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Encounter: The Rwanda Witness
April 4, 2004
By GUY LAWSON
For seven days in February, Rom�o Dallaire, the Canadian
general who commanded the United Nations peacekeeping
forces in Rwanda 10 years ago, sat on a witness stand in a
small courtroom in Arusha, Tanzania. Dallaire had served in
Rwanda during one of the worst massacres in modern history.
In 100 days, some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus viewed as
sympathetic to them were murdered, and Dallaire was
powerless to stop it. During those months, his waking hours
were a living nightmare. The bodies were everywhere, strewn
in fields and latrines and stacked in neat rows next to the
road as if someone were keeping score. Countless times,
Dallaire had to get out of his four-by-four and move
remains from the middle of the road to avoid driving over
them. Denied authority by the United Nations to intervene,
Dallaire tried to broker a cease-fire, protect the
innocent, prick the world's conscience through the media.
But his real mission, it came to pass, was personally far
more devastating -- to be a witness.
The general had returned to Africa to testify against Col.
Theoneste Bagosora at the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda. The war-crimes tribunal has been working in
obscurity for nine years, but no defendant has been as
significant as Bagosora, who was the second in command at
the Ministry of Defense and is accused of being a
mastermind behind the genocide. Dallaire recently published
an account of that time called ''Shake Hands With the
Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.'' One of the
devils was Bagosora.
At the trial, Dallaire kept a small pill case on the table
in front of him, so he would remember to take the
medications he now relies upon to control anxiety and
depression. He sat at attention behind thick bulletproof
glass and gazed straight ahead to avoid enraging himself by
looking at Bagosora. His manner was blunt and precise, but
he was given to long and complicated answers, as if any
elision or missed detail might do an injustice to the past.
Apart from a few reporters and the occasional curious
tourist, the two rows of seats reserved for spectators
remained empty as defense lawyers tried to suggest that
there had been no genocide at all. The world, it seemed,
had forgotten what happened in Rwanda. Dallaire had not.
The events of those 100 days, which will be commemorated in
Rwanda this month, have haunted Dallaire. He is now 57,
married with three grown children, and he keeps a busy
schedule giving speeches and promoting his book, which is a
best seller in Canada. He has been approached twice to run
for political office. His official job now is adviser on
war-affected children to the Canadian government, but he
has influence far beyond his bureaucratic-sounding title.
He has turned himself into a self-appointed ambassador of
memory for the forgotten wars of the world.
Dallaire came to Rwanda in 1993 on a peacekeeping mission.
Although a three-star general in the Canadian Army, he had
no combat experience and was thrilled, when he arrived, to
undertake his first foreign command. It quickly became
apparent, though, that the peace brokered between Tutsi
rebels and the Hutu-dominated government was in trouble. On
the night of April 6, 1994, a plane carrying the president
of Rwanda was shot out of the sky over Kigali, the capital.
Dallaire and most observers say the massacre that followed
was not the result of the chaos of war but a deliberate
plan to extinguish the Tutsi minority and any Hutu who
believed in coexistence -- to murder the very idea of
living together.
Dallaire testified in Arusha that he considered Bagosora
''the kingpin'' of the genocide. Three months before the
plane crash, an informant told Dallaire that hit lists of
Tutsis and moderate Hutus were being drawn up. On the night
of the crash, government soldiers and irregulars in Kigali
went door to door with lists, murdering the inhabitants,
just as foretold. Calls came in to the United Nations
mission pleading for protection, including one from a
politician Dallaire had befriended; he was killed while on
the line. The general sent 10 Belgian soldiers to guard the
prime minister. She was murdered at a United Nations
compound, and the Belgians disappeared.
Trying to find out what had happened to his peacekeepers,
Dallaire testified, he went to see Bagosora. Dallaire was
told that the colonel was at lunch, so he waited for him to
return. ''I had never found somebody so calm and at ease
with what was going on,'' Dallaire told the tribunal.
Bagosora received calls and shuffled papers while saying he
wanted to save the peace process. It was as if he was on
another planet, Dallaire remembered, as if the violence
running wild in the streets wasn't happening -- or as if he
knew exactly what was going on. ''It was surreal,''
Dallaire testified. ''It dawned on me then that the plan
was moving.'' That night, he was taken to a morgue, where
he saw the mutilated bodies of the Belgian peacekeepers.
