Featured Interview: Romeo Dallaire
by Stacey E. Ake
: Child soldiers have always existed. In fact, soldiering is often considered a sign of adulthood, usually manhood. What makes today's child soldiers, who are really weapons of warfare in a post-modern age, different from child soldiers of the past?
Romeo Dallaire: Well I'm not convinced that the concept of child soldiers has always existed. We've seen the use of children in certain wars to do certain peripheral things – drummer boys and shipmates and things like that – we've seen them historically recruited young, but never employed as warriors and as frontline troops until they've achieved maturity, as you say manhood. Now that's sort of a floating number. Is it 15, is it 18, is it 21? The age has been a bit flexible, but certainly you don't see anything like 12- or 9-year-olds.
Historically, aside from the old mythology of Amazon women, you don't see girls at all in this role. Girls have been relegated to being spoils of war, and have been raped by rogue soldiers. However, since the late 80s and the early 90s, as we've shifted gears out of classic war into this era of conflict and the massive availability of very light weapons, there was something that shifted gears in the minds of rebels and extremists and in the minds of certain governments to the extent that you could use children. Not mature warriors, not children who have been trained to be mature warriors, but outright just rip a kid out of his home, throw him in the bushes, give him a weapon, drug him up, and send him in. Be they 8 years old, 10 years old, there's been no sort of automatic consciousness of creating a warrior spirit; it's been nothing more than a very cheap, expendable weapon that is available, and made effective by the fact that these light weapons are so available. And so what we're into now with child soldiers is a whole different conceptual base than at any time in history. And it is not in any way, shape or form an exercise of maturity towards another rite of passage or something. It is pure and crass expediency of a cheap, expendable weapons packet.
: What economic alternatives can be presented to those countries whose economies seem to depend upon production of weapons of local destruction – the small light weapons, like AK-47s?
RD: To be quite honest, the production of those weapons in the economies of those countries is insignificant. And so eliminating that production would do absolutely nothing to their economies of any shape or form. I mean, we talk about the availability of something like 650 million of these damn things, and the problem with them is that they never die. I mean, with a little bit of maintenance, they're good for a hundred years. We still see black powder rifles that are still available if someone wants to use them. And so the annual production of a modern version, or even older versions that are still in production, is absolutely, totally irresponsible by governments and by arms producers who are selling them. So there is no climate to produce an incentive to stop it. It is a pure political decision.
: Why do you think NGOs [non government organizations] will have such a great impact on the future? Do you see them as a counterbalance to, or as partners with, large corporations in the rush towards global power?
RD: I see globalism as a positive asset to humanity, but I see it as still a very immature concept, and rapidly abused by the easiest of instruments, particularly industry, financial institutions, things like that. It's a fast buck and easy and you can maximize and build big empires. So I think that the whole ability to think globally will be the pull for the NGO world to in fact go well beyond its own limited ambitions. I think that those individual ideals they have will start to coalesce into bigger movements, far more than what we see now, and they will mature in their ability to move the breadth of the globe, and as such we will gain in on this power. So I don‘t see it as necessarily a counterbalance to industry, but I see it as being able to obtain the same levels with something far more complex than industrial production and a financial sort of fiddling.
The environment is going to encapsulate the whole thing. One, because we have become conscious of the vulnerability of the globe through the astronauts. We've seen them describe it as this beautiful little ball in the middle of all this stuff. So they've brought this to our conception like no time in history before, that the earth is relatively small, and that this thing is probably fairly fragile when you start playing in the big leagues. Secondly, the environment has come to the point now where we are moving towards a decision where either the planet, call it the environment or the whole planetary body, and humanity are going to come to a decision. Either they commune together, or they experience friction, and both will lose. So both are on this collision course unless they commune together. And so we are at a time when in fact humanity has got to pull together, not because of purely human rights, not because of security and conflicts, but this massive overarching one called the environment. I consider [vulnerability of humanity] to be the ultimate catalyst for making the rest of the globalization exercises work.
: One of the first actions of the UN was the formation of the state of Israel, a new state whose existence was to protect the lives of a particular people. It also played into the post-modern, post-colonial pursuit of identity, whether ethnic, national, or personal. How can the UN justify not giving in to other suffering ethnic, religious or cultural minorities and the privilege of granting them their own Israel, their own state?
