They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children

  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 attemp
ted 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 securi
ty 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.