Interview with Roméo Dallaire

Abstract

Lieutenant General (Ret'd) The Honourable Roméo Dallaire served for thirty-five years with the Canadian Armed Forces. He is now a Senator and Special Advisor to the Canadian Prime Minister. His internationally acclaimed book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda was published in 2003 and will be the basis of a feature film due for release in 2006 Roméo Dallaire was a decorated Major-General of thirty years' service in the Canadian Armed Forces when, in June 1993, he was appointed Force Commander of the UN mission to Rwanda. Prior to deployment all signs pointed to a straightforward peacekeeping mission, requiring modest force levels and equipment. Instead, in just one-hundred days, between April and July 1994, an estimated 800,000 men, women and children were slaughtered. Many of the victims — Tutsis and moderate Hutus — were hacked to death with machetes. Unsupported by UN headquarters and its Security Council, General Dallaire and his handful of under-equipped soldiers were incapable of stopping the genocide. Dallaire returned to Canada in September 1994 and thereafter took up various senior military posts, but he became increasingly disillusioned and suicidal. He was medically released from the Canadian Armed Forces in April 2000 due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In a wide-ranging and frank discussion with RUSI's Director, Rear Admiral Richard Cobbold, on 30 August 2005 General Dallaire spoke candidly of the myriad problems that beset his Rwandan mission, from lack of reinforcements to inapt rules of engagement; his despair in the face of UN apathy and incompetence; the future of international peacekeeping; and of his own failure to halt the genocide. This is an edited account of their discussion.