I’ve been reading a book about Charles Taylor, the Liberian school teacher turned business student turned activist turned rebel leader turned president of Liberia and then finally turned convicted war criminal in the ICC. Charles Taylor and Liberia by Colin M. Waugh. It is a book about the complex person Charles Taylor, but also a book about the troubled modern history of Liberia.
In the last chapters, Waugh describes some of the war crimes that were conducted by the rebel groups during the civil war. It was common for them to recruit child soldiers, and Waugh tells this story of what happened when the child troops of the rebels clashed with the Nigerian peacekeeping force ECOMOG:
Later, ECOMOG forces used loudspeakers to call to the advancing children, offering them toys, sweets or the longer-term inducement of the chance of a home and a school to go to, which in some cases proved effective in getting them to lay down their arms and defect.
I was sitting on the subway when I read this, and it made me cry. I could see the children in front of me, desperately dropping their weapons with crushed childhood innocence in their eyes. I thought of all the children who gathered around me and wanted me to take their picture, of the boys at the beach in Robertsport who tried to teach me to surf, the young men who told me I was beautiful and asked me for my phone number.
Of course war is a terrible thing. But it should be something abstract for me, a theoretical horror that I can’t understand. Still, it always makes me feel so devastated, reading about it. I think it makes me think of my grandfather, alone in the dark, icy Finnish forest, fighting the Russians. Or my grandmother, running out in her nightgown, desperately holding on to her baby brothers hand, looking for cover under the pine trees to hide from the bomber planes.
I don’t understand how a people ever can survive such a trial. I ache, and I cry, and I’ve never even been close.
Katja Malmborg 