On Rwanda, BBC World Service, The Interview

BBC WORLD SERVICE: THE INTERVIEW, 14 MAY 2005
Transcribed by Simon Tan

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Carrie Gracie: Hello and welcome. I am Carrie Gracie.

My guest today has seen things and experienced things that no
human being should be exposed to … a peacekeeper who witnessed one
of the most appalling crimes against humanity in our history and was
powerless to stop it. Had things been different, he believes he
could have prevented the atrocities from happening … the deaths of
800,000 people in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

General Romeo Dallaire, welcome to The Interview.

General Romeo Dallaire: Thank you very much.

Carrie Gracie: As chief of the United Nations peacekeeping mission
in Rwanda, you were a witness to what was the worst atrocity, I
guess, of the past half century, and the book you have written about
that is called Shake Hands with the Devil. Do you feel you came face
to face with the devil in Rwanda?

General Romeo Dallaire: Oh, it was not only face to face, I
negotiated with him, even exchanged platitudes.

But I came to the realisation that evil can actually take the
human form, and in so doing go to the extremes of even discussing
stopping massacring in one little corner so we can go through as if
discussing how much wood to cut.

Carrie Gracie: Well, let us go back a little bit and try and put
some of that in context. Just recap for us how you got there.

General Romeo Dallaire: The Rwandans, with their independence in
1962, had a large Tutsi population that was refugeed. In 1990, they
started to make grumblings and, in fact, commenced a small civil war
to come back. By 1993 August, a peace agreement was signed in
Arusha, Tanzania, between the Tutsi expatriates and the Hutus, who
are the majority in the country, to build an interim government over
two years and then move to a democratic election.

And during that timeframe they needed a neutral international
force or a referee. And so, a Chapter 6 blue beret mission was
called in to help them demobilise and reconstitute themselves. And
that was the mission I was given.

Carrie Gracie: Instead of there being a nice democratic peace
process for you to observe, there was a genocide. How did that
happen?

General Romeo Dallaire: A very very effective dictatorship that
signed under duress with moderate Hutus who were in the forefront of
wanting to bring the peace process. But the extremists with the
dictator in the backdrop, they over the months created a subversive
structure that trained militia, that distributed weapons, that
conducted assassinations and, in so doing, destabilised the country.

And with the ineptness of our international community in the UN
in being able to wrest the initiative from them and stop them, they
ultimately were able to move the country to not only civil war but
ultimately a genocide.

Carrie Gracie: Why though, why did they want to conduct a genocide?

General Romeo Dallaire: A very interesting question because so many
people have tended to make Rwanda or black Africa, simply the
slaughters there as nothing more than tribalism. But in fact these
very educated people were essentially fighting in order to maintain
their control of power.

And the instrument they used to make sure they kept power was by
identifying the other ethnicity as the enemy. And, in so doing,
eliminating the Tutsis to them gave them the total control of the
country because they already represented 84 per cent of the
population.

Carrie Gracie: And in explaining that to yourself, do you think
there are circumstances which push human beings towards evil or was
it simply a case of expert manipulation?

General Romeo Dallaire: I think you have got the two categories.

You have got the very very skilled, very adept, be they through
education or simply by the fundamental talents they have, who
comprehend what exactly they were doing. And they were mustering
hatred, they were mustering fear, and doing it in such a fashion
that they can pass it on to others who then can take action.

And so, as an example, the whole brainchild behind the decision
to go with the genocide of Tutsis was by the extremist element close
to the President. And they, a large number of them, were evacuated
in the first planes that came in to evacuate the expatriates. And
they still live in Europe, safe from the international tribunal.

And then you get the rest of them who are simply dominated by
fear. The structure that they have put in place had extremists down
to the 10, 12, 14 huts. And so, those people simply were called into
action by the indoctrination, by the radio station, and they just
went to mass hysteria.

Carrie Gracie: And what do you think, after all that you have seen
of it, what do you think goes on inside the head of those in that
mass hysteria, of someone who chops another human being to pieces
with a machete? How have you been able to make sense of it?

