We’ve also been witnessing a new phenomenon caused by a big shift in attitude and operational concepts over the last year or so, closer to home. The military, and the Canadian Forces in particular, are beginning to support the ideas on conflict resolution that have been driving the CSI. They are coming to understand that the use of force is perhaps not the first and best option in many situations for the armed forces and their political masters. The source of this sea change are the lessons learned in current realworld operations in conflict zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lieutenant General Andrew Leslie, who commanded the NATO forces in Afghanistan and has recently stepped down after four years at the head of the Canadian Army, has recently stated exactly what I have been espousing, but in military terms. He says that introducing the philosophy of conflict resolution to training and practice is essential in the complex and multidisciplined environment in which militaries are now employed. Quoted in an article on training for counter-insurgency operations, published in the November–December 2009 issue of Vanguard, he recommended that at the earliest opportunity, “all agencies and civilian and security forces should come together to conduct joint training.” He went on to say that there is an overall need for “a more comprehensive approach [to missions] that requires greater awareness of intelligence information and [the] social cultural milieu of the area of operations. Commanders must come to understand the overall environment, its systems and its overall culture.”
A more recent article in Vanguard (“Complex Solution” by Chris Thatcher, in the May–June 2010 issue) quotes the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, who says:
The greater collaboration in operations is prompting nations to re-evaluate how the concept [of collaboration] might be institutionalized … on the surface it sounds simple and obvious: integrate the work of various players in conflict zones, both at national and international levels, to achieve a coordinated, collaborative and more effective outcome … but the efforts to integrate the roles of various players—military, diplomats and aid agencies, to name just some—are still largely sporadic due to the lack of long-term effort to institutionalize coordinating mechanisms.
He goes on to recognize that the contentious aspect of the “comprehensive approach” remains the relationship with NGOs, many of which require neutrality in order to function.
This is what the Child Soldiers Initiative is attempting to achieve: build that new doctrinal base and lexicon of action verbs to bridge the gaps between the different actors so that they feel comfortable with candidly exchanging information; help integrate their efforts to produce cohesive plans that are then applied and implemented in the field with the appropriate priority of resources to successfully curtail the use of children in conflict; reduce the availability of small arms and light weapons; and ultimately stop the recruitment of children as instruments of war.
Encouraged, even elated, by the vindication of the CSI’s objectives by the uniformed side of the house, we are launching a global humanitarian movement to eradicate this scourge deliberately inflicted on children by adults in order to cement these gains and to inspire our leaders to find the political will to follow through. By securing the buy-in of world leaders in a movement to eradicate the use of child soldiers, I believe we will eventually be able to do what the Lloyd Axworthys of the world did with land mines in the 1990s. There was a day when land mines were part of the inventory of available tools one could use in warfare. The international movement, which roused public and media support around the world, led to a ban that took this weapon completely out of the inventories or arsenals of most nations.
We aim for the day when the use of children provokes the same reaction. If we can do this for a chunk of metal, surely we can do it for living beings who are the most vulnerable in our society.
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The Child Soldiers Initiative continues to pound the pavement in search of ways to creatively solve this issue. Throughout the years, it has remained clear that the CSI is a worthy and positive addition to the spectrum of means by which one day we will stop conflicts from happening due to the frictions of our differences. A project to stop the use of child soldiers will go some way in preventing conflicts in the first place. And that is the part that I want the CSI movement to be totally committed to.
I finally feel the project has matured enough that we can start going into the field to assist in building the necessary capacities for change. The practical details—the “hows”—are being worked out as I write these lines. Movement director Shelly Whitman and Tanya Zayed, a young staffer, are in the DRC right now, gathering essential data from all the actors currently engaged in a conflict that is continuing to cause so much human suffering and destruction. Yes, we are finally getting into the field, entering the phase three stage of field trials and capacity building that we dreamed up at our first conference in Winnipeg.
I’m bruised by the ride we’ve had, but not beaten, and I have to say that now I am more broadly experienced in the ways of the various disciplines in the field, with a more focused sense of how we tackle the ultimate objective of eradicating the use of children as instruments of war. I firmly believe that concerned individuals can come together and defy the norms and challenge expectations. If we open ourselves up to learning about others and share a common goal of child protection, it is possible to make a difference. I still believe I can make a difference and I am going to continue working to achieve that aim in the case of child soldiers around the world. I believe without a doubt that you can make a difference, too.
It will be a long struggle with evil and ignorance and often seemingly implacable intransigence and downright pigheadedness. But so what if we have to battle? So what if it takes forty or fifty years to end the use of the child soldier weapon system? It will have been worth it for the betterment of humanity and the protection of our youths.
10.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
As the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself.
