[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Disposables

He spoke with humour and precision, and the story he presented was 
organized and logical, but it was also packed to overbrimming with passion. 
He started with some background, talking of the effects of the Cold War on 
the  Third World, and how, when the Cold War ended, both West and East 
simply abandoned their client states, which were hodgepodges of competing 
ethnic and tribal entities: "Go thou and turn into democracies and don't 
bother us again." The power struggles that ensued turned, too often, into 
civil wars, or autocracies threatened by insurgencies.

Within about a decade, the various fighting groups had figured one thing 
out: with only a little trouble, they could outfit themselves with a 
low-cost, low-tech, high-efficiency weapon of mass destruction that didn't 
require sophisticated delivery systems or laboratories or production 
facilities, only an endless supply of lightweight machine guns, of which 
there are tens of millions in existence. Common as popcorn, those guns.

The weapon of mass destruction?

A drug-addled 11-year-old boy.

Or a 9-year-old girl, for that matter. Age doesn't matter, as long as it's 
young enough to be malleable and old enough to fend for itself.

There are too many imploding nations in which children are freely 
available, by capture, sale, or default. Hundreds of thousands of children. 
They cost little to feed and nothing to train. When wounded or injured, 
they can be abandoned in the bush and left to die and rot where they fall; 
they are as expendable as cheap ballpoint pens. They are obedient, loyal, 
and too fundamentally innocent to understand at any real level what they're 
doing.  It takes a certain level of maturity to understand the implications 
of chopping off both of a person's hands at the wrists, and 11-year-old 
kids lack that understanding. They're simply too young. It's really just a 
game, especially when the kid is stoned out of his gourd.

The speaker told us that there are something like 300,000 child soldiers 
around the world, from Colombia to Burma and Sri Lanka and (of course) 
Africa, and 40 percent of those soldiers are girls.  Girls actually offer 
more than boys; in addition to machine-gun operation, they can scavenge 
foodstuffs, cook, set up bivouacs, perform sexual services, and do other 
necessary domestic stuff, needed even if -- especially if -- you're 
operating in the bush. They do all this in addition to the other chores -- 
spying, running messages, being decoys and acting as human shields  They're 
still expendable, but a little more valuable -- say, a nice $2.95 
rollerball pen instead of a 19-cent ballpoint.

Are they victims or perpetrators? That's one of those artificial 
"either-or" distinctions; it's really a "both-and".  They are dangerous 
because they have been exploited and abused and stripped of any humanity, 
and so they see no humanity in the people they themselves exploit and 
abuse, strip of humanity, rape and murder. But one thing he left in no 
doubt: overwhelmingly, they did not volunteer to turn into monsters. They 
were forced into that mould.

And what are we doing about this? Very little. It's an "unfortunate state 
of affairs," he said, deadpanning it. The West's impulse is to study the 
problem _ad nauseam_. But when you're a unit of UN peacekeepers and you're 
facing a troop of some 30 kids with submachine guns, intent on taking you 
out, how on earth do you respond? Especially when they're targeting the 
group of civilians you're trying to protect? It's not a socioeconomic 
problem, or a theoretical issue. It's a military issue. He brings that 
understanding to a research group trying to figure out how, tactically, 
conventional forces could field and disarm this child-weapon.

We sat there, the audience, stilled and perturbed and fascinated by his 
passion, his brilliance, his extraordinary forthrightness -- for this is a 
man who stared the hell of Rwanda full in the face, and it almost broke 
him, but it also freed him from any need for tact. He's long past any need 
to please or placate, and so he can speak the truth prophetically, because 
who's to tell a hero to pipe down? I imagine that he makes very 
uncomfortable company for those more diplomatically inclined. But then, 
he's a soldier, with a soldier's practicality and pragmatism. You can study 
a problem to death, but it doesn't deal with those kids with the submachine 
guns. That's the problem he wants to solve.

He talks about the rehabilitation of child soldiers -- how many of the boys 
have developed superb leadership skills which, God willing, can be turned 
to good uses and used productively if we give them the breaks they need. 
His voice softens when he talks about the girls. Sometimes to boys find 
acceptance in their communities -- assuming, that is, that they weren't 
given the initiation job of slaughtering their own families and neighbours. 
They have, after all, become young men and warriors. But the girls -- 
that's a different story. Find me a culture in which a woman who's been 
sexually victimized isn't also scorned, blamed, and rejected, most 
especially by herself....

But what lay beneath everything he said was a passionate conviction: that 
this is not God's plan for human beings. Each and every one of those 
victims is a child of God, just as every Tutsi or Hutu whose slaughter this 
man was helpless to prevent was a child of God. And he knows that, and 
that's where the passion is coming from. He knows which direction is 
Godward, and this is not it.

I have no idea what we, who heard him, are to do with what he said, except 
to broadcast it as best we can. I'd like to find one of those young women, 
sponsor her (if I can), write to her, tell her that there's someone in this 
peaceful heaven called Canada who believes in her and knows that what 
happened to her was not her choice or her doing. I don't know how I can 
accomplish that. I only know I can try.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/dallaire/