General Romeo Dallaire: Well, as best as I can dissect this (and I
am not necessarily using the right terminology here) but the
ultimate fear...I mean a child, a 10, 12, 14-year-old, is told to
kill the grandmother because she is originally a Tutsi, and they
will do it because if they don't do that they will be killed
instantly. So they react that way.

And adults were reacting in the same fashion in that if they
didn't take action immediately to kill or slaughter or injure
someone that was identified by the militias, they were immediately
slaughtered.

And so there wasn't much thinking, in fact there was no thinking.
It was pure outright instinct of survival and fear. And so the bulk
of that killing was done in that sort of fashion throughout the
villages.

However, there was a lot of premeditated stuff going on, like
telling people who felt insecure that they might be targeted to go
to churches and missions and they would be protected by conventions.
And once those places were full, then the militias and the army
would surround it and go inside and just literally kill them row
after row after row. And this would take a couple of days.

And often what was being reported is they didn't try to kill
them, they just injure them enough so that they would bleed to death
over two or three days. So, not only was killing all of a sudden
taken as a banality but there was a sort of sense of lust of seeing
people suffer.

And so, there are reported discussions by survivors where the
militia were simply debating, you know, what sort of wrist movement
would take off the head of a child faster than another one.

They lost humanity. And that is why the subtitle of my book is
""The failure of humanity in Rwanda.'' Not only did humanity outside
of Rwanda totally forgot Rwanda but the sense of humanity inside
totally disappeared.

Carrie Gracie: You didn't manage to stop the genocide beginning and
you didn't even manage to stop it from carrying on when everybody
could see, and when you were reporting back to New York and
reporting across the world what was going on. Now why wasn't it
stopped?

General Romeo Dallaire: There is the perverse scenario of genocide.
We have come a long negative way from Holocaust and genocide being
synonyms inasmuch as the term genocide used finally by the Security
Council in a resolution six weeks into the mission on May 17 giving
me authority to get 5,500 troops to stop the spread of it.

Well, even with the term genocide, the whole of the northern
countries, the ones who could really provide me with the troops, the
middle powers like Canada and Germany and Japan or the big powers
like the French and the Brits and so on, all agreed it was genocide,
all agreed with the Security Council resolution which they
participated, and not one of them sent me one soldier. I needed them
within days and only they could deploy them.

And so, with genocide right there and the Security Council
agreeing with it and with a plan, they still refused to send me
white soldiers.

And the question is, just like we are seeing in Darfur, is the
term genocide really an instrument to not only stop a crisis but
maybe prevent it or is it simply a judicial term that we use after
the fact to bring these perpetrators to justice? And hopefully, if
we bring enough of them to justice, if there are enough genocides
and enough millions of people slaughtered, then maybe they will get
the idea that impunity doesn't work, because if we are waiting for
people to act on genocide, God knows prevention, let alone trying to
stop them, we are going to wait till we are blue in the face.

Carrie Gracie: So when people say ""never again'', is that entirely
meaningless?

General Romeo Dallaire: Totally. It didn't work. It is still not
working. It is a concept that did not work when it was tested.

And in that reason, I think we haven't achieved the ability not
only to sensitise all of us of this plight of humanity and the
impunity that is out there in regards to the abuse of human rights
of people, but on top of that we haven't been able to trigger the
political will or, let us put it this way, the statesmanship of
which there is a terrible dearth these days, the statesmanship that
would have the courage to intervene.

Carrie Gracie: And now in Darfur in Sudan, of course, the African
Union is involved. I mean is it the answer to have African
peacekeepers in Africa?

General Romeo Dallaire: Well, there you have got a real fine example
of how the developed world can set up the developing world. It calls
it to achieve a certain level of maturity. It says it is an African
problem, so Africans should solve it. And so, it hands off these
problems that in a number of cases are generated by our demands,
like oil and so on, and we know full well they can't, they are not
up to it. They just don't have the resources to do it.

