, Liberia's former president. He stands trial for his alleged role in directing the RUF rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone. To finance his own army in Liberia, he joined forces with the RUF in 1991. According to the indictment, Taylor sold Sierra Leonese diamonds on behalf of the RUF and gave them military supplies and equipment in return.
Inevitably, being without family, Beah and his friends were eventually recruited into the government army, which was protecting one of the villages in which they had taken shelter. There was no choice: join up or leave and be killed by the rebels. As Beah writes in his lucid, disturbing memoir of those ghastly years as a child soldier: "We had no choice. Leaving the village was as good as being dead."
He was given an AK-47, a short lesson in the fastest way to bayonet someone (he won a competition for this shortly after), and a constant supply of marijuana and "brown-brown" - cocaine cut with gunpowder. For the next two years, he became an efficient, drug-fuelled killing machine, nicknamed "the snake" because he could infiltrate villages so "sneakily".
Ishmael Beah looks years younger than 26 on the outside and must be years older on the inside. He orders his food with insouciance, choosing a combination from the set lunch and the a la carte menu that the waitress doesn't much like, but agrees to. He speaks quickly, articulately and with utter confidence.
His memoir was published in February in the US, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and has been a bestseller there ever since: it has just been published in Britain by Fourth Estate. There's been an extract in the New York Times magazine, an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and a high-profile endorsement by Starbucks, who are selling it inter-state in all their coffeeshops - only the second book to be sold by the company this way.
"No, I am not sure how many copies have been sold," Beah says, shrugging. "You'll have to ask the publisher. I just wrote the book." Actually, A Long Way Gone has already sold half a million copies in the US and Fourth Estate's first print run in Britain is 30,000.
When Beah was 15, he and other child soldiers were selected at random by Unicef for a rehabilitation programme. Unsurprisingly, it took months for him to even begin to adjust or trust another person. But he was lucky. An uncle in Freetown came forward to take him, and he was then chosen by Unicef to be one of two former child soldiers to speak at a conference in New York on children in conflict zones.
A woman who worked with the UN, Laura Simms, struck up a friendship with him during that visit and, when he returned to Sierra Leone, she helped him to get an American visa and became his guardian. He has been in New York ever since.
Since his arrival in the US, Beah has regularly spoken in public on the subject of child soldiers in war zones. Part of his reason for writing the book was to bring this subject to a wider audience. "I wrote it with the idea of thinking a book would be a much more powerful advocacy tool than what I had been doing speaking at conferences. I would get maybe 20 minutes with someone like Human Rights Watch, but it wouldn't be really enough to explain how this human madness comes about."
Beah's book, while unflinching in its preliminary reporting of how he became drawn into war, is selective in that reportage once he takes up a bayonet and an AK-47 himself. There are, for instance, no descriptions of killing children or witnessing the rape of women or female child soldiers. Was this a conscious editorial decision, so as not to alienate readers from the writer?
"I made it clear that we were fighting another group called the rebels and whoever was deemed a rebel was killed, whether they were children or adults," Beah says. In the background noise of the restaurant, a champagne cork pops suddenly and absurdly. "Obviously I didn't write every possible thing that happened every single day during the war; I could not include everything. But there was a deliberate decision to not write about the fate of girls in this war, who were also child soldiers and who were sexually abused by adult soldiers, so they had double suffering in that sense. I made a conscious decision not to write about that, because I would not do justice to it and I want someone who has lived through that, who experienced it, to write about that." He says it was his decision alone to edit the book in this way, not the publishers.
Acouple of months ago, Playboy magazine published photographs of a beaming Beah modelling Armani, with an AK-47 clearly visible in the background. As tastelessness goes, this went far: deadly weapon, once used for real as such by model, now shown as fashion accessory. Why did he do it?
Beah looks down at his plate of rice and alternatively smiles and grimaces for a full minute before replying. He sighs. He pokes his food and stares at it intensely. "I wrote two paragraphs about why I had written my book, which was to be put alongside the photos," he explains eventually.
"But when Playboy came out, none of the text was published, only a bit about the clothes I was wearing and how much they cost. So it was a very bad decision, both mine and the publishers. I was aware that the AK-47 was there, but the way it looked when Playboy were shooting it in the studio was that the gun was in a waste basket with army fatigues and then I was walking away from it with a book in my hand to show a departure from one life to another."
Inexperienced as he might have been in media manipulation, it seems extraordinary that his American publishers let a photographer set him up in any scenario that involved a gun. Unsurprisingly, the magazine never showed him the final pictures, where the gun appears solely as a prop. "It looked like I was celebrating the madness of killing, which is not something I would ever do," Beah says angrily. (He later refused to give Playboy an interview when his book became a bestseller.)
Given the grim subject matter, is he surprised that his book has sold so well? "Yes. Very surprised," he says simply. "In the US particularly, the public do not want to read about serious things. But I think the timing was good. People in America are interested in Africa now, partly because celebrities are drawing attention to it - Angelina Jolie and George Clooney, Bono. They might not be interested in a conference about human-rights abuse, but if a celebrity is invited to it, the media will turn up too and then it gets covered. And the media I got - the New York Times extract, the Jay Leno show and Starbucks - they each reach different generations of people, so I was lucky.
"September 11th I really think brought war onto the American landscape for the first time in a long time. The timing of the book was good in that people are thirsty to know what the nature of war is, because most people don't have first-hand experience of war now in America."
A Long Way Gone ends with the arrival of Beah in the US in 1998. He plans on writing another book, possibly non-fiction, which will tell his story after that point; how he adjusted to western life, and made peace with his traumatic past.
"I feel older than 26," he says, as his publicist advances to ferry him to the next interview (to the BBC on his views on Tony Blair visiting Sierra Leone). "I have an understanding of things that a lot of my peers have not. But I am in no position to claim I understand life or anything about it, or about my future and what I need to do next, so in that sense, I am no different from any other 26-year-old."
The Lost Boys and Girls:
A child soldier is someone under 18 who serves in government forces or armed rebel groups. Unicef estimates there are currently 300,000 boys and girls involved in more than 30 conflicts worldwide. These include Angola, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Burma, Colombia, Uganda and Lebanon.
Children are used not only as combatants, but as messengers, human mine detectors, spies, porters, cooks and for forced sexual services. Some are abducted or forcibly recruited, others are driven through circumstances to join by poverty, abuse and discrimination.
In 2002, the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child outlawed the involvement of children under 18 in hostilities, raising the age from 15.
Also in 2002, the Statute of the International Criminal Court made the conscription, enlistment or use of children under 15 in hostilities by national armed forces or armed groups a war crime.
A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Child Solider, by Ishmael Beah, is published by Fourth Estate
