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Africa: Boys of Mass Destruction
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Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)
24 July 2008
Posted to the web 25 July 2008
Katie Vandever
In a twist of realism, a new feature film, "Johnny Mad Dog", uses a cast of actual ex-child soldiers from Liberia to portray the violent lives of youth forced to participate in armed conflict.
The original script was adapted from Emmanuel Dongala's acclaimed book "Johnny Chien Mechant". Johnny, 15, and his small commando unit comprised of young boys ages 6 to 15, rip through an unnamed African country, terrorising and slaying everything in their path.
Director Jean-Stephane Sauvaire contrasts this lengthy killing spree with the narrative thread of Laokole, a 13-year-old schoolgirl, who along with her disabled father and young brother, are forced to flee their city, occupied by child-soldier militias.
Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier and now an internationally known rapper, told IPS at a screening of the film at the United Nations in New York, "The escaping of refugees and the fear in people's eyes in the movie took me back to a journey that I once experienced myself."
Jal was born in war-torn Sudan in the early 1980s. At the age of six or seven, he was forced to join the rebel army to fight in the civil war. For nearly five years, he carried around an AK-47, "the real weapon of mass destruction", which was taller than he was. By the age of 13, he was a veteran of two civil wars.
Jal told IPS that the film is largely an accurate depiction. "It's a movie that describes a day of a child soldier in a battlefield. I would love to add the moments before a child soldier goes to war and how they feel when they lose a battle and a couple of their friends. The real battle is not when you are fighting, it's when you have left the war and you have to deal with the nightmares and the boredom."
Jal was rescued by a British aid worker, who smuggled him to Nairobi to raise him as her own. After her death, he became interested in music, which he found to be therapeutic and kept him busy. Today, 15 years later, Jal has three highly acclaimed albums that narrate his experiences as a child soldier. His most recent album is "Warchild".
Preparation for the film was crucial. Sauvaire chose to shoot in Liberia, whose civil war ended in August 2003 and which now has one of the world's few woman heads of state, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, elected in 2006.
"We really sensed the government's support, its desire to welcome us, its need to give testimony," he said. "For Liberians, it was a way to assess before the international community that they had moved on, that they had turned the page after 15 years of war."
Sauvaire organised castings in Monrovia and the ghetto zones surrounding the city. Out of 500 or 600 ex-child soldiers, Sauvaire had to choose 15 for his film. Most fought in Liberia with Charles Taylor, or the insurgent Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) until August 2003, and many live on the streets without any family structure.
"It was primordial for me to work with ex-child soldiers, who seemed to be the only ones capable of giving a sincere testimony of this horror," said Sauvaire.
Because the children couldn't read the script for the film, they improvised on the scenes. Subtitles are used throughout the film, as the children speak English as it is spoken in the districts of Monrovia, "a very phonetic English, pretty crude and instinctual."
After the filming was finished, producers set up the NGO Johnny Mad Dog Foundation "with the aim of bringing framework and support to the young actors of the Johnny Mad Dog movie," the director said.
"It was unimaginable for me to reproduce the scheme the children had known during the war: the general comes, takes the children and abandons them as soon as it's over. I wanted to continue following the children's progress, trying to help them in their reinsertion (into society)," said Sauvaire.
The foundation, located in Monrovia, assists the children in their everyday lives and helps them develop long-term projects. "It is a place where they know they can turn to to eat, attend courses, sleep and be listened to."
"I hope this film will be an opportunity to address the problem of child soldiers in the world which unfortunately, is still a topical issue and remains nonetheless unacceptable and intolerable," said Sauvaire.
Today, the U.N. estimates that 250,000 to 300,000 children have been forcibly pressed into military service around the world. Although the number of conflicts in which children are directly involved fell from 27 in 2004 to 17 by the end of 2007, according to a recent report by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, military recruitment of children under age 18 and their use in hostilities still takes place in at least 86 countries and territories worldwide.
It is a problem Jal knows only too well. "I think (Johnny Mad Dog) is a powerful film and the world needs to see it," he told IPS.
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