Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much.
If you offer the floor to a retired general who was also an apprentice politician in the Senate for 10 years, you may risk having a problem of maintaining good order and discipline in timing. However, because brevity is not my strength, I have tried to discipline myself this morning to touch on a number of points in regard to current and future peacekeeping.
Dr. Whitman, when she arrives, will be touching very much on a dimension of the peacekeeping of the new era, which is the operational threat of the use of children as weapons of war—which is child soldiers—the Vancouver principles and how we see that evolving as one of the instruments of security sector reform, and the improvements of new capabilities for peacekeeping in which the Canadians are leading. We helped them write their new doctrine and helped them write their new training directive. We hope that they will gain more depth as we prepare for tasks overseas.
Let me commence by saying that I've had an opportunity to listen to all you ladies and gentlemen for hours with previous witnesses. A couple of times, I would have loved to be there myself, sitting in your seats to ask a few questions. I am honoured to be able, I hope, to respond today.
I will be disciplined and try to speak in French all the same. We spend so much time speaking English in our Canadian Forces career in Ottawa that assimilation is a danger. Too often, we forget to use our mother tongue.
Ladies and gentlemen, 25 years ago tomorrow, I was deploying into Kampala and then into Mbarara, Uganda, to take command of one of the two missions I commanded. This was the mission on the Ugandan side of the border with Rwanda to prevent the trafficking and the use of trails and so on to move weapons into the rebel area. Then a couple of weeks later, I moved into Rwanda to take command of that mission. In that case, I took it from the African Union who had an embryo of peacekeeping. They only had about 60 members there, and I absorbed that group.
I took command the day after the coup d'état in Burundi, so although I had planned for a secure southern flank in order to handle the peace process that really involved the Rwandan Patriotic Front coming from the north into the south, I ended up with more than 300,000 refugees overnight, a source of enormous recruitment for youths, particularly, to sustain covert operations, and well over 50,000 bodies in every one of the rivers, lakes and areas of wooded enclaves where they were hiding the bodies. They had a slow-moving genocide there because the ethnic groups in both countries are exactly the same and the frictions are quite similar.
I overheard that one should be leery of those who have served in the 1990s because maybe they're still caught up in a bit of old think, and I'll talk about that. I want to set up a bit of my field credentials and what we were doing, so that I can give you a backdrop to what I am proposing.
It's true that my last operational command of a mission was in Rwanda for a whole year and was through that civil war and that genocide. Subsequent to that, I've been a member of the Secretary-General of the UN's genocide prevention advisory group made up of Gareth Evans, Desmond Tutu and people of that nature, where we're looking at how to get in very early to prevent genocide from happening, and mass atrocities.
That's a new word still in the UN: prevention. Too much is still going into how we sort out a problem that's already blown apart or we wait until it's over and then throw some cash at it.
Prevention is the solution, but it is by far the hardest one to commit yourself to. If you're successful, people will say, why did you go in? If you're not, then people will maybe blame you for the thing going wrong. It's a high political risk, and that's why we see an enormous reticence on the political side of the House to actually take offensive actions. Even if there is a mandate, there's still a significant amount of hesitancy to take actions early on and deliberately enough.
From 2000-04, I worked for the minister of CIDA on the protection of war-affected children. We had a big international conference in 2000 led by Lloyd Axworthy and Maria Minna. The conference took place in Winnipeg and 135 countries signed on to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the optional protocol. It was from there, where I presented a paper, that I became Ms. Minna's special adviser for four years. I did that part time and was involved in the Sierra Leone war, which was totally fought on both sides by child soldiers. At the time, I was involved in extracting children from the conflict and trying to minimize their recruitment.
Then I went for a year to Harvard, where I did my initial research on child soldiers. I did it under the construct of what I'm calling “an era of conflict resolution and conflict prevention”. I am not one to use peacekeeping or peace support operations very much. I consider that we are caught in an era where it's not peace and it's not war but it's a spectrum, a whole variety of commitments and tasks, all of which focus on either preventing the frictions that lead to conflict or on the actual conflict. In so doing, there is a far more sophisticated requirement than peacekeeping, particularly if you're still in a chapter VI frame of mind, in “old think”.
As for my work since, while I was in the Senate for 10 years, I had the pleasure of working on the defence committee there. I resigned to devote myself fully to work on child soldiers, the aim being to eradicate the use of that weapon's platform, which you find in every conflict in the world. They're being used everywhere, be it in Ukraine, be it in Mali, be it in South Sudan. We are already deployed in Somalia. My aim is to eliminate that weapon system from the inventory of conflict as it is a crime against humanity. I hope we will succeed.
In the process, I have written three books to reinforce my position. The first one was at the operational level. If you remember, there's strategic, operational and tactical levels. The operational is a theatre commander, so I was commanding the theatre of southern Uganda and Rwanda. I was even at one point given the task of looking into Burundi. That was my first book.
The second one was at the tactical level, so that was how the troops face threats and how they respond to them in an era where threats do in fact exist because conflicts are not necessarily resolved and we are there to assist in the resolution thereof.
The last book was on the individual, on how to live with 20 years of PTSD, of which one not insignificant portion was the fact of facing child soldiers in Rwanda who did the massive slaughtering. The vast majority were under 18 and they were led by some adults to slaughter 800,000. Both sides used them, in one case to slaughter and in the other to fight in that conflict. At the time, I didn't recognize the significance of their being young. It was only afterwards that I started to realize that they sustained their war and the mobilization to war through the use of children.
I'm now—and I'll finish with this part—writing a fourth book, at the strategic level. I'm arguing, ladies and gentlemen—and I hope it gives you a bit of a backdrop—that we stumbled into the nineties after the Cold War ended. We didn't know what we were doing. When I came out of my brigade, I sent battalions into Yugoslavia hoping that the training we had might meet the requirement. We had no experience. We had nothing written on what we would be facing in the nineties.
In stumbling through that, and subsequently in my research and work, I believe we've entered an era where we need a new conceptual framework, a new conceptual base to conflict prevention. The old theory of war that we had was Clausewitzian, and it was very force on force, with the classic use of military forces. That has disappeared. We're into an era where in fact the civilian population is just as much the victims, as they can be also the targets, as they can be also the perpetrators.
In this era, we can't keep using old tools. We can't keep using NGO neutrality. We can't keep using diplomacy independent from the interfacing with the security forces. We are in dire need of conflict prevention by multidisciplinary leaders who master the various disciplines that are needed to deploy in the field.
With that as a backdrop, I should like to indicate to you that three weeks into the genocide in 1994, I was still arguing with the UN as to whether or not, as a chapter VI mission, I was allowed to protect civilians. I had 32,000 under protection, but in New York, the concept was unacceptable by chapter VI missions....
Dr. Shelly Whitman is here now.
Welcome, Shelly.
