Dallaire Initiative seeks
Pope’s support to end use of child soldiers
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| Pope Francis receives in audience General Roméo Dallaire and Dr Shelly Whitman. |
The Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative brings the
perspective of the security sector to the urgent need to end the use of child
soldiers in conflicts across the globe. The Founder and the Executive Director
of the Initiative were recently in the Vatican to tell Pope Francis about their
work and to ask him for his support.
By Linda Bordoni
February 12th is the International
Day Against the Use of Child Soldiers.
On various occasions Pope Francis has
expressed his concern for the global phenomenon and called for an end to the
practice which he has called a “form of slavery.”
Responding to a call from an organization that aims to end
the recruitment and use of child soldiers, he recently received in audience
retired Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire, and Dr Shelly
Whitman.
They are respectively the founder and the Executive Director
of the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, a global
partnership that brings the perspective of the security sector to the issue of
child soldiery, equipping leaders with the training and tools to prevent the
recruitment and use of child soldiers worldwide.
As General Dallaire and Dr Whitman told Vatican News
immediately after the papal audience that took place on January 17th,
the meeting with Pope Francis came about in a harmonious and constructive
atmosphere of “significant mutual interest”:
'Shaking Hands with the Devil'
Retired Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire’s
passionate mission to protect all children from becoming weapons of war stems
from his own powerful experience and first-hand witness of the horrific 1994
Rwanda genocide.
He was the Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance
Mission for Rwanda prior to and during the genocide. Notwithstanding the
information he provided about the planned massacre and his reiterated requests
to take action, he was denied permission to intervene and the UN withdrew its
peacekeeping forces creating a vacuum in which over 800,000 people were killed
in less than 100 days.
They were days of absolute horror, as narrated in Dallaire’s
prize-winning book “Shake Hands with the Devil: the failure of Humanity in
Rwanda”, a country from which he returned with a deep commitment to give
meaning to the tragedy and do his part in preventing such horror from happening
again.
But as the General told me the day after meeting with the
Pope, he did not travel to the Vatican all the way from Canada to talk about
the past, but to engage with Pope Francis and find channels of collaboration
and support with the Holy See.
"The Pope has been writing and speaking about the
scourge of modern slavery since 2013", the General said, and was
interested in knowing what we are doing. “We, he added, were very keen in
gaining his support for our work, and bringing the Holy See into the exercise
of influencing world leaders to be engaged, particularly in using children as
instruments of war.”
Seeking the Pope's assistance
Dr Shelley Whitman explained that the aim of the meeting was
to ask the Pope’s assistance on three levels:
- On
South Sudan (where the Initiative has a project), because we know that that is
a situation where Pope Francis can have significant influence on the religious
and political leaders and the peace process; and because we believe that it is
of primary importance that people understand that it is primary value if you’re
going to achieve peace and security in South Sudan, and break the cycle of
violence, it is necessary to end the recruitment and use of child soldiers.
- On
being a global advocate for this issue: we called upon him to make it a point
amongst members of the Catholic Church across the world so that Church leaders
can have a significant influence especially in some parts of the world where
children are being allowed to join armed groups, and where community members,
parents etc. have an important role to play.
- We
requested that the Catholic Church endorse the Vancouver Principles on
peacekeeping, at least in the moral perspective that it can bring to this set
of non-binding pledges that seek to equip security sector actors with the
skills and knowledge to prevent violations being committed against children.
Whitman said she and the General came away from the papal
audience “feeling listened to and understood: he spoke very passionately about
how issues related to children and their abuse in a multitude of forms around
the world is something that intimately touches his heart and keeps him awake”.
Francis, she said, “took notes and we left materials with
him to follow-up afterwards, and he asked how the Holy See could become an
endorser and what the process is”.
A new era of peacekeeping
Regarding the harsh lessons of the past, General Dallaire
said he believes “lessons are being learnt, whether or not there is a political
will to apply them both from the international community and within the single
countries is another matter”.
“I think the international constructs of legal constraints
have been established and we know we have the responsibility to protect” he
said.
He also spoke positively about the fact that many nations
today want professionalized security forces and want to be recognized as forces
that are responding to human rights: “they want to do peacekeeping but they
need new skills, new knowledge and competencies”.
That, he said, is one of the focuses that the Dallaire
Initiative has: “bringing a new era of peacekeeping regarding children to the
fore versus simply treating it as an afterthought”.
Both the General and Dr Whitman speak of the role of the
media, both in countries where there is conflict - where radio for example can
be used to reach communities and inform – and more generally where there is a
need for correct information and for journalists to be informed in a more
specialized way.
South Sudan project
Whitman talks about the 3-year project in S. Sudan which is
funded by the Canadian government, explaining that the Initiative has just
opened an office in Juba where she says it is working on different levels
trying to impact a situation that is going through a peace process: “trying to
get the parties to that conflict to stop the recruitment and use of children,
and working at how it is a really important piece to that peace process”.
She says the lessons learnt in Rwanda are of enormous help:
“it does help immensely to have that history and knowledge on the continent on
who General Dallaire is with many of the people we are dealing with – the
government and the SPLA (the liberation army) – they know of his name and they
know of the Rwanda genocide. The approach that we are taking is one they want
to be engaged with, as they want to be empowered instead of us just coming in
and castigating them for their behavior”.
Rwanda project
Whitman points out that having come out of the genocide,
Rwanda today is the third-largest peacekeeping contributor to UN peacekeeping
missions and has about 800 troops in South Sudan.
She explains that in Rwanda, the Initiative has been working
with Rwandans to create a center of excellence training and learning, a hub for
troops from the entire region: “what is interesting we have been training the
troops that have been going into South Sudan, and now they are a force
multiplier for us on the ground to help with ending and advocating for the end
of the use of child soldiers”.
Whitman and Dallaire both express hope, with the General
pointing out that it is not a “Pollyanna optimism”, and that they firmly
believe, being the only organization that has looked at the problem from a
security sector point of view, “that they can certainly reduce the flow and ultimately
maybe stop the flow into conflict of child soldiers, versus trying to pick up
the pieces at the end”.
Global phenomenon
Whitman explains that the recruitment of children as weapons
of war is sadly a phenomenon that is endemic throughout the world: in the
Middle East - Syria, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Lebanon;
Europe: Ukraine; Asia: Sri Lanka, Myanmar; Latin America: Colombia,
Guatemala, the drug wars and the use of children in criminal networks.
Migration
She points out that the migrant crisis has an influence and
an impact on how this is no long an “us-versus-them” issue, but touches each
and every one of us.
“When we fail to address conflicts that happen in other
parts of the world, because of our inter-connectedness, there is no way we can
avoid their impact on us: if we fail to address the recruitment of child
soldiers in country X, it will come knocking on our door and we will have to
address the influx of refugees and migrants because of those conflicts”.
General Dallaire concludes with a bitter memory: “They
refused to come and give me any support in Rwanda because it wasn’t in
anybody’s self-interest.”
But that, he says, has changed radically in the last 25
years, “because every conflict out there, and conflicts that are using
child-soldiers has an impact on us back home… there is no more disconnect:
whatever happens over there has ramifications on us”.
“So the aim”, he reiterates, “Is to go there and to
attenuate the rage, prevent things from happening versus trying to ‘pick up the
pieces’, seeing the impact on us, and trying to survive by building walls and
whatever else…”.
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