And so, in 1994 we started to tell the Africans that it was their
problem and they should sort it out knowing that they have not the
capability to respond. And worse than that is that when we asked for
equipment to be able to equip battalions to come, I was getting the
answer: ""Well, you know, if we give them equipment they might
become the presidential guard and might do a coup d'etat in their own
country, so we won't give them the equipment.''

And so today you have got the African Union that is being set up
to failure outright. And not only will it fail but in such it will
put back the ability of that region to take on its responsibility,
because with a mandate of observing and protecting and with now, its
sort of position, ego, position of not letting developed nation
troops or white troops into the region, they are in a dire strait to
bring about a reasonable scenario for the Darfurians.

Carrie Gracie: And do you hold the United Nations structure
responsible for some of these problems or are you laying the blame
squarely at the door of Western governments?

General Romeo Dallaire: There were five countries that created the
UN. Those five countries are still holding most of the cards, and
those five countries are not allowed by anybody to walk away from
having all that blood on their hands. They are not allowed to pull a
Pontius Pilate on the rest of the world, and say: ""The UN is
ineffective.''

They establish what goes on in that UN and, in so doing, they are
the ones who ultimately must hold the responsibility. You are great
powers, then you have the responsibility of the great powers whether
you like it or not.

And the UN being ineffective? Yes, it needs reform. So does every
bureaucracy. And reforms have got to be brought in by courageous
countries who want the UN to work.

But if you don't necessarily want the UN to be effective, if you
don't want another player on the block, you can certainly use him as
a scapegoat. Well, if that is the case then you have got a perfect
example with the UN.

Carrie Gracie: And so, the reports that have been written in the
United Nations bureaucracy about the failures of Rwanda, all the
things that got wrong, the endless list of things that need to be
reformed and need to be done differently next time, you have no
faith in that?

General Romeo Dallaire: Well no, because the fact that I am still
alive today calls to the fore my optimism. And my optimism is that
there is absolutely no other body on earth that has still the
transparency and the impartiality of the UN, and certainly no single
nation-led coalition will ever be even perceived as going in purely
for humanitarian reasons, certainly not yet.

Carrie Gracie: You are listening to The Interview in the BBC World
Service with me, Carrie Gracie, and my guest today the United
Nations force commander from Rwanda during the genocide 11 years
ago, General Romeo Dallaire.

Let us talk about you because there are a few issues that have
just come up and things that you have just said in passing that I
want to go back to.

You mentioned that you are still alive today and that attests to
your optimism. Do you feel that you were in some way culpable for
what happened in Rwanda?

General Romeo Dallaire: Absolutely. Absolutely. There is no way that
anyone who is in command of a mission, and a mission that failed,
that can simply walk away, and say: Oh geez, they did the best they
can, particularly when you are neck deep in bodies and you have seen
our ineffectiveness in the field, ineffectiveness because of a
variety of factors, but nonetheless of which maybe ineffectiveness
at not being to convince and not being to able to pull the strings
and to influence in order to get people to respond to that
catastrophe both in the prevention, and ultimately in the middle of
it.

And so, yes, there is no way that anyone who has been in the
field ever can walk away in saying, ""You know, it's not my
responsibility.'' You are going into these countries, you are going
in and you have got to be held accountable.

And so, I feel that I was to be held accountable not just to my
country, not certainly only to the Rwandans and the UN but to
international justice, and that means the international tribunal.

Carrie Gracie: And do you feel that your life and professional
experience as a soldier in the Canadian army had equipped you to
deal with what you met when you got off the plane in Kigali?

General Romeo Dallaire: The equipping was that of leadership, of
command, of operational skills. And as such, yes, specifics because
of that, specific theatre of operations; meaning knowing Rwanda and
all the nuances, no. Whether I was savvy enough politically, I think
that that is an area that many of our countries have got to rectify
with their generals. People are fearful of generals playing
politics.

Well, in this era where in fact no simple mandates come out, we
work in complexity and ambiguity. Generals must know what are the
inner workings of politics as humanitarian affairs and being able to
integrate all that into solutions. That I didn't have the skills to
do.

