A friend’s journey: Breathing life into a child soldier

"At first I distrusted everyone. Elliot said, 'Life is giving you a second chance.' All I wanted was death. Little by little, Elliot changed that." – Salifou Yankene

[Commentary] It is possible to cry for Africa in Iowa.

The shrill ring tone of the cell phone pulled me from early Sunday slumber. A friend so close to me that I consider him family, my college confidant and Washington, D.C., colleague Elliot Kaye of Brooklyn, N.Y., called to read me part of a New York Times article about a case that was consuming him, mentally and emotionally.

The story just broke on the Times' Web site, and I parsed it word by word in those hours after midnight. The case saved a young man's life, and changed the life of my friend. It is a case that deserves more attention – at least from those of us who consider ourselves Christian or human or something above a mere consumer of things.

Elliot, an attorney with the firm of Cooley Godward Kronish, is representing a teen-age boy from the Ivory Coast, Salifou Yankene, a kind-eyed sort with a love of literature (he reads Balzac) who was forced into the hell on earth that is child-soldiering in Africa. Salifou's life is a straight up, real-life version of Leonardo DiCaprio's "Blood Diamond." In a twisting and turning story, full of grace and sheer luck, Salifou escaped to the United States where he is now seeking protection.

The person fighting with sweat and tears and the American legal system to get it for him is my friend Elliot.

"In granting him asylum, one of the system's toughest judges would find it credible: the assassination of his father and older sister when he was 12; the family's flight to a makeshift camp for the displaced; his conscription at 15 by rebel troops who chopped off his younger brother's hand; and an extraordinary escape two years later, when his mother risked her life to try to save him," The New York Times Nina Bernstein reports. According to The Times there are 300,000 child soldiers worldwide "Only a few have ever made it to the United States, but campaigns to halt recruitment and rehabilitate survivors are resonating here – not least because a best-selling memoir ("A Long Way Home") by one former child soldier, Ishmael Beah, has put a compelling human face on the potential for redemption," The New York Times reports.

Salifou was being held by Immigration in a New Jersey jail cell. Officials one night a month ago decided to release Salifou, to dump him off in the middle of New York City. Elliot ended up talking to a law-enforcement official, finding a street corner on which to meet Salifou. The former child soldier then spent that night in the small Cobble Hill apartment of Elliot, his wife and 2-year-old son.

The child soldier slept on a living room pull-out couch just feet away from the toy trains of Elliot's son. Salifou is now here legally, but the government may seek to appeal the judge's decision and send him to back to Africa and near-certain death.

The issue of how to handle child soldiers is an international debate. Are they persecutors or the persecuted? Because they are, as the definition obviously tells us, children, and not part of an army organized in the way westerners think of one, we can't apply a Nuremberg standard or judge them as we would certain Germans who were complicit in the Holocaust.

"Salifou testified that to satisfy leaders who punished disobedience with death, he had looted during raids, grabbed new child conscripts and hit and kicked civilians without pity if they resisted," The New York Times reported. "He maintained, though, that while he had shot at people, he had never knowingly killed anyone.

"Many mysteries remain in the story of the escape of this adolescent, whose sheltered, upper-middle-class childhood and French schooling in West Africa ended abruptly with his father's murder. "One is the real identity of the foreigner his mother called Father William, who smuggled him onto a plane."

Since The New York Times ran it prominently, and most news that means anything in this country flows from the Times, you very well may see Salifou's story on television or in another venue soon.

This story is of course about Salifou. It should be. But for me it is also about Elliot, a man I've known for 20 years. I was the best man in his wedding a few years ago. He's been the chief of staff for two members of Congress, and we worked closely on Capitol Hill. We were college friends as well. I nominated Elliot to be president of our fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. – in part because I know he could do the job but in larger part because I knew he could do a better job of getting me and a few other characters out of our periodic "Animal House"-inspired troubles with administrators.

More seriously, I know how intensely he cares for other people. This knowledge is perhaps the only thing Iowan Doug Burns and African Salifou Yankene share.

"At first I distrusted everyone," Salifou told a reporter in New York City "Elliot said, 'Life is giving you a second chance.' All I wanted was death. Little by little, Elliot changed that."

In Iowa, this reporter read that line and started to cry. Because he knew it to be to true.

(There is a developing foundation for this former child soldier. Donations to be held in trust for Salifou Yankene may be sent to: Salifou Yankene Support Trust, c/o Cooley Godward Kronish, 1114 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10036.)