They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children

by Roméo Dallaire

  ROMÉO DALLAIRE

  with Jessica Dee Humphreys

  THEY FIGHT LIKE

  SOLDIERS

  THEY DIE LIKE

  CHILDREN

  The Global Quest to Eradicate

  the Use of Child Soldiers

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Foreword by Ishmael Beah

  Introduction

  1. Warrior Boy

  2. Little Soldiers, Little Killers

  3. Kidom

  4. Kidom Lost

  5. How a Child Soldier Is Made

  6. How a Child Soldier Is Trained and Used

  7. How to Unmake a Child Soldier

  8. The Moment: Killing a Child Soldier

  9. The Child Soldiers Initiative

  10. What You Can Do

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix: International Action on Child Protection and Child Soldiers

  Recommended Reading

  Recommended Websites

  About the Author

  Imprint

  Footnote

  The child, face and hands caked in red earth, wearing a dirty, ill-fitting bush uniform with a cross dangling from a chain around his neck, furtively aimed a machine gun at me. As bullets started to spew from the barrel, the child’s eyes flared in hate. Where is that child today?

  FOREWORD

  by Ishmael Beah

  I AM SIMULTANEOUSLY GRATEFUL and deeply troubled to be writing a foreword for this very important work that aims to shed new light on how to end the use of children in war. Grateful that I am alive and was lucky enough to survive the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone, where I fought as a child soldier at the age of thirteen. My survival has allowed me to put a human face to this experience. I am also grateful for the fact that some measures have been taken on the international front to remove children from war, hence the possibility of my writing at this moment in time.

  However, I am also deeply troubled because the usage of children in war continues and international and national mechanisms to prevent this appalling phenomenon—and to hold accountable those responsible for such acts—remain weak. Troubled, because what happened to my childhood and continues to destroy lives of children and their childhoods can be prevented and yet nothing concrete has been done to date.

  As you read this, there is a child as young as eight, nine, ten and up to seventeen years of age in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who is at the brink of losing his or her childhood to war, who is starting on the path of believing that violence is an acceptable part of life. I have yet to meet a parent who would like such a life for their child. So why should the world turn a blind eye on such a paramount problem, one that will undoubtedly destroy the moral and ethical foundations of a majority of the next generation? I do not have any explanation for this blindness to the countless lives of children that have been lost, that have been amputated, the countless children who have become traumatized and lost entire families. What I do know is that there is interest in the issue and that over the years much has been learned about children who are caught up in war. As a result, a greater awareness has come about and support to create international standards to deal with this issue has grown exponentially. But this growth in awareness and the push for international legal and non-legal standards, though admirable, has yielded far too little or no impact on the ground in places of conflict and in the lives of the children who are at risk of entering conflict.

  Vigorous work to bring international attention to the issue of children in conflict began in 1996, punctuated by Graça Machel’s report The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children. Since then, international instruments such as the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict and United Nations (UN) Security Council resolutions 1612 and 1882 (enacted to report and monitor the use of child soldiers and to hold recruiters accountable) have come into existence. In addition, there are various declarations and principles at regional and sub-regional levels to support and further expand on the existing international instruments. Unfortunately, in my view there are no workable mechanisms with direct influence in the field in place to implement these instruments. As the enforcement mechanisms continue to be ineffective, the possibility of more children finding themselves in the theatre of war increases.

  As someone who knows first-hand the impact of war on children, I am constantly in search of new ideas of how to end this scourge. I strongly believe that the Child Soldiers Initiative (CSI), developed and led by Lieutenant-General the Hon. Roméo A. Dallaire (Ret’d) in association with the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies, Dalhousie University, is an innovative project that goes at the root of the problem. It gathers all sectors and stakeholders involved in dealing with children in armed conflict to not only put an end to their use and recruitment but to eradicate the very concept of “child soldier” and to generate a strong global political will that is presently lacking.

  It is my hope that through the pages of this remarkable book, you will discover groundbreaking thoughts on building partnerships and networks to enhance the global movement to end child soldiering; you will gain new and holistic insights on what constitutes a child soldier; you will learn more about girl soldiers, who have not been fully considered in the discussion of this issue; you will discover methods on how to influence national policies and the training of security forces; and you will find practical steps that will foster better coordination between security forces and humanitarian efforts.

  I challenge you to read this important and timely work and discover that we as human beings, as nations, as the international community, have the capacity to end the use of children in war. We must not waste another minute as the task is clearly outlined in these pages.

  Ishmael Beah,

  author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

  INTRODUCTION

  The blue sky glittered like a new-honed knife … The purity of the sky

  upset me. Give me a good black storm in which the enemy is plainly

  visible. I can measure its extent and prepare myself for its attack.

