NO CHILD SHOULD HAVE TO DIE the way my fictional girl soldier, Rose, died. No peacekeeper should have to become the agent of such a death. After six years’ work on the Child Soldiers Initiative, I wish I could tell you that we are on the verge of eradicating the use of child soldiers in conflict. We know a lot more, it’s true—I’ve shared much of that knowledge with you, along with some new analysis, in the previous chapters. But we are not there yet. The one big certainty I’ve come to as a result of launching the CSI is that we still face a significant challenge—both in the field and inside large and small organizations, agencies and NGOs, security forces (military and police), and political and diplomatic circles—in changing many minds and many old ways of doing things when it comes to the issue of child soldiers.
Before I take you into an account of the sometimes mindbogglingly frustrating roadblocks we are attempting to find our way past, I want to share some ideas of how we can shift the whole exercise of dealing with child soldiers from the current mode—which is still mainly reactive, designed to pick up the pieces through DDRR—to a prevention mode, where all our efforts are designed to stop belligerent forces from using children in any capacity and to prevent child recruitment or abduction from occurring in the first place.
In the best-case scenario we are trying to achieve, no peacekeeper would be so surprised by ending up in a firefight with child soldiers that when shot at by a ragged kid with an AK-47, he’d react in self-defence with lethal force. Instead, my peacekeeper would have been trained, mandated, deployed and possibly armed differently, and would serve as part of an integrated operation where political, security (military and police), humanitarian aid and development workers all pulled together, along with the NGOs and local authorities, to prevent conflict rather than react to it. They would all understand that ending the use of child soldiers in the area is a primary way to prevent the conflict or stop it from escalating. They would aim to both protect children from abduction and to persuade parents that they don’t have to trade their children to the leaders of armed groups for a little money and a promise that their village will be safe. They’d communicate this message of protection in many ways, including over the local radio, which is often the best means of getting news and ideas out in areas where roads and infrastructure are lacking. The Washington-based NGO Search for Common Ground, which is one of my partners in the CSI, developed just such a radio program, designed and executed for local youths in South Kivu in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds. In a survey, 14 per cent of the children who demobilized from armed groups in that troubled place reported that they were inspired to do so by information that the program, called Sisi Watoto (Swahili for “We, the Children”), broadcast. (Unfortunately, the program is on hiatus as this book goes to press because of lack of funding.)
Peacekeepers would take every opportunity to talk to locals face to face, too, and the mission’s civilian and military members would have studied the best ways to connect and talk with the people of the region, especially the kids. In this best-case world, NGOs would have no qualms about letting military and police forces in on any crucial intelligence they’d gathered when moving through the conflict zone, because they would have established a relationship of trust based on shared aims and understanding of each other’s operational needs. As a result, they wouldn’t feel that aiding the mission “tainted” them with politics and the use of force. In such an integrated mission, there would actually be less risk of the use of force, because the troops and their leaders would have other options in their repertoire, and would only use their weapons as the very last resort.
The military leaders of the mission would reach out to establish commander-to-commander links with the heads of the armed groups, rather than leave them to the political side and to at times ethically questionable negotiations with aid workers over access to humanitarian food and medical supplies. The military mission would make it clear to these leaders that using children to fight their battles was about to become a losing proposition. They would be clear about the sanctions they faced: prosecution for crimes against humanity; the threat of arrest if they tried to cross borders; the apprehension of their child soldiers, who would be taken away from them and placed in DDRR programs; the vow that from here on in, the mission would make it very difficult for those leaders to abduct or recruit replacements.
Ideas like these could go a long way to eradicating the use of child soldiers and some of them are gaining ground. But for much of the time that I have been wrestling to find solutions, I’ve been trying to bridge a gulf between the security forces—both military and police—and the NGO and humanitarian communities that, in my view, really needs to be eliminated, but sometimes feels totally unbridgeable. We are still at the stage of getting people to accept the hard fact that we have to do these missions differently, and not yet at the place where we can get total buy-in on new operational tactics. And so the lives of our peacekeepers and peacemakers, and those of the people they are trying to protect, are being put on the line every minute of every day in conflict zones around the globe.
