photo:amnesty internationale

Nicolas Cage Donates $2 Million to Help End Suffering of Child Soldiers
Amnesty International Will Administer Funds for On-the-ground Efforts to Rehabilitate Young Combatants

(New York) — Amnesty International USA announced today that actor and filmmaker Nicolas Cage is donating $2 million to establish a fund to help former child soldiers, which will include support for rehabilitation shelters, medical services and psychological and reintegration services, and to support Amnesty International’s work on child soldiers. Amnesty International, a member of the Coalition Against the Use of Child Soldiers, will administer the funds to service providers on the ground. Amnesty International, Oxfam and International Action Network on Small Arms are focusing on encouraging the United States to lead efforts to establish strict guidelines on the international transfer of small arms and light weapons.

On the 5th November 2008 a shoking but realistic movie on the life of a former Child Soldier , will appear in the French cinemas.

“The brutal French-Belgian-Liberian movie Johnny Mad Dog, an assaultive fiction about Liberian child soldiers made with boys and girls who actually fought in that country’s recent war, left me wrung out – furious, confused, deep in thought,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “One of a gang of lost children who call themselves ‘the death dealers,’ Mad Dog roams the wastelands of his country, spreading machine-gun terror and death – to men, women and other children – in the name of the revolution. Whose revolution? The movie doesn’t say…. Without context, information or explanation, the movie plunges you into horror – yet, to what end?”

This film deals with the Child Soldier’s situation which is explain in this blog, if you want to know more about it please click on the following links :

Extract of the movie

Official site

The “No child soldiers” movement is a french organisation which deals with the awful Child Soldiers’ actual situation around the world. In order to help the children currently involved in conflicts “No child Soldiers” collaborated with singers to create and sale “The no child soldiers’s cd”. You can find it in almost every big salers in France as Fnac, or Virgin….

Red Hand Day on 12 February is an annual commemoration day to draw public attention to the practice of using children as soldiers in wars and armed conflicts.
Recently, a strong international movement has emerged to put an end to the practice. See, for example, Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers.

The Coalition’s goal is to promote the adoption and adherence to national, regional and international legal standards (including the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict) prohibiting the military recruitment and use in hostilities of any person younger than eighteen years of age; and the recognition and enforcement of this standard by all armed groups, both governmental and non-governmental.

The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers was formed in May 1998 by leading international human rights and humanitarian organizations. It has regional and national networks in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. The International Coalition has its headquarters in London.

Children who are part of the mutiple rebel armed forces have to respect some traumatazing customs and rules as horrible as eating the heart and/or other organs of the killed enemy. Once the enemy is killed children have to open the body and extract his organs in order to eat them then, children are often under drugs and risk to be violated if they are disobedient. In the worst cases children have to eat hearts without cooking , just remove from the body.

cartoon: cartoonfey

The following video relates on a rebel group whose explaining how and why do they eat enemies’ hearts, please to go to the subject go to minute 2.50!

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE VIDEO CONTENTS EXTREM VIOLENT SCENES WHICH COULD HURT SOME PEOPLE’S SENSIBILITY , DO NOT OPEN IF YOU FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE WITH VIOLENCE!!