ROME — When he was a child, Papani Kamara’s mentor was known as Adama “Cut Hands.”
“He always told us that our machetes needed to be well sharpened,” Kamara recalls. “This was important because if the cut was clean, then the victims would pass out. Otherwise, the wrist or elbow could stay attached to the rest of the arm hanging by just a strip of flesh.”
As a 10-year-old boy living in the Sierra Leone village of Baomahun, Papani was forced to become a soldier for the Rebel United Front (RUF). “They came with the syringes already filled,” he recalls. “They injected drugs in our arms. We were treated like a bunch of dogs. They used us as tools for their own personal needs. Before setting the houses in the village on fire, our commander released everyone. He made a son rape his mother. We were forced to assist. I heard her screams and had to keep a rifle on the boy’s neck.”
If they had refused, he explains, they would have been killed. “But they were killed afterwards anyway. When kids disobeyed, they were gunned down immediately. They did this to teach the rest of us a lesson.”
These unthinkable nightmares emerged during months of tearful sessions with psychologists. “This information has been confirmed by international observers,” Kamara’s therapist is careful to explain. “The use of drugs and smuggling of diamonds are some of the tools used by the RUF to carry out its missions. During the war, they branded the children like cattle.”
Today, this former child soldier is 24 years old. He suffers from depression and severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He lives in misery, just outside of Rome, in a single room within a building shared by about 100 people whose lives have been turned upside down by crises — Italians, Chinese and other Africans like him. They take turns doing the cleaning and the security at the gate. On the wall of his room, there’s a picture of the Madonna. A small dog is yelping, chained, from the building opposite.
Leaving Sierra Leone
Papani escaped the war in Sierra Leone, spending seven years on the Ivory Coast before crossing the desert in Niger in a van filled with contraband cigarettes. Then, after all that, he escaped the war in Libya. “I wanted to enroll in Gaddafi’s army,” he says.
Papani then left for Lampedusa, escaping a northern Africa embroiled in crisis during the spring of 2011, arriving on the Italian island that has become a destination for many immigrants and just last week witnessed its own horror when a boat filled with would-be new arrivals caught on fire and sank.
Back then, Papani was convinced that he would find peace here in Italy, but his troubled past followed him here. “Everybody is afraid of me,” he says. “They think that I could snap in an instant and go back to doing bad things. But it’s not like that. I want to tell the world: It was because of drugs that I did those things. When they injected me with them, I didn’t know anything or recognize anyone — not even my parents.”
His father, Momodou, was the village chief, and his mother was named Fatou. They were killed in a fire that was started with petrol. Everything in Papani’s life still smolders. “I dream of getting a job,” he says, staring at the wall, “of learning a trade, being at peace and having a family.” But, these past two years in Italy haven’t been fruitful. “For me, things get worse day by day. I’m not working, I’m not studying. To be able to register for an Italian language course, I’ll have to pay a hundred euros.” Lost time is scary, especially when you’re haunted by your memories.
Forced against his best friend
Papani tells us for the first time what makes him cry the most: “Adama asked me to cut off the hands of my best friend, Moses. I refused. I looked him in the eyes, he was shaking and begged me not to. Then Adama beat me like he had never done before and threatened me with a knife on my neck. He said to cut Moses like he had taught me to.”
The psychologist’s report on Papani defined this as impossible choice. “One of the technically most atrocious tortures, used as a rite of passage to prove one’s affiliation with the RUF,” it says. “The aim of cutting Moses’ arms was to permanently separate him from his past and from any affections.”
Papani cries into a pink blanket that he saved from the trash. He has never had a girlfriend. The only girls he sees are the ones in the naked photos he has downloaded onto his phone. He says that some evenings he has to drink five beers because it’s the only thing that helps him not to think about what happened to his best friend. “Until I ask for Moses’ forgiveness for what I did, I’ll never be at peace.”
For Papani, there is a giant kaleidoscope of horror: the image of Moses screaming and writhing on the ground, a dark boat filled with people praying and vomiting in the middle of the sea, the violent protests in Bari, the nights spent sleeping rough and alone in Rome’s central Termini station.
Papani’s Permesso di Soggiorno visa issued for humanitarian reasons is about to expire. He doesn’t have the money to renew it, and the Interior Ministry hasn’t granted him political refugee status. He dries his eyes. For a moment, he tries to imagine what a stroke of luck would be like. He knows how to tile roofs and would accept any kind of work. “Unfortunately, I haven’t found any friendly people here in Italy. I’m sorry for saying that. I’ve looked for friends, someone to talk to, but I haven’t found anybody.”
The truth is that three women are trying to help him — his psychologist, a lawyer and an Italian teacher named Cecilia. Cecilia wrote him a letter that he carries with him always, like a passport. “I haven’t known you long, but I can tell that you’re a good guy,” it says. Nobody has ever said that to this former child soldier.
