Lessons From Rwanda

IN OCTOBER 1993, General Romeo Dallaire, a lifelong officer in the Canadian army, was appointed force commander to the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, where he was to oversee the implementation of the country’s peace accord. What occurred in the ensuing months was beyond Dallaire’s worst fears. Despite persistent pleas for reinforcements and permission to intervene, the UN peacekeeper watched helplessly as more than 800,000 civilians were slaughtered in just 100 days. His recent book, Shake Hands with the Devil, chronicles his experiences there. For the last year, Dallaire has been a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where he has been looking at issues relating to war-affected children around the world. During graduation excercises in June, Dallaire delivered the Class Day speech. He spoke to the Bulletin just before leaving the Kennedy School to return to Canada, where he was recently appointed to the Senate.

Can you describe your work in stopping the use of children in war?
I’m trying to stop people from considering children as effective instruments of conflict — and not have rebel forces, and also governments, use them. There are governments — like Burma — that hire children down to 15 years of age. For the most part, people have concentrated on the socioeconomic reasons for child soldiers or on the demobilization process. We’re looking at it very much from a military/technical employment angle versus how do we prevent kids from being brought in through education and reduction of poverty. We’re actually asking, why are kids effective instruments, and what is the counter to that? There has been very little if any work done in this area.

You have said you believe the lack of media coverage of the Rwandan genocide was a deliberate decision rather than the result of indifference. How so?
When you look at other catastrophes that have happened and how the media gorge themselves on the gore, all of a sudden on this story, they didn’t care. Instead, O.J. Simpson and Tonya Harding were all over the news. It’s not that there weren’t reporters in Rwanda. The stories just weren’t getting through the editing desk. Mogadishu had happened not long before [in October 1993, 18 American soldiers were killed in Somalia], and the U.S. government was still smarting over that. The United States didn’t want to build the potential momentum in public opinion for support to Rwanda.

You have also referred to a double standard in the world regarding the value of human life? Do you think we’ve made progress since Rwanda?
Darfur is the proof that we haven’t. The thing about Darfur that’s different from Rwanda is that the term genocide and Rwanda are instruments that people are using in regard to our ineptness and our nonactions. Rwanda is a reference point. Now there’s a sense of “is it really possible that we’re screwing this up a second time?” So far, however, this point of view is still not powerful enough to influence the political side. And the perverse side of this is that the term genocide has been used by the current U.S. government as a ploy to get the media off its back as it continues the Iraq war. It’s not that everybody is apathetic — that’s bad enough, but they actually use the Rwandan exercise and the term genocide to gain a sort of political leverage and then still do nothing. Now that is sick. This is deliberate immoral decision making.

You have been very critical of the inaction of the middle powers in Rwanda and now in Darfur. Why do you think they have they been so passive?
For many years they’ve gotten away with providing a bit of support, and the big power [the United States] has filled in. Now the big power is sometimes creating more problems than it is solving, and that leaves the door open for the middle powers to move in and offer other options. There are now arguments available to politicians in middle powers to invest a lot more in international programs because of the link they can make between their security and the threat of international terrorism. September 11 has given these middle powers the catalyst for reshifting their priorities.

Given what you have gone through and what is still going on around the world, are you hopeful for the future?
Oh yes. I think that we will still go through difficult times, but I believe that the growing, maturing, and coalescing of the nongovernmental organizations and the fact that they are based fundamentally on human rights is very hopeful. Couple that with global communications, the inability of people to hide from fact, and our ability to go to any corner of the world with much more ease than we have had at any other time in the past, and they all lead to a growing ability for us to attenuate the abuses of humanity. So it’s a movement. It’s not just a little exercise or sideshow. It’s a movement. And you see it even within our own countries. Just look at how we’re more and more intolerant of unethical behaviors in our own institutions. We’ve been cleaning up our own shops a lot through the ’90s. That sort of changing nature here has made us more attuned
to the catastrophic failures that are out there still. That’s why I believe that we’re into a movement, sort of a revolutionary movement that will take years yet, but there’s no pulling it back.