Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan
While Canadians are disillusioned with some politicians, one military leader has won their admiration - Romeo Antonius Dallaire. He resigned in June from the Canadian senate to devote more time to making the world more humane, including work with the United Nations secretary-general on genocide prevention and with the International Human Rights Commission on crimes against humanity.
Lieutenant-General Dallaire headed the United Nations mission to Rwanda during the 1994 genocide that killed 500,000 to 800,000 people. He was devastated by the world’s refusal to prevent the genocide. He returned to Canada deeply depressed.
Canadians knew that he had done his best to prevent the Rwandan tragedy and that he failed because hate governs many hearts and because not many countries match their deeds with their rhetoric supporting human rights. He left the army in 2000.
Dallaire was appointed to the Canadian Senate by then prime minister Paul Martin in 2005, who realized that the retired general represented Canada’s best ideals. The Ottawa Citizen calls him “Canada’s conscience.”
Dallaire felt, however, that though he had been deluged with honors, he needed to work full-time to promote human rights. So he retired from the Senate in June - seven years before the end of his term. Dallaire served Canada for 45 years in the military and Parliament.
In 1993, the United Nations sought to end the civil war between the Rwandan government and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front. Military observers from the Organization of African Unity monitored a demilitarized zone.
Uganda requested a UN force to prevent arms smuggling to Rwandan rebels. Dallaire took command of the UN Observer Mission in Uganda and Rwanda (UNOMUR) and the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) in 1996. Dallaire requested 5,000 UN troops but was given 2,600 and later this was reduced to 500. Dallaire requested UN permission and help to thwart arms smuggling and the impending killing of ethnic Tutsis by Hutu extremists. The UN refused. In 100 days some 800,000 men, women and children were slaughtered.
Dallaire established the authority to use force to prevent “crimes against humanity” but it was too late. He returned to Canada deeply troubled. He said: “I live every day what I lived 20 years ago, and it’s as if it was this morning. You can’t walk away from the scale of destruction, nor can you walk away from the sense of abandonment that my troops and I had in the field… Rwanda will never ever leave me. It’s in the pores of my body. My soul is in those hills, my spirit is with the spirits of all those people who were slaughtered and killed.”
Struggling with depression and post-traumatic stress, he sought to raise public awareness and help for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and suicides among soldiers. He pleaded for Canada to work with the UN to prevent conflicts and genocide in such areas as the Central African Republic and also to protect war-affected children. He founded the Romeo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative to end the use of child soldiers worldwide. He is co-director of the Will to Intervene project.
He wrote two best-selling books, one of which “Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda” was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2004. A movie was also made about it in 2007.
He became a special adviser to the Canadian International Development Agency on issues dealing with war-affected children and to the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade on curbing small arms. He became a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. He served also as a senior fellow at Concordia University’s Montreal Institute of Genocide Studies and at Dalhousie University’s Center for Foreign Policy Studies. He has received honorary doctorates from numerous Canadian and American universities.
Among the honors he has received is the Order of Canada, Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec, Commander of the Order of Military and the Meritorious Service Cross, the Vimy Award, the Pearson Peace Medal and the US Legion of Military Merit.
In his last speech in the Senate he chided Canada for not being active enough in resolving conflicts and preventing atrocities.
He stated: “We are not 69th or 70th. There are 193 nations in the world and we are part of the 11 most powerful.
“Today, we have more saber-rattling and less credibility; more expressions of concern and less contingency planning; more endless consultation with allies, or so we are told, and less real action being taken, and more empty calls for respect for human rights and less actual engagement with the violators.”
Said the Ottawa Citizen: “He has come to symbolize the failure of the international community to stop genocide. That does not mean that his every utterance should be treated as a truth from on high, or even that his own role as commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda is off limits to scrutiny. He has been a hero, but never asked to be a saint. It does mean that when he expresses an opinion about peacekeeping, Parliament should listen.”
Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan is a retired Canadian journalist, civil servant and refugee judge.
