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 influence 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 taking 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.
Consider this: it is completely within your potential to gather together some of your peers and fundraise for a small, cheap, solar-powered computer to send to a school in the Congo. This is just one small example. Imagine the potential for growth, for understanding, for solution building, if once a week your class or youth group were to meet electronically with a class or youth group in Africa.
If this level of global intercommunication were properly nurtured and developed, it would eventually be possible to create a movement that would influence every human being who exists or will exist in the future. Such a movement could facilitate a grand design for the application of human rights and justice around the world—a global appreciation that all humans are equal, that all humans are human, and that no one human is more human than any other.
With all these new philosophical and technological advances that are available to humanity as a whole and to individuals within humanity, there must be a way to bring about solutions to those conflicts and abuses of power that continue to plague us. With worldwide communication tools and innovative social networks popping up at a breathtaking pace, we could create a virtual headquarters of engaged individuals to focus attention and guide action on the issue of child soldiers, to reach out to build direct connections with youth in conflict zones. A virtual worldwide movement could constantly monitor and connect victims, could target the perpetrators and also the political leaders of the developed world, who have the power to make the risky decisions to intervene in conflict zones. The power of such grassroots connections was demonstrated in the election of President Barack Obama, whose campaign team built a coalition of voters linked by cellphone, BlackBerry and laptop, in which all that communication turned into real votes. We can argue about how path-breaking Obama’s presidency has turned out to be, but how it came about is a wonderful example of the effectiveness of using the new channels of communication to motivate and inspire a new generation of voters.
As this book has revealed, I am working at coming up with some answers. What we now need to discuss is not how to eradicate the use of child soldiers, but that we will commit to doing so. We need to decide whether we are finally on a mission, you and I, inspired by our empathy for human life, whoever and wherever it is.
Since the beginning of recorded thought, there have been accounts of greed, brutality and the destruction of innocence, to the point that too many in the human race—too many leaders, too many pundits—firmly believe that the natural state of humans is a combative competition for survival. The architects of the Rwandan genocide to this day, even while standing accused of crimes against humanity in the dock at the international tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, believe that their plan to systematically destroy another ethnicity was justified by their own people’s need for security, opportunity and serenity of mind and soul against a history of oppression. “Us against Them” turned into evil of unimaginable scale. They killed and mutilated hundreds of thousands, using their own youths, their own future generations, as their instrument, driven by fear and insecurity, and a perverted drive for peace for their own kind.
But another narrative has always existed alongside the feardriven, utter selfishness of Us versus Them. It has been called by many names: social responsibility, altruism, the golden rule, ubuntu—an Africa-born concept that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has described as the essence of being human, the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation, that you, too, are humiliated and diminished when others around you are humiliated or diminished. All of these ideas inspire individuals to look beyond themselves to others; to take personal responsibility for the larger social good; to act on the ethical obligation we have to our neighbour; to assist in building the means to advance this quest to protect the peace and humanity of all human beings.
Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle asserted that human beings aren’t at their best when they stand alone, and that excellence can’t be achieved by hermits. I love how that sounds, though he was actually speaking of small states working together. In the last century, Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi advised each of us to “be the change you want to see in the world”—a line now posted on undergraduate walls in student residences everywhere. He knew the limitations of the individual—“whatever you do will be insignificant”—but believed that those limitations are not an excuse: “it is very important that you do it.” The civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had a dream “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal’”—a beautiful dream for his country, which in some ways has been realized forty years later by the election of Barack Obama.
Individuals who possessed no apparent power, wealth, influence, connections, or even the technological tools you have at your fingertips today, harnessed their passion and changed the world. Seismic change can happen over a lifetime, or in an instant.
In the 1960s, an important revolution was brewing in the United States. Black Americans were fighting for their rights, and many African-American athletes heading to the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City wanted to draw attention to the unfair poverty and injustice afflicting them back home. Community leaders and athletes, most of them African-American, came together in the Olympic Project for Human Rights to arrange a boycott of the games by all black American athletes. They were unsuccessful. Despite the fervour of the civil-rights movement on American streets, no protest of any kind succeeded on the Olympic world stage. Runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos decided to change this. After winning first and third place, respectively, in the two-hundred-metre race, they stood on the podium to accept their medals without shoes—to symbolize their poverty—then raised their black-gloved fists in pride and defiance. Their simple gesture rocked the world, and brought the terrible injustices of black America to global attention.
