Posted on 08/22/2005 6:25:49 PM PDT by Mikey
This is the story of a hero, the true story of a man who lived thru a version of hell that is simply unimaginable. That he got through it, is amazing. That he survived the madness and escaped to go on living, is a miracle.
The story told by Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire in his magnificent book "Shake Hands With the Devil – The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda" (Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York) is beautifully written, but is horrifying, infuriating and discouraging. It's a portrait of evil that was ignored and allowed to happen.
He worked on the book with Maj. Brent Beardsley, who was the first member of Dallaire's mission and stayed with him from 1993 to April 1994 when he was medically evacuated.
Almost unbelievably, at the end, Gen. Dallaire is hopeful. Perhaps that is his, and our, salvation. If the horror he and the others endured didn't have a glimmer of hope somewhere, there would be nothing left for any of us but a fall into permanent barbarism.
Lt. Gen. Dallaire, a Canadian, was the force commander of the U.N. Assistance Mission to Rwanda from 1993 to 1994. In other words, he was head of the U.N. Peacekeeping Force in that country. It was like no other "peacekeeping" effort, and he knew almost as soon as he arrived in country that things were getting out of hand.
He had a job to do, but the powers that be, for a variety of political reasons and moral cowardice, left him powerless to stop the violence that quickly became carnage – a violent, bloody genocide of the Tutsis, who were targeted for death.
Over the course of 100 days in 1994, more than 800,000 people were killed. Shooting would have been a kindness, but bullets were too expensive. This killing took on the appearance of a slaughterhouse as men, woman and children were hacked and sliced to death, or left to die, or thrown into rivers to drown, or set afire. The weapons of choice were machetes, 160,000 new ones were shipped in, plus axes and knives. Corpses were piled high. Rivers were clogged with bloated bodies and the water ran red. It was a frenzy of death.
The world looked on, but didn't care. "Rwandans didn't matter. There was no oil and there was no strategic value to the country." He said one nation informed him that "there's nothing there but human beings and, anyway, there's too many of them because it's over populated." And so the slaughter proceeded.
Lt. Gen. Dallaire was there. The killing was all around him. He stepped over and around bodies and pieces of humans. He told me he was in the midst of it, but was helpless to stop it. His calls and cries and demands for help, for military assistance for his troops, for support for the victims, for the world to pay attention were lost in the wind.
Gen. Dallaire was in Rwanda to keep the peace, but the United Nations didn't keep its part of the bargain. He needed some muscle to make his task successful, but he had too few troops who could do the job and most of those from smaller countries were either unequipped or ill equipped and, even at that, there weren't enough of them.
Gen. Dallaire told me that with 16 other U.N. missions going on, "Rwanda was a low priority." He said, "none of the developed countries were interested in participating" so he "ended up with countries like Bangladesh sending large numbers of troops neither trained nor equipped for anything more complex than classic, easy peacekeeping."
Classic, easy peacekeeping, it was not.
Early on, Dallaire had intelligence that the Rwandan militia had a plan for Hutu extremists to register all Tutsis. His contact said it was for extermination, having heard the boast that 1,000 could be killed in 20 minutes. There was also a plan to murder Belgian troops, to force their withdrawal from the country.
Dallaire told me he went to New York and told Kofi Annan, who was in charge of U.N. peacekeeping, that he wanted to raid the extremists. He said it was the only way he'd be able to stop their planning and training. "If we knock them off kilter, they'll react in panic. We'll have them and be able to stop it."
Request denied.
On Jan. 11, 1994, Gen. Dallaire sent a fax to Kofi Annan, telling him of information about arms caches and more training. He said his contact wanted protection for his family. Dallaire said he needed help and support to prevent the killings.
It fell on deaf ears – Annan buried the fax. The disaster for 18 American troops in Somalia just months before was still an embarrassment ... the mood was for non-involvement.
Dallaire insisted. "You've got to let me do this."
No.
