A Progress Report with General Roméo Dallaire — Transcript

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1. 0:18ROMEO DALLAIRE: ...it is I think important to realize that we walked into Rwanda, which
2. 0:23was at a time when the U.N. had about 15 other missions going on, including Cambodia and
3. 0:30Yugoslavia, which was cranking up at the time. Dayton was still in the works. And it was
4. 0:37considered to be a simple, Chapter Six mission where both the belligerents of a civil war,
5. 0:45wanted peace and needed a neutral force to be a sort of an umpire
6. 0:49And that concept of peacekeeping, of observing and reporting and not intervening, not protecting,
7. 0:58was proven to be ineffective as we observed and reported upon the slaughter over months,
8. 1:05of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans. The nature of the conflict was generated by extremists
9. 1:15who wanted to maintain power, and use the ethnicity card to eliminate a minority group
10. 1:23that they felt was preventing them in the peace agreement from maintaining power.
11. 1:28And so they literally decided to wipe out 1.2 million people of another ethnicity, although
12. 1:34of the same country, so fellow citizens. And they succeeded in slaughtering about 700,000,
13. 1:40and about 100,000 of their own who they felt were too reconciliatory. And we did not intervene.
14. 1:47We did not engage. In fact, we argued for over six weeks that it wasn’t a genocide,
15. 1:55that it was simply tribalism. And so when does tribalism end and genocide commence?
16. 2:03What -- is it a number, is it an ambition, is it a stated political position, was debated
17. 2:11as they were slaughtering them in the tens of thousands a day. The international community
18. 2:19essentially emasculated the U.N., and so it’s rather facile to say that the U.N. failed
19. 2:25in Rwanda. I made mistakes, the U.N. Secretariat made mistakes, and the Security Council made
20. 2:33mistakes. But the real source of the fact that we ended up witnessing a genocide and
21. 2:41letting it happen, and not intervening, came from the individual sovereign states that
22. 2:47make up the U.N., that deliberately decided not to get engaged.
23. 2:52And so the inaction of those sovereign states was an action. It decided not to give the
24. 3:00U.N. the resources, which meant not giving me the resources, to stop the genocide where
25. 3:06we could have saved still hundreds of thousands. But worse than that, it didn’t even try
26. 3:11to consider preventing it, because that’s the ultimate aim is to prevent it. And so
27. 3:18it is an example where we have attempted to simplify it into sort of an ethnic, tribal,
28. 3:25Black African thing that happens every now and again.
29. 3:29Well, in fact, it was a very sophisticated plan by very well educated leaders to implement
30. 3:37a genocide and did it, and it was also a very deliberate decision by the powers, the countries,
31. 3:45including mine, Canada, not to intervene, not to engage because it wasn’t in their
32. 3:51self-interest. And so it happened. And we are still now, 16 years later, in an area,
33. 3:58in the Great Lakes area, which is troubled by the impact of that genocide.