Imagine. You are a soldier, trained to kill the enemy. On the battlefield, just as you are about to shoot an enemy combatant, you suddenly see in your gun sights that the soldier is a mere child “in the tattered remnants of a military uniform with dozens more children behind.” What would you do?
This is the ethical dilemma that Roméo Dallaire asks his readers to ponder in his latest book, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers. The retired lieutenant-general and Canadian senator, now a celebrated icon in Canada and around the world for his attempt to protect innocent people from genocidal slaughter in Rwanda, had to wrestle with this very same moral dilemma when he headed the United Nations peacekeeping mission (UNAMIR) in that country in 1994. In the first few pages of this book, Dallaire asks the following heart-wrenching questions: “Do you treat this person aiming his weapon at you as a...
W. Andy Knight is chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta and director of the Children Affected by War project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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