The extremists got the message. The genocide began April 6, the day the Rwandan president's plane was shot down. The killing began, thousands were dead and 10 Belgians were slaughtered. On April 21, the Security Council voted to withdraw Gen. Dallair's forces.
He told me, "Many countries who had troops there were convinced they would all be wiped out, so they pulled out their forces. So at a time when I should have been reinforced, I was losing all my forces."
"The French, Italian, Belgians sent in elite troops, but only to take out white expats and they refused to make available to me those forces to stop in its tracks the militia-men and the genocide.
I asked him how he survived? "We were so busy continuing to respond, trying to save people, trying to hold on to five sites. Ultimately, we did protect 30,000."
He told me "survive" is a good term. He said, "they not only saw horrors, they tripped over them and literally, on one occasion, fell into a pit where I was standing up nearly to my neck in bodies and all the fluids."
"You kept yourself going, flat out. My officers and my soldiers worked till they dropped. We never had time to think about it. It's like a veil that drops over you because you had so much to do."
Then he added, "you end up seeing so much horror, because horror is the instrument they use. Horror and barbarism. These things reappear later ... they come back from a sound, a smell, a word, bad weather. They come back digitally clear, in slow motion and they overwhelm.
I asked again how he handled it?
I continue to be aware of what to avoid.
I can't go to grocery stores. I can't go by the meat counter I can't go to markets where there are fresh fruit and vegetables. The beauty and aroma paralyzes me and I stop. My wife has to take me away.
What I see are marketplaces where people were trying to sell rotten avocados and bananas where bombs had fallen ... at food distribution points where people were fighting to get food and always children trampled to death. Those scenes simply come back.
So I don't go to those places anymore.
When he got back to Canada, Dallaire was deputy commander of the Canadian Army and was promoted to 3-star general. He continued to work. It was, he said, leading up to another crash after which he was supposed to work part time. But he couldn't, and was "working flat out, full time."
He told me he was "literally trying to kill myself at work. I couldn't sleep and couldn't live with the pain" so he tried to create other pain.
He had become fully involved in the Rwandan international tribunals to seek justice, traveling there to testify.
The army gave him a choice, the military or the tribunals. He said, that "when he left Rwanda, his mission would end when justice is done and that he would never let the genocide die."
He was medically released from the army.
As to the trials, the principal perpetrators are in jail and the trials are ongoing. "But," he said, "the terrible thing is that although we got the leaders on the ground who were carrying out the massacres," we didn't get
They were evacuated by the French. They were not in front of the tribunal. They're sitting pretty in France, living high off the hog with that horrible concept of genocide and planning of one day going back.
That is the great injustice ... when developed nations, great nations, don't have the guts to go after the real perpetrators, and bring the real ones to trial.
Until you get the real bad people, those who create these scenarios – who are brilliant people, who know how to maneuver their populations – if you don't kill that idea there, if you don't stymie it, their sense of impunity will continue to exist and you'll continue to have these catastrophic events.
Gen. Dallaire stayed with his small force of 450 to do what he could and admits, it was "too little, too late."
None of the leaders of the free world comes out with clean hands. Gen. Dallaire didn't mince words about responsibility.
For example, the British, French and Americans principally, who right up front said we're not going in and we're not going to support anybody.
Many African countries were prepared to send me battalions, but weren't able to get there and, didn't have the equipment to do the job ... In the U.N., Kofi Annan went through as head peacekeeper with me, but made mistakes.
But the secretary general at the time, Boutros Boutros-Ghali is, by far, the one who should be held most accountable for the ineffective direction and capabilities that were given to me at the time.
He seems to have disappeared without a scratch.
I asked about the Americans, and particularly Bill Clinton who was president at the time.
He said he wanted to be excused because he didn't make the right decision ... so he said. And he said, he didn't know about it and didn't realize it was going on, it was going so fast.
Dallaire said it stems from Clinton having "instituted the policy, 3 weeks before the genocide began, [Presidential Directive 25] of not wanting to get involved in Africa again unless it's in [U.S.] self-interest ..."
