I had interrupted a not-unanticipated exchange, typical of many to come. They always followed the same path:
“But these children are people, not weapons! You can’t seriously expect us to discuss shooting children!” This from the NGO side.
The uniforms’ response: “Well, you’ve never been in a situation where keeping some people alive meant having to use force to stop others from killing them!”
“Who do you think was on the ground before you got there, providing medical aid and support with the bullets already flying and casualties mounting—and nothing more than our white T-shirts and logos to protect us? We were! We’re the ones able to respond in hours to a crisis, while you wait around for your mandate. Our colleagues are already there on the ground, and know the players and the terrain.”
“Right, and what did your presence do to stop the escalation of the crisis? You had to pull out and abandon the people you were promising to help while we were stuck waiting for the politicians to fiddle with the mission mandate, meaning that the people ended up with no one on the ground to help them.”
And there they found at least one area of agreement: the uniforms and the blue jeans both end up getting shot at because mandarins advise their political bosses to show concern but not too much of it, especially for people in places where there is nothing strategic at stake, as the UN canvasses its member nations for commitment and troops.
As I approached my place at the head of this table—or rather great divide—the military noticed me first and rose to greet me, while the NGOs continued to argue, acknowledging my presence with a nod.
Great start, I said to myself as I sat down and put a pile of my Carr Center research papers in front of me. How was I to get these typical representatives from two so opposite—and self-protective—cultures to even want to work together, let alone start doing so? Every one of these people was dedicated to alleviating the plight of innocent citizens in troubled nation states and to assisting them in achieving peace, good governance, justice, security, human rights, gender equality, democracy and education within a renewed atmosphere of hope and optimism. I knew I needed smarts and commitment from all sides if I was going to have a chance at achieving the mission. My research at the Carr Center had already identified the dearth of rigorous data and ongoing research into the uses of child soldiers in the field, and the particularly blinding gap when it came to the challenges girl soldiers faced. To cure a disease, you have to know its causes, what feeds it, and subsequently, what destroys it. No single group—the humanitarians and NGOs or the security forces—was capable of solving the problem alone; each required the others’ knowledge and skills.
But to that point (and to a large extent this is still the case) humanitarian groups and child rights activists had never trusted militaries to be sensitive to children’s needs. In their heart of hearts, even at those meetings in which I sat at the head of the table with military personnel who had been actively involved in DDRR in some of the most dangerous places in the world—risking their lives to help children—most of the NGOs didn’t think the military at large really cared about the issue. They didn’t know who they could collaborate with in the military and security forces in the countries where they were working, or even how to approach them. Since children fell in the realm of the social sciences, the argument went, human rights and child protection agencies had taken on the issue of child soldiers as their cause and responsibility, and rarely considered the military as a potential ally or as a part of the solution. Until now, most believed the only role for uniformed actors was one of protection—of refugee and IDP camps, compounds, civilians and NGO workers. Since they also believed that such protection could not be perceived to impinge on the aid group’s neutrality, the relationship between NGO and aid groups and military protectors was a well-enforced one-way street. Neutrality, they believed, was their protection in conflict zones, the only thing that allowed them to work for the betterment of the innocent in and around the contending armed groups, and as a result many of them would do everything they could to keep the “outside” security forces (the ones who were actually working to end the conflict) away from children—never considering actually giving them a role in their rescue.
Of course, as a result of the NGOs’ historical insistence on neutrality, many in the military and police assumed any interventions they launched around child soldiers would be viewed with suspicion by the humanitarian community. And they weren’t that sure they wanted to collaborate with such “undisciplined” groups anyway. Military eyes tend to view the humanitarian world as “soft” and unorganized, unversed in the “hard” realities soldiers face, and even the military personnel I brought to our many CSI tables thought it unlikely that their disciplined, organized and protocoloriented groups could really collaborate with “bleeding hearts” who didn’t pay due attention when a general walked into the room. Out there in the larger world there were a lot of singleminded military and police who saw use of force as the only solution to dealing with armed children. You shot at someone who was trying to kill you and the people you were protecting as a matter of training and self-defence, but they also pointed out that beating them in a fight, in their view, was the only way to “persuade” the leaders that child soldiers couldn’t handle the job. They considered broad rules of engagement (meaning ones that allowed the use of lethal force in extremis to achieve the mission’s objective) the only means by which we could actually put a stop to recruitment of children and influence the leaders using them.