RD: Was that one gesture in Israel a trend, or was that an aberration? And I would contend that some of the most vocal people against any fiddling with the nation-state or with the sovereignty of classic diplomatic instruments are the developing world countries. And you would think that those who have the least to lose and the most to gain would be those countries that are created so artificially and so screwed up and so absolutely arbitrary, that maybe they'd say, "You know, we'd be probably better off if we were able to move the lines here and we'd get all our gang together, and you guys get your gang together and we talk." And yet they're the most adamant in refusing…[But] because of things like human rights…and the environment…people will [be less inclined] to say "We need these borders, we need sovereignty to build a nation, we need nationalism."
: The Responsibility to Protect project seems to be based on the adage, "To whom much is given, from them much will be required." How can the pursuit of such responsibility be presented to privileged nations as being a part of their enlightened self-interests?
RD: Well, first of all, I think the responsibility to protect has moved from concept to doctrine now. The question is, "How do we operationalize it?" When you have a doctrine, let's say a military doctrine, you deduce tactics, training, organizations, and equipment to be able to meet what the doctrine articulates. The question now is, "How do we make it work?" And so, the thrust of it is that we have not moved the rural bodies to now move into this new doctrinal base. I'll give you an example: Right up until the end of the cold war, we had a very solid doctrinal base with all its elements to give us the tools of diplomacy, use of force, even humanitarian conventions in classic conflict, nation against nation. And it achieved its culminating point in a cold war. So we were working from a real solid doctrinal base and it was from a concept of what conflict is and what war is, and how to avoid it and centuries of rules and tactics. When we all of the sudden tripped into this new era, what we've been trying to do is take that stuff from that era and adapt it to this era. But there has been no central theme of the era where we have come to grips with the new conceptual base of what is peace and conflict resolution. We've not found the new action verbs of this era. In the military, in the cold war, in the classic war, it was simple in the sense that we had a lexicon of action verbs: Aid, defend, attack, withdraw, bypass. We all knew what they all meant. And we end up in this era and the mission I get is to "establish an atmosphere of security." What the hell does "establish" mean? Does it mean I defend that country against a third party while I'm demobilizing both armies? Does it mean I watch? An atmosphere of security? There's no definition behind these words because there's no concept that has articulated these words in order to use them.
: With the NGO's search for common ground, a computer simulation called War Games has been created. What will this simulation be used for? What is your vision for it?
RD: Well, it is part of the phase of research I'm doing on the eradication of the use of child soldiers. My aim is not to simplistically only find new tactics or new weapons, or new social economic tools to prevent recruitment, or new demobilization, rehabilitation, and reintegration tools. Ultimately, it is to eradicate in the minds of adults the mere thought of using children as instruments of war. Why all of a sudden, are these kids recruited? Oh, poverty and this and that. A lot of the work has also been done on DRR, which is demobilization, rehabilitation, and reintegration. What I have discovered, and maybe because of my military background, is that the middle part here, which is the use of child soldiers, does nothing. How do you stop this weapon, called a child soldier? How do you neutralize it? And so you look at what it can do, and then you devise the instruments that will neutralize it, make it ineffective. Because if the child soldier is ineffective, no one is going to recruit it. You're not going to buy a gun to shoot down tanks when you know it can't kill a tank, so you don't buy it. Nor do you have to worry about what to do with that gun afterwards because, hey, you didn't buy it in the fist place because it was of no use. And so if you can render the use of the children ineffective, then you can solve that problem. And so, what we're doing is a three-phase study. First is to gather the information on the use. Some children are used purely as cannon fodder; others are given more training, and others are used to blow up mines. This is the most sophisticated weapon system of the year, because the damn thing can shoot and kill. But it can also build your logistics base, and ultimately meets things that no other weapons will do. It could be sex slaves and bush wives—the same weapon. How do you neutralize that whole capability? And so the second phase is that we are writing a doctrine behind the use of child soldiers. And in that doctrine, we try to articulate the doctrine to neutralize that. So what we do is we create scenarios and we throw this stuff at it and we see if it works. From that we will then identify [a] third phase country…and take this and apply it in the field.
: With the end of Apartheid in South Africa, it seemed as if the quantity of evil allotted to the continent of Africa simply moved north and alighted in the nation of Rwanda. What is your view of evil in the world?