He continued:
He might be right in saying he didn't know about it in detail because the stuff never made it up to him, but it didn't make it up to him because he had ordered that he wasn't going to get involved anymore and he didn't want to know about it.
And so that is an excuse that is not forgivable, I'm afraid ...
The other gang that's getting off easy are countries like mine, middle powers, members of the G8 – Germans, Japanese, Italians, Canadians – who have much more assets than they have been proportionally providing the U.N., and more importantly, if I may say, providing the great powers with options without them having to get involved too early and then tripping over each other and dragging us into more complex problems.
The middle powers and regional middle powers like Brazil, Australia, India – those countries have got to come to the fore and offer much more intellectually and resource-wise in order to give the flexibility to the big powers not to get sucked in early, creating scenarios as we're seeing now. We can't afford to have the superpowers continually using its forces, and by such, being weakened. We must use middle powers to get far more in the forefront, with the Americans, for example, in support.
He is supportive of Kofi Annan staying at the United Nations to oversee the announced reforms, which will be discussed in the General Assembly in September.
It'll be a test of the "true colors of the big powers wanting to have an effective U.N. instead of it being a scapegoat."
Dallaire says one of the great elements of the new U.N. reforms is a conceptual document called "responsibility to protect."
But he adds, "The courage of the politicians to do that, literally isn't there yet."
As for the book?
There was no joy except my conclusion has an optimism. I do believe that fundamentally, one day we will stop conflict. Because of our differences, it may take a couple of centuries, but the movement of the NGO's [non-governmental organizations] and the human-rights movement will ultimately override many of these frictions that exist – be they religious or otherwise – and we will one day achieve the serenity that every human being wants.
Gen. Dallaire looks at the decisions made that some lives are worth more than others. After allowing the genocide, aid money poured in by the billions, a substantial part of it siphoned off to the extremists for weapons and to corrupt politicians, but not enough to the survivors. He says we're "in desperate need of a transfusion of humanity."
Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire is a thoughtful, generous, brave man whose life was damaged and changed because of Rwanda. I had the honor of talking with him. You can read his book. It will change your life.
Barbara Simpson, "The Babe in the Bunker" as she's known to her KSFO 560 radio talk-show audience in San Francisco, has a 20-year radio, television and newspaper career in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
Mark Steyn has a much less adulatory opinion of Mr. Dallaire.
On the watch of Pres. "BJ" Clinton.
He still has a high opinion of Kofi Annan, which is inexplicable. It was Kofi who ordered him to do nothing. It was UN management that nickled-and-dimed him when he faced with tragedy and left him with a force sufficient only to stand by and watch.
I wonder if he keeps up with current news enough to realize what corrupt men Kofi and his crowd really are?
The US, under Clinton, must face blame for the fact that Clinton did nothing and encouraged others to do nothing. France, on the other hand, was actively on the side of the killers, actively intervened to supply the killers, trained them, supported them, and then intervened militarily to protect them after the genocide.
France aligned itself with the butchers, and the UN got paid to do nothing. Dallaire refused to be evacuated or there would have been no witnesses at all.
After everything he witnessed and experienced in the service of the UN, he still thinks the UN is the solution. This is a mental disorder that comes issued at birth along with Canadian citizenship, I think. I can't think of any other explanation.
Yea, but he apologized, the press bought it, so no harm done.
for later...
Perhaps the 'failures' of the UN to act according to its charter and reponsiblitities are well-planned to show that the organization is obsolete, badly managed, and corrupt in order to create a demand and pave the way for the new, improved monster on the drawing board.
Can somebody help me out here? Thanks.
Whitey's fault. Not the blacks killing blacks, not the un, no, it's white America's fault. It was a no win situation. Send in the Marines, kill some of the murderers while stopping the genocide and jackson, sharpton and the black caucus would have had a field day. Oh, wait, bubba was POTUS. Maybe he could have gotten away with it. He got away with doing nothing.Saw the movie. Sorry I wasted the dollar.
bump for later read
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