When Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire speaks of Rwanda, his voice quickens. His tone hardens. The room he is in becomes silent as his audience can feel the emotion barely hidden beneath the general’s tough exterior. He poses unanswerable questions about the decisions his soldiers confronted in Rwanda. He spares no party – including himself – in assessing how the world failed to act to stop the Rwandan genocide. On other topics, Dallaire can be charming, even humorous, but on Rwanda, there is only passion.
Underlying Dallaire’s persistent frustration, perhaps even shame, about the inaction of the global community is a belief that, as he puts it, “no human is any more human than any other.” He believes this despite the glaring contradictions in resources committed to confronting crises around the world. He believes it despite his own experience in Rwanda, where the slaughter of 800,000 was deemed unworthy of the risk of casualties from peacekeeping nations.
Dallaire tells of a young boy he encountered on a road in Rwanda amid huts filled with decomposing bodies. Fearful of a trap, Dallaire approached cautiously. Beyond the malnourished body and filthy rags, Dallaire recognized in the boy’s eyes the same thing he had seen in his own four-year-old son’s eyes when he had departed for Rwanda. They were the eyes of a human child. In the boy’s eyes and those of his son, Dallaire recognized a common humanity that sustains his belief that no human life is worth more or less than any other.
Today, Dallaire’s beliefs are being challenged, again in Africa. Although the global community has been more active in Darfur than it was in Rwanda, the results have been modest.
At the end of this month, the African Union force that has been monitoring the situation in Darfur, Sudan, will officially run out of funds and abandon the region. Although no one believes that the African Union force is adequate to fully stop the violence in Darfur, their removal would result in even greater lawlessness and suffering. The United Nations has approved the deployment of a mission in Darfur – a mission far short of the 44,000 peacekeepers Dallaire recommends – but that mission will not deploy without the consent of the Sudanese government. The Sudanese government, of course, has been complicit in the effort to displace or eliminate the African tribes suffering the most in Darfur, and the government has steadfastly refused to accept any non-African troops.
Witnessing the lack of will by the developed world to sustain the attention and pressure necessary to take effective action in Darfur, Dallaire recognizes the same double standard he encountered in Rwanda. Where, he wonders, is the rule that says it is OK to send 63,000 troops to the former Yugoslavia to contain suffering there, but it is completely unreasonable to send 44,000 troops to Darfur? Who makes the decision, he asks bluntly, that it is not worth a single soldier’s life to save thousands of lives just because of where those who will die live or what they look like?
Perhaps Dallaire is being naïve. After all, it is self-interest that drives foreign policy, not some overriding altruistic concern for humanity. Yet, how could Dallaire be naïve after witnessing the most horrific consequences of strictly self-interested foreign policy, the most rapid genocide in human history? To Dallaire, these consequences are morally unacceptable and he has made it his mission to call the world out on its policies.
When Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire speaks, people listen. We listen because Dallaire refuses to remain in the comfortable world of pragmatic foreign policy, wading instead into the complex realm of morality. We listen because we all know that on a fundamental level, he is right – no human life is more valuable than any other. But mostly, we listen because although Dallaire has seen the very worst of humanity, he refuses to surrender hope of a peaceful future and offers us tools with which to get there.
Check out my article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal previewing Dallaire's visit.
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