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National Post Tuesday » November 4 » 2003
General still battling own internal demons
UN dysfunctional, troops cowards, he says in new book
Isabel Vincent
National Post
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Nearly 10 years after returning from a catastrophic tour of duty in Rwanda, Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire has come to realize that he has two sets of eyes.
The first set -- he calls them his "outside eyes" -- act like a camera and recorded the horrific acts of the 1994 genocide.
The second set -- the "inside eyes" -- look into his soul and won't let him forget what he saw.
Lt.-Gen. Dallaire saw a great deal in Rwanda he would like to forget, and which has since led to two breakdowns and a battle with alcohol. Unable, he has recounted many of them in his new book, Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.
They were horrific scenes: blood-soaked children hacked to death, their bodies thrown like rubbish on roadsides; pregnant women who had been murdered, their fetuses ripped from their stomachs; the dismembered bodies of 10 of his own soldiers.
While in Rwanda, Lt.-Gen. Dallaire never allowed himself to get emotional over what he was seeing.
"We were simply putting off our feelings until later," he recounts in his book, which was released this week and is already a bestseller in Canada. Salter Street Films in Halifax recently bought the rights to his book, and plans to start shooting a feature film next year.
But since leaving Rwanda his "inside eyes" continue to relive the horrors he saw in the small African country, where 800,000 people were slaughtered in a matter of months while he was charged with upholding a fragile peace accord between warring factions.
The failures of that mission, brought about by what he readily admits was his own inexperience coupled with the international community's intransigence and inability to react to the biggest genocide since the Holocaust, replays itself in his head at the slightest provocation.
In an interview yesterday, he said mundane things continue to set him off -- a trip to the produce aisle of a supermarket sends him back to the market in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, where he saw hundreds of dead bodies and desperate Rwandans on the verge of starvation.
"When I go to the produce area, I simply freeze because I am seeing the marketplace in Kigali," said Lt.-Gen. Dallaire, who secured a medical release from the Canadian Armed Forces in the spring of 2000 after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition he says afflicts thousands of soldiers who have returned from conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Afghanistan.
"These things come back and come back and come back and they are digitally clear and in slow motion. They never go away," he said, adding he devotes a great deal of his time to raising awareness of the disorder -- a situation that has sparked some controversy in military circles.
"Your heart goes out to the guy," said Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, now retired, who commanded UN forces in Central America and in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. "But he has become a kind of poster boy for post-traumatic stress disorder. Reliving the horror is not necessarily going to help soldiers deal with stress."
Indeed, military analysts are divided about how soldiers should deal with the events they have witnessed in the field. One school of thought says reliving the trauma only increases the trauma.
"Bullshit," responded Lt.-Gen Dallaire, who acknowledged yesterday that in the years after he left Rwanda, he battled debilitating depression, alcoholism and tried on more than one occasion to commit suicide. The only thing that helped, he said, was recounting his experiences again and again to anyone who offered a sympathetic ear.
Writing the book was also a form of therapy, although it was not easy, he said. Not only did he have to relive the horror of Rwanda over nearly 600 pages, in the middle of the project, his ghostwriter, journalist Sian Cansfield, committed suicide.
Although the book's publisher, Random House Canada, said Ms. Cansfield's suicide last summer was not linked to her research on the book, Lt.-Gen. Dallaire specifically referred to Ms. Cansfield, who is one of many people to whom he has dedicated his book, when he wrote, "It seemed to me that the UNAMIR [United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda] mission was still killing innocent people."
Shake Hands With the Devil is a brutally honest and sometimes controversial recounting of Lt.-Gen. Dallaire's sojourn in Rwanda. He is extremely critical of the dysfunctional nature of the UN, and recounts how he was sent to a country he knew almost nothing about to uphold a shaky peace.
The mission to uphold the Arusha Peace Agreement was a logistical nightmare from the first day, and Lt.-Gen. Dallaire describes pleading with UN officials in New York for everything from extra ground forces to paper and pencils.
He is also scathing about some of the troops in the multilateral force under his command. He describes the racism and lack of discipline of the Belgian soldiers, and the cowardice of the Bangladeshi contingent. According to his account, the Bangladeshi soldiers would only take their orders from Dhaka, and as thousands of people were being slaughtered in Kigali, they refused to put themselves in harm's way. Some 2,000 Rwandans died because of their inaction, the General writes.
