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There are hundreds of thousands of child soldiers across the world. Roméo Dallaire wants Canadians to know those kids aren’t any different than our own children. The retired Lieutenant-general is speaking in Halifax this Tuesday at an event coordinated by his Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative. His aim is to influence young people at home, and let them know that not so far away their peers are being unspeakably abused.
What will the upcoming talk cover?
We are talking about children who are being used as weapons of war. We’re talking about children who are increasingly being used, and abused, even though it’s now recognized as a crime against humanity to recruit children. We’re sensitizing youth in our nation, let alone internationally, that their peers are being used as tools of war by adults who are unscrupulously destroying them by the thousands.
Why are child soldiers used around the world so increasingly?
There’s an absolute laziness—I’m trying to find a word that describes adults who are not keen on fighting and they simply turn to kids because they can abduct them and indoctrinate them. They’re easy targets for bad guys.
And it’s not just boys, it’s young girls too?
Over 40 percent are girls. They’re more multitasked, because they use them so much more in all the logistics, the food, all that kind of stuff. On top of that, so many of them are abused—sex slaves and bush wives. Girls fill the full complement of horrors that you could imagine we could bestow upon a child in an armed group.
What is a security sector response and why is that a successful counter to this crime?
Everything we’ve been doing up until now has not in any way, shape or form reduced the abuse. These kids continue to be used, and all the effort has gone to picking up the pieces afterwards. That is to say, rehabilitation and reintegrating once their war is over. That has proven, although essential in reconstruction of a nation, it has not reduced the numbers being recruited—the fundamental reason why child soldiers exist. They exist because they’re a weapon-system that is easily acquirable. Why not start at the front end, prevent them from being recruited? And once they’re being used, find ways of making them ineffective without killing them. That is a security problem, not a socio-economical problem.
What can Canada do to help?
Well, Canada is in a very difficult position because to start with it was one of the leading countries in implementing the Optional Protocol on child rights, around the year 2000. They said nobody under 18 is to be recruited or used, and it’s a crime against humanity to do so. However, not long after that we had the case of Omar Khadr. We’ve proven totally inept at applying exactly what we’ve been telling everybody else to do. The people in these conflict zones are very much aware that Canada hasn’t even applied its own international convention that it’s asked everybody else to sign.
What about Canadians attending your talk, what do you hope they take away from it?
They can realize that we have an incredible respect and we hold in high regard our children. We have Amber Alerts and all kinds of laws to protect our children. But the children in these foreign countries are just as much children as ours. They’re no different. But they’re being abused. I think Canadians can engage well beyond our borders, particularly the young people.
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This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2015.
Lt. General Dallaire is a man of passion, of character and of rare humanity. But he does his cause no good by attempting to excuse Omar Khadr as what we in the West have come to view as child soldiers.
Typically, child soldiers are children wrenched from their families and all positive adult support and guidance. This was not the case. The Khadr siblings went to Afghanistan willingly with dear old dad.
Child soldiers are typically conditioned with abuse – physical, mental, sexual.
No indications of such coercion have been found with any of the Khadrs.
Child soldiers are brutalized by their captors and forced to perform brutal acts which leave them scarred and traumatized. Omar looks pretty chipper in the video of him manufacturing I.E.D. components. And, aside from a perfunctory, attorney coached statement of regret, there is not the slightest indication that he actually feels bad about killing Sgt. Christopher Speer, or permanently blinding Sgt, Layne Morris. He’s proud of killing a khufar, secure in his eventual “reward”.
He is only a victim in the sense that Marc Lepine was a victim. He and his family are only Canadians, in the sense that Ernst Zundel was.
As far as the obscenity of children being used in war, it remains a product of a post-colonial, post-revolutionary decaying third world. The countries that recognize it as an evil are not the countries to use child soldiers. Those that permit it, even within their fraying borders, and impotent to halt it, even it they could. Those non-state actors who perpetrate it, are indifferent to world opinion.
The sad truth is, that even child soldiers are capable of inflicting an immense amount of harm and suffering, and, as any North Novie who fought at Authie and Buron can still tell us, sometimes the only solution, is the one most antithetic to our cultural values.
I wish the General success, even against the odds.
Also, the word in your headline should be “complement”
I know, I know, Grammar Nazis, even if they are child soldiers deserve what they get and get what they deserve.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12th_SS_Panzer_Division_Hitlerjugend#mediaviewer/File:12SSHJPOW.jpg
general dallaire is a horse’s ass