Ford Institute Hosts Dallaire

On October 8^th, the University of Pittsburgh launched its new Ford Institute for Human Security with a lecture by Canadian Lgen. Roméo Dallaire. Dallaire’s lecture, both searing and inspiring, offered a challenge that I hope the institute will take on.

As force commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, genocide surged while Dallaire and company were abandoned by their home nations and the UN. His team’s personal altruism, resourcefulness and bravery under his leadership nonetheless, through no fault of their own, failed.

Dallaire flew home in 1994, “broken, disillusioned and suicidal.”  He was medically released from duty in April 2000 for post-traumatic stress syndrome.

He dramatically described the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in just 100 days, when more people died than in Yugoslavia over six years of war. The Western powers at that time provided support - but not to Rwanda. Why? “Rwanda has no strategic value,” he concluded.

“We pick and choose: we’ve established a pecking order,” he said. “Some humans are more human than others.”

No one came; genocide was accepted. He developed a plan for an emergency international intervention with 5500 troops to stop the slaughter, a plan that was never adopted.  He couldn’t even get $200 million for two years of operations. “We had “literally no capability to respond,” he added.

Dallaire stayed on when western officials fled. He managed to save thousands of lives but was helpless to stop young girls and boys from being forced into the killing machine. He watched helplessly as a thirteen or fourteen year old girl, infant on her back and a machete in her hand, is urged to kill another girl with a baby on her back.  Boys were given AK-47s; some were brought back home to kill their parents.

“We have no solution,” he said. “Ad hoc responses are not meeting the challenge of conflict implosions.”  We’re bedeviled there, he suggested, by a history of self-interest: colonial powers paying dictators and failing to support moderate leaders.

“We’ve entered a new era. Conflict came to the fore.” But this is a totally different classic war or peace involving nations, borders, and armies facing one another. “We now face enormous instability,” he said. “We need a new set of skills, a new set of parameters. The rules don’t work... [This has been] created by the rage of the underdeveloped world. This is worse than the nuclear threat of the 1950s. We knew who was involved.”

The rage of 80% of the world’s people, in developing nations in the East, of Muslims, and now in Africa will continue to exacerbate the situation. Potential terrorists, due to that rage, are often educated elites.

Our approach is outdated. “We don’t know the lexicon of conflict resolution,” said Dallaire. We’re “outdated in methodologies” and don’t know how to set priorities.

“The only way to build security is not to be Fortress America,” he noted. “The only way is development as the primary means [otherwise] we’ll be more and more vulnerable.”

Yet Dallaire remains hopeful that we may come to understand that addressing the misery of the world’s people, relying on prevention and conflict resolution are more workable than using overwhelming but ineffective military force.

The Institute for Human Security conducts independent research, disseminates policy papers and advocates non-partisan policy, on concerns that encompass: genocide, slave and forced labor, corporate social responsibility and human development, intra-state conflict and human rights, internal displacement, forced migration and refugees, and environmental security and public health.

A tall order indeed.  Roméo Dallaire’s courage, thoughtfulness and inspiration provided a good beginning.

- Molly Rush

For background information, see “Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda,” published by Random House Canada in 2003. Dallaire is one of  “a few humans who were entrusted with the role of helping others taste the fruits of peace. Instead, we watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed the blood of the people we were supposed to protect.”