They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children

by Roméo Dallaire

  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 hu
man 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.