Ishmael Beah was a child soldier, pulled into the war that gripped Sierra Leone in 1991. He was forced to kill by the soldiers he turned to for safety after his village was destroyed and his family killed.
Best selling author of A long way gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Beah presented a small part of his story to a packed gymnasium on Tuesday at the University of Manitoba. There were both laughs and tears throughout his tale, a story as remarkable as the man who told it.
"The fact that I am standing here before you is proof of faith," he said as he began his talk.
Before recounting the dark and bright days his life had traveled, Beah emphasized the importance of putting a human face on the far flung wars of Africa. He said he found that North Americans glamorized violence through Hollywood depiction and were disconnected from the real horror of war.
In real war, said Beah, there is no romance or background music. "It is only destructive to the human spirit."
Beah began his story not with the war but with the challenge to publish a book that would go on to sell 700,000 copies and land on the New York Times best seller list.
At first, publishers told him to take out the parts before and after his gut-wrenching experience as a child soldier. They wanted only doom, and Beah wouldn't go for it.
"I didn't want to tell that kind of a story."
And so the story contains a time of peace, a time of conflict and a time of recovery afterwards. It is placed in a human landscape that is full of misery, but also hope.
"When there is no human context…people begin to lose hope," he explained. Readers needed to see these children-turned-murderers not as an African phenomenon, but as human beings with the same dreams and sorrows all humans know.
"Once people see that, it is very difficult to turn away."
As the audience listened, Beah recounted how he and some friends had left their rural village to go to a talent contest. When they tried to return, war had arrived. Instead of family, he encountered bullet-riddled villagers and parents carrying dead children.
Scared for their lives, the group wandered for a year. At 13, Beah and some friends went to a military base seeking security. And that is where his killing days began. It was death or murder, a choice that was no choice at all.
Beah described one of the soldier's methods of turning innocent children into weapons of war. These children, who grew up with a deep respect for their elders, too timid to even look them in the eye, would be brought to their home village and forced to kill their own families.
To kill others, explained Beah, you had to dehumanize them. But in the process, one dehumanized oneself as well. The person left behind is empty, devoid of human dignity.
"There was no remorse, no time to even cry."
Beah didn't recount his own days as a killer, but his book does. In other settings he has put it succinctly, saying he killed more people than he can count, be they other soldiers or hungry refugees who wouldn't give up their food.
Beah said he can't let the guilt overwhelm him; instead he looks to the future and holds to faith.
"I don't think anyone has ever gone beyond the point where they cannot be healed at all," he said. Few could deny his authority on the matter.
After being rescued and placed in a rehabilitation center, Beah was adopted by an American woman. He went on to graduate from a top-ranked liberal arts college in the U.S. and is now a U.N. ambassador working to bring attention to the horror child soldiers experience.
Beah's talk contained a recurring message, a message every human rights leader has proclaimed in their time: injustice to one is injustice to all; when one human being's dignity is stripped away, all humanity suffers in turn.
"You always have to be in a position to help people," he said after calling upon the audience to make their own stand for human rights.
"That is what makes us human."
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