Roméo Dallaire: End the use of child soldiers
"The ultimate focus of the rest of my life is to eradicate the use of child soldiers and to eliminate even the thought of the use of children as instruments of war." —Roméo Dallaire
LGen the Hon. Roméo Dallaire (Ret) visited Concordia on November 4 to discuss his new book on the scourge of child soldiers, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children.
The 600 seater auditorium in the Henry F. Hall Building was packed for his lecture and book signing.
Dallaire is a Senior Fellow with Concordia's Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS) and is a co-author of the MIGS Will To Intervene (W2I) report which openly challenges U.S. and Canadian governments to take direct action to prevent future genocides.
Montreal-native Dallaire was United Nations Force Commander during the Rwandan genocide and his book, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, was one of the first on-the-ground accounts of that conflict.
It exposed the failures of the international community to stop the worst genocide in the twentieth century and has been turned into an Emmy Award-winning documentary as well as a feature film.
Dallaire was first confronted with child soldiers in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994. Believing that not one of us should tolerate a child being used in this fashion, he has made it his mission to end the use of child soldiers.
Related links:
• Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies
• Roméo Dallaire's website
• The Child Soldiers Initiative