The witness
ROSEMARY GORING June 27 2005
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/41789.html
It was June 1994, at the height of one of the worst genocides in history. General Roméo Dallaire, Force Commander of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, was being led by a guide to meet with the leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in the hope of finding some resolution to the apocalypse that was convulsing the country.
The road was pot-holed, too dangerous to travel along at speed; and when they reached a river, Dallaire did not trust the makeshift bridge to hold the weight of his vehicle. He got out and began to cross on foot. Upstream, he could see soldiers fishing bodies out of the water. He was used to such sights and did not flinch. But as he stepped onto the bridge, he noticed clothes caught between its slats. He looked into the water and his gaze was met by the empty-eyed stare of countless bloated, half-naked corpses, on which the floating bridge was resting. He was walking on a mattress of rotting flesh.
At that moment, the protective emotional screen Dallaire had built around himself shattered. "My stomach heaved and I struggled for composure. I couldn't bear the movement of the bridge, up and down on the slaughtered hundreds."
Every day for the previous ten weeks, Dallaire had been witness to the aftermath of murder: babies, women, young men and the elderly sprawled by roadsides and in their homes, not only killed but so savagely mutilated, both before and after death, that he was forced to blank out what he was seeing. Ten thousand or so were being massacred daily. His responsibility was to remain calm, detached, effective. Yet on this particular morning he reached his limit. He has not fully recovered yet.
"I've learned I can't go to grocery stores and so on," he says, matter-of-factly, "because the opulence of the odours and the freshness of the fruit and the vegetables bring me back to the terrible scenes in the marketplaces and people dying of lack of food, and distribution points where they're killing each other for food, stuff like that …"
Sitting in his tranquil mahogany office on the elegant, olde-worlde Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada, Dallaire appears utterly calm and composed. You can not tell that re-living these events made him feel "like Jesus descending to hell after the crucifixion". It took him seven years to summon the courage to write Shake Hands with the Devil, his devastating memoir of his command in Rwanda.
The bridge of bodies was a turning point in his already desperate and harrowing mission to bring peace to one of the most beautiful, tiny and bloody countries in central Africa. Rwanda, geographers like to say, is so small its name cannot be written across it without spilling into other countries. It is a land of staggering, claustrophobic beauty; a place where you cannot move without running out of breath. For every lush, mist-filled valley there is a vertiginous hill. Cars and lorries grind gears going uphill and scorch their brake-pads on the downward slopes. Quite how a population of eight million lived in such a confined space is a mystery.
In his memoir, Dallaire recalls that when he was told he had been appointed to head the UN peacekeeping force, he "didn't know where Rwanda was or exactly what kind of trouble the country was in". His ignorance was matched on a global scale. Until 1994, when 800,000 Rwandans were murdered in 100 days by neighbours, friends and family, the world had scarcely heard of it. But what was to follow cannot be attributed to ignorance alone but to stony-hearted indifference. As the long-oppressed Hutu majority turned on their privileged Tutsi compatriots in a bid to eradicate them completely, an overseas reconnaissance group reported, after a brief assessment of the situation: "We will recommend to our government not to intervene as the risks are high and all that is here are humans." In other words, there was no economic or political importance to Rwanda. It could safely be left to its fate.
It was into this climate of venomous tension and international lack of interest that Dallaire stepped when he arrived in Kigali, the capital, in August 1993. What he was to experience in the next 14 months would change his life for ever. At the moment of alighting from his plane, however, he says he was "carried away by the romance of it, by the idea of adventure that Africa represented to me".
Rarely have hopes been so cruelly dashed. Dallaire was not only horrified by the events that unfolded; he was so racked by guilt at being unable to prevent them that on his return home he drowned his misery in drink and twice tried to commit suicide. As he writes in his memoir: "I could not face the thought of leaving Rwanda alive after so many people had died."
In a macabre further twist of the knife, Sian Cansfield, the researcher assigned to him by his publisher, killed herself when they were part of the way through writing his book. Only after her death did Dallaire learn she had a history of depression. After her suicide, Dallaire tried to follow her. He slashed his wrists and legs – "every vein I could find" – with a razor, and was saved only by the timely arrival of his sister-in-law.
