Mariatu Kamara, Survivor
SUSAN McCLELLAND talks to two young people who know too well what happens when war becomes child's play

The Globe and Mail
Saturday, April 14, 2007

Toronto writer Susan McClelland was nominated this week for an award in investigative journalism by the Canadian Association of Journalists.



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She slips into the kitchen, and until she says hello, her presence goes almost unnoticed. At 21, with her braided hair, designer jeans and trendy sweatshirt, Mariatu Kamara could be any pretty, young woman living in a Toronto suburb. She even giggles when asked if she has a boyfriend.

But then she tucks her right arm under her leg, and it is painfully obvious that she has a story to tell about the horrors of war in her native Sierra Leone.

Like Ishmael Beah, the celebrated young author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soldier who is to visit Canada next week, Ms. Kamara has seen what happens when children take up arms. But unlike Mr. Beah, she was on the receiving end: Prepubescent rebel warriors cut off both of her hands.

"Sometimes, I can find in my heart a place to forgive the people who did this to me," she says. "I have to let go because what is done, is done. I can't change that.

"Other times, I think, I can never forgive them."

Ms. Kamara was 12 in April, 1999, when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) sacked the village where she was living with the aunt who had adopted her. During the more than 10 hours she and her cousins were held captive, she was raped and beaten.

The hostages were rounded up and told that they could live in return for choosing some additional form of punishment. "We started crying like babies," Ms. Kamara has written. And that hesitation cost them dearly. "They said, because we could not decide our punishment, they have decided to chop off our hands."
The spine-chilling scenes in the Oscar-nominated film Blood Diamonds are anything but fiction. An estimated 20,000 people, half of them children, had limbs cut off during Sierra Leone's civil war.

Why? Because, as Mr. Beah explains in his memoir, people vote with their hands, and the rebels wanted no one to cast a ballot.

One of her captors told Ms. Kamara to go to the country's president "and let him give you new hands." To which she responded: "But I don't even know this person."

Three soldiers took part in the amputation. One held a gun to her head, another held her hands and the last wielded the machete.

"I could not feel the pain because it seems as if my hands were frozen," she later recalled. "I must have passed out for a few seconds or so. When I recovered, I walked into the bush, as my village was burning and I did not know where my parents were."

Eventually, a woman took her to a clinic in the capital, Freetown, where she spent a month recovering. Still not knowing where her family was, she moved to a refugee camp where she encountered other amputees. "Sometimes, I thought what is the use of living," she says. "Forget about finding love, how am I going to get a good career that will help me with my future? How am I going to have a family and get my life together?"

A news report on the refugee camp featured her photograph and so touched a man in Collingwood, Ont., that he tried to adopt her. Accompanied by a social worker, she arrived in Canada in 2002.

The initial adoption didn't go through, but she met Abou Nabe and his wife, Kadi, at a barbecue put on by Toronto's Sierra Leone Immigrant Resettlement and Integration Centre. The couple had opened their home in nearby Pickering to more than 30 relatives escaping the Sierra Leone war, and soon Ms. Kamara was moving in as well.

"When my cousins and sisters play ball in the backyard, and Mariatu wants to join in but she can't, that's when I feel it the most," Mrs. Nabe says. "That's when I think, 'God, what have they done to her?' "

She had never been in a classroom and spoke no English, so "school was hard at first," she says. "Other kids would ask: 'How did this happen to you? Why did they do this to you? How come you were there?'

"I was like, 'You don't understand, so let's just leave it that way.' Sometimes, I don't feel comfortable sharing everything."

Despite the hurdles, she has thrived and is now looking forward to graduating from high school with a B average. She has been accepted into Centennial College's office-management course for September and, like Mr. Beah, dreams of going to law school some day.

Despite her reticence, she does speak publicly about her experience. "I am doing well in Canada. While I still need help with things, the children like me who are still in the Sierra Leone need far more. I want to help them."