But at least we do know where we need to go—which is more than I could say when it all started, at the end of my Carr Center fellowship in June 2005. In the CSI we have built something that, against pretty incredible odds, has brought all the necessary players into the room to talk to each other, has sponsored research in the field, has found an academic home at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and is about to conduct trials of the working field guide we’re developing for military and police forces and NGOs alike. And we have recently decided that beyond this useful work, what we really need to do in order to eradicate the use of child soldiers is to expand the CSI from mission to movement.
I will challenge you in the next chapter to get involved in that movement. But first, I’d like to sketch what I’ve been working to build. I think that one of the benefits of optimism and idealism is that they lead you into things you would never have tried if you’d let yourself imagine how hard it was going to turn out to be. I knew, from my work at the Carr Center in 2004 and 2005, that my research team and I had stumbled on a way of thinking about child soldiers that cracked open the problem in illuminating ways. Until we began to apply that language to the issue, no one had ever really conceptualized child soldiers as “weapons systems.” To most, they were victims of horrible abuse, not agents of conflict: but the truth is that they are both. This was a hard reckoning, I was to discover, and the first meetings I convened were interesting, to say the least.
The hushed, tense voices inside the glass-windowed, high-rise boardroom ceased when I came through the door. On one side of the heavy oak conference table was a group of men in military uniform with polished shoes and solemn faces and on the other side, a more motley crew of young women, scruffy young men and grey-bearded older chaps in bright, somewhat wrinkled, collarless shirts. Even the tabletop spoke of the chasm between the two sides: standard notepads and reference documents, sharp pencils and ice water on the uniformed side and on the NGO side a potpourri of papers and paper scraps, weathered notebooks, eye-catchingly colourful ballpoints and paper coffee cups.
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 before 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.
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.
With so much effort in coming up with a formula, a format, a method, an instrument, even just a paper listing a bunch of things to do and not to do, we kept whirling around on the merry-goround of consultation. Then an old colleague and friend, Major Ken Nette (Ret’d), came up with the idea that what we needed was a bunch of tools at different levels to fix the problems and that the tool box we put together needed different drawers, from one labelled “framing the mandate of a mission,” so that child soldiers become a priority; to one called “assisting the senior leadership of the mission,” in the case of a UN deployment; to another labelled “helping the troops in the field” with the practical tools they needed when they came face to face with the child soldiers and had to implement the operational tasks assigned by the mission headquarters. The tactical level of the tool kit would help them sort out who to talk to, who to seek information from, how to establish links with all the other actors in the area, and where to fit into the process of neutralization of the child soldiers and stopping their recruitment.
But when the first drafts of the tool box were circulated, all hell broke loose again. Some felt we shouldn’t tackle the mandate or strategic level at all but should concentrate on the nuts and bolts of field work, while others were equally certain we had to stay away from the nuts and bolts and focus instead on moving political leaders and the UN into deliberate action against the mere concept of the use of child soldiers.
To say that frustration with turning in relentless circles was overcoming my enthusiasm would be a gross understatement. For a time, I felt I was treading water, and only hoped to be able to do it long enough to keep from drowning and ending the whole affair. We were supposed to be launching the war game soon in Accra, Ghana, to test the tools in the tool kit. As the debates went on, I was concerned that we would not in fact have anything of real substance to study.
