Posted by Hap from Canada on April 12, 2021 at 12:19:47:
Haunted by Rwanda, Dallaire leaves army
General agrees to medical release because genocide has broken him
By Allan Thompson
Toronto Star Ottawa Bureau
`I know God exists, because I shook the hand of the devil'
OTTAWA - The ghosts of Rwanda have finally driven Lt.-Gen. Rom�o Dallaire from his post in Canada's military high command.
The son of a soldier, Dallaire devoted his own life to Canada's armed forces.
Now he is a broken man.
Tormented by memories of the slaughter he witnessed as commander of the ill-fated United Nations peacekeeping mission to Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, Dallaire has agreed to a medical release from Canada's armed forces more than a year early.
Post-traumatic stress disorder has reduced the 53-year-old general to a shadow of the robust soldier who was posted to Rwanda in the fall of 1993, to take command of a U.N. force that was to witness one of the twentieth century's darkest moments.
Dallaire, who tried to warn the U.N. of the impending genocide but was prevented from intervening, was not available for comment yesterday.
But in earlier interviews with The Star, he described his struggle to exorcise the demons that cause him to twist in his bed at night, or inexplicably burst into tears in the supermarket when the smell of fresh fruit reminds him of the tiny Central African country where up to a million people were butchered.
Friends say the general who now appears frail and thin is determined to continue the battle against his illness.
``He's not going to give up, he's a fighter,'' one friend said.
``But it's a tragedy, for someone in the prime of life.''
Dallaire has acknowledged that his illness drove him to contemplate suicide. He continues to undergo therapy, and ultimately accepted that he had to be relieved of his duties.
``I know God exists, because I shook the hand of the devil,'' Dallaire said in one interview, describing how he was forced to maintain daily contact in Rwanda with Hutu leaders who had blood on their hands during the 1994 genocide.
Thousands of Rwandans who huddled in churches for sanctuary were slaughtered as death squads lobbed in grenades, then finished off the survivors with machetes. Teachers killed their students and neighbour turned upon neighbour in the densely populated countryside where local officials helped to co-ordinate the killing. The death toll has been put as high as 1 million.
But Dallaire has also spoken of his yearning to return to Rwanda.
``I mean I'm physically in Canada, my heart may be here with my family and my duties in the army, but my soul is still there.''
Dallaire, who is married with three children, is scheduled to leave the armed forces on Tuesday.
``He's made the decision to leave on his own accord for health reasons,'' a military official said yesterday. ``He understands the responsibilities that come with his rank and feels he's just not able to perform to that rank level and feels that this is the best time for him to continue with his therapy.''
He will retire with a comfortable pension, but unlike other senior officers who typically leave the armed forces at 55 for other work, it will be virtually impossible for Dallaire to pursue a second career because of his illness.
Dallaire hopes to write, give some lectures and speak at military colleges when he is able.
But always, there will be Rwanda. As testament, on a shelf in his Ottawa office, Dallaire used to keep a small field hoe that was used to hack people to death.
Perhaps most troubling is the fact that months before the rampage began in April, 1994, Dallaire, based in the capital, Kigali, had been warned by an informant that Hutu extremists who opposed a power-sharing deal with the minority Tutsis were plotting genocide.
But when he reported the intelligence to U.N. headquarters in New York - where Canada's current defence chief, Gen. Maurice Baril, was then a military adviser - Dallaire was told that it was beyond his mandate to take action against the conspiring militias.
In the haunting two-page message transmitted to Baril on Jan. 11, 1994, Dallaire had explained the situation:
``Force commander put in contact with informant by very very important government politician. Informant is a top level trainer in the cadre of Interahamwe-armed militia . . .''
The Interahamwe were the Hutu death squads trained to orchestrate the killings.
Dallaire said the informant also said ``he has been ordered to register all Tutsis in Kigali. He suspects it is for their extermination. Example he gave was that in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1,000 Tutsis.''
The informant was willing to take U.N. soldiers to where the militias had stashed weapons, if he was guaranteed asylum.