Which may be why, not long after joining the Nabes, she began to scour the Internet for amputees she had met at the refugee camp, many of whom had gone to live in the United States.

Last fall, she found the first of her friends, and today has a network of about 30.
"Now that we're back in contact," she says, "I don't feel so alone."

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Ishmael Beah, Ex-Soldier

One night, when he was just 5, Ishmael Beah sat by the village fire as a friend of his grandfather told a story about a hunter desperate to bring home a monkey. Finally, he found one and just as he was about to make the kill, the monkey spoke. "If you shoot me, your mother will die," it said. "And if you don't, your father will die."

"What would you do, if you were the hunter?" the storyteller asked.

It took two years, but Ishmael finally came up with his answer: He would shoot the monkey because, that way, at least it wouldn't be able to force anyone else to make such a horrible choice.

"I never discussed it with anyone," he says, "for fear of how my mother would feel."

This anecdote appears at the end of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soldier, the book that has put Mr. Beah's remarkable story on the cover of The New York Times Magazine and will bring him to Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto next week.

It's also a book that his mother, if she's alive, probably would not want to read.
Between the ages of 13 and 16, Mr. Beah hunted men instead of monkeys. He also watched violent movies, smoked marijuana and sniffed amphetamines and "brown-brown," cocaine mixed with gunpowder. When it came time to kill someone, he writes, he would have been awake for days, and "didn't feel a thing for him, didn't think that much about what I was doing."

It is estimated that 50 violent conflicts are now going on around the world, and about 300,000 of the combatants are children, drawn into battle by propaganda, drug use and fear of being killed themselves if they refuse.

In Mr. Beah's case, the abuse was not inflicted by Sierra Leone's notorious rebels, the Revolutionary United Front. He was the victim of his own government.

The brutality began in January, 1993, when he, his brother and some friends left their Sierra Leone village to take part in a talent show in another town. While they were gone, rebels attacked. His family may have survived, but Mr. Beah never saw them again.

He fled, and managed to elude the rebels, only to wind up in the army. He pillaged, killed and, he says, lost his humanity.

After years of carnage, he was rescued by UNICEF workers who had gone into the thick of the fighting to take a truckload of child soldiers to a rehabilitation centre in Freetown, the capital. It took time, but finally Mr. Beah was able to recall his childhood and find his heart again.

"In Western culture, people have romanticized war and violence," he says in a telephone interview. "But none of it is glorious. When you're there, it's madness. It's your life, or someone else's."

Eventually, he moved in with an uncle in Freetown, going to school, pubs and soccer matches with his cousins. In 1996, he was invited to New York City to give a speech to the United Nations' First International Children's Parliament on war-affected children. While there, he met author Laura Simms, who had been invited to help the children tell their tales.

Shortly after his return, war reached the capital. Illness claimed his uncle and the boy found himself on the run again at 17. He had stayed in contact with Ms. Simms and called her for help when he reached neighbouring Guinea.

"He had no papers, and if he was sent, he would be killed," she recalls. "I said I would do whatever I could. That's when he asked, 'Aren't you going to adopt me?'
"I panicked for a moment, thinking, 'What will I be taking on?' Then I said yes."
Back in New York, he attended the United Nations International School in Manhattan, where, as he says at the beginning of his book, classmates constantly asked: "You mean you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?"

"Yes, all the time."

"Cool -- you should tell us about it some time."

"Yes, some time."

But it wasn't until he had gone to study political science at Ohio's Oberlin College that he finally took the plunge. "Many times I would start writing about what I did, and then have to step away and write about something easier, like my mother's cooking," he says. "What gave me the strength to continue, to face myself and relive my experiences, was reminding myself there are children living it right now."

He started with a fictional account. A professor saw it and said: "Either you have a really sick imagination, or all this stuff is true." He also pressed Mr. Beah to finish.

Now, at 26, with his degree in hand and his book on store shelves, he is preparing to tackle his next goal: law school.