Romualius (Romeo) Dallaire went to Rwanda in 1993 a proud soldier, and came home a broken man. Many Canadians consider the 59-year-old lieutenant-general-turned-Liberal patronage appointee a hero, recalling television images of the lone Canadian trying to move the world’s heart to halt Rwanda’s slide into depravity.

This view is shared by the CBC and most Canadian journalists. Dallaire’s recent autobiography, Shake Hands with the Devil, became a best-seller. And there was no shortage of defenders to respond to last month’s news that an autobiography by Jacques-Roger Booh Booh, the UN’s former special envoy to Rwanda, was accusing Dallaire of “megalomania.”

But an unsentimental examination of the facts suggests a radically different interpretation of the man’s conduct. It is time to remove the halo from Romeo Dallaire’s head.

Although Dallaire had never served, let alone led, a full UN mission, or visited Africa, his command in Rwanda began with some promise. Upon arrival in the country, he observed the danger that extremists within the country’s majority tribe, the Hutus, would commence a campaign of violence against the Tutsi minority. In particular, he instantly pegged Theoneste Bagosora, a Hutu colonel and operator in the ruling party, as a troublemaker. He also read malevolence in the glittering eyes of Paul Kagame, commander of the Tutsi exile army, who had packaged himself as a man of peace.

A Hutu informant provided Dallaire with a virtual blueprint of the low-tech Holocaust being planned, including the location of illegal arms caches. He also revealed the extremists’ scheme to provoke an incident in which a small number of the UN mission’s Belgian paratroopers — say, 10 — would be killed. After the recent debacle in Somalia, the extremists figured that the West had no stomach for a fight and that the withdrawal of Dallaire’s only combat-capable unit (the rest of the UN force consisted of poorly led Ghanaians and Bengalis) would destroy the mission.

“I had to catch these guys off guard, send them a signal that … I fully intended to shut them down,” writes Dallaire in Shake Hands.

Unfortunately, before raiding the arms caches, Dallaire faxed the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations seeking permission. This virtually non-functional office was headed by an African diplomat named Kofi Annan. His deputy was Maurice Baril, later Canada’s Chief of the Defence Staff. Annan ordered Dallaire to desist from “offensive operations,” and it’s still unclear whether even Baril, an old friend, backed Dallaire.

Annan also ordered Dallaire to share his intelligence with Rwanda’s president, a Hutu married to a known extremist. In retrospect, one wishes Dallaire had “misplaced” these bizarre orders, as so many things are misplaced at the UN. But instead, he obeyed.

The UN’s culture seems to have rubbed off on the man, for when the hot breath of war swept over Rwanda in April, 1994, Dallaire proved not a fighting soldier but a bureaucrat in uniform. Amid growing signs of imminent bloodshed, he took to roaming Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, unguarded and unarmed. Dallaire meant it as a reassuring, calming gesture. But just as he was sizing up the locals, so the locals were sizing up Dallaire. And to them, his meekness signalled: This general doesn’t fight.

The war began with the assassination of Rwanda’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana. Within hours, normally indolent Hutu officers had formed a “crisis committee” (in fact, the Hutu war cabinet). Its chairman: Bagosora. Dallaire rushed to a committee meeting, where Bagosora told him it was not a coup d’etat. Dallaire apparently believed it — even though he knew Bagosora headed a group dubbed “Network Zero,” the number indicating the quantity of Tutsi the group planned to leave alive.

Shake Hands shows Bagosora manipulating the Canadian’s eagerness to read good faith into the actions of men he today calls “genocidaires.” In one surreal scene, Dallaire chauffeurs the busy mass-murderer from one genocide-planning meeting to another. In another, the war raging, Dallaire tells the crisis committee he still believes in the “peace process,” then promises the UN won’t intervene militarily. The Canadian peacekeeper not only shook hands with the devil, he gave him the thumbs-up plus a lift between levels of Hell.

It was the Tutsi exile army in Uganda, not the UN or any multilateral body, that ultimately rescued Rwanda — but not before up to 800,000 innocents were hacked to death.

Dallaire’s accounts of massacres and vile mutilations are deeply disturbing. But his naivete is shocking in its own way. As Kagame’s forces swept into the country and the Hutu intensified their nihilistic slaughter, Dallaire tried to broker a ceasefire — and today remains puzzled the Tutsi commander wasn’t interested. He also handed hundreds of Hutu prisoners to the enraged Tutsi army. And he colluded with aid agencies to prevent the rescue of local orphans through foreign adoption. Better they die, it seems, than survive through politically incorrect means.

It appears Dallaire even helped trigger his personal nightmare: the mission’s collapse. On the genocide’s second night, he sent a lightly armed squad of Belgian blue-helmets into the chaos, even though radio stations were blaming the Belgians for the president’s assassination. These men — 10, as it turned out — were seized and disarmed by Hutu army extremists.

Dallaire soon learned of their capture, driving right past the building where they were held while heading for one of his meetings. As Dallaire dallied with Bagosora, the 10 were massacred and mutilated (it’s uncertain in which order). Dallaire made no serious attempt to help his men, several of whom reportedly remained alive for hours. The Belgians later insisted they could have mounted a commando-style rescue.

(To this day, Dallaire is reviled in Belgium, which launched an inquiry into the episode. Dallaire refused to testify, a fact oddly omitted in his book.)

Dallaire and his apologists have portrayed his faltering command as the victim of circumstance and external forces, but it was he who handed the extremists the opportunity they had sought, he who threw away his only military asset. The genocidaires saw an officer who wouldn’t protect his men; surely such a man wouldn’t defend mere Tutsi “cockroaches.” Any hopes of bluffing his way to peace were gone.

As the Hutu hoped, news of the massacre panicked the Belgian government, which immediately withdrew its troops. With that, the UN mission collapsed. Dallaire was left to issue nightly pleas over the airwaves and, in his impotence, become a Canadian hero.

A decade on, Dallaire has not lost his faith in the United Nations. He continues to proselytize for a “revitalized and reformed international institution charged with maintaining the world’s peace and security.” He clings to this fantasy despite the fact the UN’s current secretary-general personally subverted the best chance to forestall the Rwandan genocide.

This is part of a larger pattern of wilful blindness. In Shake Hands, Dallaire frequently mentions looking the devil in the face, and he appears to believe in the objective reality of evil. Yet except for one disclaimer, he presents Rwanda’s indigenous evil as the fault of the devious French, the greedy Belgians — and of course the Americans. As Dallaire sees it, it is not tribal hatred, but “colonial discrimination” that was the root cause of the genocide.

As for the Rwandan mission itself, Dallaire heaps abuse on his Belgian paratroopers, accusing them of poor discipline, drinking, consorting with Rwandan women and racism. His account portrays a commander more mistrustful of his only effective troops than of the genocide’s architects. He finds it worth noting the Belgians once “roughed up” Bagosora, elevating even the mass-murderer to victimhood.

What Dallaire has done, in other words, is to have taken a story of horrific black on black murder facilitated by the UN, and adapted it to the specious, one-size-fits-all anti-Western narrative popularized by Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore — glossing over his own less than honourable role in the process.

Given the political culture in this country, it is easy to see why Dallaire has become such a celebrity. But one hopes he understands why others — Belgians and Rwandan Tutsis, for instance — may take a somewhat less generous view.

— National Post

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