They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children by Roméo Dallaire

Author:Roméo Dallaire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2010-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Traditionally, DDRR programmes were created for adult male combatants in civil wars in order to disarm and reintegrate them into their communities after the war was over. However, increasingly over the last twenty years or so, women and children have also been taking up arms in war and, either voluntarily or by coercion, becoming combatants within the belligerent forces. They, too, need assistance once war has ended, but the needs of adult women, of boys and of girls are distinct from those of adult men. One size cannot fit all, but because of expediency and lack of resources, children and adults have often been processed under the same security and support conditions, which in effect ensure that the young ones remain under the sway of the adults who brought them such suffering and abuse. The early steps at establishing separate protocols for children suffered from the assumptions Ishmael Beah saw played out the first time he was offered up by his own commander to an NGO for DDRR: believing that all these children were longing to be “just kids” again, the aid workers housed demobilized boy soldiers from both sides of the conflict in the same facility, and the outcome was more violence. Those boys had to be taught, very carefully and with infinite patience, how to be boys again, how to give up their power as fighting units.

The UN’s IDDRS Framework defines two categories with respect to children and war:

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