Lt.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general who commanded UN peacekeepers during the horrors in Rwanda in the early 1990s, won a Governor General's literary award today for his account of the experience, entitled Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.
The citation called his entry, the winner of the non-fiction English prize, "a book of singular importance and courage in the voice of the principal witness of the Rwandan tragedy."
A decade ago, UN authorities ignored Dallaire's warnings of an impending genocide of the minority Tutsi population by the country's Hutus, and a massacre claimed the lives of 800,000 men, women and children.
"Out of his own experience, Romeo Dallaire has written a brave cautionary tale for our hard and selfish times," said the citation from the Canadian Council for the Arts for Dallaire, who has begun a fellowship at Harvard where he's writing about conflict resolution.
Last Christmas, I bought Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. I really wanted to read this book. I bought this book and I looked forward to reading it over the holidays. I started reading the book and got to 3/8th of the way into it and I have never been able to finish. It was well written but I grew increasingly frustrated with the decisions Lt.-General Dallaire made during his time leading the Rwanda peacekeeping mission; too much the politician and not enough the general.
Perhaps I am not being fair to Lt.-General Romeo Dallaire but I want my generals to act and to lead, not plead their case before acting. He has information about a large illegal arms cache. Go confiscate it before those very same weapons are turned against your men or the people you are trying to keep the peace for. Then send a message to the UN that you have confiscated a large arms cache and destroyed the weapons and the peace has been saved. Don’t ask the UN for permission to act as the commander in charge – you’re the one in the field.
I freely admit that I have a certain kind of fondness for generals who act, and act boldly. One of the things I always like about Ariel Sharon’s time was his insistence on acting, and often contrary to central command. He was very much the general on the field and not in the tent. If not for his boldness in the Sinai in 1973, the Israelis would not have crossed the Sinai and the entire Egyptian Third Army would not have been cut off and completely surrounded. The road to Cairo would not have been open and the State of Israel might have been nothing more than a foot note in the history of the world.
Perhaps, one day I will finish the book and I will have a different opinion of Lt.-Gen. Dallaire, who knows, perhaps he will surprise me yet.
7 comments:
I hate to slag a Canadian officer, but I tend to agree with you Kate. All of Dallaire's public pronouncements have led me to believe he was the attitudinal opposite of guys like MG Lewis MacKenzie (Ret). MacKenzie was stuck with similar do-nothing bureaucrats in charge while he was in Sarajevo, but he usually found a way to act first and then strong-arm the UN bureaucracy into seeing things his way. His biography, Peacekeeper is also excellent.
Y'all are saying, win first and let them court-martial you later, right? (And most of the time, they won't.)
Works for me -- most of the time. (In those two examples, yes -- Sharon was perfectly right and Dallaire should have acted.)
Other times, not so much -- think of MacArthur and the Korean War. He went against Truman's orders and his actions got the Chinese involved.
Much more complicated situations, sometimes. But... I guess that's why we have generals and not just standing orders.
Yep, that about sums it up. If you win, all is forgiven, lose and you could end up (today anyways) at the ICC -
I agree that wasn't the coolest move of MacArthur but he made more right decisions to act than wrong decisions. Same with Sharon, in the Sinai, he was right to act directly against orders. If I recall correctly he blew off the Command by telling them he didn't have the time to discuss why they were wrong as he had to catch a tank and save Israel...
Then there is the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon...refugee camp. Seemed like a good idea to let your allies go in and clear out any holdovers...bad decision. But, faced with that same situation, I very well might have played it the same way. Israelis going into that camp and clearing out any PLO holdouts surrounded by civilians....its a recipe for disaster, if nothing else a publicity disaster - remember Israel's only ally, the US, and they weren't too happy with how the Israelis had been acting unilaterially. Iraq, then Lebanon.
It is my personal opinion that the reason the Dallaire has so much of a problem with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) is due to the fact that he failed to act when he should have and damn the torpedoes.
Most Canadian military officers are inculcated with this sense of act first. For whatever reason, Dallaire did not, and a large part of his cognative dissonance stems from the fact that he betrayed the very essence of what he is.
Of course, this in only a personal theory, and I have no more information than anyone else.
It is my personal opinion that the reason the Dallaire has so much of a problem with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) is due to the fact that he failed to act when he should have and damn the torpedoes.
Most Canadian military officers are inculcated with this sense of act first. For whatever reason, Dallaire did not, and a large part of his cognative dissonance stems from the fact that he betrayed the very essence of what he is.
Of course, this in only a personal theory, and I have no more information than anyone else.
Canadian generals have been conditioned over the past 20-30 years to not take a decision or act beyond the guidelines set for them by the government or the UN. A retired officer I asked about this once said basically that Canadian generals now are not allowed to blow their noses unless there is an ADM (Assistant Deputy Minister) there to make sure they blow it in the prescribed manner and dispose of the tisse in an environmentally friendly fashion. That Dallaire let things go was not entirely his fault: it was just how he was taught to do things. When he did try to act beyond his mandate, he had the best troops he had taken away by the Belgians. And then, after the war, the Belgians tried to hold him personally responsible for their men dying... Not a sequence of events that will teach other officers to be bolder...
If this is rampant among the Canadian Generals, then let us give thanks that it is not 1939.
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