Thousands of children under the age of 15 have been directly involved in the conflict in Sierra Leone.

United Nations Refugee Agency says it believes soldiers, loyal to the former military regime,

are holding many civilians as hostages.

For more than a decade, the West African nation of Sierra Leone was ravaged by a brutal civil war.

The fighting was triggered by the refusal of the hunter.

In the struggle for control of the West African nation since last month's brutal rebel attack on the capital free-town.

Children as young as seven were given machetes and machine guns and forced to become killers.

From systematic amputation of limbs to mass rape, murder and enslavement of the civilian population.

Some election days are more momentous than others, for example, today in Sierra Leone.

The West African nation is attempting to elect a legitimate government after a decade of brutal civil war in the first multi-party election there in 25 years.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedaantham. Today we're talking about reconciliation.

Now, when we talk about forgiveness, we usually mean forgiving minor violations.

It's one thing to forgive someone who says something offensive or steals your purse or accidentally crashes a car into yours.

But could you forgive a neighbor who kills your father or cuts off your hand?

Could you continue to live next door to that person? Could you go back to being just neighbors?

I was always fascinated by this question of how we can restitch the fabric of society in the aftermath of war.

This is Andrella Dubé. She's an assistant professor of political science and economics at New York University.

And here's the question she set out to answer. Can there really be reconciliation after atrocities on the scale seen in Sierra Leone?

Over 50,000 people were killed, thousands more were raped and amputated, and a lot of this violence was actually neighbor on neighbor.

So when a conflict like this came to an end, you could find yourself living next door to someone who was responsible for amputating you or for hurting your family members.

And, you know, the question that I really wanted to ask is, how does the community move on from something like this?

I was a small boy when the war entered my village. This is Numa. He's from a small village in East-Chanceira, Leone.

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