How could such a singularly simple gesture have been so powerful? It was not an act of terrorism, of destruction of other human beings or infrastructure, or of themselves in some form of self-immolation by fire or dynamite. It was a powerful symbol that shifted focus effortlessly from their physical prowess to their cause.
Raising their fists had the impact of a nuclear bomb on those with political, social and economic power. That ever-so-simple gesture, protesting the exploitation of millions of abused humans and the injustice that dogged their every day, helped to topple evil and abusive laws that kept so many humans in a state of less humanity than others. Imagine if we could define the right moment and harness such powerful energy to eradicate the use of child soldiers. What would our symbolic action be?
Of course, change is rarely instantaneous. In a longer but no less revolutionary way, another man helped to change the world through defiance and refusal to accept the status quo. Rolihlahla Mandela was born in 1918 in a small village in South Africa at a time when apartheid—an Afrikaans word meaning “separateness”—denied black South Africans basic human rights and forced them to live segregated from white South Africans. Mandela was the first member of his family to go to school, where he was given the English name Nelson. Despite the heavy oppression of apartheid, from a young age Mandela worked with others of like mind to overturn the racist status quo. He was suspended from his first college for participating in a protest boycott, which was only the beginning of his lifelong struggle for equality for the black citizens of South Africa.
Mandela helped form the African National Congress Youth League and tried to encourage the ANC itself to become more radical in the fight against apartheid. Even after his first arrest and trial, Mandela continued to follow the rules and try to create change peacefully. But at every step, he was a victim of apartheid—he was constantly being banned, arrested and imprisoned—and it further radicalized him. “When I was first banned,” he said, “I abided by the rules and regulations of my persecutors. [But] I had now developed contempt for these restrictions … To allow my activities to be circumscribed by my opponent was a form of defeat, and I resolved not to become my own jailer.”
In the early 1960s the National Party banned the African National Congress, and Mandela made the difficult decision to change his tactics and promote the use of sabotage and violence against government and military targets. Mandela wrote in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, “I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the Whites.” Arrested and on trial again for subversion and treason, Mandela closed his defence with the following statement: “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” Despite his passionate plea and massive support from the black population of South Africa, Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment and spent the next twenty-seven years in jail.
But his resolve not to be defeated, even in jail, slowly led over the decades to an international movement to “Free Nelson Mandela” and end apartheid in South Africa. Even after his release from prison in 1990, Mandela continued to acknowledge the unfortunate need for violent action to combat the violence of apartheid. He was often misunderstood as a terrorist, but he maintained his resolve to bring justice to his country. In 1993 he won the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1994 South Africa’s first multiracial elections were held, and Nelson Mandela, at the age of seventyfive, was elected as the country’s first black president.
Like Mandela, many revolutionaries—think of Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi today, or even Dian Fossey, who was murdered for her campaign to protect the gorillas of the Great Lakes Region of Africa—pay a high price for holding to their convictions and attempting to share their beliefs with others. Why would anyone want to be out in front of the pack, trying to influence its direction and its capacity to perform beyond itself? What logical, responsible individual wants to submit to ridicule, to ruthless cross-examination, to physical attack, to incarceration, to risk that his family, friends and associates will suffer too? What is the trigger? What keeps him going?
In his award-winning 2009 book, Murder Without Borders, journalist Terry Gould explored what compelled ordinary local reporters in dangerous and corrupt places to keep doing their jobs in the face of death threats. The answers for each of the journalists he profiled, in Colombia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Russia and Iraq, were individual to a certain extent—bravery, stubbornness, guilt, bravura and, in one instance only, saintliness. But they were all only people, people like you and me, who shared the stubborn belief that life in their hometowns needed to be fair, needed to be free of the impunity of criminals and overlords, needed to be organized so that the poor had as much right to safe and fulfilled lives for themselves and their children as the rich. It was not some rarefied quality that drove them to sacrifice themselves, but an insistence on justice for their neighbours.
Whenever I falter, I think of the people I met before the genocide began in Rwanda, so human, so full of hope, so deserving of life. I reread a passage written by Elie Wiesel, published in an anthology called What Does It Mean to Be Human?: “To the homeless, the poor, the beggar, the victim of AIDS and Alzheimer’s, the old and the humble, the prisoners in their prison and the wanderers in their dreams, it is our sacred duty to stretch out our hand and say, ‘In spite of what separates us, what we have in common is our humanity.’” I also remind myself of the old saying, attributed to “Anonymous”: “We are told never to cross a bridge till we come to it, but this world is owned by people who have ‘crossed bridges’ in their imagination far ahead of the crowd.”
