They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children

by Roméo Dallaire

  The Canadian government was actively involved in the diplomatic and UN action on the issue, riding a wave of optimism over its ability to play a leadership role on humanitarian and human security issues. More than optimism, in fact, since the Ottawa Treaty to ban land mines was proof that Canada could in fact lead global change. Lloyd Axworthy, then the minister of foreign affairs, and Maria Minna, the minister in charge of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), had now dedicated themselves to drawing attention to the gaps in the international efforts to protect children affected by war. The conference at which I’d just been invited to speak turned out to be the first global ministerial-level conference on the issue, drawing delegations from 132 countries and 126 NGOs, as well as representatives from the UN, the corporate sector and academia, and fifty youth delegates who were to bring the voices of child soldiers and child victims into the discussion during two days of dedicated talks.

  We convened in Winnipeg on September 10, 2000, and I spoke on the second day of the section of the conference devoted to hearing from those in the know. The relatively small room where we met was packed to the rafters with attendees and media. Since this was my first foray into the spotlight out of uniform, I suspected that most of the journalists were interested in my command of the Rwandan mission, and questions during the scrum before the session proved me right. That was fine in a way, as it provided me with an initiation into speaking my mind without previous guidance from government officials on what to say or avoid saying.

  My fellow panellists spoke of war-affected children as victims of circumstance, describing various parts of the world where failing states were unable to stop massive crimes against humanity, including the abduction and abuse of children by the belligerents. When it was my turn to speak, I remember squeezing the microphone as I described how youths in Rwanda had been indoctrinated by extremist ideologues, had been captured by the mass hysteria of racism and hatred, and had literally chopped their way across a nation in a rampage of human destruction encouraged and energized by adult leaders and racist radio broadcasts. In Rwanda some children had been abducted by one force or another and others were victims and innocents, but many were disenfranchised youths enticed by power, by the machismo of weapons, by the idea of belonging to an organization that was feared by all. At the end of my twenty minutes or so, I was sweating—literally burning with the desire that people understand how inconceivable it was for children to be used in this fashion. I don’t remember much about the question period after the panel, but I do remember the absolute silence in the room when it was my turn to respond, as if the audience was expecting me to take them somewhere they did not want to imagine. To my own chagrin, I delivered on that expectation with vivid scenes from the genocide. But my point was that we had to stop extremist adults from turning children into killing machines.

  Maria Minna had attended the session, and later that night offered to make me a member of Canada’s official delegation to the conference so that I could participate in the resolution-framing part of the exercise. At the closing news conference, the minister announced that she had made me a special advisor on war-affected children to CIDA, reporting to her, the first position of its kind. I could not have asked for a better place from which to address the moral, ethical and legal dilemmas of using children, arming them and employing them as the principal weapon in conflict. I now had the chance to influence the actions of my own country through the minister, to help make war-affected children and child soldiers a cause célèbre.

  As the minister’s special advisor, I took my first trip back to Africa since I’d come home from Rwanda, travelling to Sierra Leone and Guinea in 2001 to gather information on what was happening to African children, attempt to advance the demobilization process that was already launched, and bring their stories and some ideas for long-term solutions back with me. As I was operating outside the regular bureaucratic stream, and because I had been a general not a humanitarian groomed inside the UN or on the board of an NGO, I soon found that I came at the issues from a different place than most.

  I met with the UN political leaders and military commanders, and talked to peacekeepers at all levels, right down to the young corporal guarding a demobilization site. They spoke of frictions and difficulties in coordinating with their civilian colleagues from the political and humanitarian realms and how complex it was to gain their confidence and support in security matters. Because I was retired from the military, those same NGO workers so often leery of people in uniform briefed me equally candidly, though I think the old hands in the world of humanitarian work probably viewed me as more odd than useful. As for the leaders of the armed groups and the child soldiers themselves, my rank gave me access to their world view in a way that wasn’t offered to either the aid workers or the UN troops. I came away thinking that maybe I really would be able to dig into the nature of this beast from a different angle than my civilian colleagues.

  What stood out starkly for me then was the continued influence that the child soldier leaders had on their peers—and even on the adults delivering the demobilization, rehabilitation and reintegration programmes. These were fourteen-year-olds who were going on twenty-five, who were still very much in charge and who were not going to buy into any simplistic Dick-and-Jane rehab programme delivered by adults, no matter how well-meaning. They were seeking much more than just a short-term return programme to social normality. They could influence and they could command, and they demanded recognition of the power, the potential and the respect they had earned over years in the bush. They could spell the success or failure of any programme; to work effectively with them, the adults needed to realize who they were dealing with, and figure out how to help these youths find a path away from brutal addiction to power, toward using their powers of leadership to beneficial ends.