—BARACK OBAMA (INAUGURATION SPEECH, 2009)
SHE FOUGHT AS A SOLDIER but died as a child. And the professional soldier deployed to implement a mandate of protection ends up a casualty, having been forced to face an armed child as the enemy. The act devastates the adult peacekeeper as it destroys the child, eating away at a grown man who cannot forgive his own action, no matter how hard he tries to frame it as part of an overall mission that brought some stability to a nation in turmoil. He doesn’t have internal tools to deal with killing a child combatant, because no such altercation should ever take place—it should be totally inconceivable. And yet adult soldiers are repeatedly meeting children in combat in conflict areas around the globe today and have been for the past twenty years.
Peacekeepers are still not formally or properly prepared to expect this encounter. Despite issuing protocols and passing legislation condemning those who recruit and deploy children, political leaders fail to take action against these criminals. Even the presence of the ICC does not seem to deter rogue commanders. Agencies neglect to address the source of the issue, merely its aftermath. Why? This is a complex political, security and social issue, indeed, but the use of child soldiers is not a subtle or surreptitious practice of which experts can claim ignorance. It is a brutal crime against humanity being perpetrated in the most blatant and provocative fashion against the most vulnerable people. How many more thousands of children have to be recruited, how many raped, wounded, killed, before we become engaged?
Where is the urgency? Where is the outcry? Where is the will to act?
Maybe it lies in me—I’ve described what I’m attempting to spark with the CSI, with the help of the academics, NGOs, ex–child soldiers, the military, the police and the donors who have rallied to these ideas. And maybe it lies in you.
Through history, there have been individuals who have overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieve milestones of human rights. They have exhibited the necessary strength, eloquence and presence to influenc
e others (and ultimately those in authority) to create revolutionary action. We may need just such a revolutionary in order to stop the impunity of adults who use children as soldiers, and to ultimately eradicate from the human mind this practice as a potential option. We definitely need a movement, not just a one-time surge, to sustain and build a marathon of hope.
I have witnessed the destruction of children who have been recruited as child soldiers—not only the bodies of the dead, but the living souls of these once-children who have been influenced to commit such horrific acts. In Rwanda, I saw child soldiers in action and met the adults who directed them, and I was unable to engage and to stop them, leaving me with a rage that remains unabated nearly two decades after the fact. Despite my efforts, I have not yet been able to significantly influence action against the use of child soldiers, let alone eradicate their use. But that has not deterred me from continuously seeking means and ways of attacking the problem—or from hoping one day to succeed. I keep searching for the code we need to break to put this crime against the vulnerable on the world’s radar once and for all, to push our governments and leaders into action.
Now that you are aware of the horrific abuses inflicted on these children, where do you fit in to the solution? Will you rely on old excuses: that these children are too foreign, too far away to matter? Or will you recognize that these children are exactly like the child you once were, maybe not so long ago, like the children you love. These child soldiers once lived in the safety of their parents’ care, played in their schoolyards, learned in their schoolrooms, explored the magical freedom of their minds. What is distance anymore? The conflict zones of the world are only a few hours away by plane, seconds away by Internet. Too many people are living in them.
I’d like to believe that you and I are on an ancient journey together—a journey that begins with a promise made to our fellow human beings. In Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, Gary J. Bass writes of how timeless this promise is: “The basic ideas go all the way back to Thucydides, who, horrified at bloody ancient civil wars, hoped for the endurance of ‘the general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress.’”
They are not laws that all humans choose to adhere to or even believe in. Every day, conservative “realists” make the pragmatic argument that we shouldn’t get involved, that to aid the world’s failing states is beyond our capability, that it is innate savagery that leads military commanders to go so far as to use children to kill innocent civilians, that such savagery has nothing to do with “us,” is not our fault.
But I believe that you are like me: now that you know of the terrible reality in which these children exist, you can never un-know it. You are involved now, and once you are involved it is impossible for you to remain aloof, impassive, detached or uninterested. We both understand that no human is less human than any other. And you have also made a friend of the little soldier I tried my best to describe, and of all the boys and girls she represents. Our responsibility to them is our responsibility to all humanity.
I remain indefatigably positive. After all I’ve seen, I still have hope and I still take action. Do you? Will you? I sense that you will—particularly if you are of the generation that has come of age since the turning of the millennium. And though I encourage older readers to continue to “eavesdrop,” what I have to say from here on in is directed at the young.
Your generation seems to have something beyond a passive sense of hope. You do not wish merely to avoid despair, but rather to understand your obligations. You have the tools, you believe the time is right, you see the future up close and you want to shape it. You are not going to merely hope for change, you will make it. As my father would have said, you are full of piss and vinegar.
Over the past twenty years, which have seen such massive abuses of human rights, especially of children, in Rwanda, the Congo, the Sudan and other conflict zones around the world, we have also been witness to seismic revolutions occurring all around us in the way we connect and perceive our world. And within this dizzying revolutionary era, we can sense a radical shift in our civilization’s powers to eliminate evil and to hold those who conduct crimes against humanity accountable for their actions.