Carrie Gracie: Your failings, though, were in your view professional
rather than moral.

General Romeo Dallaire: Professional yes, I think that is a fair
assessment. Moral? When in the first 24 hours the rebels decided to
launch their operations, at that point I did not have a mission
anymore, and as such I could have pulled out all my forces. I stayed
because I felt that there was an ability to maybe influence.

And when I received orders in fact to pull the whole of the force
out, I refused those orders because although legal, they were
immoral. We were not going to abandon the 30,000 Rwandans that we
had in our protection, and we were certainly not going to abandon
the ability to at least be a witness to it.

Carrie Gracie: So why are you culpable then? I mean it seems
slightly paradoxical to me that you blame yourself for not being
equipped with the political skills when you at the point of moral
decision stood your ground.

General Romeo Dallaire: I took hundreds of ethical, moral and legal
decisions every day and in my estimation, the end result was that
the mission failed. And so it is in that sort of all-encompassing
situation that I take my sense of responsibility.

When you are in command it is like being pregnant. You are either
pregnant or you are not pregnant. And if you are in command then you
are responsible. If you are not in command, then it is somebody else
is responsible. In that case it is me.

Carrie Gracie: A Belgian inquiry found you at least in part
responsible for the orders which resulted in the deaths of those 10
Belgian troops we talked about a moment ago. Do you have those
deaths on your conscience?

General Romeo Dallaire: Every commander who has troops under his
command and loses them in operations lives with those memories and
lives with those lives because he ultimately is the one who gave, or
she, the orders that potentially could have put them in harm's way.
And so, that will never ever leave and has never left any
responsible commander.

However, if the decisions I took were right, I stand by them and
I have no qualms that my decisions were right. I lost 10 soldiers
that day, I didn't lose many many others nor a whole bunch of other
people. And so, when I weighed the situation, I took the decision
that ultimately, yes, ended up that 10 soldiers died.

Carrie Gracie: You have been medically discharged from the Canadian
army. It has obviously been a difficult personal journey. Tell us
about it.

General Romeo Dallaire: Well, I don't think we have got another hour
or half hour except to say that in this era, a bit different from
the eras of previous classic warfare where we have combat fatigue
and shell-shock, this era, because of the nature of conflict,
because of the ethical and moral dilemmas that we often feel by the
nature of the threat and by simply seeing the horrors in which we
are involved with on a continuous basis, post-traumatic stress
disorder is an operational injury.

And this country here has recognised that and has also made it to
the extent where we are introducing a whole new veterans charter to
meet the requirements not only of soldiers but their families who
lived the missions with us now because of the media, which was not
the case in history and the Second World War and so on.

And so, it has been an exercise of how do you live with an
operational injury that is not arm hanging or your classic
prosthesis but one between the ears that has all the stigmas,
particularly from a very Darwinian organisation like the military
is, but also has general stigma in the population mental health, and
in which you find your faculties of concentration and your ability
to cope with stress simply attenuated and, as such, cannot conduct
your job anymore.

Carrie Gracie: And so, what were the symptoms for you of that
operational injury apart from the lapses of concentration you
described?

General Romeo Dallaire: Not trying to kill yourself. In the end, I
asked to be relieved because I had become a threat to my own
mission. I had lost my sense of humour, and any commander who
doesn't have a sense of humour can't be on top of his composure and
be able to be convincing with his eyes and his body language to his
troops that he holds the situation in hand, puts the troops in grave
danger and creates doubt in their mind.

Secondly, sleeping, eating and so on.

But ultimately, what really pulled it off was my escapades of
running away and trying to get ambushed and getting wiped out.

Carrie Gracie: And so, how do you move beyond that state of mind,
the state of mind where you are preoccupied with these terrible
events that you have witnessed? Is it religious faith? Is it
counselling? Is it medical drugs? Is it the love of your family?
What actually helps you move on?