Then there were the ongoing funding problems. I was certain that I had a surefire humanitarian project that was intimately linked to security problems in a number of developing states. But I was finding that donors did not, as a rule, wish to invest in a project that was extremely long-term, scattered around the globe, and still uncertain as to how it would achieve its aim. As a result we were always in a money crunch, and fundraising became my most necessary and least-favourite part of the job. A good portion of the royalties I earned from my first book, Shake Hands with the Devil, has gone to the CSI over the years (and also into my own foundation, which helps Rwandan orphans as well as children in Canada). I also poured in the fees I received from speaking engagements. Sandra Melone and Search for Common Ground built an extensive fundraising campaign in 2007, in which Ishmael Beah and I spoke at several events in North America and the United Kingdom, with rather limited success. We brought in thousands, for which we were grateful, but we needed hundreds of thousands if we were ever to get to the stage of a field trial. The lack of funding limited our scope of research and slowed us down: at times, we could not even afford paper and phones, let alone the salaries of a small core staff of two persons earning starvation wages as they put in an average of sixty hours of work a week.1
The subject of child soldiers was captivating and donors felt empathy whenever Beah and I presented our experiences and the situation in the field. But we were working on a project that was still trying to figure out what the answer would look like. I did not have a bona fide new “medicine” to plop onto the table to assure people that if they funded my work, I could “cure” the world of the use of child soldiers. So, dollars dribbled in, and we were trapped in a cycle of creating funding proposals to all sorts of foundations and potential donors, which was taking the precious time of the staff away from the research to advance our goals. That staff and volunteer commitment was never in doubt, but with so little in the way of resources they could not sustain their effort. Many came and went as the years flowed by. As the body count of child soldiers kept creeping up, especially in Africa, we were caught in a labyrinth of words, egos, endless arguments and cash crunches, and stuck at home with no sense of when we might actually reach phase three, the year-long field trial.
Contrariness kept me going. Quite frankly, I was pissed off that even with my background, I could not get any military or police force at home or abroad to engage in a serious way with this problem. To most of them, the solution was obvious: child soldiers were simply members of the belligerent forces and were to be treated like any other threat. I knew that was too simplistic, and vowed that I was not going to let more and more uniformed personnel find themselves facing the ethical, moral and legal dilemmas of having to kill kids to achieve their aims of security in a mission area.
That we managed to get to phase two—role-playing solutions in the week-long simulation exercise at the Kofi Annan centre in Accra, Ghana, in July 2007—is a miracle I credit to some very innovative support from the exercise group at the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in Ottawa.
I assembled a multidisciplinary group to take part in the war game (the non-military types were more comfortable with the term “simulation exercise”), which we called “Prodigal Child.” Fifty participants came from all over North America and the African continent to engage in a simulation we devised, whose setting was Fontinalis (a fictional imploding country caught in social breakdown and civil war, whose features had been sketched out over some years at the PPC’s operational centre in Cornwallis, Nova Scotia). Fontinalis’s political disintegration and economic and social collapse made a fertile ground for child recruitment. Three teams of about fifteen participants each were challenged to come up with collaborative ways to prevent child recruitment or abduction.
We ran up against many obstacles: the military was used to the idea of role-playing—many training situations are role-playing writ large—and had no problem absorbing some of the “un-real” parameters of Fontinalis as the basis for the exercise. The NGO participants, I soon realized, were experience-oriented people, who were more used to confronting real situations in real places and jerry-rigging solutions to fit the circumstances. They and the ex–child soldiers both had trouble throwing themselves into the role-playing, and as a result, the sessions could be ragged affairs. Some team members would express their discomfort by not showing up to their sessions, or by voting in their chairs by actually falling asleep. And everyone wanted to argue, demonstrating clearly the ever-present rifts between the camps.
The use of force was a flashpoint. Nigel Fisher, who came to the table with unequalled field experience and international HQ knowledge, nailed it bluntly: “The biggest spoiler,” he said, “is [the disconnect between] humanitarian principles and use of force. Until we can find some way of agreeing on this issue there is going to continue to be a problem.” NGO members just could not bring themselves to accept that the use of force could be an option, and the security types could not accept that it wasn’t an option, vividly aware of what it was like to be shot at by anyone wielding an AK-47, child or not.
