hello welcome to. shevardnadze what do you do one war robs you of your childhood i guess today lost his mother in the fighting in sudan and became a soldier at the age of seven the kindness of strangers and music helped him overcome his classic childhood steeped in extreme violence manual job is now wolf famous hip hop artist and he's here today to share his extraordinary story with us . there are three hundred thousand child soldiers in the world most of them from. drug war deprived of families forced to kill. children good soldiers. and what happens if they do.

a manual joel child soldier turned hip hop artists welcome it's great to have you on our show today i just want to go back and remind our viewers where you started out you were only about seven years old when your mother was killed and the second sudanese civil war then you became a child soldier and were told that a k forty seven would be your only parent that it would be taking care of you from now on this is how you really felt that your life depended on this weapon to survive. well there some more so when you're in a training center you actually train to be told the gun is your father and your mother so your life depend on on it and saw. it's a it's a situation where people get transform and get brainwashed to. do whatever i do and

that you're being trained to focus so the cause become more powerful than you believe in because you're told even if your father is again is this cause you can kill him. you know another thing that you have said is that the children who joined the rebels they wanted to revenge did you at that age understand what revenge was. well i remember stan. what to eventual us then but now i can't put it into the words i was really angry as a kid you see when you lost everything you own and. everything that is your world disappear in front of you in your toe your mother is gone and then because the war itself. different people experience it differently and now when you're told that people are destroying your home they're in such a such a place and you're given a description you don't need to think twice so you want to act out of their emotions at that moment. going to war and becoming

a soldier i just wonder what it's like for a kid after talk to a man who joined the army in all who are to you at the age of twelve i've just talked to him recently now what he was telling me is that for him it was were an adventure and a thrill more than anything else what was it like for you was it again well least at first. well children don't or you only die once so you kind of live don't understand or you don't know when you die it. so a death moment you're taken by adrenaline you want to know what's going on but for me my desire and i wanted to kill as many muslims and arabs as forcible this was one second i wanted a bike. well is that children don't know that he only die once and that's because they're actually fearless state don't know what it's about but did you ever fear that you were going to be killed did you think about that. yes sometimes you

know. the thing that i didn't warn was i didn't want to get shot in my eye on my leg broken i actually prefer to die than to be injured because i've seen people who have been injured how they cry and so you know like a kid you know it's like in your head you choose where would i be shot so all of the should wear this meat but not breaking my bomb not my i know of my mouth and my leg so you do you know that's how you think as a child in the real war and you know up in the bullet. whichever police it's aim it doesn't care where to shoot have you ever been one dead i've been wounded differently but not. well this one thing he said that actually mark me about just wanting a bicycle now when the army was recruiting q did they give you any incentives did

they tell you like if you take a gun and kill people that will give you something in return for example a bicycle or were you just doing it for free were you getting any a warrant whatsoever for what you were doing. you know those no awards as such like somebody being paid for doing something you know the country has been destroyed people are fighting for their survival so and you could see from the idols that there's something you know when you go to a house and you attack the people in the house and that children they'll try to join in fighting but now this is not the villages this is like the whole community this is all tribe uniting again it's. a force that want to wipe them out as we do not know that they want to wipe us out we don't know what's was the reason for the war in fact one when the war happened i got the world was ending because my mother here tells me they were all the children of god and one day the world is going to

end and people are going to turn a niche up and so you look at it as a child you just get confused with different messages and so i didn't really understand what was going on but now i have an idea of what actually was happening . when you were at the camp what were you told were told why you were fighting where you trained at all or you were just given guns and told go and shoot it actually we were trained in the come it was a difficult trainings six straight months. first time warner stepping in the cam it was a violent entrance so were they on bush to us and all of beaten so people were running you drop your back yard shooter forget yourself so it's like a separate ing us from being loving w when we're coming we're singing songs holding hands with this guys are hiding in the bush and they just started whipping us bitten and i was really angry that time i said the first person i will shoot when i

finish training will be my trainer or look for the people of beating us because you don't understand why they just beaten you for no reason. so those scaring you sit down get out you look behind someone to slap you kick you for no reason you can't talk you can do anything he was an exciting to be trained it was terrifying because i'm still really been dug into training. did you ever go back to see your trainers after you've graduated and never. i can't even remember any of them not a mile tell me a little bit about this fighting itself were there actual battles or were there are more like raids those bottles or do pan where. how your i want to explain it so there's different grades this being invaded where you are on this when you're taken going to