In a photograph that came to symbolize the failure of Lt.-Gen. Dallaire's mission, Bangladeshi officers rushed an evacuation aircraft "like a scared herd of cattle" when it landed in Kigali in the early days of the genocide. The photograph -- which appeared on the front page of The Washington Post -- tainted the entire mission "as scared rats abandoning a sinking ship," he writes. "Even in their departure, the Bangladeshi contingent was able to bring my mission even further down in the eyes of those who saw us as a joke in the first place."
Still, he stayed on in Rwanda, even as the UN, and particularly the United States, turned away. At the time, the crisis in the former Yugoslavia occupied the world's attention. The United States had just emerged from its catastrophic mission in Somalia, and pressured the UN's then secretary-general, Boutros Boutros Gali, not to send reinforcements to Rwanda.
"I vowed to stay there to save one Rwandan life," said Lt.-Gen. Dallaire, who could barely feed the soldiers under his command and had to scrounge water and gasoline for generators after the genocide began in April, 1994.
Today, in addition to his work raising awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder, Lt.-Gen. Dallaire works as a special representative of the Canadian government working with former child soldiers around the world. He has travelled to Sierra Leone and Brazil, where he saw children working as soldiers for drug trafficking gangs.
He is also committed to what he calls conflict resolution, and will take up a prestigious post at Harvard University next fall to hammer out a plan that would see such middle powers as Canada lead efforts to change the nature of peacekeeping.
"In the past, the UN has simply stumbled into areas," he said. "Today, we need a whole new lexicon to deal with modern conflicts. We need conflict resolvers -- soldiers who are permitted to act in the ambiguity of complex missions."
He wants to create a cadre of troops who are well-versed in sociology, anthropology and history as well as military tactics, who could be called up to deal with such complicated situations as the one in Rwanda.
"The real crime is not to learn from Rwanda," he said. "It's like raping a person once and coming back and doing it again and again and again."
© Copyright 2003 National Post
Copyright © 2003 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest Global Communications Corp. All rights reserved.
Optimized for browser versions 4.0 and higher.
General still battling own internal demons
UN dysfunctional, troops cowards, he says in new book
Isabel Vincent
National Post
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Nearly 10 years after returning from a catastrophic tour of duty in Rwanda, Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire has come to realize that he has two sets of eyes.
The first set -- he calls them his "outside eyes" -- act like a camera and recorded the horrific acts of the 1994 genocide.
The second set -- the "inside eyes" -- look into his soul and won't let him forget what he saw.
Lt.-Gen. Dallaire saw a great deal in Rwanda he would like to forget, and which has since led to two breakdowns and a battle with alcohol. Unable, he has recounted many of them in his new book, Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.
They were horrific scenes: blood-soaked children hacked to death, their bodies thrown like rubbish on roadsides; pregnant women who had been murdered, their fetuses ripped from their stomachs; the dismembered bodies of 10 of his own soldiers.
While in Rwanda, Lt.-Gen. Dallaire never allowed himself to get emotional over what he was seeing.
"We were simply putting off our feelings until later," he recounts in his book, which was released this week and is already a bestseller in Canada. Salter Street Films in Halifax recently bought the rights to his book, and plans to start shooting a feature film next year.
But since leaving Rwanda his "inside eyes" continue to relive the horrors he saw in the small African country, where 800,000 people were slaughtered in a matter of months while he was charged with upholding a fragile peace accord between warring factions.
The failures of that mission, brought about by what he readily admits was his own inexperience coupled with the international community's intransigence and inability to react to the biggest genocide since the Holocaust, replays itself in his head at the slightest provocation.
In an interview yesterday, he said mundane things continue to set him off -- a trip to the produce aisle of a supermarket sends him back to the market in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, where he saw hundreds of dead bodies and desperate Rwandans on the verge of starvation.
"When I go to the produce area, I simply freeze because I am seeing the marketplace in Kigali," said Lt.-Gen. Dallaire, who secured a medical release from the Canadian Armed Forces in the spring of 2000 after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition he says afflicts thousands of soldiers who have returned from conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Afghanistan.
