General Roméo Dallaire appeared on The Charlie Rose Show Wednesday evening. (Also appearing was Nancy Soderberg, who shared some of her own keen observerations on international relations). General Dallaire was the leader of the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda, 1993-94, which really didn't do a whole lot to assist the victims of Rwanda's genocide, as recounted in Dallaire's memoire Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. The failure did not occur at one point, but was distributed throughout the framework of international relations, from the leaders of the world's military powers, through industrialized world leaders that Dallaire calls the middle powers (Germany, Japan...), through the United Nations under Secretary Boutros Boutros-Ghali, through the Security Council, through the Department of Peacekeeping Operations headed by Kofi Annan, down to Dalliare himself and others. Auxillary institutions such as humanitarian agencies, churches and news media also failed.
Naturally, as Hannah Arendt had occasion to note (in "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," which will be the subject of a blog posting here before long), if everybody's responsible, nobody can be held responsible. Dallaire's argument hardly makes such an error, for in his analysis there are definite levels of repsonsibility, and particular decisions that can be pointed to as leading to a failure of humanity in Rwanda. And we can see these points of failure also in similar cases of egregious crimes against humanity such as are presently being committed in the Darfur region of Sudan. As much as these failings would appear to be endemic to the international body politic, Dallaire remains optimistic--his choice of words-- that over the next hundred years or two we can collectivity place a concern for humanity at the center of international relations.
I'm not sure about whether or how the Charlie Rose Show makes its transcripts or recordings freely available--they seem to have changed policies in recent months. If you can catch the show, do. In any case Dallaire has given many interviews which are widely available online. I've made a list of some with brief excerpts that highlight Dallaire's perspective on conflict resolution in the present era, exploring the moral imperatives and dilemmas of preventing crimes against humanity, and offering practical guidance for future missions. In no particular order: Can you talk about the personal impact that all of this has had on you? Like veterans of other wars and other conflicts … you are affected by not only what you've experienced, but as a commander even more you're affected by the decisions you took, or didn't take, and as such have a significant level of guilt, of responsibility, particularly when the whole scenario has failed. I came back with and still live with this enormous guilt. I was the commander, my mission failed and hundreds of thousands of people died. I can't find any solace in statements like I did my best. … A commander can't use that as a reference in any operation. He succeeds or he fails and then he stands by to be held accountable. My mission failed and that's that. …The old theory of "you work hard and with time you forget" is a false statement. What you do is you remember the stuff in digitally clear slow motion. It's a matter of how you handle it, and how intrusive it is and what sort of prostheses you have that prevent you from falling into these bubbles of terrible depression, losing your objectivity totally and moving you even to suicide. …You want to hide, you don't want to see people, and you find solace in all of a sudden being in that bubble, even when that bubble is leading you to try to kill yourself. In fact, there's enormous solace because the pain of killing yourself is nothing compared to the pain of living with this, and it's only by flukes and by chances that some of us don't actually do it. My suicidal attempts were based on booze. I starting falling into these depressions, and I'd just drink and drink and then I'd cut myself or try to jump off things, but more often than not that was totally ineffective because I was pissed to the gills. It's only that and people checking up on me that prevented me from killing myself. I'm not the man I was, and never will become [him again], but hopefully with some drugs or medication that I take, just like someone who's got diabetes takes insulin, to keep me stable...-- that will be my life Given everything, are you glad you took the job? Absolutely. Never ever a doubt. My whole life was to command, … to be given missions, to accomplish missions -- of course accomplish them with the minimum amount of casualties or destruction, and with success. I've never ever even pondered that if the opportunity was given to me again would I do it, even knowing what's going on, because I'd say to myself I'm sure I will be able to change it. Ted Koppel:General Dallaire, this will be the last question and it brings us back to where you and I began a little over an hour ago. The question reads as follows, "Many people have forgiven or not held you responsible for this tragedy. Does this knowledge bring you any peace, any comfort? Do you allow yourself the flexibility of being human?" .... Roméo Dallaire:.... You can't just say well, it's eight years ago or nine years ago and you did what you could. Did I do everything I could? Did I have all the tools? Did I or should I, like you said, have walked up to Kofi Annan or Boutros-Ghali and throw my commission in front of him and say, "To hell with you. Nobody's coming so I'm going"? Should I have commenced opening fire? The first morning it was made very clear to me that if I opened fire I would become the third belligerent because then it's open season. But with the force I had there was no way that I could open fire and guarantee the security of my force. I didn't have enough ammunition to be able to hold out in a fire fight for more than half an hour. Those are the nations that sent the troops without the ammunition and the bartering between the UN and those nations, who is going to pay the ammunition, and in the middle of the war we had none. No, there is no conceivable way of actually being able to walk away from the immensity of what it is. You can't imagine the smell, the sounds of dogs eating humans throughout the night howling by the hundreds, of seeing children living amongst the corpses of their families because there's nowhere else to go and there's no orphanage and nobody could pick them up at the time, of watching women who are being moved to safety and all of a sudden a sniper just shoot her head off and say that you can come back from that. And imagine the moral dilemmas we had of all those people calling that morning screaming at the end of the phone for me to send troops to get them and hearing the people smashing down the door and shooting them at the end of the phone or deciding which I could go and rescue and which I couldn't go rescue. Of the moral dilemma of the soldier who is all of a sudden seeing a crowd encouraging a girl of 14 or15 with a machete and a child on her back to kill another girl of 14 or15 with a child on her back. What do my soldiers do? They're held up at the entrance of a village and they see these hundreds of people edging on this girl to kill another one. Do my soldiers open fire into the crowd killing God knows how many and injuring to go save that girl? Does the corporal who is 19, 20, 21 coming out of our same schools take a sniper and order him to shoot the girl with the machete, probably killing her child? Does the corporal simply walk away with his guys? What's the answer? What is the answer? What will you be held accountable morally and what will you be held accountable technically? If he had opened fire he went directly against the mandate and God knows what the reaction was. He didn't open fire. He negotiated and negotiated and as he's negotiating this girl was being chopped up and her child was chopped up and the crowd roared and it was finished. MotherJones: You also argue that peacekeeping needs to be redefined in the post-Cold War era. What do you see as the main changes needed to respond to today’s world? Roméo Dallaire: I think the term peacekeeping is of another era. Classic chapter-six peacekeeping does not exist. In conflict resolution, we should be looking for far more enlightened leadership, people who are far more multi-skilled, who handle different disciplines in-depth -- meaning military, humanitarian or diplomatic/political. I believe we don’t even have the right lexicon to be able to handle these missions. I think that generals who stand there and need clear and absolutely transparent exit strategies and orders are generals of the old era of classic warfare. What you need now are people who can not only fight -- because they may need to protect and defend -- but people who have a whole new set of skills in order to be value-added in these conflicts. So you need them to have more intellectually based skills like anthropology, sociology and philosophy. There is no such thing anymore as a blue-collar soldier because conflict is far more complex than outright fighting and has so many more traps to it, with ambiguous moral and ethical dilemmas. So in order to prepare troops, you need to bring them to a different plane of competencies than the fighting skills that we know. You need something far more in the psyche of the soldier. I believe that the big powers should maintain themselves as world powers, and not be the first ones in when there is a looming conflict or a crisis. I think middle powers are capable of influencing and creating more flexible diplomats and soldiers to maneuver in that, with the big powers’ oversight. Then, if we move to a crisis that cannot be resolved by the middle powers through the U.N., then intervention with the might of the big powers is required.
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