Liberal Senator and retired Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, author of They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children, says children are being used as primary weapons of war. It should be a crime against humanity at the UN and the ICC.

PUBLISHED Dec. 13, 2010, THE HILL TIMES

More than 250,000 children worldwide are used in wars and conflicts and this must be stopped, says retired general and Quebec Liberal Senator Roméo Dallaire, author of his recently-released They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers.

There are currently 30 conflicts in the world, a little more than half in Africa, where children are “the primary weapons system,” Sen. Dallaire said. Seventeen of the governments involved in these conflicts make use of child soldiers within their own government forces.

Sen. Dallaire, who is a senior fellow at Concordia University’s Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies, said foreign governments need to intervene in these types of conflicts in order to prevent children from being used as soldiers.

Sen. Dallaire also wrote the bestselling Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda based on his experience leading the UN peacekeeping mission during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Sen. Dallaire spoke about his book, published by Random House Canada, on Dec. 2 at Ottawa’s Mayfair Theatre as part of the Ottawa International Writers’ Festival. Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone who wrote about his experience in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, wrote They Fight Like Soldiers‘ foreword.

Why did you write this book?

“Because the subject of having children used as primary weapons of war is lost on the developed world in regards to taking action to stop it. There is a lot of work on making it a crime against humanity at the UN and the International Criminal Court, but not nearly enough political engagement in applying these conventions and actually stopping wars where children are the primary weapons system.”

Can you expand on your comment that children are the primary weapon system?

“It’s not just using a child sporadically to do logistics. We now have conflicts where the belligerents, sometimes on both sides, the government and non-state actors, use children as young as nine, arm them after having abducted them, drugged them and indoctrinated them and use them to fight up front and do the horrible actions to all the way through to being logistics, a transport system, including setting up the camps, preparing the food. In many of these male-dominated societies, the girls do that. The girls are also used as sex slaves and bush wives. And with 40 per cent of child soldiers being girls, you can’t find a more end to end complete system which on top of that is readily available because there’s all kinds of children in those societies and all kinds of weapons. There’s an unending source of those resources.”

In your first chapter, you wrote that you first confronted child soldiers in Rwanda and “at first they seemed to be children just like I had been, dressed up and playing adult games” but then you realized that they were for real. How did that make you feel?

“There was an obvious uneasiness of seeing adults in a very disciplined organization where in a conflict where they had as the bulk of their forces, very young boys mostly. At the time we were implementing a peace agreement. So, I was inspecting them, they’d be demobilized and the like. What really got to me … was changing these youth from the political group to a belligerent gang to a trained and armed militia, fully indoctrinated, in racist concepts and who ultimately conducted the bulk of the slaughter in Rwanda.”

Another quote that was interesting was in your chapter about killing a child soldier. You wrote, “can you kill a child if that child is dressed and armed as a warrior? If so, how many times can you do that deliberately before revulsion and disgust and self doubt fry your brain?” What is your answer? Have you spoken to people who have killed child soldiers? What was their response?

“People who face such overwhelming ethical and moral dilemmas are injured psychologically with operational stress injuries and suffered essentially PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder]. The effect is the same for all of them. The question often is exacerbated by a sense of guilt even though in accordance with the rules of engagement of self defence and of protecting others against belligerents who are using force against them, they were legally in a position to use that force. …

“My book has a significant difference to other books on this subject. I built two characters just like [Antoine de] Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince. I have the professional soldier from a developed country and how they become a soldier, and I have a youth who’s abducted and turned into a child soldier and what happens when the confrontation happens. I use that as a catalyst to convince people that we’ve got to find other ways to stop these scenarios. … What can we do to make the child soldier weapon ineffective and even render it a liability to these rogue adults who want to use them? If we can do that, then they won’t recruit them.

What do you think of the outcome of the Omar Khadr case? When you wrote the book, he was still at trial.

“Disgust.”

Why?

“Why? Because not only have we contravened an international law regarding the use a youth in conflict in as much of our handling of him, which means he’s supposed to be demobilized and rehabilitated and reintegrated, and not prosecuted in criminal court, but what we have done is put at risk the 250,000 other child soldiers in the world where we have been using the threat of the rogue adults to be prosecuted in front of the International Criminal Court for a crime against humanity which is the use of child soldiers. So, we now find ourselves with an international law that’s been established and two of the countries that led the charge to create it under the optional of child rights have flagrantly acted contrary to all its edicts.”

In your book you wrote that the Khadr case “is a black mark on my own country’s international reputation and standing for child rights and human rights as a whole.” Who’s to blame for that?

“There’s no one else to blame, but the government in power. The government in power, we’ve had three governments, there was the Chrétien government, there was the Martin government, and there is the Harper government. I would contend in the first year, in 2002, as we were all reacting to the panic of 9/11 and Al Qaeda, that there was a period of such over reaction in regards to overriding human rights, civil liberties and international conventions as we tried to articulate our protection that Khadr was caught in that time warp. However, all the other developed countries then assessed their fundamental values, their ethical references, and found the process in Guantanamo Bay inappropriate and withdrew their prisoners from that process and handled them themselves, be they adults or child soldiers.”

Do you think we can erase that black mark?

“No.”

Why?

“Because here you have the leading countries who convinced the world and had the bulk of the nation states of the world sign up to an international convention that has one of the highest rates of approval and being tested in actually applying everything that’s in the convention and absolutely and totally failing. … There is decades now of work to be done to establish the credibility that we can have to enforce that crime against humanity.”

What can governments do?

“Some of the first things is take the conventions that they signed, and put them into law in their own countries. We never changed our laws except a slight modification to the National Defence Act regarding the Convention of Child Rights, this optional protocol. I’m hoping to introduce in the new year legislation on our Immigration Act, Criminal Codes and Security Act to conform them to the convention.

“We signed it 10 years ago, and we haven’t done it. That’s the first thing. The second thing is the Will to Intervene. Intervene in stopping countries from recruiting children in conflict, by helping to prevent conflicts happening, intervening by engaging in a real effort to stop the flow of weapons, or the proliferation of small arms, and ultimately engaging in the fundamental premise of taking deliberate action where conflicts are being conducted by belligerents who are using child soldiers. We’ll do it for it oil, why can’t we do it for kids?”

You also wrote that you remain “indefatigably positive. After all I’ve seen, I still have hope.” How are you able to have that hope?

“That hope comes from after years of therapy and medication that helps to stabilize the injury of PTSD. The hope comes from realizing that being engaged and advancing human rights in whatever form or specific arenas or aspects of it is a long term exercise. My references for success are not based on short term scenarios but all on the contrary, on the very long term, which means decades and the fact that I’ll do my part and if I build enough momentum I will have engaged others to do their part, and that will continue to the extent where I hope we will achieve a time when we will not revert to conflict because of the frictions of our differences.”

Who should read your book?

“I wrote the book to generate anger, and a will to get engaged and I wrote it for senior high schoolers, undergrads, and adults who are conscious of the fact that those children who are being abused over there are just as much a child as their own kids and they count just as much.”

They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers, by Roméo Dallaire. Random House Canada, 320 pp., $34.95.