In Killing in War, Jeff McMahan argues for a moral requirement of minimum force against child soldiers (which is already in all mission rules of engagement) but then makes a significant observation: “[J]ust combatants … may be morally required to fight with restraint, even at greater risk to themselves … [W]hen child soldiers are conspicuously young … just combatants should show them mercy, even at the cost of additional risk to themselves, in order to try to allow these already greatly wronged children a chance at life … I suspect that any commander would earn the respect of his troops if he were to order them to take additional risks to try to drive back, incapacitate, subdue, or capture child soldiers, while sparing their lives.” We still have a long way to go to persuade military forces around the world of the justice of such a position.
I’m a passionate humanist, and while I long for and strive for universal peace, as ex-military I understand that my resolve to protect and preserve human rights must be tempered by the sad reality that lethal force is sometimes necessary. As much as I attempted to argue that, even so, we had to avoid using lethal force against children in all circumstances, in the end Phil Lancaster (who had by far more practical experience with child soldiers than most of us) did win me over to the fact that we may, in extremis, have to look at the most horrible option of actually using force against some of the children in order to stop the killings, mutilation and horror of the many. And that by doing so we would finally be foiling the adult leadership using and recruiting these children. (This point would come back time and again and is still a very contentious subject, many years later, in my continued work on the CSI.)
NGOs might eagerly embrace the option of using non-lethal weapons in combat against child soldiers—rubber bullets, tear gas and the like—but experienced soldiers did not take so kindly to it, not because they wanted to kill children, of course, but because they knew how hard it would be to equip missions with effective non-lethal weapons, enforce their use and then deal with the real possibility that using such weapons would put our soldiers in graver danger. The leaders who sent kids into battle weren’t stupid: they paid attention to a mission’s rules of engagement, and if they discovered that soldiers were mandated to use non-lethal weapons against children, they’d be sure to sprinkle enough children into the front ranks to protect their adult fighters from harm.
After a week of role-playing and informal discussions, we basically proved one of my major contentions: there was truly a fundamental lack of co-operation, of coordination, let alone collaboration, in the field. It was a critical weakness plaguing even the newest UN peacekeeping missions, which on paper at least were “integrated.” Individual NGO workers, security personnel and politicos in the field were able and willing to work together informally, and as a result, sometimes collaboration worked. But that all depended on the personalities of the people involved. When a crisis escalated, each group crawled back into its own silo and reverted to its disciplines’ traditional communications.
I also came to realize that most of the actors deployed in the conflict zones and up to their necks in child soldier problems felt that they already had the insight they needed to resolve the issue. They didn’t really see that an innovative, cross-disciplinary approach was needed for conflict resolution, or that they needed any new tools, though they were always willing to agree that the uniformed forces were a problem. They felt that if we could simply tweak the training and education of the military personnel and police to enlighten them about the needs of child soldiers, the uniformed players would know how to properly protect the DDRR efforts of the humanitarian workers, who could then comfortably concentrate on fixing the social problems faced by demobilizing child soldiers.
I knew that this was limited, ineffective, status quo thinking. But coming out of our session in Ghana, I doubted my own abilities to break down the barriers between soldiers and humanitarians. My doubts were fed by the fact that in March 2005, while I was getting the CSI up and running, I had been appointed to the Canadian Senate, and my workload as a senator meant that I just did not have the time to commit to the day-to-day strategic thinking that the project required. I felt that the CSI was stalling because I had not given enough time and thought to the proposals, options and research focus so that I could push the agenda effectively. The frustrations of a debate that never seemed to evolve was eroding my ability to grasp the holes in processes and find a way to bridge the gaps.
I’m fighting off the desire to share the rest of the ups and downs of the CSI to this date, but I don’t think I really need to take you through all those bumps in order to explain where we are now.
