LIBERIA: Sending the Devil Home

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is such an exceptional documentary, transcending mere fact telling to provide a shocking occasion of human affirmation. In a shorthand of crisp but telling images and interviews, the 2008 film, recently released on DVD, tells us of the remarkable victory had by a Liberian peace movement. The movement was led by women in the face of a civil war marked by brutal extremes of murder, mutilation and rape.

The movement was largely organized by Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian social worker who was able to bring Christian and Muslim women together with such determined and growing force. Armed with white T-shirts and prayer, and using one of the oldest bargaining tools in the world -- sex -- the women took on the warlords and helped bring an end to the civil war being fought by the monstrous Charles Taylor. Taylor was a dictator, it is true, but it should be noted that he was no more cruel than the rebel forces focused on removing him from power. War is like that.

The award-winning film proves what Picasso felt was the deeper identity of war -- no matter the ideology, the nation involved or even the religion, there is a consistent connection true to all conflicts. That connection is the slaughter of the innocents. Those who fight wars rarely recognize the individual humanity of their victims.

Guns and bombs will kill, wound and mutilate whomever is available, or just happens to be, as it is said, in the wrong place at the wrong time. That wrong place for women is anywhere that battle takes place. In the blood-spewing theater of war, rape is yet another weapon used against the innocent.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell, directed by Gini Reticker, moves the viewer from heartbreak to a feeling of unexpected affirmation in a time when human cruelty is on daily display on the international stage. These women of Liberia decided to rouse their courage and stand up in the face of the devil they knew so well he could have been a close relative. In the film, each of the women interviewed speaks simply of right and wrong; they realized that civil war was destroying their country. And they realized that it was destroying them as well; they had become were sexual pawns in a man's war.