``It is our intention to take action within the next 36 hours'' to raid the arms caches, Dallaire reported. And he asked New York for guidance on how to give the informant asylum.
The fax ends in French with the ominous line: ``Peux ce que veux. Allons-y,'' which roughly translates as: ``If there's a will there's a way. Let's go.''
There was no such will.
Dallaire's fax was never formally transmitted to the U.N. Security Council - fatigued by the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia. But the general maintains that the United States, France and Belgium, the former colonial power, were informed and chose not to act.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dallaire bristles at the claims that the world wasn't warned about slaughter in Rwanda
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In one interview, Dallaire bristled at claims by officials from those countries that they weren't warned.
``They can claim whatever the Christ they want,'' he said.
After the massacres began, and the Belgian contingent pulled out, Dallaire was left to hunker down with a small, ill-equipped crew, which could do little to stop the killing.
Later, Dallaire failed to persuade the U.N. to adopt his plan to airlift 5,000 troops into the country to try to staunch the bloodletting.
Dallaire said in one interview: ``My greatest fear is that people are simply considering that a million people, black people, killed in the middle of Africa, is nothing but a blip in history.''
A U.N.-backed inquiry into Rwanda concluded last year that the world body failed the country at every turn, ignoring early warning signals - especially the now-famous cable from Dallaire - and rejecting continued pleas for aid from peacekeepers and others while corpses piled up.
The killing rampage in the country was triggered by the April 6, 1994, assassination of president Juvenal Habyarimana, and in the following months Hutu extremists slaughtered hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Later, a Belgian inquiry into the deaths of 10 peacekeepers from that country slaughtered April 7, 2021 - in the first hours of the genocidal mayhem - said Dallaire was negligent and showed indifference to the plight of the soldiers.
Dallaire maintains that on that morning he had already been advised of numerous killings in Kigali and of U.N. patrols gone missing. Fearing a coup d'�tat or descent into the kind of killing rampage he'd been warned of months earlier, Dallaire headed to the Hutu high command meeting.
When his own vehicle was stopped at a checkpoint, he continued on foot with a Belgian officer. They were picked up by a Hutu soldier.
Driving by the gates of Camp Kigali - where the Belgians were being hacked to death - Dallaire says he caught a glimpse of a couple of bodies on the ground in Belgian uniforms. But his terrified Hutu driver refused to stop and continued to the meeting.
That night, Dallaire had to identify the bodies of the Belgians and has said the sight of their mangled corpses piled outside a hospital morgue will never leave him.
``What comes back to me is the pile of bodies of those soldiers in the corner near the morgue, with a 25-watt bulb there about 10 metres away. And it was just (like) looking at a sack of potatoes piled up,'' he said. ``That hospital that night had bodies and limbs chock-a-block,'' he said. ``I've seen for months many, many other horrific scenarios.''
Dallaire was first forced to take an extended medical leave in November, 1998, and had to give up his post as associate deputy minister for personnel. Later, he was eased back into work in a new post as adviser to the defence chief on personnel development issues, a job he took very seriously when his health allowed it.
With tears welling in his eyes, Dallaire spent a day on the stand in early 1998 at the Rwanda war crimes tribunal, sitting in Arusha, Tanzania, where he once again recounted that thousands of lives could have been saved.
After his testimony, Dallaire told reporters how difficult it was to look back.
``I had the sense of the smell of the slaughter in my nose and I don't know how it appeared, but there was all of a sudden this enormous rush to my brain and to my senses,'' he said.
Dallaire had hoped to make a personal pilgrimage to Rwanda during the 1998 trip to Africa, but the United Nations advised him not to go. Dallaire is still scheduled to testify in one more trial, and U.N. lawyers wanted to avoid any chance he could be accused of prejudicing the proceedings, for example by talking to witnesses.
Dallaire said after testifying that he doesn't think his ordeal will end ``until I can see many of those places, until I can see some of the graves, until I can see those hills and those mountains and those villages.
``I have not had the opportunity of mourning Rwanda yet.''