‘Soldiers of Peace’ Reports on Youthful Crusade in Colombia

Here come five doves for peace.

These Colombian teens are the subject of an inspiring new film from the team behind last season’s Emmy-nominated “Dying to Tell the Story,” which recalled the brief career of a young photojournalist who was killed by an angry mob in Somalia. This new documentary, “Soldiers of Peace: A Children’s Crusade,” which airs Sunday night on CNN, celebrates the children’s peace movement that emerged from a 1996 special election that 2.7 million Colombian youngsters, ages 7-18, took part in, voting overwhelmingly for peace.

Although just symbolic, it led to a children’s peace drive in Colombia twice nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. And it’s this movement, whose supporters include UNICEF and the Red Cross, that is represented by the remarkable teens profiled here, all of whom were at the Agape Center in Los Angeles recently for the launch of this film written and directed by Kyra Thompson and executive produced by Kathy Eldon.

The camera chronicles their participation last May in the Hague Appeal for Peace Conference in the Netherlands, where they meet such Nobel laureates as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Rigoberta Menchu. And it follows them to their various homes in war-weary Colombia, where citizens have found themselves in a cross-fire of extreme violence for years.

You watch the eyes of the film’s young subjects and wonder what they have seen, and what they will see in the future--should there be a future for them.

“I have received threats,” says Wilfrido, one of the five peace-promoting teens through an interpreter. “I don’t know why or who they are from. They call me on the phone at home. They tell me to leave the neighborhood or they will kill me.”

Which emphasizes the barriers facing any peace movement, much less one initiated by youngsters armed only with their optimism and hopes for a better future. Not that they have any choice but to continue. “They say when your heart starts melting,” Wilfrido comments, “there is no way to stop it.”

* “Soldiers of Peace: A Children’s Crusade” can be seen at 7 p.m. Sunday on CNN.