"Johnny Mad Dog"
Triggers Child Soldier
Debate, Treatment of Africa in Question
Byline:
Matthew Russell Lee of
Inner City Press at the UN: Media
Analysis
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.
UN peacekeepers in Liberia, prosecutions
beyond Africa not shown
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.
A
disturbing subject like child soldiers lends itself to shocking
treatment, as Sauvaire
gives it, and do the Patrick Robert war photographs that accompany the
credits.
There were some in the UN auditorium uncomfortable with a sensational
presentation of Africans killing Africans. But perhaps situations such
as that
in Myanmar are not as easy to present, because governmental control is
so great
that child soldiers and the killing of civilians can't easily by
filmed. One thinks, not a sarcastically as
might be
expected, of Sylvester Stallone's most recent Rocky film, set in
Myanmar, but
filmed in Thailand. The government in Bangkok, however, would probably
not
approve such a film meant to expose Laos. Most of Africa, it's clear,
can be
filmed with or without its consent. In this case, it's worth it.
Watch this site.
And this --