"These things come back and come back and come back and they are digitally clear and in slow motion. They never go away," he said, adding he devotes a great deal of his time to raising awareness of the disorder -- a situation that has sparked some controversy in military circles.
"Your heart goes out to the guy," said Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, now retired, who commanded UN forces in Central America and in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. "But he has become a kind of poster boy for post-traumatic stress disorder. Reliving the horror is not necessarily going to help soldiers deal with stress."
Indeed, military analysts are divided about how soldiers should deal with the events they have witnessed in the field. One school of thought says reliving the trauma only increases the trauma.
"Bullshit," responded Lt.-Gen Dallaire, who acknowledged yesterday that in the years after he left Rwanda, he battled debilitating depression, alcoholism and tried on more than one occasion to commit suicide. The only thing that helped, he said, was recounting his experiences again and again to anyone who offered a sympathetic ear.
Writing the book was also a form of therapy, although it was not easy, he said. Not only did he have to relive the horror of Rwanda over nearly 600 pages, in the middle of the project, his ghostwriter, journalist Sian Cansfield, committed suicide.
Although the book's publisher, Random House Canada, said Ms. Cansfield's suicide last summer was not linked to her research on the book, Lt.-Gen. Dallaire specifically referred to Ms. Cansfield, who is one of many people to whom he has dedicated his book, when he wrote, "It seemed to me that the UNAMIR [United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda] mission was still killing innocent people."
Shake Hands With the Devil is a brutally honest and sometimes controversial recounting of Lt.-Gen. Dallaire's sojourn in Rwanda. He is extremely critical of the dysfunctional nature of the UN, and recounts how he was sent to a country he knew almost nothing about to uphold a shaky peace.
The mission to uphold the Arusha Peace Agreement was a logistical nightmare from the first day, and Lt.-Gen. Dallaire describes pleading with UN officials in New York for everything from extra ground forces to paper and pencils.
He is also scathing about some of the troops in the multilateral force under his command. He describes the racism and lack of discipline of the Belgian soldiers, and the cowardice of the Bangladeshi contingent. According to his account, the Bangladeshi soldiers would only take their orders from Dhaka, and as thousands of people were being slaughtered in Kigali, they refused to put themselves in harm's way. Some 2,000 Rwandans died because of their inaction, the General writes.
In a photograph that came to symbolize the failure of Lt.-Gen. Dallaire's mission, Bangladeshi officers rushed an evacuation aircraft "like a scared herd of cattle" when it landed in Kigali in the early days of the genocide. The photograph -- which appeared on the front page of The Washington Post -- tainted the entire mission "as scared rats abandoning a sinking ship," he writes. "Even in their departure, the Bangladeshi contingent was able to bring my mission even further down in the eyes of those who saw us as a joke in the first place."
Still, he stayed on in Rwanda, even as the UN, and particularly the United States, turned away. At the time, the crisis in the former Yugoslavia occupied the world's attention. The United States had just emerged from its catastrophic mission in Somalia, and pressured the UN's then secretary-general, Boutros Boutros Gali, not to send reinforcements to Rwanda.
"I vowed to stay there to save one Rwandan life," said Lt.-Gen. Dallaire, who could barely feed the soldiers under his command and had to scrounge water and gasoline for generators after the genocide began in April, 1994.
Today, in addition to his work raising awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder, Lt.-Gen. Dallaire works as a special representative of the Canadian government working with former child soldiers around the world. He has travelled to Sierra Leone and Brazil, where he saw children working as soldiers for drug trafficking gangs.
He is also committed to what he calls conflict resolution, and will take up a prestigious post at Harvard University next fall to hammer out a plan that would see such middle powers as Canada lead efforts to change the nature of peacekeeping.
"In the past, the UN has simply stumbled into areas," he said. "Today, we need a whole new lexicon to deal with modern conflicts. We need conflict resolvers -- soldiers who are permitted to act in the ambiguity of complex missions."
He wants to create a cadre of troops who are well-versed in sociology, anthropology and history as well as military tactics, who could be called up to deal with such complicated situations as the one in Rwanda.
"The real crime is not to learn from Rwanda," he said. "It's like raping a person once and coming back and doing it again and again and again."
© Copyright 2003 National Post
Copyright © 2003 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest Global Communications Corp. All rights reserved.
Optimized for browser versions 4.0 and higher.
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