  Later I travelled to Brazil to meet children who’d been hauled into the gang wars that raged in the favelas of places like Rio de Janeiro, and it struck me that the drug lords found children useful for the same reasons that combatants in Africa did: they were easily recruited, cheap to maintain, they could fire a light submachine gun as well as any adult, and occasionally the fact that they were children could disconcert an opponent for a crucial moment.

  —

  At the same time as my involvement in the subject of child soldiers deepened, I was also at last working on my account of the genocide, Shake Hands with the Devil, published in Canada in the fall of 2003. Needless to say, the act of disinterring memories and researching every step and misstep was both gruelling and gruesomely clarifying. I was able to travel back to Kigali for the tenth anniversary commemoration of the genocide in April 2004 with a certain amount of strength drawn from my close examination of events, and pay tribute to the lost, to the mourners, to the survivors, without being completely hijacked by shame. For a time, the attention paid to the book threw me full-time into the work of genocide prevention, and when I was offered a fellowship for the academic year of 2004–2005 at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which is part of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, I believed that my academic and research work would focus on conflict resolution, and the new role of peacekeepers actively attempting to make peace, not just enforce it, in the planet’s numerous barbaric wars in failing states.

  But in the end, the children kept drawing me onward. Since the Machel report had been released in 1996, there had been some research done on the recruitment of children—mostly anecdotal—and on the disarmament, demobilization, rehabilitation and reintegration of child soldiers, but there was almost no analysis of the child’s own experience during conflict and even less on the recruiters and the commanders using them. Absolutely no one was looking at the tactical advantage of using children in war, and no cohesive or concrete results were coming forth as to why they were being recruited in the first place let alone what made them so valuable to commanders. After some cursory research, I discovered that no country had developed t
actical responses to this issue from the military or even the policing point of view. No doctrine existed to deal with child soldiers in the field, even though soldiers and police were facing them daily. This new weapon of war had snuck into the inventory of conflicts around the world and—despite the diplomatic conventions and protocols we were passing and signing and ratifying—we were acting as if it wasn’t there. Much money and effort were being spent, are still being spent, on picking up the pieces in post-conflict settings. Children were being cared for in the aftermath of war, but no one was thinking of ways to neutralize this weapon, nor successfully preventing child recruitment in the first place.

  My experience in Rwanda taught me that soldiers—be they rebels, armed thugs or conscripts—respond to soldiers: it turned out that I could use my military rank and my operational credentials as a bridge to negotiate even with the bloodied youth leaders of the Interahamwe, whose machetes had hacked their neighbours to death. No matter what force you fight there is an unspoken respect for rank that could be taken advantage of. Rebel leaders who relied on child soldiers had been bombarded with attention from the NGOs, which would of course never discuss the actual tactical and strategic value of the use of children with them, but they had never been approached by a former senior operational commander in a humanitarian role. No one seemed to be speaking the language the rebel leaders were using when it came to their primary operational forces, these child soldiers. No one was making the argument that the inexhaustible availability of child soldiers as well as the proliferation of small arms were actually fuelling conflict and keeping wars going.

  Quickly my research began to focus on children being used as weapons of war. Tools used by adults to wage war. Much like a soldier would use his gun or grenade, the child had become another weapon in their repertoire. The thesis of my research became clear: in these conflicts around the world, and especially on the African continent, children had become a weapon of choice for commanders. Indispensable. My very keen and adroit research team was soon deep in the exploration of what exactly made this weapon system so attractive to commanders. Beyond the ubiquity of children, what made them a military weapon of choice?

  I was amazed to find that my new military or operational vocabulary shocked people working in the field. But out of it came my mission and the mission of this book. If it is possible to use a child as a weapon system, it should be possible to decommission or neutralize that weapon system: to eradicate the use of child soldiers. Not to eradicate the child, but to eradicate the use of that child in war.

  This book explores how I am attempting to decommission a weapon system that is itself a crime against humanity yet is used extensively in the ongoing conflicts around the globe. On the battlefield, how does one render such a weapon ineffective—even turn it into an impediment? How does one prevent such a choice weapon from being used in the first place? How does one change these human weapons into plowshares after demobilization?

  Child soldiers are not weathered warriors who have consciously, willingly and wholeheartedly committed their adult life to the use of force against others and are prepared to pay the price of the same against them. We are not speaking of Sparta and Athens in ancient times, where young boys (and only boys) were selected by competition and breeding to be indoctrinated into the warrior caste through years of education in the knowledge of war, of training to hone weapon-handling skills, of experience through deliberate apprenticeships mentored by seniors, of bathing in the stories of exploits of great fighters and of being led by wise and astute generals once they were of age. Nor are they combatants in countries that consider the use of force as limited exclusively for protection and self-interest, and use it under strict rules and codes, whereby civilian leaders issue mandates to those who are professionals in the art of war and conduct themselves within an honourable ethos. These children fight and die where there seem to be no rules except self-preservation—basic survival.