Revolutionaries such as Gandhi and Mandela were called to use the tools that were available to them, to overcome the obstacles of racism, sexism, national politics and international apathy. They each helped change the world in their own ways, and you and I are their heirs.
Given that it is so easy to find out about the world we live in, is it even conceivable that, going forward, any one of us could actually abandon other humans to their brutal fates? Not just by living as if they do not exist, but by acting as if you are the only one who really counts, as if you can actually detach yourself from the rest of humanity and be purely an observer, a hermit cut off from the suffering of others—an audience of one, watching with varying degrees of interest the screen in front of you where humanity is playing itself out.
I know people regard such isolationism as a real option—I see detachment all around me. I can connect to the world at the click of a mouse, and I can disconnect exactly the same way. Why get involved, why be bothered by what other human beings are doing to their fellow humans? Why should I want to be an actor in the film of the human race?
If we in the developed world don’t like what we see, a thumb or index finger quickly removes it from in front of our eyes. Having the world at your fingertips can take you down a dark path as easily as it can take you toward engagement with that world. I see lots of evidence of instant, anonymous communication over the Web being used to foment stupidity, ignorance and hate, or to mire people in intellectual futility, serving up endless helpings of celebrity gossip or instant reinforcement of ignorant attitudes, or worse. Illegal material, such as adult and child pornography, colonizes much of the Internet, the latter being a form of child abuse that perpetrators can now easily share all over the globe, creating a virtual community of pedophiles. Youths in the developed world sit in their bedrooms imbibing the hate represented by videos of beheadings, being recruited to a cause that has little to do with the realities of their own lives, but much to do with the perversion of youth’s sensitivity to injustice, and longing for action.
Many of your peers fall into the dark side of the Web because we adults—as teachers, as parents, as community leaders—have not been able to show them an alternative, to prove to them that they are needed and wanted, and that there are opportunities all around them that will stretch them to their limits in the cause of humanity rather than hate. We adults need to show that it is possible to be as energized by empathy, compassion, courage, determination and altruism as by negativity, narrowness and selfishness. Though it can be daunting, it is also invigorating to try to change the world for the betterment of humanity.
But I can see where anti-hope and anti-idealism grow. I mean, if our duly elected leaders can shirk their collective responsibility to intervene in any number of conflicts and humanitarian catastrophes, even when the evidence of flagrant need is presented to them—selectively engaging only when they perceive a national interest—why should a lone individual think she or he could influence the situation?
In 1994, sovereign nation states around the world decided that the only reason to intervene in the Rwandan genocide would be to protect the human beings at risk. Since there was nothing to be gained other than saving a million black Africans from slaughter, the powers-that-be decided that the risk to their own troops was too high a price to pay. The leading voice in the debate at the UN Security Council was the United States, which in 1993 had pulled its forces from the peacekeeping effort in Somalia after eighteen of its soldiers were killed during a raid to try to capture a warlord in Mogadishu. President Bill Clinton and his administration decided that the American people would not permit casualties in a mission that was purely humanitarian, a rationale he enshrined in Presidential Proposition 25: going forward, the only missions the United States would risk shedding blood for were ones that also served American strategic or national interests. Rwanda had nothing to offer the American people. It lacked resources and strategic value. Someone from the U.S. military at the time of the genocide had the audacity to tell me that there was nothing in Rwanda except human beings, and there were too many of them.
As the genocide began, the United States informed the UN Security Council that it would also oppose any effort to preserve the presence of UNAMIR, the peacekeeping mission I was leading in Rwanda. We were physically protecting thirty thousand Rwandans from immediate slaughter, but the Americans wanted UNAMIR abandoned and all the remaining peacekeepers withdrawn because of the risk of non-Rwandan casualties, and the fact that no American national interest would be served by intervening in the war. A few people, such as the late Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch, tried to get that decision reversed; she was told that Rwandan citizens weren’t a significant enough political constituency in the United States to justify changing course.
