[AfricaRealities] Fw: [uRwanda_rwacu] Washington Post - 3 hours ago: Roméo Dallaire: I watched the Rwandan genocide unfold. We're making the same mistakes in Iraq.

 

From: "Jean Bosco Sibomana sibomanaxyz999@gmail.com [uRwanda_rwacu]" .

 

Roméo Dallaire: I watched the Rwandan genocide unfold. We're making
the same mistakes in Iraq.

(Washington Post 08/18/14)

Lt. Gen Roméo Dallaire is a recently retired Canadian senator, former
UN Force Commander for the UN Assistance mission to Rwanda and Founder
of the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative.

In 1994, I was tasked with stopping a genocide waged, in part, by
children and youth.

At the time, I was the United Nations Force Commander for the UN
Assistance Mission to Rwanda. My opponents, the Interahamwe,were
highly organized in their recruitment and training of youth, well
before the killing began. I saw firsthand the way they used children,
some as young as 13, to commit horrific acts. The experience of facing
a child soldier from the barrel of a gun left me questioning the
world's very moral fabric.

Despite my efforts, 800,000 people were killed in just 100 days.
Preventing this genocide was possible; it was our moral obligation.
And it's a failure that has haunted me every day for the last 20
years.

Now, the early warning signs of genocide are sounding once again, in
Iraq. Yet again, children are being used as fighters and weapons of
war. And still, the world does little to stop it.

In Iraq, children have participated -in repeated and wide-scale
mobilization and military training carried out by Iraqi forces since
1991. Today, the Islamic State flaunts the presence of children in
their ranks and cultivates child jihadists as part of their
propaganda.

The use of children by these armed groups must be recognized as an
early warning indicator of mass atrocities. The Islamic State are
indiscriminately attacking and targeting markets, restaurants, shops,
cafes, playgrounds, schools and places of worship, anywhere in which
the public gather in large numbers. Children are targets for these
attacks, and also employed for a myriad of uses within the conflict;
as informants, for manning checkpoints; and as suicide bombers.

We ignore these crimes at our peril. War and genocide impacts children
and their children, reverberating down through generations. Futures
are destroyed, not only through loss of life but from lost
development, missed education, the infliction of moral, physical,
psychological wounds on individuals and communities. And when we fail
to intervene, especially when children are being indoctrinated into
the war, we must be prepared for prolonged conflicts and cycles of
violence that become more difficult to address for generations to
come.

We continue to debate the political and economic costs of
interventions in conflict, we have failed to understand that it is our
collective omissions in preventing conflicts that leads to unthinkable
scenarios of extreme human suffering in which our ability to react
will never be sufficient.

The American public is "war-weary." So, though, are the children of
Iraq. Whether we are in Iraq or Rwanda, we have a responsibility to
prevent human suffering; placing children at the top of that agenda
should be key to this rationale. Shirking our responsibility now will
lead to many more generations of intense oppression that we will not
be able to ignore in the future.

As Gareth Evans of the Global Centre for R2P states, "There can be no
better demonstration of good international citizenship than a
country's willingness to act when it has the capacity to prevent or
avert a mass atrocity crime." I couldn't agree more.

By Roméo Dallaire

http://www.google.ca/gwt/x?gl=CA&source=s&u=http://en.africatime.com/articles/i-watched-rwandan-genocide-unfold-were-making-same-mistakes-iraq&hl=en-CA&ei=8FfyU9XTFofOsgeGu4D4AQ&wsc=yh&ct=np&whp=3139

--
SIBOMANA Jean Bosco
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http://www.youtube.com/user/sibomanaxyz999
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Posted by: Jean Bosco Sibomana <sibomanaxyz999@gmail.com>

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Posted by: Samuel Desire <sam4des@yahoo.com>

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