Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at UN
www.innercitypress.com/film1jmd071508.html
UNITED NATIONS, July 15 -- A gang of child soldiers, one dressed in butterfly wings and another carrying a stolen pig on his back, approach a pair of blue helmeted UN peacekeepers and threaten to shoot them, in a scene from Jean-Stephane Sauvaire's film "Johnny Mad Dog." Set and filmed in Liberia, where the UN still maintains a shrinking peacekeeping mission, the movie was screened at the UN before a standing room only crowd on July 15. Sauvaire explained how he spent a full year in Monrovia choosing his cast, and another year living with them while they shot the movie. The UN, he said, helped with the production. But the UN's appearance in the film, outgunned peacekeepers guarding a hospital while civilians are slaughtered all around them, is hardly flattering.
In an early scene, a young boy is recruited by making him shoot his father. Chicken blood is smeared on him. Later he walked through a fire fight carrying only a toy wooden gun, and gets shot. An obscene funeral dirge is sung for him in the dripping lobby of a bombed out Monrovia building. A mourner stares out at the undulating Atlantic -- in today's Liberia, there are attempt to draw surfers to these waves.
The child soldiers help overthrow the president, then mistake a recorded speech of Martin Luther King as being by the president they think they have installed. They are unceremoniously demobilized without getting paid, offered only jobs beating back refugees who surge forward desperately for bags of rice. The details come from the underlying novel, by Emmanuel Dongola, who has attended and gracefully hawked books at the UN screening.
The head of the UN's Children and Armed Conflict Office, Radhika Coomaraswamy, moderated the event, fielding questions ranging from France's colonial history throughout Africa to how the film will be distributed. The latter was easier to address: it will be screened in two weeks in Australia, then in Los Angeles, then Paris. The representative of the French mission to the UN who answered, Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert having left just as the film began, did not address colonialism, but rather his government's work on small arms and in creating Ms. Coomaraswamy's office.
Inner City Press followed up on the Africa question, specifically asking Coomaraswamy as well as the International Justice representative of the Open Society Institute, listed as the sponsor of the screening, about why all child soldier recruitment cases, and all of the International Criminal Court's cases so far, have been in Africa. Ms. Coomaraswamy, for example, has named Myanmar as a major governmental recruiter of child soldiers. Apparently answering for both, she noted that most countries in Asia are not members of the ICC. But as is prominently in the news these days, neither has Sudan joined the ICC. Prosecutions there are based on Security Council referrals. So the Council could make referrals on child soldiers and other cases outside of Africa, but hasn't.
Emmanuel Jal, hip hop musician from South Sudan who showed a trailer for his own child soldiering film featuring an endorsement by Andrew Natsios, praised Johnny Mad Dog as you-are-there realism. Charles Rapp, the prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, said there is growing interest in pursuing the suppliers of small arms to such conflicts. The Ambassador of Sierra Leone recounted recent UK and U.S. intelligence about a plane flying into Freetown, without permission, full of guns and drugs. The Ambassador of Liberia called small arms "the real weapons of mass destruction," given how many people they have killed.
And see, www.innercitypress.com/film1jmd071508.html