Recently appointed to the Canadian Senate, for whom he has previously acted as an adviser on war-damaged children and the prohibition of small-arms distribution, Roméo Dallaire is military only in his bearing. A strikingly handsome 59-year-old, he is smaller than you might expect, and surprisingly softly spoken. No doubt he is as capable of barking orders as the next general, but his accented French-Canadian voice, pitched in a tenor's range, and his occasional hesitancy over choosing the correct English word, suggest a man who is keener to be conciliatory and co-operative than to bulldoze or bully.
Yet while he appears gentle and courteous, even a short spell of inactivity is an unwelcome intrusion, one suspects, in his minutely scheduled programme. When we meet he has just returned from Addis Ababa, where he was lobbying for more aid for Darfur. The following day he is flying to Calgary. He shows no hint of tiredness, although for all his urbanity he does not look like a man happily chained to a desk.
His chin has a deeper cleft than Cary Grant's, and as his eyes focus on you with the force of an Exocet missile, it's hard to imagine disobeying any order – or suggestion – he might make. Yet there is nothing of the superman about him. He comes across as powerfully driven and energetic, but also seems vulnerable; a man who can testify to the worst of human behaviour yet remains a dreamer, an optimist and a visionary. One thing's for sure: he is not like any other soldier you'll ever meet.
It is difficult to imagine all he has seen and survived. How does he view human nature? "Fragile," he says. "It's manoeuvrable, in as much as I believe we will one day not see these extremes. I think that one day we will not have conflict because of our differences. I totally believe it. It's the thrust of why I'm still alive. As we work on human rights and we work on the respect of humanity and human beings, there is a momentum. It may take a couple of centuries, but I believe there will be a day where we will not be in conflict because of our differences."
That someone who witnessed the Rwandan massacres could emerge so sanguine is extraordinary. As he describes his time in Africa, however, it becomes clear that Dallaire has deep reserves of compassion and understanding. When asked why the killings in Rwanda were so vicious, he is unjudgmental.
"Fear," he says. "Fear overrode over a century of Judaeo-Christian teachings. Fear overrode any of the logic. Fear overrode the deepest of sentiments of attachments: children killing parents, family killing other members of family because they're from another tribe.
"Fear was nurtured by horror: horror of having things done to you. The Hutus were being indoctrinated that the Tutsis ate children. 'These people eat children, and they slaughter everything they see.' So it raised the bar from just scaring people away – they'd scare them away into the other countries – to actually having to get rid of them, because they're going to do this.
"And those who can master the levers of that, of course, override logic, religious beliefs, the sanctity of family ties … And the horror comes from the fact they didn't just kill. This was not just running through town and shooting up the place. This was machetes. This was very close. This was people seeing you in the eyes, and you seeing the eyes. And a huge blade is not a bullet. This thing projects far more fear, bloodied and so on. Or other instruments like hoes – the pointy hoe they used to strike in the head. The fear of being cut. And you know that it's going to hurt."
Those mastering the levers included a private radio station, Radio-Télévision Libre des Milles Collines, which began to urge Hutus to kill Tutsis, and even to kill moderate fellow Hutus. Dallaire himself was named as a target, "the white man with the moustache". The radio, says Dallaire, "was at times nearly conceived as the voice of God, and as such it nearly dominated people's thoughts and so they thought, 'We've got to do it'".
He asked if the UN could block the frequency to stop the station broadcasting, but his request was refused. "The Pentagon judged that the lives of the estimated 8,000 to 10,000 Rwandans being killed each day in the genocide were not worth the cost [of blocking the station] or the violation of Rwandan airwaves."
By this time, such lack of humanity came as no surprise. Dallaire had known from the outset that he would be working on a shoestring. Keep it cheap and simple, he was told. But the lack of support remains staggering. And what made things worse was Dallaire's inexperience for the post.