  —ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, WIND, SAND AND STARS

  IMAGINE YOURSELF ON A HILLSIDE in the chaotic throes of war, with a sea of innocents behind you whom you are tasked by duty, honour, mandate and ethics to protect. Your weapon is drawn, and you are prepared for the attack. Over the hilltop, right in front of you, comes a troop of marauding rebel soldiers with rifles and machetes. You raise your own weapon and peer through the magnifying gunsight at the leader.

  Shock hits as you realize this soldier is not a man nor a professional—not your equal in age, strength, training, understanding. This soldier is a child, in the tattered remnants of a military uniform, with dozens more children behind him.

  As you stare at him, you picture yourself in a flash, aged ten, playing war games in the woods. For a split second, you are transported to the world of childhood, with its make-believe, its wonder, its potential. And in that split second, you must decide your own fate, the fate of the villagers under your protection, and of these children in front of you. Do you treat this person aiming his weapon at you as a soldier or a child? If you do nothing, dozens will be slaughtered and you put your own life at risk. If you fire to frighten or disarm, you begin a doomed and bloody shootout. Fire back to kill, as you would at an adult, and you will save a village, but at what cost?

  I was a soldier. A peacekeeper. A general. Years have now passed since I stood among the corpses of a human destruction that rivalled anything Dante could have imagined. The smells, the sight
s, the terrible sounds of the dying in Rwanda have been damped down in my psyche to a dull roar through constant therapy and an unrelenting regimen of medication.

  But no similar intervention has liberated me from the ethical dilemma that spat in my face far too often during that catastrophic period of inhumanity in Rwanda, one hundred days in 1994 that saw 800,000 human beings slaughtered in a genocide no one in the international community could muster the will to stop.

  Was that rebel coming over the hill a soldier or a child? Was that rebel acting of his or her own free will or because he or she was coerced and indoctrinated? Is a child still a child when pressing the barrel of a gun to your chest? Those child soldiers’ eyes were wide and brilliant, screaming of pain and anguish and fear and hatred; what had they seen and what effect had it had on their souls?

  “Civil” is ironically what we call a war where civilians are the primary target, and power over them is the principal gain—a war where combatants mingle with civilians and use them as shields, as camouflage, as bait and as recruits for the “cause.” In the failed states and war-plagued regions of the globe, young recruits exist in unlimited numbers, available at will.

  It may seem unimaginable to you that child soldiers exist. It seemed impossible to me when I first encountered them that anyone would abuse the state of childhood so ruthlessly. And yet the reality for many rebel and gang leaders, and even state governments, is that there is no more complete end-to-end weapon system in the inventory of war machines than the child soldier. Its negligible technology, simple sustainment requirements, unlimited versatility in all possible facets of low-intensity conflict, and capacity for barbarism has made the child soldier the weapon of choice in over thirty conflicts around the world, for governments and non-state actors alike. Man has created the ultimate cheap, expendable, yet sophisticated human weapon, at the expense of humanity’s own future: its children.

  Thanks to a worldwide proliferation of light weapons and ammunition, combined with the limitless resource of children as a result of the overpopulation in developing countries in conflict, such as we see in so many cases in Africa, there is no more readily available, cost-effective and renewable weapon system in existence today. Desperate children, boys and girls, are cheap to sustain, have no real sense of fear, and are limitless in the perverse directions they can be manipulated through drugs and indoctrination since they have not yet developed a concept of justice and have been ripped away from their families to fend in the new perverted family of armed force.

  Children are vulnerable and easy to catch, just like minnows in a pond, especially in places where families are being destroyed by famine, epidemic, AIDS, warring factions. Children are faceless and they are considered expendable. The guns are light enough for children to carry, and they are plentiful. There are illicit arms traders in the dozens who (for blood diamonds, especially) are most accommodating. The children dig up the diamonds and sustain the weaponry, and they are the expendable platform to conduct the killing. Girls are an even greater asset, as they can do everything that boys can do, and so much more. They set up bivouacs, prepare the food, control the younger children and are used as sex slaves and bush wives.

  Children are excellent as combatants, as bait for ambushes, as cannon fodder. They are light to transport but still heavy enough to explode land mines so adults can move safely in their wake.

  Young children are walking the earth right now with no sense of youth, of imaginary worlds, of joy, of love, of human warmth. They are not truly children in any definition except biological. But of course they are still children, are they not? Have conflict, abject poverty and abandonment mutated them into some other type of being that is neither child nor adult? A category of their own that does not fit any description of what civilizations over the millennia have called a child?

  What has humanity created? What have we permitted to be created? Alive and breathing in the hundreds of thousands in not-so-far-off lands are beings who have the physical form of children, yet who have been robbed of the spirit, the innocence, the essence of childhood.

  It is hard for me to believe that in the twenty-first century, after hundreds of years of renaissance, of enlightenment, of modernity and human rights, we are faced with child soldiers in their hundreds of thousands. Where do we go from here?

