Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (24 page)

A short distance from here, eighteen months ago, a boy had been travelling to football practice when a ‘disturbance’ happened. Perhaps he was throwing rocks, perhaps worse. In any event, an Israeli sniper shot him in front of this mural that spoke of a boy’s rights to play, and, without there being an Israeli military inquiry into his death, that is all we will ever know.

A human rights group listed the boy as just one of fifty-four minors under the age of eighteen who had been killed between 2012 and mid 2014 in the Occupied Territories. This did not include the deaths of children in Gaza from Israeli air strikes and
bombs.
³⁶
The date of his death was 23 January 2013, and his name was Saleh Ahmad Suliman al-’Amarin. He was fifteen.

The house where Saleh lived before a sniper bullet shattered the lives of his family was in the long-established al-’Aza refugee camp. Outside the house were pictures of the boy. The community had embraced his death as that of a martyr, a
shaheed
. ‘If you live, live free, or die like the trees standing up,’ read an old Arabic proverb across one banner.

My translator rang the buzzer, and, after a time, the boy’s father, a thin man with a cracked face, greeted us. He invited us in, leading us to a quiet room at the top of the stairs, lined with baroque, sapphire-hued sofas and memorials to his son.

‘He was everything to me,’ he said, sitting down on one of the heavy brocaded chairs. ‘The promise, the happiness of this house. You cannot imagine. He was the only child I had and now he is dead.’ Above him an image of his child looked down.

He stopped and allowed composure to come back. He spoke of the intimate details of Saleh’s life. How he excelled at football and was being considered for an academy slot in an Italian club. How his son was so popular that when he died the father had been humbled by how many others had known and loved the boy.

He then said how his only child had been shot in the head, and that it took him four days to die. ‘I wish . . . I wish he had a machine-gun,’ the father said. ‘All of Palestine will take revenge some day.’

Perhaps sensing my twitched response to these apocalyptic words, his tone changed. ‘We don’t think all Israelis are criminal. If someone is in Tel Aviv, and another Jew here in Bethlehem shoots my son, then that is a different person. I cannot want that Jew in Tel Aviv dead. We are not against Israelis. We are against the occupation here, the Zionists. They take our land, our freedom, our joy.’

I listened to his anguish, and after half an hour we had to go
because his grief was washing over him again, and there is not much more you can ask a man who has lost his heart. You can only record.

It was clear that guns, both in this room and in Palestine as a whole, had only wrought the agonies of torment. A thousand sons’ lives gone and a thousand fathers’ happiness ended: a sorrow repeated endlessly.

Even Israel, where fathers have to leave rifles on their sons’ beds to see if they will touch them, lives under the gun’s tyranny; where snipers wear T-shirts of pregnant women in the crosshairs; where children are taught to shoot terrorists in the forehead.

These were hard truths. For me, the most militarised nation in the world had so much potential and talent and warmth. Like when, during one air raid warning, a shop owner in one of Tel Aviv’s markets beckoned me inside with offers of lemon cake and iced water, apologising for the overhead bombs – as if it were her own fault. Such moments offered small insights into the nature of the Israeli character, and into the eternally complex relationship they have with their country and the violence that besets it.

But it was also the craziest and the saddest nation with the bleakest of all futures that I had ever visited. And I couldn’t shake the thought that guns had played the greatest part of all in its endless tragedy.

War and tragedy are ugly twins – co-joined and grotesque. In a way a journalist’s life is marked by them – as if drawn towards them like a tourist queuing for a freakshow. And it is never more grotesque than when that show involves children. While I had seen guns aplenty, been shot at, met snipers and victims and seen the ugly face of defence and attack up close, there was one aspect of militaries and guns that upset me more than most. And that was those times when I had met with child soldiers.

One such occasion was the summer of 2012. I had come to West Africa and was travelling on the main road that connects Liberia’s capital of Monrovia with the plantation lands of Bomi county. I was
there to see, as part of the rehabilitation programmes that the organisation I work for, Action on Armed Violence, carries out in West Africa, what guns had done to children here.

A decade before, this densely tree-lined road was witness to the sort of vicious fighting that so often defines conflict in Africa: young kids with big guns. At its end lived communities of ex-child combatants who, having put down their weapons, were being trained by us in agricultural work – a useful skill for men and women hardened by years of violence.

The potholes dotting the dirt track caused the car to lurch. Over the noise of crunching gears, my driver, Moses, was shouting at me about the best Liberian food to eat for breakfast. He strongly recommended hot pepper soup as a solid start to the day. It was quick and easy to make and left your mouth smarting long enough to stop hunger until lunch. It was a conversation best understood in light of the fact that Moses had, for years, lived with the terrible famine the Liberian civil war had brought to the land.

After two hours of driving, moving under a thick blanketing cloud of ochre-white, the road split, and we took the reddened earthen path up into a plantation. As we left the road, the greenery changed into a broken land of upturned trees, splintered branches and beaten soil. The forest was being tamed. Men stood in the near shadows, swinging machetes at the remaining shoots that had not been knocked down by Chinese-made bulldozers. This jungle was tenacious.