  There are now international and national laws against the use of children under the age of eighteen in armed combat. Couldn’t we eradicate the use of child soldiers by applying those laws to the adults who recruit children to fight their wars? Couldn’t we simply arrest the culprits at every opportunity and have them thrown in jail ad vitam aeternam? Can’t we stop this impunity?

  We immediately run up against the question of who will apply these laws and international arrest warrants. What political will or capital would be expended by foreign governments to go into a sovereign nation in conflict and conduct operations to arrest the adult leaders, be they from the government forces or the rebels, on the basis that either side or both sides are using children as weapons of war? And what tactics do you use to secure an arrest when these adult leaders are surrounded by drug-induced “brain-dead” child fanatics?

  The 2007 Paris Principles—a culminating point in a decade of activism and legislation guided by Graça Machel, in particular—vigorously argue that the long-term impact on child soldiers is so horrifying that the international community needs to assume the responsibility for enforcing its own laws. But the response has been slow, barely noticed, uneven and often overshadowed by more pressing concerns in the search for ceasefires, truces, peace agreements and permanent freedom for the people afflicted by the conflicts.

  What if, rather than waiting for the great powers of the world to rise up in unison and come crashing down on these sovereign yet imploding and chaotic states, we were able to create another solution? What if we were able to bring to the field a sort of tool kit of actions that could be taken by a variety of players and institutions attempting to solve the conflict in the first place?

  What if we addressed the problem of this new low-technology weapon system by confronting it directly, on the ground and in the bush where it hides and preys on its victims? Leave to others the complex socio-economic quagmires that have created the conflict in the first place. Leave to those already well versed in these things, the demobilization, rehabilitation and reintegration of those children who have escaped, been abandoned or rounded up.

  What if we actually went after the weapon system itself? What if we directly attempted to neutralize its effectiveness in the field and in the conduct of its evil crimes? What if we introduced a set of tools that would eradicate this weapon system from ever being employed or even created ever again? What if?

  Today more than ever, on distant and disparate battle zones, we find the professional soldier, buoyed by years of experience and tradition in the most modern of technological instruments of war, coming face to face with the absolute opposite. It would be nearly impossible to invent a more complete antithesis to the modern, mature warrior-cum-peacekeeper than the child rebel, the child fighter, the child soldier. And what response can there be when the child combatants fire the murderous weapons in their hands? Do you kill children who kill? Do you use force to prevent their continued use of the guns they carry?

  Can we actually eradicate from the minds of evil adults the very idea of using children as weapons of war? Is there room for innovative research and training to counter and prevent their use? Is there a way by which we free citizens can engage with political leaders to stop the massive abuses of children in conflict-riddled and imploding nations where poverty drives desperately corrupt and ill-begotten power?

  This book is my best effort to show some of the ways in which we can answer yes to these questions. It is also an attempt, drawing on my own experience and the research I’ve undertaken over fifteen years, to understand the exact nature of the crime against humanity that is involved when a child is used and destroyed in this manner. A small warning to readers: I’ve done my best to come at these questions imaginatively as well as through facts and argument, and in three of the chapters of this book, I have created a fictional narrative involving the abduction of a child, the indoctrination of that child as a child soldier, and the moment in which that child and a UN peacekeeper meet in combat. I tell the story from the child’s point of view in chapte
rs three and four: “Kidom” and “Kidom Lost.” Then in chapter eight, “The Moment: Killing a Child Soldier,” I switch to the vantage point of the peacekeeper.

  I believe that because this material is so painful, and because many of these children live in places many of us have never travelled, we create barriers in our own minds that prevent us from recognizing and feeling the damage that is being done to the fabric of humanity by allowing our children to be abused in conflict zones around the globe. Just as this book is a plea to protect the imaginative growth of children everywhere, it is also me putting my money where my mouth is by trying to use the power of my imagination to help the reader to connect to the reality of child soldiers. In my humble way, and with no comparison implied, I took my inspiration in this attempt from The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic. I believe that none of us will hesitate to act if we at last connect to these children through the child that survives within ourselves.

  Imagine yourself on a hillside.

  1.

  WARRIOR BOY

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my father set out to build a cabin in the bush in the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec. The site was on a small cliff overlooking a violin-shaped lake, with virgin bush for tens of kilometres in nearly all directions around it. In the late fall and winter, the local farmers would go into the woods with their enormous horses and chains and tackles and sleighs to cut and then haul out spruce and cedar, and even the odd oak, to the provincial road where the logs would be piled sky-high until spring. I would marvel at these weather-beaten and muscle-bound farmers and their sons, who seemed to effortlessly wield enormous axes and bucksaws a hundred feet long.