General Romeo Dallaire: The profession remains there. And one of the
gravest errors that we are doing and have been doing in the past is
taking that uniform away and often moving the people away from the
community in which they feel so loyal to and often give so much to.

Secondly, the only instrument that will permit people to build
the prosthesis to live with this injury. And one must remember that
the old theories of, you know, if you work hard and with time you
will forget this stuff is nothing but crap. What you have is in fact
digitally clear in slow motion episodes of which you are
continuously vulnerable of finding yourself reliving, and as you
relive them, you have your necessary vulnerabilities of ultimately
even going to the extreme.

And so, you have got to build these prosthesis to avoid such
situations, and you do that with professional therapy. Sometimes you
need drugs but you certainly need a bosom buddy whom you can spend
hours just talking and vetting. And quite often the family is too
close and too intimate to be able to do that. So you need someone
from the outside.

We built here in this country not only the clinics for the
professional side but a whole peer support structure to help our
soldiers as they worked their way through these catastrophic
failures.

Carrie Gracie: You yourself visited Rwanda again last year 10 years
after the genocide. How optimistic do you feel about the country as
a whole a decade on?

General Romeo Dallaire: If I am looking at it purely from
infrastructure and the rule of law, governance and so on, it has
done small miracles. If I look at it in trying to build social
programmes, it has done quite well. If I am looking at it in regards
to whether those of the Hutu background are in fact coming back and
in full reconciliation, there is a lot of work to be done. And if I
look at the elite, well, the elite is still dominated by a minority
and, as such, there is going to be a lot of work to be done to
restabilise I think in the longer term.

Anybody who is elected with 98 per cent of the population voting
and 97 per cent positive vote to me is not necessarily playing with
all the cards in a positive way.

Carrie Gracie: General Dallaire, let us talk about justice. You
mentioned earlier that some of those involved in orchestrating the
genocide are still living in Europe. What should happen to them?

General Romeo Dallaire: Absolutely. It is great to have the
international tribunal and to bring to justice those who actually
conducted the actions in the field, but the whole concept of that,
the whole mindset, how these people were warped into doing those
actions doesn't make them not responsible for what they did but the
atmosphere that was created was created by leadership.

And so, the ultimate culprits who must be brought to justice are
those who brought the idea to fruition … and they are sitting around
in countries that are members of the Security Council, the permanent
five. And there isn't one movement, not one movement to take them
on.

However, I find it interesting that we are ready to want to
string up Kagame because of exactations that his troops did
afterwards.

Carrie Gracie: This is the President of Rwanda now. He was then at
that time the head of the rebel Rwandan Popular Front.

General Romeo Dallaire: Well, the military side of it, yes.

So, I mean I just can't understand. And maybe it is the
immaturity that the Europeans think of us Canadians but it just
doesn't make any sense to me when you talk about human rights and
freedoms and so on that you can play from both sides of your mouth
in those countries where on one side they are selling weapons and
reinforcing capabilities to continue the slaughter and protect those
who initiated it, and on the other side are prepared to crucify
small players or blame it on somebody else.

Carrie Gracie: We are very short of time. I just want to finish by
coming back to you, your sense of coming to terms with what
happened. I mentioned you went back to Rwanda last year. You talked
even about living in Rwanda and you support charitable work there
for orphans. Do you feel a kind of restless need to go on making
amends?

General Romeo Dallaire: I am going back. My plan was to go back for
a couple of years and just fiddle there in sort of communion with
the hills and with the spirits of Rwanda because it is just not an
ordinary country. It is a Garden of Eden on earth that the devil
took over for a while.

And so, my wife, when she came back with me on the 10th
anniversary; she works for Unicef, she is a kindergarten teacher,
and she fell in love with the people and the place. And so, we are
going to go back and live for...we have guaranteed a year, and do
some work there on the ground, and maybe I'll bring some closure to
the mourning of all those that we failed.

Carrie Gracie: General Romeo Dallaire, thank you very much for
joining us on The Interview.

General Romeo Dallaire: Thank you.