a bottle school but did the other side also use children soldiers yes sometimes they do you know they depend on the government was more of them are they hard child soldiers on in the malicious the militias. well in there are two army and they have that we'll train soldiers that fight because they're getting paid. they have a salary. you know i spoke to a british mercenary who also fought in africa when he was younger salman man i don't know if you've heard of them and he told me that he viewed child soldiers just like any other soldiers you know when you were fighting did you feel your enemies or like just normal soldiers so you the same way despite your age well you're just trained to fight if it's the same enemy that's your enemy in front child soldiers are the worse they're very sensitive you know they come and the

reason why they like using child soldiers is because. they don't have plants. i don't have children so they don't know our idea of the feature so they can actually scream and go forward and mostly they're very brave sometime the worst thing is if they really get terrified it's hard to convince them to to fight ron do you remember the first time you killed someone. i won't say like i actually did one remember me killing somebody myself but i was in an octave situation where we did more justice of other people just in the hey it was your bullet that shot the person. did you think about what was going on at that moment i was just like too much of an adrenaline rush and you had no time to stop and analyze. it here you've get scared

before you want to go to toilet several times your throat to dry you know your stomach your body scheck's you know so many things happened so many thing goes on in your head at that moment you go silent you want in the world you know sometimes like your legs can move but after the battle begins you know the rhythm of the gun itself it's it goes with the flow it takes you over. now to battlefields our musical you know when there is war it's very musical when he made a noise out of them. it's like that sounds of the guns it's like they flow the reason especially if you're very far you have that sometime your gun even you can't even hear the sound of your gun you know so maybe when it's shocking you know when you're into it so much you know and then the other thing is when what the other

experiences when you're not in the battlefield when you're sleeping and other people are fighting it's like you know when the bullets to stop. because it's light dark dark dark bomb that act of attack back out of a car bomb so it's it's almost like there's a beat the blue and then you do see a boom the big sound is like a bass so you just warn the explosion to continue in the sounds but is this something that you actually wherein you and that helped you in your music later on that rhythmic sounds and the ceiling of the rhythm that you experienced during the war no actually became i'm doing what i'm doing not because i planned it i think it's something that process and it's accidental was unplanned. amanda we are going to take a short break right now now when we come back we're going to continue to talk to

a model of. a hip hop star right now who grew up as a child soldier in sudan and we'll talk more about how he escaped from the war and how he became a pop singer stay with us. history is never really dead as long as it's with us the start of the first world war one hundred years ago here's a case in point in numerous ways the beginning in conclusion of that conflict shapes our world today. right. search string. and i think the true.

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i marinate join me. for in-depth an impartial and financial reporting commentary in for news and much much. only on bombast and only on. now we're back with emanuel jale a hip hop artists who was a soldier rain his childhood fighting in the sudanese civil war. now i know that young children not even teenagers but really lot of young like seven or eight like you where are still uses soldiers in africa looking back do you feel like children make good fighters they're sad to be more clear cruel than the grown

ups that there's nothing more dangerous than a kid with a rifle would you agree with that. to because they don't thanks to our second small uneven idle costs next to them they think that because and let's not they're gone you don't negotiate with a child soldier and they tell you stop you have to stop if you try to talk too much ensued talk and then shoot you. now i guess when you guys were taken to those camps and you were taken away from your families the only thing that you have is each other did you make any close friends when you were in a camp or when you were fighting yeah i had a lot of childhood friends and you know you're told to be brother skippers so your fellow soldiers your brother you know and because you'll both of you only got each other so when the battlefield happened you could be injured and your fellow soldier

will come cry to you there's no hard feelings you can afford to hate any and any of your members when you're in the same place because when the war happened then you know you can be hurt and also if you're going to leave your fellow soldier one day injured and you are not a good person they can actually shoot you because they don't want to die right themselves. or if they're really nice and the like you they can actually give you a cover for you to skip if they're injured so they have to be nice to each other what would happen to the kids who would refuse to take part in training in fighting they'd get punished or if you try to skip and go and see your family members they know where you're from members are and they're going to cause from your home now for you i mean it will be fair to say that you yourself chose to stop what was the turning point when you gave the soldiers camp how did you manage that well

actually i didn't plan an escape it was planned by artists and i just joined them and it was a difficult journey because in the way a lot of people died. one of my friend was dying in can you will is i'm started i was tempted to eat my friend actually because my senses change and that was one of the lowest points and then i arrived in place called the wort where i was rescued by british aid worker or smuggled me to kenya well we're going to get in a second but i just really want to know what was that turning point that made you escape made you say to yourself that say i need to go yeah. because i'm glad and so even when i ask one of the guys say to him we've been planning it for a while we can tell you because you have a big mouth and you're going to get us in trouble so it's because i ended up going with them i realize that we're skipping late on because i thought is just

