From: Mother Jones
Commentary: While Hollywood swoons over teen guerrillas, the real lost boys are hidden in plain sight.
By Alissa Quart
June 30, 2007
This is the year child soldiers went pop. They were the centerpiece of Blood Diamond, in which Leonardo DiCaprio played a child-soldier-rescuing diamond trader. African kids with guns made appearances in The Last King of Scotland and in the latest James Bond movie. Lost introduced a subplot in which the series' West African strongman was revealed to have been a child soldier. Indie actor Ryan Gosling is reportedly set to direct his own script about child soldiers, perhaps inspired by War/Dance, a Sundance award-winning documentary that Variety called "Spellbound with orphans."
In February, a handsome 26-year-old named Ishmael Beah published A Long Way Gone, a bloody, moving memoir of how he went from being a guerrilla in Sierra Leone to getting adopted by an American woman and finally attending Oberlin College. The New York Times Magazine put him on its cover; Starbucks sponsored his 10-city book tour and prominently displayed his memoir in its outlets. Time sneered that we'd hit the "cultural sweet spot for the African child soldier."
This sudden fascination with photogenic survivors such as Beah seemingly reassures us that Africa's young fighters can be redeemed if only they step forward to share their stories or win the heart of a kindly Westerner. But most former child soldiers remain in the shadows, whether they're in West Africa or Staten Island, home to as many as 8,000 Liberian immigrants, and consequently what might be the largest concentration of child soldiers in the United States.
According to Staten Island community activist Rufus Arkoi, around one-fifth of the hundreds of young refugees he has met while working as a youth counselor and soccer coach were once boy soldiers. "They are reliving in their minds the violence and the roles they played. They think about the craziness they did," he says. "They talk easily to me—we are very friendly. Otherwise, they keep the acts they have committed to themselves."
Take Jonathan, a 20-year-old who lives in the borough's Clifton section. Jonathan joined his grandparents in the United States in 1998, one of thousands of young war refugees who, with the help of aid organizations and the U.S. government, were brought to New York and granted political asylum during and after Liberia's long civil war. He may or may not have fought in the conflict; he won't say. In fact, he doesn't want his real name used because of the stigma of just being a Liberian refugee.
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http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2007/07/witness.html
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