As both a retired general and a committed humanitarian—with credibility as an advocate of human rights and conflict prevention as a result of my experience in Rwanda and the work on genocide prevention I’d been doing since—I was in a unique position to talk to both sides, because I was an amalgam of both. I had been a soldier for most of my adult life and so was slightly suspect still in the eyes of most humanitarians, but I had witnessed a massive, brutal genocide of a scale and from a vantage point no other military commander had experienced in the post–Cold War era. I had seen the best and worst from humanitarian and NGO workers in Rwanda, and they had seen my efforts to bridge the gulf between us to save lives where we could. But I suspect that both sides remained unsure as to whether my scales tipped to favour one side more than the other: too military for the humanitarians, too bleeding heart for the military. Did these ideas we were kicking about mean inventing a new military and police entity that would be too soft to be effective? Or was I on a mission to subvert the vaunted neutrality of the NGOs and bring them into an alliance with uniforms that would, in the end, only hurt their organizations? Well, I am neither one nor the other, yet I am both. I am attempting to be an amalgam because I suspect that to help resolve the complex situations of failing states, we need amalgams, especially when it comes to the issue of child soldiers.
Still, on the one hand persuading military forces to consider psychosocial factors and, on the other, convincing a rights-based NGO that the use of lethal force against some children might be unavoidable, in some rare instances for the greater good and safety of many other innocent victims, was a challenge to say the least.
I am not going to recount here every step of the journey we’ve been on with CSI. Six years, now, of meetings, conferences, round tables, war games, draft working documents, reviews of those drafts, and redrafting. This is what it takes to try to change minds and hearts: endless, incremental, effortful attempts to bridge gaps and bring all parties into the full light of each others’ knowledge, and then create innovative action out of those new understandings.
Referring to children as a weapons platform continued to make collaborators physically react, squirm in their chairs, mumble under their breath. How could someone refer to a child as a weapon? Such language had never been used before and thus became the subject of much objection and discussion.
People are extraordinarily sensitive to words, and some are not willing to take the time to examine the new word suggested befo
re drawing conclusions. In many sessions, we were caught in a linguistic and cultural divide that prevented a true meeting of the minds.
The military and police stakeholders wanted clear definitions to words that permitted some flexibility but were not ambiguous in their intent. For the military, words allow you to figure out how things work and thus how to take them apart. They are accustomed to defining and analysing tasks so as to avoid confusion, because when it gets right down to it, they bear the responsibility for the disciplined use of lethal force and its deadly consequences. They need to know exactly when, how and how much is required, with as little doubt as possible, or (as we saw with my fictional peacekeeper) their soldiers pay the price either with their own lives or with physical or psychological injuries. But NGOs and civil society actors had an almost allergic reaction to the language of soldiers, finding it too strong, deliberate and unequivocal—lacking sensitivity to human and social factors.
In turn, the military broke out in hives over how words could take on a fluid identity for humanitarians, with circumstances dictating definitions. In session after session, they rendered themselves tone-deaf to the nuances of humanitarian language and grumbled over the way it seemed designed to avoid the specific.
I didn’t think it would be productive if, in order to talk with each other, everyone had to put a lot more water in their linguistic wine, because I thought we’d lose the real information and insight each discipline could bring. Who really wants to drink watereddown wine? The taste is blah and you are left with the firm impression that you have been had by the barman, which only leads to more friction and even blows. Essentially, if you’re constantly editing your language, you’re not bringing your true self and all you know to the situation, just a version of your self that seems safe enough to offer. I didn’t think we could get at real solutions until we understood each other, but in too many sessions our words seemed to keep us apart, not bring us together. Even over the very word I proposed to describe our coming together: integration, which I saw as a step beyond coordination, cooperation and collaboration, and which I hoped could give birth to a new conceptual base.
Much discussion was held around various tables over several years about the concept of integration—bringing the NGO community and the uniformed members together in one concerted mission. Humanitarians were quite fearful of that term since it implied to them that one discipline would be swallowed up by another, leaving the people with the guns and the people without them in unequal positions. Countless discussions about this issue boiled down to the fact that we had to coin a new descriptor for the same idea that didn’t carry so much baggage: cohesion. We started focusing on “cohesive” plans of action using child soldiers as the catalyst that all stakeholders were working to help.
No one said this would be an easy task. Finding a way to get these disparate actors on the same side of the argument has kept me both frustrated and determined since 2005.
Helping me keep the faith, though, was the simple fact that from the very beginning I had a strong NGO partner. In 2005, Sandra Melone, the executive director of Search for Common Ground, based in Washington, D.C., heard of my work on the child soldier issue and brought a group of her colleagues to meet me and my research assistants, including Phil Lancaster, in a small classroom at the Carr Center at Harvard. The idea of describing child soldiers as more than victims—as utilitarian tools of war—intrigued them. Melone and Search for Common Ground are still key collaborators with the CSI to this day.
As a result we organized a one-day round table at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., in June 2005 to introduce my research to the major agencies and NGOs in the capital who were working on the topic of war-affected children. About forty people were around that first table, including Mike Wessells, a leader in research on child soldiers, and Peter W. Singer, who had been looking at the impact of child soldiers on American soldiers and the trauma that dealing with them caused. During this meeting I drilled home the fact that until that moment, we’d only had marginal successes in confronting the child soldier phenomenon in over thirty civil wars, primarily in DDRR efforts after the conflict ended. It was time to listen to new perspectives, debate and try to create concepts and methods that had never been considered before.