  As I will describe later in the book, my first encounter with child soldiers came in 1993 in Rwanda, where I was serving as the UN force commander of UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda). It was not meant to be a hot spot of an assignment. I was sent with minimal troops to help ensure that all parties adhered to the peace agreement that had been brokered between the government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel army composed mainly of second-generation refugee Tutsis who had won significant military victories against the regime. I was also to help prepare the way for democratic elections that were designed to enshrine power-sharing between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority. While in Rwanda I bore witness to preparations for what ultimately became a genocide designed to annihilate an entire ethnic group, the Tutsis, along with moderate Hutus and opposition politicians. Despite my increasingly desperate pleas and the presentation of overwhelming evidence, the international community insisted that I not, under any circumstances, interfere in these preparations, raid arms caches or otherwise take action. I was commanding a peacekeeping mission, not fighting a war.

  A hundred days. Eight hundred thousand innocent people slaughtered.

  I stayed at my post throughout the genocide that began on April 6, 1994, along with a small contingent of Canadian and African—mostly Ghanaian—soldiers who decided to stay with me, doing what we could, which was nowhere near enough.

  Even now, a sensation, especially a smell, can send me back to scenes from that slaughter. I hear a sticky, tacky sound, and then flash to decaying bodies slithering like fish in the net of an open mass grave, and I am briefly unable to extricate myself from this quicksand of memory.

  Despite the increased responsibilities and the more and more senior appointments I took on after I got back to Canada in September 1994, I spent the next six years intensely reliving the Rwandan genocide—in my mind, at podiums around the world, and at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. I made no progress in healing. Rather, I maintained a pace designed to drive myself to the self-destruction I felt I owed the people of Rwanda as retribution for my part in the failure of the international community to come to their aid.

  Then, in April 2000, I was given a medical release from the Canadian Forces and asked to clear out my office at National Defence Headquarters. April, of course, is the anniversary of the beginning of the genocide, and is a difficult month for anyone with ties to those horrible events. Though I understood that I was no longer able to cope with my job as assistant deputy minister (human resources—military) at National Defence, I could not imagine being cut loose from military life, which had been my first love through my childhood as the son of a non-commissioned officer (NCO) in the Canadian Army and my own reality for thirty-six years. Since I also had absolutely no idea of what I would (or could) do in civilian life, I entered a period of ever more turbulent days and nights that no amount of medication could ease. I could not imagine being “retired,” with nothing but therapy to break the hamster wheel of regret, self-doubt and self-flagellation that left me relentlessly rethinking every action I’d taken, every order I’d given, through every moment of my time in Kigali.

  One morning during the exit process from the forces, I received a standard briefing from the group public affairs officer, and he happened to mention that his wife was heavily involved at Foreign Affairs with a large international conference on war-affected children, which was to be held that September in Winnipeg. She and I soon spoke, and we agreed that I should present a paper. To my surprise, her boss endorsed her recommendation.

  I had given hundreds of speeches and written thousands of words on Rwanda, but there had always been one reality of
the genocide that I hadn’t allowed myself to fully explore. It was one thing to remind people of the children who had been orphaned, maimed or murdered, and another thing to remember them myself. The usual mental image conjured by the phrase “war-affected children” is of the child victims of conflict, and I had encountered many vivid, heartbreaking examples.

  But what about the other kind of war-affected child, the one compelled to pick up the machete or the gun, the one who becomes a crucial part of the killing machine? I had also met many such children in Rwanda and had witnessed the consequences of their work: they inhabited my nightmares.

  As a military commander I’d been forced to deal with the fact that children were foot soldiers of both the genocide and the resistance in Rwanda—much as I still wanted to write them off as an aberration, a one-time-only historical phenomenon. I’d blocked the knowledge out of my mind: there were so many horrors, so many unthinkable things. Now I decided I was finally going to talk about the children. All of them.

  What I couldn’t know when I agreed to prepare a paper and participate on a panel of “experts” on war-affected children was that I was about to find a vocation to replace my long commitment to the military—a calling to act on behalf of children affected by war, children drawn into the arena of war as child soldiers. To this day, this commitment is the driving force of my humanitarian work, and of this book.

  By 2000, humanitarians, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governments had made great strides at identifying the scope of the crisis facing our children and in putting the issue of child soldiers on the world agenda. The UN achieved its landmark Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. The most significant work since then had been done by Graça Machel, the widow of the Mozambican president Samora Machel (killed in a plane crash in South Africa in 1986), who was appointed by the UN to lead a study focused sharply on the dangers to children who found themselves in the midst of war, as victims or as victimized perpetrators. Her report, “The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children,” presented to the UN General Assembly in 1996, called on the international community not just to note these harsh realities but to respond. And to some extent it did, appointing a UN special representative on children and armed conflict and (around the time I was being retired from the Canadian Forces) adopting an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child that pledged its signatories to limit the military use of children.