Of killers and clowns

摘要

With his comic wooden glasses, baggy britches, oversized shoes and white-painted face, Boutini the clown seems an unlikely front man for a disarmament campaign. But in Liberia, many of the soldiers who need to be disarmed are children. At a "sensitisation" meeting last weekend in Bo Waterside, a sleepy town on the border with Sierra Leone, Boutini reduced a gaggle of ex-fighters to giggles with his slapstick routine. Then he urged them to "Hand in your guns". After 14 years of on-off civil war, Liberia is probably west Africa's most destitute country. But since its chief warlord, President Charles Taylor, was toppled, it has had a chance to recover. With two rebel groups threatening his capital (and his life), and America ordering him out, Mr Taylor fled to Nigeria last August.