RD: Let me get you from another angle. It is my belief that human beings seek serenity as their basic premise. Even the most evil human seeks serenity for his person. What curbs that is the frictions of our differences that are coming from economic, ethnic, religious backgrounds, sovereignty, and nationalism. We have frictions, and so the essence of the evil is how these frictions escalate and how people are able to use that because of their sense of what they feel their serenity will be to take advantage and create. And so, in this modern era, what we've discovered is that horror has been a new instrument of friction and power. Massive rapes, mutilation, movement of people into displacement camps and so on, genocide, ethnic cleansing. All these things are based on horror. You'll produce horror, which is an extremist friction of difference, and through horror and acting upon it you instill fear. When you instill fear, those who are in fear are exceptionally vulnerable. You gain power by instilling fear and that's how you are able to win whatever you want. The extremists in Rwanda created horror and fear and were able to move millions upon millions of people to achieve what they wanted to do. But there was just a bunch of assholes on the side who moved the concept of horror to the absolute extreme, to genocide. And so evil is a result of either a maturing of the frictions deliberately or a subtle, random hitting of these frictions that escalate. Respect, democracy, human rights, governance, rule of law, equality: these are all tools that are there to slow down these frictions, to attenuate the frictions and that's how we are able to work together. But if you don't have the instruments to attenuate the frictions they then escalate and then move into a concept of evil. So I don't think that evil is generic. I think it is the result of frictions that are affecting our serenity that move to escalate to the extent where they become an expression of evil.
: In The Responsibility to Protect, you advise the US not to intervene unilaterally in places like Darfur, but rather to encourage middle powers to work together to end such conflicts. How is such a policy related to the fact that the US, through such agencies as the School of the Americas, exports many of these very techniques of warfare you are hoping to eliminate?
RD: The stuff we found in Afghanistan, the school material, it's just absolutely incredible. Because it's the United States, a world leader and great democracy with a whole lot of smart people, doesn't always mean it makes smart decisions. And I'm not convinced that a world power so powerful as it is has all the checks and balances on what exactly it's doing. It's fine to simply take on African countries, developing countries, and say, "Oh, look at the God-damned wastage, the corruption," and to hit easy targets like that. But I would contend that if you looked in the entrails of the developed countries and looked at what they're doing, the corruption and the methodologies are quite vicious because they're a hell of a lot more sophisticated. But it's not that they're not existent. So there are a lot of instruments of accountability, and counterbalances in order to prevent abuses, but they don't negate the fact that initiatives can be created in these great resource-based countries that just don't make any logical sense.
: OK. Well then what kind of economic incentives could the middle powers create, or this country – the great powers, or whatever – to end things like child soldiers, or basically many of the inner-nesting conflicts that they kind of support for various reasons?
RD: The economic side of this, poverty, is the overriding factor. Eradicating poverty means you build a middle class, you build a whole infrastructure, and you build a sense of purpose of nations. However, the overarching problem that is creating these scenarios and exacerbating the frictions in the developing countries is poverty. The 20% of the "haves" of the world who cannot come to grips with .7% GDP into development is something that I don't understand. To me, the .7% GDP into national development is the starting point; it is not the ultimate aim. Now if, within the developed countries, the opulence that we have, that we cannot achieve that .7% for 80% of humanity, then there is a fundamental concept of humanity that is erroneous. No matter how much we say that we believe in democracy and human rights, it just doesn't make any sense. And it's not because we're pouring all our money into defense and we're pouring all our money here. I'll give you an example: even our Prime Minister has said that we couldn't achieve .7% in the budgetary process. And I said you're absolutely right, when you look at the way things are prioritized. I said international development, in the whole policy basis, is a residual. After you've paid education and health and this and that, if there are a few bucks leftover we can tolerate giving that much. However, if you made international development on par with health and education and defense and transport, you're into a whole different concept in regards to that amount. And at that point, .7% is more than achievable. And so where the grand strategic failing of international development and poverty exists is the fact that that problem is perceived as a residual after we've solved many of our own problems. And until the 20% of humanity shifts gears and says that 80% of humanity is a responsibility of that 20%, to assist in at least getting a human state with hope, until we do that then we will chronically continue to throw patches at a thousand cuts. And so we won't eradicate poverty until they make [the shift].
: Thanks for talking with us.
Stacey Ake teaches Philosophy in Drexel's Department of English and Philosophy. While much of her primary writing is on semiotics and existentialism, she has also written about the role magic realism plays in women's literature.