Emmanuel Jal Quotes

Whenever I speak at the United Nations, UNICEF or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone.

As a child soldier, your rights are constantly violated.

More and more, we have been able to present the argument that recruitment of child soldiers is a social breakdown that leads to atrocities, because that's why they get them.

A lot of child soldiers lose their minds.

In Bosnia, little children shot in the head by a guy who thinks it's okay to aim his gun at a child.

Northern Uganda presents a situation of extraordinary violation of the rights of children.

Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life.

'Beasts of No Nation' began when I read an article about child soldiers in Sierra Leone during my final year of high school.

There are guerrilla armies that make little boys kill their own families. Such acts rip out the soul and make space for beasts to grow inside. Armies need beasts, don’t they? Pet beasts, to do their terrible work!

I was one of those children forced into fighting at the age of 13, in my country Sierra Leone, a war that claimed the lives of my mother, father and two brothers. I know too well the emotional, psychological and physical burden that comes with being exposed to violence as a child or at any age for that matter.

In some sense, when you take a child soldier out of an armed group, you've taken away the identity he or she has had for years, and you can't assume life is just going to return to normal.

I was fighting men at age 10.

Any child soldier has to go through a lot of love, care and understanding to become normal.

Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?

One of the most painful things in the Western States and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children - only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old.

If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail.

When you kill 500,000 children in order to impose your will on other countries, then you shouldn't be surprised when somebody responds in kind.

I have made my living bearing witness to some of the most horrific events of the end of our century, at the end of the 20th century.

It is certain that concentration camps had a bad reputation with us.

My giving birth was nothing when I think about all the people in Sri Lanka that have to give birth in a concentration camp.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

Now children as young as nine carry AK47s which can kill 30 people in seconds.

Rape and other forms of sexual violence were used in Kosovo in 1999 as weapons of war and instruments of systematic "ethnic cleansing." Rapes were not rare and isolated acts committed by individual Serbian or Yugoslav forces, but rather were used deliberately as an instrument to terrorize the civilian population, extort money from families, and push people to flee their homes. Rape also furthered the goal of forcing ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.

My mind revolts and my soul cannot support the weight of so much evil: theft, rape, pillage, deaths, and murders, fires and devastation; the virgin violated, the cry of the widow and the orphan; the father armed against his son and each one looking for his brother to kill him; of those who have migrated; of the thousands who have fled; of the bodies stretched out in the public streets; of the bones which cover the fields and of so much blood shed on Venezuela’s soil.

In the past we had child-volunteers: 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds. They went into the minefields. Their eyes saw nothing. Their ears heard nothing. And then, a few moments later, one saw clouds of dust. When the dust had settled again, there was nothing more to be seen of them. Somewhere, widely scattered in the landscape, there lay scraps of burnt flesh and pieces of bone. Such scenes would henceforth be avoided. Before entering the minefields, the children now wrap themselves in blankets and they roll on the ground, so that their body parts stay together after the explosion of the mines and one can carry them to the graves.