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Johnny Mad Dog – a film by Jean-Stephan Sauvaire, graphically depicts the sex and violence that consumed life of the child soldiers who had fought in Liberia’s civil war from 1999 to 2003. The special screening of the movie was part of a series of events at the United Nations focused on the protection of children and child soldiers in armed conflicts around the world. Sauvaire spent two years in Liberia making the movie that won accolades at the Cannes International Film Festival this year. In the opening scene child soldiers are looting a village somewhere in Liberia. The group is led by Johnny Mad Dog, a young lad, who has been fighting since he was 10 years old. The children between the ages of 10 to 15 pull triggers without scruples and rob their impoverished victims of all their possessions. “We are freedom fighters,” they say.
A traumatized boy in a pink button-down shirt is recruited as a child soldier. “He is a student not a soldier,” the father pleads before his own son is forced to shoot him. The film progresses from one fantastically disturbing scene to the next. The days bring drugs, death and rapes and the nights unleash more drugs, frenzied chanting and dancing around bonfires. “Any soldier talking of ma and pa will be executed," General Never Die, their chief threatens in the movie. Die orders his recruits to take command of the city. In a crazy haze of blood and dope the boys murder their way to the successful completion of their assignment. “You don't want to die don't be born," they convince each other over a joint. The book Johnny Mad Dog on which the film is based is not set in Liberia but in the Republic of Congo. "In 1997 I saw child soldiers with guns bigger than they are intimidating and humiliating adults," said Emmanuel Dongala, the author of book, describing his personal encounters in Brazzaville. After watching the film for the first time at the UN-he noted that child soldiers and their victims had shared the same miserable experience in other parts of Africa. Sierra Leone’s ambassador to the UN, Allieu Ibrahim Kanu said that film was an accurate description of what happened in Liberia and Sierra Leone. “It brought back terrible memories of what happened in my country,” he said referring to the civil war that lasted from 1991-2002, killing tens of thousands and displacing over 2 million people. A former child soldier in Sudan, Emmanuel Jal, saw his own past in the images. “It is raw and it is not hollywoodized,” he said. Jal, now a renowned musician, thanked Sauvaire for his work. “You have done an amazing thing,” he said. The French director spent one year in Liberia looking for children who had been forced to fight. He found many and picked 15 to act in his film. However, his business with the actors did not conclude after the movie. “I could not leave Liberia,” he said. “I felt very close to it.” Sauvaire has set up a foundation for the 15 boys who acted in the film to provide for their education and general wellbeing. The UN Special Representative on Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy, who chaired the panel discussion that followed the movie, noted that the "Children have been victimized and forced to become perpetrators.” "Those children should be considered primarily as victims,” stressed Jean Maurice Ripert, the French ambassador to the UN. France has been very active in enhancing the protection of children in armed conflicts. In 2005 it pushed for a Security Council resolution that condemned the recruitment and use of child soldiers by parties to armed conflict and called for monitoring and reporting mechanism. This week the Security Council issued a presidential statement reiterating its condemnation of “recruitment and use of children in armed conflict, and of their killing, maiming, abduction, rape and other sexual violence against them.” The representative of the United States noted that the use of child soldiers persisted in many countries, including Burma, Sri Lanka, where the rebel Tamil Tigers recruited. In her statement to the Council, Coomaraswamy called for targeted measures against 16 persistent violators. Stephen Rapp, the chief prosecutor of the Special Court of Sierra Leone (SCSL), said the film served to “bring art in the service of justice- a truly important alliance.” Rapp himself has played a pioneering role in the securing justice for the child soldiers. The Special Court is the first court to put on trial persons most responsible for the conscription, recruitment and use of child soldiers in Sierra Leone’s civil war. The SCSL has issued 13 indictments and three convictions for the crime. Rapp pointed out that these were the first convictions of the crime in the history of international criminal law. The International Criminal Court at The Hague is following SCSL’s lead and has indicted Thomas Lubanga, the leader of the armed militia in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo for the recruitment of child soldiers- among various other charges. Liberia’s UN ambassador Nathaniel Barnes emphasized that while justice should run its course, the efforts to protect child soldiers had to be "proactive rather than reactive." According to the ambassador one preventive measure was to stop the proliferation of small arms and light weapons. “The real WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) are small arms and light weapons,” he said. “They are plentiful, cheap and effective killing machines”. Kanu also called for more support and assistance from the international community to rehabilitate the child soldiers. The ambassador noted that former child soldiers who had never been to school were still roaming the streets of Freetown- this time without their guns and no skills to find work. “The fundamental pillow for development is education," he said. “They are potential soldiers in another conflict-unemployment”. 
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