Just as I was ready to throw in the towel over lack of funds, time and consensus, a report came out from a NATO task group on “Child Soldiers as the Opposing Force.” The CSI team and I, who over all these years had been in and out and up and down every possible trail only to so often find ourselves nearly back to the starting point, were elated that the report recommended the development of military doctrine on the phenomenon of child soldiers, that it noted that a successful doctrine required a comprehensive approach that would bring all the players in a region into the solution, and that “isolated application of the recommendations [would] not be fruitful.” The real vindication of the CSI came in the last pages of the study:
Such co-operation has been demonstrated in 2007 where a group of specialists assembled at the Kofi Annan International Peace Operations Centre in Accra, Ghana, in exercise PRODIGAL CHILD. The group consisted of humanitarian workers, child protection specialists, police and professional soldiers, lawyers, UN political affairs officers, and NGO mediators [they forgot to mention the ex–child soldiers and a few of their commanders]. The exercise was organised by Canadian Senator, the Honourable LGen Romeo Dallaire (Ret’d).
The next part of the study could have been written by the staff of the CSI:
In order to be effective in operations, military personnel need to understand and be engaged in all stages of the phenomenon of child soldiers. A fire fight is just one of the stages in encountering child soldiers. The prevention of recruitment or abduction, the reception and treatment of detainees or escapees, demobilization, disarmament and reintegration in society are evenly important aspects in the handling of child soldiers in which military and other agencies are to play an important role. This is referred to as the Comprehensive Approach.
The recommendations go on regarding training and support:
Close and regular inter-agency communications, including NGOs, is required to raise mutual understanding of competences, identify common goals and fields of co-operation, and avoid duplication of effort. In that respect the efforts of the different Centers for Peacekeeping Operations are to be combined.
After absorbing this shot in the arm from the NATO report, followed by more meetings and a diligent academic review, I realized that our lack of progress was due to the fact that we were trying to roll too many balls up the hill all at once, and had lost sight of our primary strength, that we existed in a niche that nobody else was really tackling: the security dimension of the problem. The CSI was in an ideal position to move the whole security agenda of child soldiers into the forefront—and was also poised to move the uniformed disciplines much closer to comprehending the complexity of the issue and to accepting that some ways of thinking and acting needed to drastically change.
We would keep as a primary aim the continued enhancement of a practical field guide for missions at the operational and tactical levels, which we would continuously upgrade. But we would also commit ourselves to creating the climate of change and funding that would help us to make the CSI really happen, by building a movement with the youth of the world itself. Who better to react to the plight of children forced to pick up the gun than their peers who had so many more options in life? At the strategic level, I would lead a campaign at the highest political, military and humanitarian levels to advance the cause of eradicating child soldiers sooner rather than later. We’d reinforce both those efforts with steady operational research that would remain field-oriented.
What ultimately clinched this refined course of action was the fortuitous arrival in the project-cum-nascent movement of Professor Shelly Whitman from Dalhousie University, an expert on waraffected children and international affairs, introduced to us by the CSI’s director at the time, Brigadier General Greg Mitchell (Ret’d). Shelly was soon followed by her boss, the director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies at Dalhousie University, Dr. David Black. His engagement with us, in turn, was supported right up the decision chain through the dean to the university president himself, and the result was that the Child Soldiers Initiative found a permanent home at Dalhousie. This became the North Star we needed to move the project into its new incarnation, and from our current stalemate to the dynamic force I hoped this movement would become.
A first step in this direction was the second venture on the African continent. In November 2009, we hosted an executive seminar in Gaborone, Botswana, on child soldiers and security forces. Participants included military officials from Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, The Gambia, Angola and the DRC. Botswana’s minister of defence attended and spoke of the risk child soldiers posed to the fragile stability of this region of the world.
Covering topics such as international legislation on child’s rights, gender dynamics in conflict, negotiating release of children in combat, as well as a personal account of life as a child soldier, this seminar proved to be instrumental in engaging the Southern African sub-region defence forces on this issue and set the stage for repeat productions in other regions of the continent with military and police alike. Most participants had stories to tell of encounters with child soldiers, but they had no training to speak of when it came to coping with that particular challenge. For some of the countries represented, child soldiers were not considered an issue, but the representatives at our session understood the vital importance for all to be engaged—whatever hurts your neighbour hurts you. Conflicts can occur quickly, borders are porous, and trouble can land on your doorstep: it is in everyone’s best interest to assist in finding effective solutions. This was an extremely heartening session.
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.
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.