Dallaire, Lieut. Gen. Romeo

▪ 2006

      By the time that Canadian Lieut. Gen. Roméo A. Dallaire left Rwanda in 1994, the ill-fated UN peacekeeping mission he led had been forced to watch helplessly as extremist ethnic Hutu butchered thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu. Wracked with guilt over the debacle, he sank into a despair that nearly ended in suicide in 2000. By 2005, however, Dallaire had turned his life around to become a voice of conscience for global humanitarianism. In March he was awarded the Pearson Peace Medal by Canada's governor-general for his international service, and that same month Prime Minister Paul Martin appointed him to the Senate, Canada's upper house of Parliament.

      Dallaire, the son of a Canadian soldier, was born on June 25, 1946, in Denekamp, Neth. He joined the Canadian army in 1964 and earned a B.S. degree at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont., in 1969. During his career as an artilleryman, he held various appointments in Canada and Germany, including command of the 5e Régiment d'Artillerie Légère du Canada. He was promoted in 1989 to the rank of brigadier general.

      In 1993 Dallaire took command of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda. As a lightly armed force of approximately 2,500 troops, UNAMIR was given a mandate to oversee the peace agreement ending a civil war. The death of the Rwandan president, however, whose plane was shot down over Kigali airport in April 1994, triggered events that quickly became a gambit by extremist Hutu to exterminate the Tutsi population. During the bloody chaos, Dallaire ordered 10 Belgian soldiers under his command to protect the new Rwandan prime minister. The Belgians and the prime minister were taken hostage by Hutu and later found murdered. As the situation deteriorated, Dallaire pleaded with his UN superiors in New York to send reinforcements, but his requests fell on deaf ears. Confronted with an impossible situation, Dallaire consolidated his troops in a few urban areas and was able to protect some civilians. By the time the rampage subsided in July 1994, more than 800,000 people had been murdered and 2,000,000 made refugees.

      Dallaire returned to Canada, and from September 1994 to October 1995, he served simultaneously as deputy commander of Land Force Command and commander of the 1st Canadian Division. Other senior appointments followed, but he sank into a despair that eventually led to a suicide attempt. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Dallaire was medically released from the army in 2000.

      By 2003 Dallaire had come to terms with his Rwandan nightmare and published the autobiography Shake Hands with the Devil—the Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, which won the Governor General's Award for English-language nonfiction and later was made into a documentary film. In 2004 he received a fellowship at Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy to pursue research in conflict resolution.

Peter Saracino

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