World

How to bring children back from the dead

April 01, 2011
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Tonight Channel 4 is screening a film entitled Congo: The Children Who Came Back from the Dead: the story of a man who liberates child soldiers forced to fight in one of the world's longest-running conflicts. But this powerful documentary also makes an important point about the changing nature of war, and how it can be stopped.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, wars have been increasingly fought within states, rather than between them—from Bosnia to Sri Lanka to Libya. Fuelled by ethnic and economic fragmentation, these conflicts drag on for years, and war becomes a way of life. Thanks to the complicated, deep-seated causes of the violence, up to 40 per cent of wars ended by the signing of a formal peace treaty have restarted within 10 years.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a case in point. Between 1998 and 2003 5m people died in civil conflict. The formal cessation of hostilities did not end the suffering—since then a vicious bush war has blighted eastern Congo, which now sees unparalleled use of sexual violence against women as a weapon of war, and the highest concentration of child soldiers in the world.

What can be done? The UN has its largest peacekeeping operation there, but the violence continues. What is interesting about tonight’s film is that it documents a radically different approach: one that is led not by outside "experts" but by local people.

The film focuses on Henri Ladyi, a Congolese activist leading a remarkable operation to rescue child soldiers from the bush, disarm rebel militiamen, and rebuild entire communities. In the past 18 months, his local organisation, the Centre Resolution Conflits, has helped over 14,000 displaced villagers to return home, demobilised 1320 rebels, and released 444 child soldiers. It is painstaking work, but it addresses the grassroots factors that prolong these internal conflicts for years on end.

As Gordon Brown’s special representative for peacebuilding, I had the opportunity to travel widely in some of the most grim conflict and post-conflict states on the planet. I saw huge UN and World Bank-funded programmes to disarm and demobilise fighters—sometimes positive and successful, but too often incomplete. Disarmed rebels would be unwelcome in their home communities, or would be taught trades that were not viable: they would be drifting back into the only life they knew, and the war would go on.

Unfortunately, I saw far too little of the patient work carried out by committed local people like Henri Ladyi. Groups like the Centre Resolution Conflits work with communities to achieve reconciliation, to deal with the inevitable problems that arise when perpetrators of violence come face to face with people who have suffered. Land disputes are also common and need to be resolved. And it’s important that livelihood programmes—whether agriculture, mining or road construction—benefit the people who never picked up a gun, as well as those who did. Programmes that only benefit militia members can act as an incentive for future members to join up. It’s a long process, and at every step the local knowledge that groups like Centre Resolution Conflits possess is brought to bear, as is the trust that they have gained through their work in the past.

Our present government is rightly concerned to get maximum value for money from its aid programme. But is there really sufficient focus on the cost effectiveness of using local organisations? Henri, and many other local peacebuilders like him around the world, are supported by the British charity Peace Direct, whose experience suggests that such local organisations can permanently resettle a combatant for around $150—one tenth of the cost of a World Bank or UN programme.

In eastern DRC I met young UN peacekeepers from India trying to protect villagers from those in the hills nearby who would kill, rape and terrorise them. I was inspired by their bravery, but the billions spent on UN peacekeeping around the world cannot continue to increase forever.

We need more effective international peacekeeping and peacebuilding. But above all, on the ground, we need to back localised solutions and methods that work. Spending more on locally-led resettlement programmes could be one way to end the hopeless merry-go-round so graphically depicted on Channel 4 this evening.

Lord McConnell was Gordon Brown’s Special Representative for Peacebuilding 2008-2010. To find out more about Henri Ladyi’s work, visit Peace Direct