Deciding not to intervene is as much a course of action as choosing to leap into the fray. Governments tend to hide behind the skirts of their citizenry, insisting that “we” don’t care, that “we” don’t want to take such risks. But in my experience, it’s chicken and egg. As editors I. William Zartman and J. Lewis Rasmussen wrote in Peacemaking in International Conflict:
The lack of a clear sense of interest and legitimacy results in an absence of public commitment. All these doubts and arguments, repeated authoritatively by world leaders, feed the reaction behind which the leaders hide. Yet many polls have shown that the public is strongly committed to the management and resolution of international conflicts for reasons of both morality and interest, under these specific conditions: when leaders show that they know what they are doing, have a plan, explain it confidently, and pursue it deliberately … A commitment to these goals allows leaders to turn conflict into an occasion of decisiveness and allows parties to get on with productive activity. It is a calling of courage and compassion, a hard defence of basic interest under dangerous conditions, a contribution to local reconciliation and global leadership.
Intervening when a massive abuse of human rights is the essence of the conflict is still a hard sell, especially when the lives of our soldiers are on the line and the end of the mission is not in sight. It seems that governments (and most individuals, too) are prone to act only when there is a threat to themselves. As a result we need to demonstrate that abuses of human rights elsewhere have ramifications in our own lives, too. They clearly do, no matter how we attempt to turn a blind eye. As Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution, wrote, “Inhumanity, when it is systematized as it is in dictatorial and genocidal regimes, is not only an outrage against common human values, but it also carries very real security implications.” Gareth Evans, past-president of the International Crisis Group, spelled it out even more plainly: “States that cannot or will not stop internal atrocity crimes are the kind of states that cannot or will not stop terrorism, weapons proliferation, drug and people trafficking, the spread of health pandemics, and other global risks.” As we’ve seen more and more, all of the threats Evans listed do not respect borders.
Despite the evidence of change all around us, we have a tendency to view our political “verities” as unchangeable and timeless. For roughly three centuries, national sovereignty has been held to be above all other principles and laws of humanity. Hiding behind this powerful, fundamental and long-standing international respect of nation states’ autonomy—which is also enshrined in the UN Charter—world leaders have freely abused their own populations within their borders while other nations bowed to their sovereignty. But as Gary J. Bass argues in Freedom’s Battle, the very idea of national sovereignty grew out of European reaction to the devastating Thirty Years War, in which “perhaps 40 per cent of the population of central Europe perished in the name of competing versions of universal truth.” In other words, the idea of the nation state was created in large measure as a response to an annihilating assault on the lives of individual citizens and was actually designed to better protect them.
By the late twentieth century, though, the concept of national sovereignty could not contain our outrage any longer. The genocide in Rwanda and other horrific crimes against humanity around the globe demonstrated that armed conflicts within a single country, not between nations—and with mainly civilian casualties—were the new standard for warfare. And it was clear we needed to invent a new doctrine that could engage the political will of nation states to prevent future massive abuses of human rights and destruction of human life on the scale of Cambodia, Rwanda, East Timor, Kosovo, Bosnia, the Congo and Darfur.
In response, Gareth Evans led an international group, funded mostly by Canada, that conducted a seminal study on the interrelationship between sovereignty, massive human rights abuses and the impact of those abuses beyond national borders. (I was asked to provide input to that group.) The year-long study, the results of which were published in 2001, produced a paradigmshifting concept: nations have a “responsibility to protect” suffering humanity in any country on the planet.
The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) states that no sovereign state or its authorities can deliberately abuse the human rights of its citizenry and claim that no other state has a right to interfere. It says that should such a scenario present itself, or in the case where a government cannot stop such massive abuses of innocent civilians, then the international community has a responsibility to protect those civilians under a mandate from the UN. In other words, the protection of individual citizens is paramount over the sovereignty of a nation state. The doctrine contends that if innocent people are being abused, we do not have a choice about whether or not to intervene; we have a fundamental responsibility to humanity to intervene in extremis, even with force.
The principle of R2P, endorsed at the UN World Summit in New York in 2005, continues to be controversial. Smaller developing countries at first feared—citing historical example—that world powers would abuse such a doctrine and simply invade at whim to depose regimes that were dictatorial, or even rogue. And, as I mentioned above, using the example of the Rwandan genocide, world powers are reticent to embrace the concept of R2P, which they perceive to be a near-open door to involving them in trouble spots in which they have no compelling interest—beyond the saving of human life. The old attitudes and reflexes and excuses linger, exacerbated these days as NATO in Afghanistan and the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq try to figure out ways to responsibly exit from conflict zones that the major powers had deemed to be within their national interests.
