2014 Reflections of Hope Award Recipient: Roméo Dallaire — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:061993 the African nation of Rwanda
2. 0:09General Romeo deir was about to take up
3. 0:12the most important command of his career
4. 0:15leading un troops charged with keeping
5. 0:18the
6. 0:19peace General delir was determined to
7. 0:22keep the peace and it was personal for
8. 0:25him he had been raised on Vivid stories
9. 0:28of heroic Canadian so soldiers who
10. 0:30brought hope to Europe after the
11. 0:33Holocaust for months the UN commander in
12. 0:36Rwanda had warned his bosses in New York
13. 0:39that hu extremists were arming and
14. 0:41training
15. 0:43militias deair and his powerless troops
16. 0:46could only save the few people they
17. 0:49could
18. 0:50reach having watched helplessly as more
19. 0:53than
20. 0:54800,000 people perished in the genocide
21. 0:58we could have actually say saved
22. 1:00hundreds of thousands nobody was
23. 1:03interested in the fourth week of the
24. 1:05killing un Secretary General Bros bros
25. 1:09Gali ordered a total pull out of all un
26. 1:12troops from Rwanda General deir
27. 1:16refused so you were
28. 1:19insubordinate I no well insubordinate is
29. 1:21nice way I mean I I I refused the legal
30. 1:25order and but it was
31. 1:28immoral
32. 1:40it started with the proliferation of
33. 1:42small arms and the availability of of
34. 1:46millions upon millions of these weapons
35. 1:48particularly by the end of the Cold War
36. 1:50that were not destroyed but when it
37. 1:52really hit me was when I saw this this
38. 1:56uh youth movement of a political party
39. 1:59slowly getting being converted into a
40. 2:01militia and then that that militia was
41. 2:03armed and then it went on a rampage uh
42. 2:07that ultimately slaughtered so many
43. 2:10people I felt that I had to engage and
44. 2:14who do I engage in the problem of child
45. 2:17soldiers why not engage their peers
46. 2:20those kids are just as human as you and
47. 2:24they count just as much as you do and
48. 2:27it's up to you to be able to
49. 2:30significantly engage us into going in
50. 2:34and stopping the proliferation of small
51. 2:36arms and stopping the massive abuses of
52. 2:39human rights of those children by adults
53. 2:42using them to achieve their aims of uh
54. 2:45of conflict and
55. 2:52War