We decided on a phased approach, starting with a conference in Canada to follow up on the Winnipeg conference on waraffected children that I had spoken at in 2000. Our conference would be called “Expanding the Dialogue: Preventing the Use of Child Soldiers.” It would concentrate on naming all the gaps in our efforts to end the use of child soldiers and our deficiencies when it came to stopping recruitment and DDRR, and generating ideas for new approaches. Afterwards, we would collate the results and proceed to the second phase of the research, which would test our ideas in a war-game scenario as close as we could get to the conflict zones on the African continent, where child soldiers were used most extensively. We settled on the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra, Ghana, as an ideal venue that also had relatively easy access to child soldiers and even their commanders. And finally, after we’d digested the results of the war game, in phase three we would move the solutions into the field, conducting a year-long trial in a conflict zone, such as the DRC, and produce a set of initiatives that we would disseminate to missions already deployed.
Armed with my Harvard research and the alliance with Search for Common Ground and UNICEF Canada (its CEO, Nigel Fisher, had been with me during the Rwandan genocide), we secured support for the week-long conference in Winnipeg, slated for August 2006, from some of the major NGOs working on this issue, and also received a substantive study grant from CIDA to pay for much of the conference. I reached out to the military, and approximately ten reserve officers were sent by the Department of National Defence to participate. I asked them to come in uniform, figuring that the civilians needed to get used to talking to military in full garb, which didn’t turn out to be such a good idea. Back then, I hadn’t really taken on board how much of an impediment the outward signs of military life could be to communication with people who didn’t wear uniforms.
Though the Canadian minister of foreign affairs at the time, Peter MacKay, agreed to give the keynote address at the conference, we had trouble getting some other crucial participants—ex–child soldiers from various African countries that were now into rebuilding their nations after years of conflict—into the country. The Canadian government was reluctant to give them visas, arguing that they were a risk to national security. I was indignant that the bureaucrats we were dealing with did not realize that these youths were ex–child soldiers and believed the real reason that they didn’t want to let them in was the fear that they might bolt and then ask for refugee status. Even if they did bolt, I didn’t see that as such a bad thing, since a life in Canada might be more secure and fulfilling for these young people than life at home. In the end, the dozen or so youth participants at the conference were former child soldiers who had already entered Canada as refugees, most of them living in the Winnipeg area.
MacKay opened the conference with a speech that emphasized how important child protection was for Canada, and how important it was that we fulfill the promise of the conference by working together to help solve the issue of child soldiers:
A robust legal regime is in place, a series of Security Council resolutions has established a framework for implementation, and a broad array of international and non-governmental organizations are working ever more closely to provide protection for children caught up in armed conflicts. Yet the nature of the abuses faced by children in dozens of conflict zones remains unthinkable. Concerted action is required by actors at all levels to prevent and respond to violations of the rights of children. An investment early in conflicts will pay huge dividends in [preventing] future abuses.
During the ensuing week, more than a hundred participants went to work in discussion groups to hammer out innovative ways to advance our quest of neutralizing the use of
children on battlefields around the world. Despite endless arguments leading to many communication breakdowns, we came out of it with some ideas: mission commanders should engage in military peer-topeer dialogue with rebel leaders; procedures needed to counter this weapon system should be elaborated; sound military tactics and strategies to prevent recruitment must be developed; issues of small arms and light weapons must be addressed, as their proliferation was linked to the use of child soldiers; media strategies (at both local and international levels) had to be created to raise awareness and provide information on a range of rights issues. Most importantly, this conference pushed for a more deliberate research plan, demanding a shift in focus to the task of understanding recruitment strategies, ways of avoiding recruitment, military uses of children and gender dimensions, and it called for this research effort to be part of an integrated, interdisciplinary analysis of the conflict—basically an endorsement of the mission we had set for the CSI.
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A war of words followed the Winnipeg conference and carried on well into the following year. If the military were being pigheaded about the use of force (maybe too many still dreamed of a return to the “good old days” of the Cold War, where we pushed hightech equipment forward and the enemy actually dressed up for the showdown), our NGO colleagues were entrenched in the humanrights-based position that forbade even contemplating the use of lethal force and enshrined neutrality.
Joe Culligan, a retired Canadian colonel I’d asked to be the CSI’s diligent scribe, produced draft after draft of the conference’s fundamental findings and also the results of several multidisciplinary working groups held at the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre at Carleton University in Ottawa, with inputs from organizations such as UNICEF, Search for Common Ground and War Child, diplomats with UN experience, the military, humanitarians, police officials, academics and other experts. We never had a lack of involvement and review of our work: people genuinely thought we might be on to something essential in regards to the child soldier problem. But they were very uneasy with this more security-based approach. I argued vehemently that though DDRR was essential for those child soldiers already caught in conflict—and we could not turn off these wars until we got organized—we had to leap ahead and stop children being used in the first place.