Hon. Roméo Antonius Dallaire:

Honourable senators, I have spoken before on this motion, and I have spoken on a few other occasions with respect to the issue of child soldiers. I wish to give you a brief anecdote of facing child soldiers.

 

I personally have faced them and have faced those young eyes, totally out of control, under duress, under fear, on drugs, and indoctrinated to kill and maim. The logic of their use of force is non-existent. There is no logic. It is not an adult making an adult decision. It is a child that has been massively abused and has been armed by adults to kill and maim.

 

I had a patrol that went into a village that had been wiped out. As the patrol was going through the village, the chapel doors of the small village opened and about 100 people were hidden inside, which was unusual. Normally, the extremists would tell people to go into the churches and then they would be protected by convention. Once the churches were chockablock full, they would surround them and go in and slaughter them, row after row — for days on end, in certain cases. They had not yet slaughtered these people. The sergeant in charge of the patrol called my headquarters and said he needed vehicles to move these people to a safe place. As he was on the radio calling, from one side of the village there were about 30 boys, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, who opened fire on the sergeant clearly in uniform and the solders and the people he was protecting. As he was reeling from that attack, from the other side of the village there were about 20 girls, the same ages; some of them pregnant. They were human shields behind which other boys were shooting at the sergeant, his soldiers and the people he was protecting.

 

The question I pose to you is: What does the sergeant do? What orders does the sergeant give? A corporal who was part of that patrol, every now and again, remembers, and falls into a state of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. He hears the sergeant give the order to fire. He feels his finger pulling the trigger. He sees digitally clear the cartridge leaving his rifle. He is looking through the sight and he sees the head of a child exploding. Was that the right answer? Was that ethical? Was that moral? Was that legal?

 

Honourable senators, we are talking about a combatant facing other combatants who are illegally combatants by convention, for they are child soldiers. By international law, the International Criminal Court is now trying adults who are using child soldiers in the Congo. That child soldier is held in an illegal prison, shot twice and put under all kinds of scrutiny. Even our Supreme Court has said that the documents taken by that interrogation are not appropriate for use by the court. He is then held six years.

 

Senator Mercer: Six years!

 

Senator Dallaire: In 2002, we knew about Guantanamo Bay. We did not act. In 2002, I was writing my book on a genocide created by people who ruled without any rules; people who did not believe in human rights, the rule of law and good governance. They only wanted to keep power, and they slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands. Omar Khadr was not on my radar screen. The 800,000 other human beings that we abandoned were on my radar screen, as were the 14 soldiers who were killed under my command.

 

I moved through that, started to research child soldiers at Harvard and started to look at the impact of child soldiers, namely that 30 wars are going on right now using 300,000-plus child soldiers who are held under duress and drugged by adults to achieve their aims. We are letting that go by as if it does not exist. We do not want nuclear war but the wars that use children as the primary weapons system are okay; we will let that go. It is not in our self-interest to be involved.

 

We are being hoisted on our own petard, because now we have a Canadian child who was abducted, moved into a combat area and used as a combatant when all the adults involved knew it was illegal. That child suffered under combat duress and was injured. He has been incarcerated as an adult for the last six years, in a process that has been identified by everyone under the sun who has an opinion as illegal, inappropriate, abusive, against human rights and against the rule of law. He is being abused because a nation has panicked under a threat they do not understand and have not been able to handle, and that nation is using every means to achieve their aim of security including fiddling with human rights, civil liberties and conventions, including the Geneva Convention.

 

Honourable senators, if we let them continue to do that, we will have security. We will build a fortress North America as they wanted us to build on September 12, 2001, but we will be living in a police state. What is the aim of all these debates, and decades of work, if, ultimately, the only way we can be safe is by living in a police state?

 

Honourable senators, this child was used illegally as a combatant, was injured in action, was traumatized by it and has been held in jail illegally. Tomorrow afternoon, a trial will start that can put him in jail for the rest of his life in an illegal process that we know is against the conventions that we believe in. I went to Sierra Leone three years ago and negotiated with the rebels to release the children. I had the credibility to negotiate that and to manoeuvre with UNICEF, Save the Children and the UN mission. Honourable senators, if we keep Omar Khadr in jail and we put him through that American process, we will have to stay home because if we do not, we will be going to other countries as a bunch of hypocrites.

 

This motion is extremely time-sensitive. This is not an insignificant gesture. This is not only a matter of one human being. Not one of us, no matter what our differences — be they ethnic, religious, tribal or political — is more human than the other. If we bent over backwards yesterday to ensure that our soldiers are treated fairly in our own judicial system, and they are adults, how is it conceivable that the next day we would let a motion go by that permits a child soldier to be treated illegally?

 

I ask you to vote for this motion.

 

Some Hon. Senators: Hear, hear!

 

 

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