The eldest son of a soldier who fought during the second world war, Dallaire spent his childhood marching lead soldiers across the living- room floor in his Montreal home. He was never in doubt about the career he intended to follow. Choosing to serve in the artillery division of the Canadian army, he was promoted through the ranks – without ever seeing combat. His role was administrative and strategic, and part of it involved training Canadian troops in peacekeeping procedures. By the time he went to Rwanda, he was living a settled, comfortable middle-aged life with his wife and three children. This posting was his first operational command.
Dallaire's mission faltered in the face of the escalating tension between the Rwandan Patriotic Front – which was fighting for democracy on behalf of Tutsis – and the Hutu population's incendiary resentment over decades of subordination. He came under fierce criticism. Depending on the commentator's standpoint he was considered a loose cannon, too emotional, not sufficiently macho or overly punctilious about protocol. The French novelist Gil Courtemanche, author of A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali, recently condemned the UN mission thus: "With imperturbable coldness and implacable cynicism, the peacekeepers allowed an entire nation to commit suicide." His is one of the more measured accusations.
It didn't take Dallaire long to realise he was a scapegoat for an unparalleled disaster. The clues as to what he might be in for were, however, plain from the start, and it is perhaps a measure of his almost incurable optimism that he was not more wary.
Before reaching Rwanda, Dallaire and his single fellow officer, Major Brent Beardsley, were given so few resources they had to borrow laptops and work with a tourist map of the country. In Kigali, their tiny team of helpers was forced to work on the floor, since there were so few tables and chairs. Almost every request Dallaire made was met with silence, delays, or an outright no. Working with only a few hundred troops from a patchwork of nations, without any authority over the tribes gathering for battle, Dallaire's position soon became nightmarish. Where he had hoped to act as a force for peace and reconciliation, he slowly realised his mission was little more than a public-relations sop.
"I couldn't help but feel," he writes in his memoir, "that we were a sort of diversion, even sacrificial lambs, that permitted statesmen to say that the world was doing something to stop the killing. In fact, we were nothing more than camouflage." All eyes were turned instead on the situation in places such as Mozambique, Haiti, Cambodia, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. Everywhere, it seems, but Rwanda.
Most chilling of all is that those behind the genocide had predicted this neglect. They had judged," Dallaire writes, "that the West was too obsessed with the former Yugoslavia and its peace-dividend reductions of its military forces to get overly involved in central Africa." His bitterness is palpable: "They knew us better than we knew ourselves."
As the death toll mounted, Dallaire was sickened by the lack of response to his pleas for more men and supplies. His conclusions are damning: "Ultimately, led by the US, France and the UK, this world body [the UN] aided and abetted genocide in Rwanda. No amount of its cash and aid will ever wash its hands clean of Rwandan blood."
But Dallaire feels complicit in the horror. The guilt he shouldered still hangs over him like a pall. His mea culpa, he says, is that he was "unable to persuade the international community that this tiny, poor, overpopulated country and its people were worth saving from the horror of genocide".
By the time he realised the extent of his isolation, it was too late. All he could do was fight to limit the chaos and keep a handful of potential victims safe. Some of the scenes he describes in his book are sickening beyond belief. There is so much carnage it becomes numbing. One seasoned war observer, Shaharyar Khan, gives a flavour of the depravity: "The Interahamwe [a rebel Hutu militia, still active on the Rwandan/Congolese border] made a habit of killing young Tutsi children, in front of their parents, first cutting off one arm, then the other. They would then gash the neck with a machete to bleed the child slowly to death but, while they were still alive, they would cut off their private parts and throw them at the faces of the terrified parents, who would then be murdered with slightly greater despatch." Many paid their murderers to shoot them rather than use blades.
Throughout his unsensational but bruising memoir, Dallaire gives no hint of the dangers he himself ran. Asked about his own safety, he is philosophical. "The first ambush … I was scared shitless, but once you went through the first ambush, the fear of bombs and grenades and bullets disappeared. And the more and more you went through these ambushes, the less you were fearful. You became brazen."
Only once does he recall being truly frightened: "The night that we were going to be attacked, there was fear that we would not end up doing our job – you know, defending the Hutu leadership that we had in headquarters. I think that was a night of outright fear. But there was not any room or time for fear: there was too much to do. And that might be also a bit of a saving grace."
