The David Gribble Archive : Talks

Children don’t start wars

Leipzig University, 2008
Page 7

Al Gore later commented on this incident, and said he had been much moved. He attributed the interpreter's emotion to fully realising the pain and the suffering in her homeland that this young girl was describing.

Marthe Olive, though, did not describe her own suffering in particular, and she did not ask for sympathy. She simply reported the suffering of the children of Rwanda. What disturbs us so deeply as adults when we hear her message is that all of a sudden we are made to understand what the word “war” actually means. There is no euphemism, there is no political apologia, there is simply a straightforward statement of the facts. The normal adult detachment becomes impossible, and once we have lost our detachment then the sentence, "Children do not like war," becomes an indictment of our former attitude. We are suddenly restored to a simpler ethical system where the ultimate wrong is to cause suffering, and all political excuses become unacceptable. "[Children] in Rwanda want the war to end very soon so that people can live in peace."

An atmosphere had been established at the Hearing in which children's voices were heard and their opinions were listened to seriously. What I think happened during the translation of Marthe Olive's words was that the interpreter found himself saying things that are obvious to anybody, but that we usually take great care to avoid taking into consideration. Adults are trained to accept political explanations, to foresee complications, to put power before people, but when they actually listen with respect to someone who does none of these things, they see at once how wrong they have been. Normally we are able to ignore such voices, but the Rio hearing had created a situation in which that was impossible. The interpreter found himself speaking words that echoed in his own heart, words that he recognised as containing an important truth, a truth that if it were more widely understood might even bring the war to an end. What he was weeping at was, I think, the sudden recognition of an ideal, and the realisation that it had for so long been scorned as an irrelevance.

Adults build walls around their own moral awareness, so that the routine of their lives is not interrupted by awkward demands from their consciences. It seems that children are capable of pulling those walls down.