Orphans of the Storm: Peacebuilding for Children of War

Raymond A. Jones is a history professor at Carleton University in
Ottawa.

John Walker has written a powerful and compelling account of the
predicament of children caught up in the backwash of international and
civil conflict, and of the attempts of the United Nations to provide in
these conflicts humanitarian “zones of peace.” This concept, the
brainchild of UNICEF director James Grant, was first successfully used
in El Salvador, in 1985. Since then it has been used in a dozen other
situations, notably in the Sudan, Somalia, and Lebanon.

In 1991, an international conference was held in Ottawa to discuss the
problems raised for the international community by these humanitarian
exercises. Walker’s book concentrates on the issue of state
sovereignty versus human rights, which was raised at the Peacebuilding
for Children Conference. The UN Secretary-General stated that national
sovereignty could not be allowed to become a protective barrier behind
which armies could practise ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the
indiscriminate slaughter of innocents. Recent events both in the former
Yugoslavia and in Rwanda show just how far the international community
has yet to go if the universal declarations on human rights are to
become something more than mere pious declarations of intent.