Concurrently with my work on eradicating the use of child soldiers, I was also nominated by the UN secretary general to his advisory board on the prevention of genocide, mass atrocity and abuse of human rights, which was designed to assist him in moving the UN, its agencies and member states into prevention mode when it came to genocide. Having embraced such a doctrine doesn’t mean that we have worked out how to apply it or how it should be integrated with other radical initiatives of the last decade, such as the ICC, which has been establishing jurisprudence for prosecuting crimes against humanity and even indicting heads of state. We are on a steep learning curve when it comes to applying these new international tools and figuring out the resources we need to use them effectively.
For instance, the 2008 indictment for genocide of the president of the Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, was designed to bring a halt to the slow-acting ongoing slaughter in Darfur. But when the ICC brought down the charges, al-Bashir immediately threw a large number of foreign NGOs and humanitarian support out of the Sudan, depriving millions of his own people of the means of survival. That act should have been enough to further indict him, but where does the escalation end?
Glen Pearson, a Canadian member of Parliament with deep humanitarian ties to the Sudan, wrote in A Land of Designs: The Saga of Darfur and Human Intentions: “Before any nation or group of nations can intervene, there must be a full and proper humanitarian assessment undertaken to determine the effects on the citizens of that nation.” Every indictment, every sentencing, he continues, “carries stupendous recriminations; for one or a few brought to justice, thousands could be consigned to their deaths. No decision that could result in the privation of hundreds of thousands, even millions, can be truly just unless the people making the ultimate decision provide for the full protection of those who will surely endure terrible consequences of such a complex choice.” If we are going to indict the leader of the Sudan, we have to be ready to step in so that the Sudanese people don’t suffer repercussions. Who is ready, however, to go in and arrest a serving president and bring him to trial, along with the other fifty-two members of his government, his military and police, in order to break the back of an evil regime and stop a genocide that is already seven years old?
I have been doing operational research on this very question with colleagues at Montreal’s Concordia University: the will to intervene based on the principle of R2P. I felt that I needed to bring rigorous thought and options to the UN Advisory Committee on Genocide Prevention on top of the in-the-field knowledge gleaned from my experience in Rwanda. I approached Dr. Frank Chalk of Concordia’s Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies to strategically develop the will to intervene (W2I) in international humanitarian crises. What became clear to us, as we wrote in our 2010 report, is that we can’t wait for our leaders to take action: “When leadership at the top is absent, civil society … must strongly pressure governments to broaden their concept of ‘national interest.’”
This is our responsibility, as much as our leaders’. For the most part, we continue to watch the world passively and permit our leaders to respond with no response. By not raising our voices, we as citizens allow the political elite to get away with inaction even after they have signed on to the concept of R2P. I believe our governments cling to their own sovereign status and allow others to do the same so that one day they do not find themselves being accused of crimes against humanity by fellow members of the UN.
Because of this fear we continue to not only witness immorality in action in those countries that allow the use of child soldiers and other abuses of human rights within their own borders, we also continue to participate in immoral inaction, either standing on the sidelines or paying lip service by donating hundreds of millions of dollars in an attempt to wash our hands of these complex problems.
Clearly, we need to become individually engaged in influencing the decision makers of our own countries to actively participate in the R2P doctrine to which they have formally agreed. This is an instrument of enormous power in the hands of the populations of the world, of the citizen juries of the world, of the NGOs of the world, to go forward and pressure the political decision makers to take the action they committed to on our behalf in front of the international world body. It responds to a crying need. It is the essential requirement for protecting millions of human beings from being abused, mutilated, raped, killed, slaughtered, displaced from their own homes and turned into refugees in other countries for the rest of their lives with absolutely no hope of a future for their children.
Some people mistakenly blame international failures and inaction on the UN. But the UN is only as effective as its member states allow it to be, by approving robust mandates, providing multidisciplinary and progressive mission leaders (civilian and military), contributing sufficient funding up front and guaranteeing the logistics essential to sustain the mission in the field for the length of the mandate. Effective action depends on the political will of sovereign states, and on those countries acting according to the will of their populations. The failure is ultimately not the fault of the UN but of sovereign member states whose peoples choose not to act.
