Perspectives on the growing trend of child piracy.

AuthorDallaire, Romeo
PositionEnd Game: An International Conference on Combating Maritime Piracy

Imagine telling a politician to face the camera. I am always a bit tongue and cheek. I laugh when people ask me if they can take a picture with me, and I say. "What politician do you know that doesn't want his picture taken?" And so I am flattered for that opportunity and also for those who are watching us streaming on the web.

First, thank you very much for, one, the invitation to be able to address you as a lay person and not from the legal background, although I have chaired a number of court marshals and thrown a bunch of people in jail in my time, but as a commander and not necessarily the pure JAG side of the house or Judge Advocate General or legal side.

Secondly, thank you very much for the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center Award, and also the funds that are so attached that are going directly into our research work at Dalhousie. So thank you very much for permitting us to continue to do our work.

I think that, if I may, I will try to watch the clock so that we do have time for questions and answers, and I probably would like to stay longer, but our leader here has got us lined up with NPR. So I don't think we will be able to play with those timings.

So first of all, I would like to say that I consider it quite risky for an American institution to invite so many Canucks or Canadians down here, particularly in this time frame when we are in Canada celebrating the War of 1812, and you are commemorating it.

We know we won it, so we don't have many problems with that, but we don't really like rubbing the noses of our friendly colleagues on that.

It adds an interesting link, though, to the discussions of today because there was quite a Naval component to that war if you remember, mostly on the Great Lakes, and there was some piracy done; of course, by your side, not ours.

And so I tend to like some of the anecdotal history of the War of 1812, because, as an example, the farthest north you actually made it was to attack and burn a fort called York, which ultimately is Toronto. I'm from Montreal. That doesn't bother me much.

We thought we would do you a favor and come down south, and we found this town, built on a swamp, and it was hot, and it was humid, and there were lots of mosquitoes. And so we thought we would burn it down and do you a favor, and what you do is you rebuild it, and it is Washington. So we are not too sure who really understood how to win a complex war even in that era.

I am also in a scenario that is not totally foreign to me in regards to trying to establish some naval credentials. I am an artillery officer by profession of arms. But I am a graduate of your U.S. Marine Corps Staff College, and so I spent a year with Marines afloat and have served with a number of them over the years.

It was interesting that during my year there in my syndicate there was a naval P-3 pilot, you know, the antisubmarine aircraft that you have, and we have the same one who wrote a paper on how to bring naval gunfire back into the diplomatic arena by creating lightweight 8-inch guns on destroyers.

And so it was interesting to see a pilot pull that out, and that made me quite warm to him because, as an artillery officer, I was also trained on naval gunfire. However, since we have gotten rid of the big guns, I think that that has been quite a downer for us who love the Navy and respect that tradition and that service significantly. Back home we call it the senior service, and it rightly deserves that title.

I am--because we are talking child pirates and child soldiers, I decided to wear my--a bit gaudy tie, which is my UNICEF tie today, as UNICEF is one of those front line NGOs very much involved in this arena, as they are included also in Somalia where we are doing some work with them and have been heavily involved on the child soldier but on the demobilization, rehabilitation, reintegration side of the house, which I will argue is a way of handling the problem.

But it is not necessarily reducing its impact, picking up the pieces afterwards is not necessarily stopping its use, and so I will get into where I think we can be far more effective in the preventative side of the house, which, ultimately, I hope takes away a weapons platform from the inventory of conflict or use in other realms, including, as an example, piracy, banditry, and similar activities.

I nearly forgot that two of my children are in the Naval Reserve, but I am saved by the fact that my oldest son is in the infantry so we will continue.

In regards to today, I am going to be a bit constrained by two factors. The first one is, I am not using a PowerPoint, or for those who are more modern, with Apple Keynote. And the second one is, I was asked to be relatively brief, and brevity is not the strength of retired generals nor politicians, particularly if you want time for questions, which I hope we will have a dynamic exercise in so doing.

I also want to tell you that I come from a country that is, at times, talking from both sides of its mouth, which makes it rather difficult to be credible here at this podium and many others in the international sphere in these days, because, on the one hand, Canada was leading, as with the United States, in moving the Optional Protocol on Child Rights, as an example, in regards to child soldiers and the recognition thereof, (1) but on the other hand refused to repatriate a child soldier from Guantanamo Bay, who was Canadian, and who was, in fact, ultimately dumped in Canada after he was tried in Guantanamo and is now in a Canadian jail. (2)

And it was interesting, we just fleetingly touched upon by one of our speakers on child terrorism, and there was a heated debate back home on whether or not this fifteen year-old, who had been taken to Afghanistan by his dad, who was very close to the Al-Qaeda hierarchy, four years indoctrinated over there, and at the age of fifteen ended up in a firefight, and in so doing was accused of killing an American soldier. (3)

He was shot twice in the back, two years held in prison, where some of the people who imprisoned him were ultimately court marshaled for having killed other prisoners, and then held seven years without trial and then did a plea bargain to eight more years of jail, in maximum jail back home in Canada finally. (4)

And so there was significant debate whether or not Omar Khadr was a child soldier, or was he a child terrorist, and does that change all the rules of the exercise?

And I have been quite adamant in that throwing the catalyst of terrorism to a fifteen year-old engaged in a conflict does not override the Optional Protocol on Child Rights. And I still consider that individual a child soldier, and I would be happy to see if the debate is as interesting down here as it has been up north.

Now, there has been establishing some of the parameters that we have discussed this morning, and particularly with the last panel, a significant debate on age, a significant debate on volunteerism and so on, and we have had--we shared panels right before on this, and I want to bring an angle to this discussion.

And I want to bring the angle to the question of not the age because it is a reference point, and it is interesting that we in our military do not permit people to be recruited, trained, and particularly used in operations under the age of eighteen, although our military academies do recruit under the age of eighteen, but they don't deploy under eighteen.

And yet, we have problems accepting that that is a criteria that can be used in other countries for youth who are engaged in conflicts, but it is the volunteerism side and the link I make that comes from my Rwanda experience as the Force Commander.

At one point, there were...

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