Roger Lemoyne's ProposalThis project would document the effects of conflicts on children in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. The work would contribute to a 10-year project on war-affected children that has taken up much of my professional life. Despite the dark nature of this topic, children's abilities to heal, grow, learn, play and find joy under almost any circumstances inspires those of us that sometimes feel peace is out of reach. War-Affected Children The world's deadliest conflict today is unfolding in the western provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the last five years, it has claimed more than 2 million lives through violence, disease and starvation. As is often the case in conflict, children are the ones paying the highest price. War is not what it used to be. Since WWII, conflicts have shifted away from organized armies fighting conventional warfare to civil wars and inter-ethnic conflict. These conflicts are often long-term, low-intensity, and involve untrained and undisciplined irregular armies or militia. In the wars of the last decade, the greatest number of casualties was among non-combatants. Civilian fatalities in wartime climbed from 15 per cent during World War I, to 65 per cent by the end of World War II, to more than 90 per cent in the wars of the 1990s. There has been an increasing use of civilian populations as cover, bargaining chips, targets of psychological warfare or as another resource for soldiers to exploit. The most vulnerable civilians of all are children. In the last decade 2,000,000 children have been killed and another 4,000,000 disabled in conflicts. At least half of the estimated 57.4 million people displaced by war around the world are children, many of whom have been orphaned. The cyclical nature of many long-term conflicts means that children grow up with war as a state of normalcy. The most obstinate wars are the ones in which combatants have been educated in conflict while still children. I did not set out to cover conflicts in this light. The theme of war's civilian victims seemed to be thrust upon me as I traveled to areas of conflict. The fate of civilians was inescapable and drew the camera to it, while the geography and hardware of conflict seemed less real than the suffering it left behind, particularly among the young. This project first materialized when I exhibited some of the work that I had been doing at the International Conference on War-Affected Children in Winnipeg in the fall of 2000. To date, this project covers events in Israel/Palestine, Rwanda and the Congo, Afghanistan, Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia, Southern Sudan and other countries. The immediate goal of the work this grant would support is to draw attention back to the neglected conflict in the Congo and others in the Great Lakes Region. The overall aim of this project on war-affected children is to raise awareness of the nature conflict in our time and of the international community’s obligation to intervene whenever and wherever human rights are violated. After WWII the international community created global structures to mediate between nations and governments, but not between ethnic groups or within borders. But as war changes, the international community must also change its ways of dealing with war. The subjects I would cover with the help of this grant are in the Great Lakes region in Africa:
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