The unmaking of a child soldier

Lives Less Ordinary

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.6 • 814 Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a boy, Ishmael Beah was forced to kill. How do you turn a soldier back into a child?

Ishmael Beah was just 13 when war reached his village in Sierra Leone and he was made to flee. In the chaos, he was separated from his family. He ended up with a group of other children at what they thought was the safety of an army base. But instead, he was taught to become a hardened killer and sent out to fight. Nearly three years went by before he was finally rescued by child protection specialists from Unicef, but he was so brainwashed that he didn’t want to leave. It took months of careful rehabilitation and the support of a very special woman to break down his defences.

In 1996, at the age of just 16, he gave a speech at the UN in New York where he recalled his experiences. His testimony formed part of a pivotal report into the impact of armed conflict on children. A decade later, he would become the first Unicef Advocated for Children Affected by War. Today he is a bestselling author and married with three children. This interview was recorded in 2020.

This interview contains disturbing descriptions of violence.

Presenter: Jo Fidgen Producers: Edgar Maddicott and Jo Impey Editor: Munazza Khan

Photo: Ishmael Beah Credit: Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Transcript

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0:00.0	On Radio 4, the more you listen, the more you see.
0:04.7	Hello, I'm Brian Cox.
0:05.6	And I'm Robin Ince, and this is The Infinite Monkey Cage.
0:08.3	In this series, we're going to have a planet off.
0:10.8	I feel like Jupiter wins.
0:12.8	And after all of that, we're just going to chill out a bit.
0:15.9	We're talking about your bog standard.
0:17.8	Ice, not the fancy one.
0:20.1	Science with funny bits.
0:21.9	The new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage.
0:24.1	Listen on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
0:29.6	At this point, I was 13 years old, so we didn't think anybody would make soldiers of us.
0:35.7	They showed that if you didn't follow command, you'll be killed.
0:39.0	So you really had no choice.
0:41.7	That 13-year-old was an orphan of war, Ishmael Baer.
0:46.6	The command was from the Sierra Leonean army.
0:50.1	Ishmael was drugged, given a gun, a bayonet and his orders to kill.
0:58.0	I remember the first time I did it. It took me years and years before I was able to sleep.
1:04.2	I was replaying the eyes of the man. And when I tried to sleep, I could see him in my dreams looking at me.
1:31.9	It's depressingly easy to make a child a soldier.
1:35.5	But afterwards, when it's over and the guns have gone,
1:38.3	how do you go about making him a child again?
	...

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