As we bore down to what each individual citizen can do, we have to figure out how to compel our politicians to act. The way to drive the political will to intervene here at home is to find inventive ways to describe the impact that the conflict abroad will have on our lives here, making the risk-taking more palatable and easier to explain. We must help our politicians—who ultimately are the ones who must make the difficult decisions of investing resources and the human lives of soldiers, diplomats, humanitarians and police—establish clear objectives, reasonable means to achieve them and clear exit routes if the situation turns completely sour. The more an intervention seems manageable and limited, the easier our leaders will find it to commit. They are the ones who bear the electoral heat for unpopular decisions, who need to take pragmatic, tactical and short-term action to survive in their positions. We need to help them do it.
There are two goals you must keep in mind as you venture forth on your mission to eradicate the use of child soldiers and to encourage our political leaders to accept the responsibility to protect. You must be a leader, and you must influence leaders. There are many ways to do both. But two important places for you to start are in the voting booth and with the media.
In my home, Canada, people between the ages of eighteen and thirty make up about 35 per cent of the population. But voting patterns show that barely 15 per cent of them exercise their right to vote. What a waste, to fail to use this peaceful political process to shape the great democracy we live in. If young people coalesced around key issues and voted, they would change the face of Canadian politics in one election. Why? Because you hold the balance of power in this country. Each young person represents a brand-new vote that has never been counted. It is tragic that Canada’s young voters, the eighteen- to thirty-year-olds, have never stepped up to the democratic challenge of influencing the path they believe this country (and humanity) will take into the near future. Voting patterns in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe don’t vary much from Canada’s.
Don’t tell me you’re not being heard—it’s that you’re not speaking. You may roll out to the streets of Toronto to protest G20 meetings or travel to Copenhagen to voice your opinion on the climate change conference, but overall your age group is letting political leaders off easily because you aren’t forcing them to craft a vision of how we are going to move the country forward. So far as I can tell, you aren’t consistently demanding your rightful place in the political process. The political elite thrive on the non-participation of the vast majority of citizens and end up being driven more by the media than by the individuals that comprise a country.
You have been allowing traditional media (television, radio, newspapers, magazines) to speak for you and to influence you rather than the other way around. Governments are strongly influenced by the media—and largely define what they perceive as important based on coverage in the press. You need to make the media report on youth-led priorities.
Through voting, through affecting media priorities, through activist commitment and constant engagement with political leaders, public opinion will jell into a solid front that can influence public policy and garner political leadership and action. Without your voices and leadership, the political will to intervene in the world’s toughest and most intractable hot spots will simply not materialize.
As the great American philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” He was right, but I’d add a significant qualifier: it is a lot closer than it was.
When I was graduating from military college, a very senior officer asked me what I wanted to achieve during my career. I immediately assumed that we were talking about a future twenty years down the road. It was a given that I would have a lengthy, demanding period of apprenticeship upon which I could establish my credentials, build my experiential base, hone my skills and acquire the knowledge I required to be an evolving asset to my organization and the community.
This slow and predictable progression is no longer a given for young people today, born into a wide-open and limitless world. When we speak of your future, we’re speaking three, four, five years down the road, because we’re not in an era of evolution or even in an era of change or reform. We’re actually in an era of revolution. There’s nothing static or stable about the status quo anymore. It’s shifting all the time. The future will be in your face so soon that you will wonder how you got left behind.
In the decades to come, it will require more of your time and intellectual efforts to keep up and survive, let alone master and lead. Your challenge, then, is to lead in a time of perpetual and rapid change. You need a vision that will inspire others to maximize their potential, not just survive by sitting on the sidelines. There are no sidelines anymore. And you need to do this, even as you understand that eradicating a horrific abuse such as the use of children to fight dirty civil wars may take decades of steady effort.
To lead must be your aim, and you also have many more tools than did past revolutionaries to enable you to achieve it. You don’t have twenty years to work out your priorities, dreams and passions in the comfort of your milieu. Everything is changing, and you must participate in that change so that it does not happen at your expense, or at the expense of the rest of humanity.
You are looking at a future that is not only very near but one that is within your power to affect. The Internet seems to have no limit on providing you with information, and you seem to feel there is no limit in moving toward all the knowledge and awareness of the world, the whole of humanity, and all that it has produced in thought, research and development, and accomplishments, good and bad.