a normal way of going to one place where we're going to deliver. on the nations our support or check our people injured or just going for patrol somewhere so he didn't know you were going you walked literally across the whole country. and you said some of your people who were actually moving with you died how did you manage to survive well this was difficult i actually i probably knew after six hours of exam events when i was able to know actually escaping so i survived waiting on snails vultures anything that we could find in the january days we started to eat the roots of the trees the plantation other people got poisoned was a difficult difficult journey also d.h. ration people died of durations so i'll say that i was lucky that i survived but i

kept myself positive that tomorrow's going to come where between two to four hundred young people mix with other girls and only sixteen people survive their journey. and now we come to emma mccune a british aid worker who actually saved you how did you come across or and most importantly why did you trust her what i want to happen is ended up in a place called a watch. and she and her friend decided to do me and then promising to tech me to school and i always wanted to go to school but in my mommy's i had a different plan i said i'm going to go to this lady's country and go to school join me become a pilot and steal a plane and come back toward that's what i had in my head but everything changed later so it was all about the bicycle school and an airplane. it.

you know when you're trained into that as a child so it took a while a long of transformation. well unfortunately am i died soon after that in a car crash and you know there was no one else to take care of you what did you do after that i was lucky our family members took it and that's different people can possible and life you can really difficult so this is where the music came and took an opportunity and this is where i was able to to heal myself because i used to have a lot of nightmares i was in focus some time and get kicked out of school so music became the pain killer of the for me at that time and then i happened to me kenyan woman called mrs moon watching me help me out in my process when i became a musician size became more focus and doing what i'm doing up to now. he also talked a lot about the feeling of guilt that you experience and other interviewees but

looking back do you really have a choice and on the adults that got you involved there more responsibility well sometimes when you see so much problems happening you see have a body suffering. it's hard to actually blame the audience because they're dying you see everything is happening so and you all know well all in it together we're in this boat we're dying all together we mass work together try to get us out of it that's the mind concept. the only time i can really get angry and feel betrayed is actually what is happening in south sudan when the very people who say they are fighting for an independent to swallow the freedom that we we we suffered for. us only if things that make you really feel betrayed because now you had a government that want to stay in power and the testing people who are founding

fathers of the organization that wanted to transform the country to be accountable and transparent and the president decided to stick their tried to find an opportunity to terminate his political opponent and other countries in civil war you just heard like a couple days ago where the police in. the prison guards dress in uniform in remove the uniform and entered a u.n. compound to kill women and children will happen to be under the guiding of the u.n. and now you see like this hatred this bitterness fighting not because of no targeting killing the killing is on ethnic lines. i know right never men kill one ethnic group the rebels go in and some of them were not control goes

into other events so it's terrifying. but emanuel thankfully right now you are a very successful hip hop artist and your path your rap is political it's all about sending a message out there you sing about peace using people to speak up for their rights najee theel your message is getting across i mean i know that it has lended you in trouble before now for example last september when you went back to south sudan you were brutally beaten by police. you have the voices going so the police beat me because they know the strengths of my voice so they're trying to silence me and later on when they don't like activists they do move their eyes and put them in the box and drop them in the mire and so so they're trying to scare me not to talk but i didn't keep quiet i kept doing my thing because i know why i am in this to speak full voice you know pushing for justice and equality for freedom for

everybody through the music just creating awareness so what i do is mostly for conscious aware. getting people to understand they have the power to actually change things not the government. emanuel thank you so much for this saying inside into a life child soldier i wish you all the best in getting your voice across the whole world and to everyone and to stop being a child soldier. recruited in the future thanks a lot for this interview we're talking to a man old jar forward child soldier and world famous rapper right now we're talking about the horrors of being a child soldier and how it could be stopped thanks for being with us the same for sophie and co we'll see you next time. i'm looking for. the we should let the lord know we've got.

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we speak your language any time of the will or not at the. school music programs in the. some spanish more matches to you breaking news a little too much of anglos kiddies story just seems. so you hear. that surely the spanish find out more visit i too am all tito it's comb. i'm abby martin the stories we cover here are not going here in iraq other big story the extra headlines same talk there's a reason they don't want him to know about me that are important to them no reason that we should be completely out now let's break the set. just like. they were going to do the job did you know the price is the only industry specifically mention in the constitution and. that's because

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