Some of the documentaries at Tribeca this year feel like messages in a bottle sent from the recent past, efforts at preserving material that will be useful to those who eventually write the definitive histories. Pray to Send the Devil Back to Hell is a mixture of old news footage and fresh interviews dealing with the fifteen years of chaos and carnage that followed the declaration of civil war in Liberia in 1989. Ragged as the movie is, it makes for an inspiring viewing experience, and its tribute to the "women's peace movement" of Liberia succeeds in taking something that, at the time, may have seemed like a footnote to the big events and making the case that it was instrumental in bringing about many of the happier developments in this story. The women's peace movement grew out of the escalating sense of hopelessness that developed as President Charles Taylor and the "warlords" jockeying to replace him both used violent terror as their main tool in their battle for power. Things finally got bas enough that the Christian and Muslim women of Liberia, for the first time in their history, joined forces to campaign for peace through public protests and more intimate strategies, such as what one of them calls "sex strikes." The campaigners betray no hesitation in declaring themselves the representatives of peace by virtue of their gender, and united as a group against men, who they regard as "guilty" of supporting violence "either by commission or omission." As they see it, the men are the ones with the power in their society, and if they didn't want the bloodshed to continue, they could do something to stop it. Instead, they've used their power to bring war--and to approve the use of rape as a weapon in warfare.
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