Dallaire's self-control was remarkable. Invited to meet the men orchestrating the genocide – he describes them as the Three Riders of the Apocalypse – he first took the bullets out of his pistol. Does he ever wonder if he would have felt better if he had shot them? "That's what I just don't know," he replies. "I haven't been able to answer that, directly."
That encounter gave his book its title. As he writes: "I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the Devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the Devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God."
But what kind of god? He frowns. "It's unusual that we end up discussing things like that. But soldiers have always been fairly close to religious structures, you're in life and death so much. My perception, you see, is that I don't go down a road of 'god of love', protector and that kind of stuff … I tend to take the position that this being, this entity, whatever it is, is one that has permitted us to be, as humans, entities that seek serenity. We want things to be serene so that we can do things, good things, that we can thrive. For me that's what humanity is all about. Even the most evil of guys seeks serenity for his own family.
"We've personified [evil] as the Devil, and that is simply the alter ego to that serenity. These frictions happen because of our differences. And our differences are physical, they're financial, they're cultural, they're all kinds of differences, just by where we live, and so on. And these frictions can go to create catastrophic scenarios in the extreme."
Dallaire's search for serenity has been tortuous. Even today, he says, "it's as if someone has sliced into my brain and grafted this horror called Rwanda, frame by blood-soaked frame, directly onto my cortex." Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, he retired from the army in 2000, and has since helped establish a more enlightened approach to the psychological treatment of traumatised soldiers. His advice on how to cope sounds deceptively simple. "Therapy," he says. "Absolutely critical. Professional therapy. There's no way round it. Medication, depending on the severity of the injury, which is post-traumatic stress disorder. And a bosom buddy, someone who doesn't ask questions and is prepared to listen for hours on end.
"With the years, none of it disappears at all. It stays digitally clear and in slow motion, and it'll appear when it wants to appear, or gets triggered by a noise or smell or something. But what you've got to do is be able to discern when these things are coming to you and to take appropriate action. And so the injury is as draconian and as debilitating as losing an arm or anything else, but the prosthesis is not a technology problem: it is a far more sophisticated and complex problem of the mind."
Today Dallaire is highly respected in his homeland. He was awarded the Order of Canada and Canada's Pearson Peace Medal, and is working on eradicating the culture of child soldiers in many nations. Perhaps most crucial is his mission to update the concept of peacekeeping. The United Nations, and the developed world itself, must undergo a renaissance, he says, if it is to wield any power as a force for stability. The very term "peacekeeping" is misleading: "A general who knows only how to fight is of no use. The general who's afraid of dabbling into politics, or politicians who don't want the military dabbling in things, or the humanitarians who want to stay neutral and aloof – all those old parameters are in fact often what's preventing us from achieving the aim of mediating conflicts.
"And that's why very often the belligerents are able to keep the initiative, because they're integrating all that. You know, a rebel leader is very often political, military, humanitarian, he's got all those things right there. That's why I don't like using the term 'peacekeeping' any more. I prefer 'conflict resolution', because it's not war and it's not peace. It's a whole spectrum of conflict."
It is time, he says, to drop the nation-state outlook that is both divisive and cruelly self-centred. There's a different perspective he prefers. "I like how the astronauts look at the Earth. It's just a ball out there in amongst everything, and there are no borders. The Earth is really a small little thing, and so I don't see how we can't sort it out. Because there's a much bigger game ultimately that will be played.
"I scare my mother when I say this, devout Catholic as she is, but I say it's impossible that we are the only intelligent beings in the universe. It is impossible. Just like I have faith, I also believe in that. So that to me is the bigger exercise that will continue to evolve. And it will bring its frictions and it will bring its resolutions."
As you can see, he is like no other soldier.
Roméo Dallaire is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Friday August 26 at 3pm. For tickets visit www.edbookfest.co.uk or call 0131 624 5050. Shake Hands with the Devil is published in paperback by Arrow, priced £8.99.
