Eyewitness Testimony: General Roméo Dallaire — Transcript

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1. 0:01One day, I was coming between the lines and there was a young boy about three years old,
2. 0:06on the road, and what the extremists used to do was put children in the middle of the
3. 0:12road to stop convoys, and then once the convoy stopped, then they would attack it and kill
4. 0:16and steal the stuff.
5. 0:18And so this boy's up ahead and I'm expecting to be in an ambush, and so with a couple of
6. 0:23soldiers we stop, jump out, and there's no ambush.
7. 0:27And so we go to the huts along the road there and we start looking inside, yelling for people
8. 0:33to come and take care of the child.
9. 0:36And in the huts the bodies have been decaying for weeks and half-eaten by rats and dogs.
10. 0:41And so we're going through these huts and all of a sudden realize that the child's no
11. 0:44more with us.
12. 0:46So we go back and find him in a hut where there are two adults, male, female, and some
13. 0:51children who are in advanced decay.
14. 0:53And he's sitting there in a corner, as if it's sort of like his home; he's comfortable.
15. 0:57And I couldn't figure out how come he had not been killed.
16. 1:01And so I took that child and I brought him to the middle of the road, and I looked at
17. 1:05him, and his stomach was bloated and he had scabs and flies and dirt, and rags on.
18. 1:11But then all of a sudden I looked into his eyes, and what I saw in his eyes was exactly
19. 1:19what I saw in the eyes of my three-year-old at the time.
20. 1:24They're the eyes of a human child.
21. 1:29And they were absolutely no different, one from the other.
22. 1:33They were both human children.
23. 1:39And so are all humans human, or are some more human than others?