The lessons of peace are best learnt through the stories of war

Dr Samantha Nutt, co-founder of War Child Canada, describes the journey that changed her life

War is taught to us as history but it is meted out in the every day upon the sick, the dying, the impoverished and the innocent. And while we often think of war as a problem that happens over “there”, it is very much the case that it is abetted over “ here”. Leadership on the issues of war, and AIDS, and global poverty begins with the simple realization that these are problems over which it is possible for us, as individuals and as Canadians, to exercise some control.

It all began for me, professionally and personally, back in Somalia in 1994. Prior to this point in my life my ambitions and my career were not all that dissimilar to many young people in their 20s, although the political context in the early 1990s certainly influenced my course of study. The 1991 Gulf War left me feeling profoundly unsettled. Watching those tracers light up Baghdad’s night sky left me wondering what kind of world my generation was inheriting. So it wasn’t all that surprising that while I was pursuing a Masters degree in the UK, I jumped at an offer to work as a volunteer with UNICEF in Somalia. I was 24 years old.

Ultimately, this was the experience that would change me and my view of war forever, because once I had seen war, and lived it, and experienced it, as millions and millions of others have around the world and throughout history, there was no way that my life could ever be the same as it was before.

I was based in Baidoa in South-Central Somalia. Baidoa, during the early 90s, was called the “City of Death” by western journalists when one quarter of a million people died. Mass starvation was still rampant throughout the country, and war had destroyed almost everything in its path.

As I went about my work, I was shocked and appalled by many things – the extent of people’s suffering, women standing in line at feeding clinics while their children lay dead in their arms, the insecurity, and the absurdity of war. But by far one of the most shocking things, for me, was the sheer number of guns in the country – AK47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and machine guns were everywhere. This was a failed state, where gangs of teenage boys carrying automatic rifles thrived with impunity, seizing or killing whatever stood in their way. And Somalia is not alone. Indeed, in every country in which I have worked I have come face to face with children, some as young as 8, who have never been to school but who have fought, and killed, with Kalishnokov rifles.

Somalia was and is a conflict that has been waged over the years by rival warlords and their various clans. But it is also a war that, for nearly two decades, has been propped up, maintained and propelled forward by the sheer abundance of lightweight, child friendly, steel killing machines capable of firing up to 600 rounds a minute. The Somali warlords that have trained and recruited generations of soldiers, many under the age of 18, to fight their war need to be held accountable for their actions. But the chain of accountability does not and should not end there, because war is a problem that needs to be understood, and acted upon, in a global context.

War has everything to do with each and every one of us, no matter where we live in the world; we cannot disengage, and we cannot offer excuses, we are a part of war and so too is it a part of us, and anyone who has not lived the horror of war, or touched it, or been scarred by it should not see that as a reason to disengage; instead, let us see it as an even greater reason to demonstrate the depth of our compassion as human beings. It is not a question of charity; it is a question of our common humanity, and the kind of world we want to live in.

When I first landed in Somalia, I had no concept of what it meant to live with war. But I know what it means now. I know what it means to lie awake in the darkest night listening to the crackle of automatic gunfire wondering how many more minutes I have left until it will be right on top of me. War has killed too many people close to me, and it has almost killed me. But I get up and do what I do every day because I believe that we can effect social change. I have to believe we can, and that it will be possible, some day, for war – and all the death, destruction, and unfathomable hardship that war brings – to be a footnote in the history of humankind. But we will only begin to effect change when each and every one of us decides that enough is enough. When we decide that we will not support this irrepressible cycle of violence, that we choose instead to invest - through our donations, through our public policy, and through our consumer practices - in peace at the expense of war, and not in war at the expense of peace. There is no other way.