UN force commander remembers Rwandan Genocide 10 years later
By KEVIN SPURGAITIS
Somewhere in Rwanda nearly a decade ago, Lt. General Romeo Dallaire, then former force commander of the UN Mission to Rwanda, journeyed down a precarious stretch of road in his Land Cruiser, subjected to sniper fire and the vacant stare of a three-year-old. Clad in a filthy T-shirt and tattered underwear, encrusted in dust and dirt, the orphan stood silently sucking on a biscuit — indifferent to his distended belly and open sores. Having seen many children — and their parents — hacked to pieces in a civil war, Dallaire amorously decided the boy would be the fourth addition to his family back in Canada. If he couldn’t save Rwanda, the general thought, he could try to save the child. However, the reverie abruptly ended when a well-armed rebel — no older than 15 — approached, yanking the child from the general’s arms and carrying him off into the bush. A struggle for the boy would have been fruitless, the general surmised. Not knowing how many gun sights were fixed on him, he reluctantly climbed back into his land cruiser and continued through the war-torn wasteland.
“The phrase, ‘Never Again, Plus Jamais’ has proven to be one of the most ineffective lines that could have been imagined,” Dallaire says while sitting in an auditorium at the University of Toronto. “I don’t think it has brought the results that can prevent entire genocides.” His words come on the 10th anniversary of when Rwanda President Paul Kagame, then rebel leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), ousted Hutu extremists from government. The Hutu hard-liners systematically slaughtered more than 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus within 100 days, following a plane crash that killed Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana in April 1994.
Says Dallaire: “We are now in an era of enormous complexity. The end of the Cold War brought about a significant new dimension to the international community, but one that has never really attracted our full attention.”
Earlier this year, Dallaire finished duties as a UN force commander after testifying for the prosecution at the International Tribunal on the Rwandan Genocide in Arusha, Tanzania. After serving 35 years with the Canadian Armed Forces, the 57-year-old is now an adviser on war-affected children to the Canadian government. His newly released book on the genocide, Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, is a Canadian best-seller. It is an account of his military experience in sub-Saharan Africa and an exposé of the UN’s failures, as well as a tribute to the Rwandan people.
Failure to persuade
Soldiering was not only his profession, but his passion growing up French Catholic in Montreal’s east end. The son of a non-commissioned officer in the Canadian Army, Dallaire attended mass every Sunday. On Tuesdays, he went to Cub meetings.
At the peak of his military career, he was dispatched to the Rwandan capital of Kigali in August 1993. The soft, mist-covered mountains, tiny terraced fields and rolling hills resembled “a kind of garden of Eden,” according to the general. His mission was described by Dallaire’s superiors as a classic peacekeeping operation — “a confidence-building exercise designed to encourage belligerents to get down to the serious business of peace.” It was to be the United Nations Observer Mission in Rwanda (UNOMIR). Modest in scope and size, the operation consisted of 81 unarmed military observers situated on the Ugandan side of the Rwandan border. When the genocide began, there were about 2,500 UN troops in Kigali, but a UN Security Council resolution dramatically reduced their force to a skeleton staff of 270 troops.
Meanwhile, a humanitarian crisis quickly enveloped the region with the attempted annihilation of Tutsis by Hutu extremists, including the butchery of children barely out of the womb. While Rwanda was awash in guns and grenades readily available in the local market for US $3, Dallaire was unable to persuade UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, then chief of peacekeeping operations, and the UN that he wasn’t some “gun-happy cowboy.” His unprecedented, coded cable message alerting the top brass was disregarded. He was painfully reminded that UNAMIR’S role was “limited to a monitoring function.”
“My own mea culpa is this: as the person charged with the military leadership of UNAMIR, I was unable to persuade the international community that this tiny, poor, overpopulated country and its people were worth saving from the horror of genocide — even when the measures needed for success were relatively small.”
Dallaire also cites his own inexperience as a third-year commander of the 5th Brigade Group. Although he lacked peacekeeping experience on the ground, the elated three-star general was eager to take up his first foreign command. With no political expertise, background or training in African affairs, Dallaire acknowledges he was unable to effectively “manoeuver in the weeds of ethnic conflicts in which hate trumps reason.”
Dallaire may be deemed an honest man, but he is not unanimously regarded as a hero. Belgian Senator Alain Destexhe not only accuses the general of failing to protect Rwandans, but also abandoning 10 Belgian soldiers hacked to death by Hutu extremists. “It’s too easy to refuse to take any responsibility and to heap the blame on others, as he (Dallaire) did,” Destexhe told an audience during an April conference on the Rwandan genocide. Destexhe maintained Dallaire should either have disobeyed the U.N.’s order not to intervene or resigned his post.