Our car pushed up a hill, a gap in the trees looked down onto a slick of silver – a thin river with five naked boys splashing in the shallows. Then, a glimpse of white ahead, a house deep in the bush. It was the beginning of a village, a loose collection of low-slung huts around shady trees. Corpulent women sat on the narrow porches that fronted their two-room bungalows, slipping food into blackened, bubbling pots. Slim strips of dark wood were being slowly fed into the flames beneath.

As I stepped from the car, a young child broke into deep sobs. The others laughed. ‘He’s scared of you, white man,’ said one. And they laughed again as he dissolved further into a mess of wide-eyed fear and pearly speckled snot.

Settling down, the interviews started slowly. ‘Say what the European expects you to say,’ I thought. Their answers were short, guarded. Why would they be anything but? But then, as time passed, the conversation relaxed.

Food arrived – bony fish in a brown sauce, served up in a white pot with lilacs etched on the side. Those talking to me – five onetime child soldiers who had grown up to become rubber plantation workers – focused on eating. They dipped their spoons into the mush and ate with fierce concentration, the burned flecks of rice catching the sides of their mouths, more falling onto the ground, where chickens hovered. Behind us, a group of children gathered, one of them holding a slim stick. He began hacking at the forest edge, and the others joined in. Swish, swish, swish; small boys, sharp sticks, milky teeth.

Then, as the food hit their bellies, the four men and one woman who had sat with me in the shade of a sheltering tree began to talk about the war. What war it was – the reason for the fighting – in a sense was unimportant. What was important to me was an attempt to understand what happened when you put guns in the hands of children.

Then the woman among us started talking, and the tone of the meeting changed. Slim, about twenty-five, she had a white scar the size of a tangerine on her right shin. She got this wound the day the rebels arrived in her village and started shooting. A bullet had passed through her leg as she lay on the floor of her hut, cowering from their wicked firepower.

Her father had picked her up and carried her into the thorny bush, but the rebels had stopped them before the green had enveloped them, and they had turned on her father, accusing him of fighting for their enemies. The men with the guns had pushed her down and, instead of letting them flee, allowed their own perversions to run wild. They forced her father to carry an impossible weight on his head. But he couldn’t lift the bags of weapons they wanted him to porter, so they shot him in front of his bleeding daughter. An AK47 round to the back of his head. Then the rebels took her. She didn’t say what happened after that.

But she did explain how, like the others here, she was forced to become a child soldier, because this was what the Liberian rebels were seeking. Those leaders knew that the AK47 was as deadly in the hands of a ten-year-old as it was in the hands of an adult.
³⁷
They knew that children don’t eat as much and don’t expect to be paid as much, if at all. That children are easier to brainwash and have a less acute sense of danger compared with adults.
³⁸
Such children, armed with guns, are able to commit terrible, terrible acts.

Then she told another story. Some days later these child soldiers captured another man. He was big, and they brought him to her. In front of him, they told her that he looked ‘greasy’ and that his fat would make a good meal. He pleaded for his life, but they cut him, stripping the skin off him as he screamed and screamed, until one of the young men must have felt a pang of something like humanity and put a bullet in his head. Then the rebels ordered her to carve him up, take out his heart, and make a soup for them.

She set about cutting and boiling, and in the early hours of the morning she had finished the stew. They woke from their sleep and crowded around. Eating the heart of this man, they believed, would make them stronger fighters, it would give them ‘jungle magic’ – and this meant bullets would pass around them in a firefight. But they feared being poisoned, so the rebels forced her to eat her dish before they ate their fill.

I pushed the fish around my bowl. The others in the group sat in silence, listening to the story. And then they joined in – they too had seen such things.

A pregnant woman, approaching a roadblock, was stopped by two rebel children with AK47s. They argued about the sex of her unborn child. To find out they took a knife to her belly and settled the matter.

A boy once wore the dried breasts and genitals of a woman he had killed with his pistol, adorning himself with these withered amulets so as to protect himself from harm.

Then there were those who drank the blood of other murdered children to boost their powers.

These were stories, or variations of stories, I had heard before.
Horror stories know no bounds and I had met child soldiers not only here in Liberia but also in the Philippines, in Colombia, in Somalia and in Mozambique. Just some of the estimated 250,000 child soldiers in the world today, their existence as old as war itself,
³⁹
and they often told the same harrowing tales.

Here, shrouded by Liberia’s shading trees, these adults who once had killed as children talked long into the afternoon cool, telling tales of what happens if you make soldiers out of children and give immature hands guns to hold. War descends into a
Lord of the Flies
hell – a charnel house where immature morality is animalistic and where deadly acts are committed without regard.

Their tales got so dark that a doubt flickered in me. I wondered if they had begun to make up things just to shock me. But in the car on the way back Moses told me in a quiet voice that they had only scratched the surface of what had happened those years before in the hidden depths of the bush.

‘They were children with guns,’ he said. And then he asked if I had enjoyed lunch.

IV. Pleasure

9. THE CIVILIANS

The joy of shooting – Cambodia – shooting AK47s with a beauty queen in Phnom Penh – the American gun owner – meeting a gunslinger in the Midwest, USA – the evolution of gun sports – a journey north to Iceland, a land of many guns and few murders – meeting a sportsman beneath a volcano – understanding the culture of peace through punishment – the rarified world of the gun collector in Birmingham, UK