Just think back for a moment to the last communications revolution, which your parents witnessed and which you may regard as a birthright: television, which brought the world’s wars, famines and natural disasters into people’s living rooms. Michael Ignatieff, in The Warrior’s Honour, describes the impact of television on the concept and practice of humanitarianism:
Television is … the instrument of a new kind of politics. Since 1945, affluence and idealism have made possible the emergence of a host of non-governmental private charities and pressure groups … that use television as a central part of their campaigns to mobilize conscience and money on behalf of endangered humans and their habitats around the world. It is a politics … that takes the human species itself rather than specific citizenship, racial, religious, or ethnic groups as its object. It is a “species politics” striving to save the human species itself… . It is a politics that has tried to construct a world opinion to keep watch over the rights of those who lack the means to protect themselves. Using the medium of television, many of these international organizations have managed to force governments to pay some degree of attention to the public-relations costs of their exercises in domestic repression.
But as Ignatieff also points out, “television’s morality is the morality of the war correspondent, the veteran who has heard all the recurring justifications for human cruelty advanced by the Left and the Right, and who learns in the end to pay attention only to the victims.” But it’s not the correspondents’ morality that rules what gets on the air. When the international community effectively abandoned UNAMIR, I turned to journalists and their cameras and tape recorders, helping them as best I could to film and record the unfolding genocide and get the tapes to their producers at home in London, Paris, New York and Toronto. I figured that if what was happening could be seen, my calls for support might trickle up to the political elite, who couldn’t then ignore the slaughter. My soldiers risked their lives to get the tapes out, but much of the video, film and audio tape ended up on the cuttingroom floor when other stories were deemed more immediate and interesting for the audience. It was censorship by ratings in the service of making money.
The Internet and social media are not run by that particular profit model, and information over the Net cannot be stomped on by media bosses who assume that people won’t be interested. In this new era of social media and YouTube you decide what to disseminate and how to do it in order to achieve our ends.
The only impediment in this new era of global connectedness may be the risk of being overwhelmed. As technological megacompanies like Google advance the digitization of all materials that have been written and printed, from fiction to the most complex scientific matters, access to information is limitless. You also have access to online, real-time observation of any specific spot on Earth—you can even check out what the locals are drinking at the cantina. There are downsides to this, but there are also tremendous upsides: we are entering an era in which evil has no place to hide and there is no limit to how we can present the good.
The ancient rule of borders and boundaries, which have separated and split humanity into boxes, is broken—despite the lastditch attempts of barbaric regimes to cling to them. Can you grasp that there are practically no limits—except those we wish to impose upon ourselves, individually and collectively—that can prevent us from influencing the whole of humanity, from initiating and sustaining reforms from anywhere we live and work? With these tools we can attempt to extricate ourselves from those constraints that have driven us as a species so readily to evil and conflict and greed, and to express and make real our desire for improvement and serenity for ourselves and others around the world.
Recognize the enormous potential this gives you, the influence you could muster. You’ll be able to change things faster, shifting more paradigms than your parents could ever imagine. In fact, the intensity and magnitude of the revolution is already beyond a mere “shift.” To express this limitless potential, we require a new lexicon: new action verbs and terms to guide us. You cannot allow anything, not even the limits of language, to hold you back.
So go forth and invent, create and become a new generation of multidisciplinary individuals dedicated to ensuring that all members of the human race thrive on our vulnerable planet in peace and serenity. Attack with courage and energy those hangovers of the past that put the whole exercise of universal humanism at risk. Inventions like the child soldier: an insidious threat to humanity that you can aim to eradicate.
You could create a global accountability process that would so overwhelm those in power that they would agree to the eradication of the use of child soldiers. This is an objective as tangible as was the elimination of slavery, or the pursuit of human rights, and it is within our grasp. Not only can you make a difference, you are ethically responsible to do so. Your generation must be a generation of activists. I have offered you some suggestions for how to proceed. But what is most important is that you develop your own ideas. You know the problem, you have the tools, and you have the will. You are more than halfway there.
In this period of blistering change, persevere in your aims. Beware of fleeting popular interest. As quickly as you can bring an issue to the world’s attention, it can just as quickly be distracted. As I struggled against the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the world’s eyes flitted past Africa to American celebrity car chases. Be prepared.
