World still blind to genocide, warns former UN officer
By Christy Helbinger
NEW YORK, Feb 15, 2005 (IPS) — Ten years after Western nations silently watched the senseless murder of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda’s genocide, the international community is going “the same route” in Sudan, warns Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, former Force Commander of the U.N.’s mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR.)
The Western world did not put enough resources into preventing the Rwandan genocide because it was focused on tensions in Yugoslavia, said Dallaire. Likewise, said Dallaire, Sudan is being sacrificed for another conflict.
“We’re not going to Darfur (because) we’re so involved in Iraq,” said Dallaire at the New York City stop of his first U.S. book tour. “There are no lessons learned in stopping the violence and rape and decimation of an ethnic group.”
Racism and disinterest are part of both conflicts, he says. “Black Africans don’t count unless there’s something there for us,” he said.
Dallaire’s memoir of his time in Rwanda, “Shake Hands with the Devil”, is a bestseller in his native Canada. A documentary of the same name, which chronicled the general’s first return to Rwanda in 2004, received the “Audience Award” at last month’s Sundance film festival.
Dallaire struggled for 10 years to write his version of the tragic events in Rwanda. Its 500 pages are filled with regret, sorrow, and painstaking detail about how UNAMIR fell apart. Blow-by-blow, Dallaire tracks the peacekeepers’ transformation from guardians of Rwanda’s future to observers of the systematic killing of the Tusti ethnic group. Dallaire personally transforms as well, from optimistic careerist to shell-shocked and incapacitated leader.
The turning point for the mission and its leader happens early in the book, four months before the genocide began. Dallaire’s forces, then involved for five months, were aware of what they called “a shadow force” that was neither Hutu nor Tutsi military factions. One night, an informant from that group, the Hutu Power movement, “Jean-Pierre”, approached Dallaire’s officers and laid out the Hutu’s plan for genocide.
Dallaire says he was told by Kofi Annan, then under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations, not to act on the information. Further, Annan told him to give the data to the leader of the official Hutu political party — and one of the orchestrators of the secret plot.
Dallaire deeply regrets not acting on Jean-Pierre’s advice and preventing the genocide: “My failure to persuade (U.N. headquarters in) New York to act on Jean-Pierre’s information still haunts me.”
The scenes he witnessed will also haunt the reader. The extent of murder was so great, he says, that Hutus relied on dump trucks to remove the corpses. Individual scenes are also chilling, such as in a church where 200 children were killed after completing their prayers.
What makes Dallaire’s account especially gripping is that it comes from a man who, before Rwanda, had idealised military service. His father fought in World War II and Dallaire grew up seeing the military as liberators, not as observers.
While witnessing the horror in Rwanda, he recalls that military generation: “Fifty years after my mentors had fought in Europe, I had been left here with a ragtag force to witness crime(s) against humanity.”
He wrote this account, he says, to do what he can to prevent situations like Sudan. “I pray that his book will add to the growing wealth of information that will expose and help eradicate genocide in the twenty-first century.”
After leaving Rwanda, Lt. Gen. Dallaire became the highest-ranking Canadian officer to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He is currently a fellow at the Carr Centre for Human Rights at Harvard University studying conflict resolution and working towards “an era where we won’t create conflict.” He also runs a foundation that supports schools and orphanages in Rwanda.