Posted on 11/23/2003 8:24:20 AM PST by Jakarta ex-pat
Romeo Dallaire often told people that once, in the cool, misty, green hills of Rwanda, he looked evil in the eye and shook hands with the devil himself. That haunting allegory became the title of his wrenching memoir of the ill-fated 1994 UN mission in Rwanda.
According to his publisher, Shake Hands with the Devil, The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda is "a story of betrayal, failure, naivete, indifference, hatred, genocide, war, inhumanity and evil."
It is a gripping story of a clash among African politics, old colonial prejudices and big power indifference that left Dallaire and a handful of UN peacekeepers essentially abandoned in central Africa in the midst of a storm of communal bloodshed and collective madness.
It is estimated that up to 800,000 men, women and children died in a four-month spasm of ethnic slaughter in the tiny, poverty-stricken country. It became a humanitarian disaster of biblical proportions, with hundreds of thousands of refugees uprooted and left to the squalor of desperately overcrowded camps.
Rivers and streams were choked with bodies. "The crocodiles had a feast," he writes.
No one would call it genocide, at first, because international conventions require a response to genocide.
"We were in the middle of a slaughterhouse, though it was weeks before we could call it by its real name."
Dallaire was a career soldier who grew up with the army and jokes that his diapers were khaki. He was born in the Netherlands, son of a Canadian army sergeant and a Dutch war bride. He was reared on military bases, absorbed a love of soldiering with his milk and put together a respected career that took him to the rank of brigadier general.
Then, fate called. Dallaire went off with high hopes to lead a UN mission that was supposed to implement a 1993 peace deal between the Rwandan government (mostly ethnic Hutus) and a rebel army (mostly ethnic Tutsis). The peace agreement was a thin reed to carry the weight of generations of ethnic hatred, but Dallaire still argues that it might have worked had the UN reacted fast and gotten soldiers on the ground quickly.
But Washington, still reeling from the Somalia fiasco, was loath to get involved again in Africa. Belgium and France both carried colonial baggage in the region.
Canada, with bilingual soldiers, a track record in peacekeeping and no colonial past, was the ideal source for a commander.
But Dallaire couldn't get the soldiers he needed quickly enough. Belgium sent a contingent of tough, swaggering paratroopers, just what you don't need for a peacekeeping mission, Dallaire says. Bangladesh sent a hastily scratched-up unit.
The mission was also saddled with Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, special representative of secretary general Boutros-Boutros Ghali of the UN, who established himself as a minor potentate.
The country exploded on the night of April 6-7, 1994, when the Hutu president died in a still-mysterious plane crash at Kigali airport. Hutu militiamen began slaughtering Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Neither police nor army would interfere. UN troops, thin on the ground, with little transportation and no heavy weapons, could do little to protect the doomed.
Dallaire came home wounded in spirit, wracked by guilt and tormented by post-traumatic stress disorder. He was blamed by Belgium for the deaths of 10 paratroopers murdered at the start of the genocide.
The psychological demons that haunted him took a toll on his wife and three children. His military career ended in 2000, when he retired as a lieutenant-general, just months before a formal UN report exonerated him for the Rwandan debacle and praised his desperate efforts to warn the world of the horror.
Dallaire has written an emotional, often bitter book. He is harsh toward Washington, which he says turned a blind eye to the gathering storm in Rwanda, and bitter about France, which he says tried to manipulate events to support its Rwandan clients.
He is contemptuous of UN bureaucracy.
He remains angry, saying that if someone today began slaughtering gorillas in the mountains of northeastern Rwanda there would be more of an international outcry than if someone resumed the genocide.
"He remains angry, saying that if someone today began slaughtering gorillas in the mountains of northeastern Rwanda there would be more of an international outcry than if someone resumed the genocide. "
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So true..So sad, but true.
They just can't get them to say the word. The word is CLINTON not WASHINGTON.
I wonder who they were?
Granted that the US had little if any national interest there.... but if something had been done to take control of the governments when the two leaders were assassinated, no anarchy would have resulted,and the resulting slaughter wouldn't have occured. This would have best been done by the previous colonial powers.
Of course, if the aid groups to that area had managed their money, the killers wouldn't have been able to siphon it off and buy all of those weapons they had stockpiled.
The same thing happened in Somalia; once the US Navy had to hand over the relief program to UN control, the aid program went from a success to a failure. It became the resource through which the warlord Aidid gained power.
But the Clinton Admin and Maddie Albright were too busy patting themselves on the back for putting US troops under UN command.
US troops in Mogadishu were killed and the remainder rescued by Malaysians and Turks driving Pakistani tanks. So much for US backup... we then ran away to save Clinton's poll numbers.
The Clinton admin simply didn't have enough support to do anything even had it chosen to; it had shot the wad of goodwill long ago because of its corruption and Americans didn't feel comfortable with Clinton sending US troops anywhere. We were never sure if he would follow through and win- if anything, we were convinced the Clinton admin wouldn't just bungle any action- we were certain the administration would DELIBERATELY bungle it.
Even today, aside from maybe Lieberman, do the Democrat candidates look like they want to WIN the war on terror, or surrender to it?
That's what always happens.
And those who complained about inaction in Rwanda are often the very same people who complain about US action elsewhere.
The Western world doesn't have the stomach to watch what kids with weapons can be trained to do, but then it also doesn't have the stomach to do what is neccessary to stop it once it happens, turning instead against those who are trying to stop it.
No, these were, in fact, the very weapons that were stackpiled: machetes.
It still supports the idea that, if you want to kill people, guns are not necessary.
I will look for his book.
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