People sometimes get stuck in a rut doing nothing because their ambitions are too large: they won’t act until they discover their life’s purpose. I’d argue that it is only through action that we have a hope of discovering our purpose. Instead of asking yourself, “What do I want to do with my life?” ask, “If I had one or two years to devote to something, what would that something be?” What would you do? The great ones—Gandhi, King, Mandela—devoted their whole adult lives to creating “impossible” change. Your world is so much faster and smaller and the impossible seems so much more plausible, and you do not have to wait to be an adult to take a leadership role. (In fact, it is the adults who created child soldiers in the first place.) The action you commit to does not have to be large. It does not have to cost much money, or take much time or effort. It can be free and fast. You don’t even have to get out of your chair.
As I discussed earlier, we have shamefully abdicated to the media our democratic responsibility to guide our politicians. They’re telling us what’s pertinent; they’re choosing the issues. What can you do to change this? Well, the media reports on what’s hot, what they think people are interested in. Let’s show them that we are interested in the children of Africa.
Let’s say, for example, each day this month you emailed your local media outlet and asked them to tell you what was going on concerning the use of child soldiers in Uganda. At the end of that month, they would have received thirty emails. If everyone in the country did this, at the end of the month, they would be inundated with 996,380,880 emails. If everyone in France, Japan and Australia did this as well, in one month 7,291,402,320 emails would have been sent—and the Western media would surely have begun reporting on Ugandan child soldiers.
Does this sound naive? It’s true—I have been accused of naœveté. But I hope that you, too, are a little naive, a little sensitive, a little hopeful. These qualities make us human, make us able to hope, to care, to act—not for profit or politics, but for humanity.
I am not asking you to take action alone. I am asking you to join me, going forward, in the CSI movement, and all the other initiatives that are finding ways to enact and embody and enforce the human rights conventions and laws in the field, bringing to justice the perpetrators who use and abuse children as soldiers. It will not be easy and we will not be successful overnight; even though we are in an accelerating era, it will take time and concerted effort to shift our political leaders away from the status quo. But our efforts will be just and right and ethically responsible. To protest, to confront, to disturb, to argue: these are all gestures of a mature, democratic society. What an impact you will have on your elders, too, if you find ways to raise your voice. Don’t be torn by dilemmas of guilt and commitment. Get engaged in fighting to stop the conflicts adults create, in which children are forced to do the reprehensible dirty work; help me to eradicate the use of child soldiers.
When I led the international peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, I was given strict orders from the highest commanders of the UN not to act, merely to observe. It was a legal order, but I refused to obey it because it was immoral. I didn’t hesitate to disobey, because I knew it would be a death sentence for the thirty thousand men, women and children—from both sides—we were protecting from the génocidaires. In the first days of the genocide, some troops pulled out without orders and the two thousand people they were protecting were slaughtered within hours. I simply refused to add the 30,000 humans under my protection to the 800,000 people who were ultimately mutilated, raped, traumatized by indescribable evil acts against family and friends, and ultimately slaughtered.
I stress one more time that many of those génocidaires were children, forced to act against all moral references and instinctive feelings. Thousands of youth, indoctrinated, drugged, and overcome by mass hysteria created and sustained by adults who were aided and abetted by the rest of the world’s nation states, who refused to provide any assistance to stop this human catastrophe. Adults who pursued relentlessly their objective of destroying all humans they perceived as “different” from them, as a threat to them. They decided that they needed to exterminate them and that their most effective means of mass destruction were children, who they encouraged to be imaginative, energetic, deliberate and effective in inflicting physical and psychological pain.
I will not rest from my goal of eradicating the use of child soldiers. I ask you to join me on this mission. The humanity of these children is as real and valid as your own, and I know you will not fail them. However you proceed, never let it leave your mind: all humans are human; not one of us is more human than any other. The challenge is before you, screaming for you to take it on. Become an activist: inform others, influence public policy and public opinion, join an NGO’s efforts, and get engaged in advancing humanity beyond the evil that it does.
The time is now and the moment is yours to grasp. Go and get your boots dirty in the field. Go and smell, taste, feel, see, hear and cry with your peers, so many of whom are starving for love, aching for release from the grip of conflict, hoping that one day they will find again their inner world of childhood—that they will be aided in their desire to grow into mature, responsible adults, parents of future generations of children with a chance at being safe and happy. And then return to your own safe and happy home and take up the cause of the advancement of human rights for all with a passion, transfigured by witnessing with your own eyes the impact on your peers of being used by rogue adults as instruments of conflict.
Bring your new-found depth of argument to the political elite of our nations and remind them day in and day out of their enormous responsibility to protect, to assist, to intervene.
Peux ce que veux, allons-y.