In conflicts around the world, there is an increasingly popular weapon system that needs negligible technology, is simple to sustain, has unlimited versatility, and an incredible capacity for both loyalty and barbarism. What are these cheap, renewable, plentiful, sophisticated, and expendable weapons? Children.This important book is part of a passionate personal mission against the use of child soldiers, by the three-star general who commanded the UN mission in Rwanda.When Romeo Dallaire was tasked with achieving peace there in 1994, he and his force found themselves caught up in a vortex of civil war and genocide. He left Rwanda a broken man, disillusioned, suicidal, a story he told in the award-winning international sensation Shake Hands with the Devil. Now, in They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children, Dallaire provides an emotionally daring and intellectually enlightening introduction to the child soldier phenomenon, as well as concrete solutions for its total eradication.Dallaire speaks up for those without a voice - children in conflicts around the globe who do not choose to fight, but who through ill-fate and the accident of birth find their way into soldiering. This is a book that addresses one of the most harrowing, urgent and important issues of our time.
'"Leaves the reader reeling, disorientated - and surely changed . . . the case for more muscular, moral intervention could hardly be better made' Sunday Times
In conflicts around the world, there is an increasingly popular weapon system that is versatile, simple to sustain, needs negligible technology, and has an incredible capacity for both loyalty and barbarism. What are these cheap, renewable, expendable weapons? Children.
Romeo Dallaire encountered child soldiers for the first time in Rwanda, where he was the three-star general tasked with achieving peace in 1994. 'I saw them, heard them, faced them down, and ultimately confronted them in the midst of a carnage that swallowed their youth and my professional warrior ethic,' he writes.
He left Rwanda a broken man, disillusioned, suicidal, a story he told in the award-winning international sensation Shake Hands with the Devil. What he saw and heard turned him into a passionate campaigner against the use of children in war around the world.
They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children provides a powerful introduction to the child-soldier phenomenon which also makes concrete solutions for its total eradication. Dallaire speaks up for those without a voice - the children who through ill-fate and the accident of birth find their way into soldiering - in a book that addresses one of the most harrowing, urgent and important issues of our time.
'A rallying call for those whose common humanity is affronted by the image of children brainwashed, bullied and exploited into becoming killing machines' Mail on Sunday
'Dallaire's sorrow and anger is impressive ... Reading this book is tough, but so are the lives of children who are forced to kill.' The Times