Revolutions in human rights, global awareness and communications technology have created an atmosphere ripe for action, giving you and me the opportunity to find a new path away from the well-travelled and corpse-laden byways of old regimes that used force and abused the innocent as a means to gain, maintain and sustain power.
But in order to appreciate this revolutionary position, we need to take a moment to consider that brutal past and the status quo that at times still seems an overpowering hindrance to positive change.
Only three hundred years ago, human beings in the Western world were ruled over by god, by king, by master. Most couldn’t vote or own property. They rarely raised their voices to question authority, and if they did they were brutally put down. There were no rights, only service and obligation. No equality, only servitude or tyranny. No progress, only acquiescence to the existing system. The Enlightenment introduced ideas of reason, education, equality, freedom, progress and rights, which did not prevent the rise of the great colonial powers and the subjugation of millions of humans considered to be below the threshold of “reason,” but which also gave the subjugated the ideological ammunition they needed to break their chains.
The slow evolution of these enlightening concepts led most significantly (for our purposes) to the idea of individual selfrealization. Despite (or perhaps because of) the global polarization and subsequent unity around the world wars and the formation of the UN, this concept of individuality came to a head in the 1960s, when young people took to the streets in countries throughout the Western world, demanding their civil and individual rights. And then “one small step” led to an important clarification of this concept: just over forty years ago, a human being walked on the moon for the first time. The astronauts photographed our planet from space, and humans saw the evidence of their collectivity. Our geography, our culture, our equality, our personal humanity make us unique individuals, but also bind us together: we are humans. Each one of us.
The planet Earth is no more an utter mystery. What once was considered foreign is now known to be ultimately familiar, intimate, connected. Though many desperately and relentlessly cling to old divisive ideas in the face of a future that looks complex and uncertain, no one can legitimately portray themselves as members or practitioners of the one true faith, the superior race, the best culture. No one can say, with the image of the blue and green Earth floating in their heads, that others don’t count as much as “we” do, that others don’t hold the same status as we do, are not as significant as us, are ultimately just not as human as us.
You children born in the last decades of the twentieth century are part of a generation that need not be restricted by perceptions of “the Other” (a term coined by the white European philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel over two hundred years ago to mean people who are different, i.e., non-white and non-European). It was only in the late twentieth century that we collectively began to end the subjugation of the Other. Significantly, the modern French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (quoted by Ryszard Kapuściński in his 2008 book, The Other) has redefined the Other as “a unique person whom we should not just notice but also include in our experience and for whom we should take responsibility.”
As the title promises, Kapuściński devotes his book to explaining our era’s new relationship with the Other:
For five centuries Europe dominated the world, not just politically and economically but also culturally. It imposed its faith and established the law, the scale of values, models of behaviour and languages. Our relations with Others … were invariably imperious, overbearing and paternalistic. The long five-hundred-year existence of such an uneven, unfair system has produced numerous ingrained habits amongst its participants. A new world is taki
ng shape, more mobile and open than ever before as the Cold War was ending … This pro-democracy atmosphere has been enormously conducive to human mobility. The world is in motion on an unprecedented scale. People of the most varied races and cultures are meeting each other all over this more and more populated planet. While formerly the Other meant the non-European, now these relations are as extensive and varied as they can be on a never-ending scale of possibilities covering all races and cultures.
Your generation takes this democratic philosophy to heart. Many of you already think in terms of the globe, not a patchwork of nations; of humanity, not Us and Them. You innately understand that we are all the Other to someone else, and that in this way we are all the same. Great concepts like human rights and preserving the global environment are in the atmosphere you breathe; your generation seems able to grasp these concepts and knows that you can manage them and influence the future. You are not defeated by the parameters that limit your parents—ideas like the nation state, sovereignty, the hugeness of the planet. You understand that a large portion of humanity lives in inhuman conditions, and you are uncomfortable with that knowledge because your world is small. Humans in places once considered “far away” are real, they are at hand, and they are your peers. And you don’t just know this metaphorically, you know it viscerally, thanks to your ability to go online and communicate directly with them if you choose.
I marvel that we actually live in an era when technology potentially allows us to communicate with every person on this planet. Granted there are regimes that spend a lot of brain power and resources on preventing their citizens from participating fully in Internet culture, but they are constantly faced with subversion of their control. The potential may seem commonplace to you, but it is astounding to me. While some of us are still trying to master typing, you are the masters of this information age. This places a burden on you, too, in that you must maximize what this rapid technological change can offer humanity. You must harness the power of the information revolution to communicate ideas and experiences worldwide. And you must take the time to listen to the ideas of others.