 How do you do? My name is Lieutenant General Romeo de Lair. I'm an ex-Senator in Canada. I'm a commissioner as part of the Principles for Peace Commission that is looking at how to establish lasting peace. And we've come here to the U.S.A. because it's a forum that I've been here before on child soldiers that I found to be a catalyst for thought and for bringing in people with innovative ideas and desire to change things. There is a fundamental construct in all these different bodies that are in fact engaged in peace and peace-making and peace-building and so on, of them individually trying to survive. Others are institutions that are looking for work or trying to figure out what their job is. So the first group would be like the NGO world and so on and their limitations in regards to neutrality and so on. Another group would be the whole world of diplomacy and the limitations that politicians put on them. But another gang is the whole security group. And one, they're so disparate from the intelligence bodies that have capabilities through to the normal military and police and rule of law institutions. They're all going up in their own silos and they've been built on the premise that they are an entity, a specific entity with a specific job. And yeah, I'll cooperate with the others and I'll coordinate it and I'll collaborate it, but it's all in the fringes. It's not integrating it. And so there's this complete disparate scenario of all these things working concurrently but not being able to integrate into one plan, one process with milestones that people have agreed to and tripwires in and out of implementation. We have built humility. We have made the children a dignified dimension of the population. We have established a credibility so we're now legitimate as a player, not just at training soldiers and training police with new tactics and teaching them how not to shoot kids, but on the contrary, we're now seen as an instrument of preventing children from being recruited, which means engaging the communities, which is engaging the families of taking them back or not letting them go or not putting them into scenarios that put them at risk. It has been in fact an offshoot of what I've been applying for the last nearly 12 years or so of trying to bring the child soldiers scenario in the forefront of early warning to conflict, of in fact eliminating the recruiting base and the mobilization base of belligerence, of sustaining conflict, and ultimately of getting the communities and societies engaged in making children peace and security a fundamental dimension or instrument, put it that way, of getting belligerence to talk to each other. I'm in South Sudan and I had the politicians, the generals and so on there in just one province and after an hour and a half of talking with them and with the opposition, they handed over just under 300 kids to me. So that's why I believe that this system will work. Be aware that you are going to face enormous dilemmas, ethical dilemmas, moral dilemmas, legal dilemmas that you're going to be into the gray zone of what conflict is and what peace can be. And because of that, that complexity and that ambiguity is prevalent. It's not just, you know, getting a clear mandate. It is how that mandate could actually be interpreted to be applied. And so to me, the word that I've been articulating very much is you've got to integrate and learn what the other players are doing and how they can ease the burden of these dilemmas by bringing in solutions, by being an assistance to prevent scenarios from going sour and to be proactive. But that means you take your military hat off, you sit down and you talk with people. You take your NGO hat and sort of influence and you say, yes, I've got to talk to these security people because we can exchange information. And so the transparency and the openness is critical in the field in order to be able to handle the extraordinary destructive impact of having to face those dilemmas and not having a solution because ultimately it creates casualties. It creates moral dilemmas that ultimately will burn the gray cells of your mind and you come out of there hurting for life. And so that makes it so significant to find these solutions because we don't need walking wounded coming out of missions. We need to build experience to be able to handle the next one.