Dallaire’s cri de coeur for Canada to step up
There are days when it seems that fully half the world is on fire — neighbour set against neighbour, hate spreading as fast as blood is spilling, gory video after gory video posted online — while the other is in rigid denial, cluck-clucking, offering stern words or, at best, targeted sanctions or aid.
It isn’t just the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, though those boys have surely set the modern standard for gross brutality, but also the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan; Boko Haram in Nigeria; and the escalating religious violence in the Central African Republic where, you will be heartened to learn, the United Nations has deemed the situation marginally less dire than the outright genocide other groups have labelled it.
Enter Romeo Antonius Dallaire, or rather, exit the distinguished Liberal senator and retired general who headed the UN mission to Rwanda before and during the 1994 genocide there.
He announced his retirement last month, saying he wanted to devote himself more fully to the causes — preventing, not presiding over, such war crimes and the use of child soldiers — that are embedded in his soul as a result of his Rwandan experience.
The 67- year- old made his last speech as a senator Tuesday evening. He went out with a bang.
Really, it was a cri de coeur — in places funny and modest, but fundamentally so tough-minded that in our careful and conventional country, it takes your breath away.
His message was simple: Doing nothing, or doing the least we can get away with, ought not to be an option for Canada.
“We are one of the 11 most powerful nations in the world,” he said off the top.
“We are not 69th or 70th. There are 193 nations in the world and we are part of the 11 most powerful.
“We didn’t necessarily want it. We gained it by creating a democracy that is one of the most stable in the world, and soon we will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of it.
“We won it because the youth of this nation, the young people of this nation, crossed the pond nearly 100 years ago and fought, bled and died and won victory that permitted us to be recognized not as a colonial cousin … but as a nation state.
“We paid it in blood as was required in that concept.
“That was Vimy Ridge,” he said.
As for the celebration that anniversary will cause three years from now, Dallaire sees only big chocolate cakes and a few memorial hockey rinks: Not good enough.
“What is the plan? What are we going to provide Canadians? What is the vision for us in this very complex and ambiguous era (into which) we’ve stumbled? … I do hope we will produce something that will give that intellectual guidance and focus for this great nation to maximize its potential, which it has not done since World War II. We have not shot above our strength since World War II,” he said.
Given his military background, Dallaire sees the answer in the game Canadi- ans “more or less invented” — modern peacekeeping, though I’d say the more robust peacemaking is a better fit for the world’s most dire pockets.
No worries; we practically invented that, too.
“We have exceptional armed forces,” he said, “made up of bright and courageous young men and women — veterans nearly to the man and woman. We have a talented and dedicated diplomatic corps. We have development people and other whole-of-government agencies prepared to deploy and whose ingenuity is invaluable in today’s increasingly complex and ambiguous operations.”
Yet today, he said, Canada has 43 peacekeepers deployed.
And, “Today, we have to dance around the words ‘responsibility to protect’ and the International Criminal Court, and even the term ‘child soldiers’ to protect, out of fear of having to actually maybe turn our alleged principled foreign policy into principled action.
“Today, we point to the humanitarian aid dollars we’ve given, which are never enough, and proclaim we’ve done our part.
“Today, we have more sabre-rattling and less credibility; more expressions of concern and less contingency planning; more endless consultation with allies, or so we are told, and less real action being taken, and more empty calls for respect for human rights and less actual engagement with the violators.”
Given his time in Rwanda, where he learned firsthand the dreadful truth that inaction is far more costly than action — by this I don’t mean just the human catastrophe he witnessed, but also that he was given neither the tools nor authority that might have stopped it — Dallaire believes that nowhere is there a more pressing need for all that Canadian expertise than the Central African Republic, where the crisis bears an uncanny resemblance to the situation two decades ago in Rwanda.
And today in the CAR, as was the case in Rwanda, thousands of people have been killed because of their religious identification, hundreds of thousands more displaced, and the weapons of choice are child soldiers.
Most important, perhaps, Dallaire said, is that in both places, a former colonial power — the same one, as it happens, France — is leading the international response, which renders an already tricky crisis infinitely more difficult.
That’s why he chose June 17 as his last day on the job in the Senate.
It was on June 17, 1994, with half a million already dead in Rwanda and almost a million injured and the genocide in full bloody swing, that a French politician came to his office to tell him France would head a coalition force to end the bloodshed. “They were a bit late,” as he said.
France’s decision that day, he said, “is still, for me … proof that middle powers, like Canada, have a role to play in resolving conflicts and preventing atrocities.”
Canada, he said, needs to be on the ground come September, when a UN peacekeeping mission is set to deploy and there’s a chance for new leadership and a new day. I agree with him, but that hardly matters: What a man he is.