DEALING WITH HORROR
Some three decades later, Roméo Dallaire continues to carry psychological scars of massacre in Rwanda
I'm disgusted, absolutely disgusted (with the situation in the Middle East). There is no talk of lasting peace. What we're ending up with is generational war.
Roméo Dallaire
The Peace: A Warrior's Journey
Roméo Dallaire
With Jessica Dee Humphreys
Random House Canada
The horror of Rwanda will never leave retired Canadian general Roméo Dallaire.
It's 30 years since he served as force commander of a United Nations peace mission to that troubled African country, 30 years since his tiny contingent watched helplessly as civil war led to the bloody massacre of 800,000 human beings.
Dallaire still carries the psychological scars of that catastrophe. So it's not surprising that moments of intense anger flare up in his new book, The Peace, which explores the repeated failure of conflict resolution initiatives around the world and calls for a new and more humane approach — one dedicated to measures that are preventive rather than reactive.
On the broader canvas of international power politics, Rwanda didn't count.
In his darkest moments, Dallaire would rage that had the country's mountain gorilla population been at risk, he would have received more support from the international community than he did for the nearly one million Rwandans whose lives were in jeopardy. The brush-offs he received took many forms, but they ultimately reflected an expression of disinterest that he paraphrases in this way: “We just need to step back and let them slaughter each other for a few weeks.” And his anger remains palpable when he remembers then French president François Mitterrand's infamous observation that “in countries like that, genocide is not important.”
Dallaire's most recent session with his psychiatrist came only a few weeks ago. “We've been working together for 25 years,” he tells Postmedia from his home near Quebec City. For him, it's been a long process of recovery. In Rwanda, he has seen the UN'S commitment to peace disintegrate and his own mission collapse into what he has frequently termed “the hell of genocide.” So he himself paid a price — PTSD, suicide attempts, his own emergence as a casualty of war.
“I was medically released from the forces in 2000,” he says now — and the admission comes across as a simple statement of fact. But it was during his own prolonged healing process that his humanitarian concerns mounted.
“Coming out of therapy I found myself thinking about war — but not in the sense that we normally understand it, of big armies against big armies.” Dallaire became convinced “of the need for a new set of skills, a whole new conceptual framework” for addressing conflict.
He has a subtitle for this book, his fourth: “A Warrior's Journey.” And the journey he chronicles is one of change and evolution. He started his military career as a classic warrior with a belief in classic warfare: NATO and the UN might exist, but in the Cold War years, there remained an entrenched belief in “the use of military force and power to establish stability and peace.” But then came Rwanda.
Dallaire, now 77, has achieved a distinguished post-military career — member of the Canadian Senate, bestselling author, human rights advocate. He's become a different kind of warrior, contemptuous of the military macho image traditionally identified with the word, and prepared to question hallowed precepts.
His call for a revolution in political and military thinking comes at a time of growing international unrest. “We are more ineffective now in trying to prevent conflicts than we were 30 years ago with Rwanda,” he says bluntly.
So he is calling for new ” strategic solutions for our present-day purgatory — a new conceptual framework for conflict prevention.”
His concern is “peacemaking” — a long-hallowed ideal that is starting to fray at the edges.
“People keep talking about peace but we're not having peace,” he tells Postmedia.
“There are simply truces that give a certain security, but there's always a nagging fear that something else will happen. So the challenge is how to prevent conflict in the context of how we're living, now and in the future.”
As far as Dallaire is concerned, it's folly in most cases to equate a truce with peace. “The frictions ultimately continue and are very often preyed on by forces seeking ultimate gain,” he says.
The Middle East provides a horrific example. His new book was approaching its final stage of publication last autumn when war erupted as a result of Hamas's bloody attack on Israel. He's appalled at what's been happening.
“I'm disgusted, absolutely disgusted,” Dallaire exclaims. “There is no talk of lasting peace. What we're ending up with is generational war. The kids now in the midst of this conflict will carry it with them as they move into adulthood, and that will just keep this thing going.
“The Middle East is crucial to lasting peace, but there can't be change through the continuing use of force by either side or by abuse of human rights and other conventions we've been working for years to establish — including an end to the use of children as instruments of war. We can achieve nothing if we're all of a sudden going at each other to kill, to destroy, to slaughter, to make people suffer just to try and gain an upper hand.”
Dallaire looks back with unease to the era of legendary U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, whose view of power politics was to carry a big stick. “The fundamental premise he had for peace in the world was to maintain the balance of power and I was starting to say to myself that this was wrong because it's always keeping the world on edge. That's not a system that gives you lasting peace. What you now see is that nations have gone back to these absolutely stupid horrific abuses ... and now Putin is threatening to use tactical nukes in Ukraine. To me, the premise of peace does not rest on these monstrous capabilities based on power. To me, that will never bring peace.”
Yet he's also a realist: the use of force is sometimes necessary, but with it must come a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of a situation.
“In Rwanda, I discovered that the conflicts were so complex and ambiguous and grounded not only in political and economic issues but in cultural bigotries that they went beyond simple attempts to find a solution.
“There was a need to go deeper and determine what we could do to change frictions and in so doing bring lasting peace. So I'm not saying there is never a need for the use of force — we're not yet at a time for getting rid of it.”
Dallaire fervently believes that such a time can come — but that it will require a collective effort on the part of human beings, one that goes beyond the political and military. He has great faith in the world's new generation of young people — “I call them a generation without borders ... more global in their thinking ... capable of reaching sustained solutions.”
Furthermore women must be “fully integrated” into the process. “Everything we have today is based on male egocentricity, hubris misogyny ...”
And how long will this take? “I totally believe we can move to a higher plane of what humanity and lasting peace can be. Yes, it might take a couple of centuries, but what the hell? What's a couple of centuries when we've been fighting each other for 2,000 years?”