Racist World View
In his book, Dallaire admits his small-scale peacekeeping mission was an adhoc, band-aid solution inexplicable to the families of those killed. Rwanda, he writes, was a nation dependent on foreign aid and international funding to avoid bankruptcy. The people of Rwanda were deemed an “insignificant black mass living in abject poverty, in a place of no consequence.” Dallaire was told Rwanda did not count.
“We are not necessarily guided in this era of complexity to bring the solutions for humanity. And why not?” the befuddled veteran asks. Killing women and children is not inherently a part of Rwandan culture. The practice was exported by white colonial powers, many of which conducted some of the most horrific human rights abuses for more rubber, tea and poppy, Dallaire charges. Hostilities between the Tutsis and Hutus were rooted in the Belgian colonial rule of the early 20th century. Then, Belgians viewed the tall, light-skinned Tutsis as a “closer kind of European,” elevating them to power over the majority Hutu — characteristically shorter and darker in complexion.
“The depth of commitment to these people was non-existent … Despite this catastrophic failure, (first world leadership) is still wrapped up in politics, self-interest and the electoral process of public opinion. It has not advanced to a level where there is consideration of these human beings.”
His eventual departure from Africa in August 1994, and his promotion to deputy commander of the Canadian Army offered no respite; the genocide’s barbarities haunted him in waking life and drug-induced sleep. A man apart, Dallaire says he fell rock-bottom in the late 1990s, plunging into a “disastrous mental health spiral” marked by several suicide attempts. He reportedly tried steering his car toward concrete barriers while driving from Ottawa to Montreal. And in April 2001, Dallaire was determined to cast himself into the Ottawa River, instead passing out drunk on a park bench. Affected by post-traumatic stress and facing exhaustion, he finally received a medical release from the Armed Forces.
Even a road trip with his wife and children harks back to one of many excursions through the RPF zone, where roadsides were littered with dead Rwandans — half-nude corpses and whitened skeletons in the “position of total vulnerability,” he recalls. In his book, Dallaire recounts how churches became sites of “calculated butchery” discriminately executed by armies and militias. Pregnant woman were disemboweled. Men’s genitalia were mutilated. Most victims were left to bleed to death. In hospital compounds, families huddled with their wailing, hungry and dehydrated children amid the smell of unwashed and decaying bodies. It was like a concentration camp, he says. “Here, the elderly suffered a slow death, and newborns brought anguish to their mothers, who couldn’t feed them.”
Rwanda Today
Men are now conspicuously absent in towns and villages — their numbers diminished following the genocide. Of the Tutsi women who were raped during that period, an estimated two-thirds now live with HIV-AIDS. One-quarter of all Rwandan children are orphans, according to NGO reports.
According to the Associated Press, in Kibuye town, 1,000 freed killers now walk amongst Tutsis, even drinking beside them in local bar halls. Two years ago, more than 25,000 so-called genocidaires were released back into the streets. And tens of thousands more will follow as authorities try to curb the country’s prison population, by reenacting traditional court systems imposing restitution and community service for convicted murderers.
“I was amazed at Rwanda and how it’s recovered in a clinical sense,” Dallaire told CNT. However, there are still, as stated by Rwandans, Tutsi survivors trying to readjust. There’s their reintegration with the large Hutu community. They are going to be entering the complexities that will have to be molded together.”
In Shaking Hands with the Devil, Dallaire describes the many faces of death during the genocide, “from the innocence of babies to the bewilderment of the elderly, from the defiance of fighters to the resigned stares of nuns.” He struggles to remember every one of them, yearning to disappear into Rwanda’s blue-green hills with their ghosts, he writes.
“Rwanda is the story of the failure of humanity to heed a call for help from an endangered people … We watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the blood of the people we were supposed to protect.”
Dallaire remains self-effacing — a “simple pilgrim” unwilling to pardon himself for his paralysis as UN commander. Yet, he holds out hope for himself, Rwanda and the international community. The career soldier admits if he wasn’t an absolute optimist, he would be dead.
According to Dallaire, the UN must undergo a renaissance if it is to be involved in future conflict resolution. In the 21st century, the ‘blue-beret neutrality’ is tarnished, he opines, urging First World countries move beyond national self-interest. “We have not brought one solution to these very complex problems, and as such, hundreds of thousands, millions, have become internally displaced and suffering. This has not been a stellar fifteen years — This is the new world disorder.”
Dallaire extends a couple of questions to present-day leadership: “Are all humans human or are some more human than others? Do some actually count more than others?” The scantily clad child he once coddled along the road to Kigali bore the same eyes of his three-year-old. “Both the same, both the same, no different.”
Dallaire concludes emphatically but in a voice barely above a whisper: “We cannot permit ourselves to say that humanity is advancing, if the larger percentile is not treated with dignity, as having the hope and the serenity of seeing their falling generations evolve. They’re just looking to have their fundamental human rights, to be considered a complete human just like any of us.”
Originally published in the Catholic New Times, May 2004