Months before the killing began, Dallaire had contacted his
United Nations superiors in New York, requesting permission
to undertake deterrent operations; seven times he asked,
and seven times he was turned down. Not many months
earlier, dead American soldiers were being dragged through
the streets of Somalia. There was no stomach at the United
Nations or in the Clinton administration for a mission that
might risk more Western casualties for a humanitarian
cause. Now as the killing grew fiercer, Dallaire's force
was cut from 2,600 to 450. His request that the United
States jam the radio signal of the extremist Hutu radio
station inciting its listeners to murder Tutsis was not
acted upon. Dallaire's only order from New York was to
evacuate foreigners.
During that period, he was in constant motion, operating on
adrenaline and desperation. Alone with his thoughts in the
darkness of the African night, caught all day in duplicity
and indecision and murder, he felt despair steal over his
body. He would shake his security detail and roam alone in
his jeep, taunting fate. Maybe he'd run into an ambush or a
land mine or a roadblock manned by armed teenagers, drunk
on banana beer, who had heard the radio broadcasts urging
listeners to kill the Canadian general with the mustache.
Dallaire left Rwanda that summer, after the genocide ended.
He returned to Canada, where he was promoted to deputy
commander of the Canadian Army, and to a seemingly normal
life, but the spirits followed him. Back in the gray
government town of Ottawa, he was too afraid even to go
into his bedroom. He moved office furniture into his living
room, and he slept, when he slept, passed out at his desk.
It was then that he dreamed. He would be in a valley. ''I
would literally be up to my waistline in bodies,'' he
recalled. ''I would have my hands spread out, to the sky,
and my whole body would be red with blood.'' In his dreams,
he couldn't move for fear of stirring the bodies. ''And
you're trapped. You're trapped and you're trapped and
you're trapped, and all of a sudden you wake up
screaming.''
He started taking wild, suicidal risks again. He steered
his Jetta toward concrete barriers on the drive between
Ottawa and Montreal. He worked and worked, trying to avoid
even a moment's pause, sometimes becoming incoherent from
exhaustion. A military doctor told him he was working
himself to death.
Dallaire remembered that he was aware he was out of
control, a kind of disassociation he likened to watching
himself through two different sets of eyes. ''Your inner
eyes are very conscious but your outside eyes have gone
nuts,'' he said. ''I'd get mad at home, just for a word,
and I'd get into a rage. My inner eyes would say, 'Stop it,
stupid, the kids are scared, it's not a big thing.'
However, my outside eyes were getting madder and madder and
madder, and I couldn't stop it.''
Dallaire was put on medical leave and left the army, but
his descent continued until April 2001, when he went to the
river in Ottawa, determined to throw himself in, only to be
found, drunk and passed out, on a park bench. His collapse
made him famous in Canada. He started therapy in earnest
and talked openly about his demons. Here was a man who
tried to do the right thing in Rwanda and was willing to
say what it had cost him. He said the genocide had not been
inevitable, and his conscience would not allow him to move
on, or forgive.
On the streets in Canada, Dallaire is often stopped by
strangers who want to shake his hand and thank him, who
describe him as a hero. The adulation embarrasses him. A
hero throws himself on a grenade to save the lives of his
comrades, he told me. He said he had argued with his
therapist about his refusal to allow himself comfort, let
alone absolution. ''You can't be a hero when your mission
failed,'' he said. ''There's absolutely no solace in saying
I did the best I could. That is not going to erase the
suffering of one million people. I would find that the most
insulting, self-righteous goddamn thing to say.''
Though Dallaire was no longer in the military, his sense of
duty as United Nations commander remained with him. After
he finished his testimony in Arusha, he turned toward
Bagosora, who was sitting in the far corner of the
courtroom, and stood for a long time, silently staring at
him. ''I felt a great pressure had been lifted off my
shoulders,'' Dallaire said. His responsibilities as
commander, he reckoned, had finally ended.
But there still was a part of him that seemed elsewhere --
not just distracted, but damaged, irretrievable. ''I'm not
the same man I was, the man my wife married,'' he told me.
''And I liked how I was.'' Self-justifications and tearful
apologies for mistakes made didn't end it for Dallaire.
''I'm so terribly lonely,'' he said. ''And cold. Always. I
feel abandoned. I feel out of place.''
This month, Dallaire will be in Rwanda for the
commemoration of the genocide. But he told me that he also
has a plan of sorts to return one day on his own, when no
one will be watching. Dallaire described, in a kind of
reverie, how he will wander the country surviving on goat's
milk and beans and rice. ''I will live the life of a
pilgrim in those mountains and valleys and villages. I
would be walking the thousand hills of Rwanda. I would stop
at a village here, a lookout point there. I would do a bit
of work, help a farmer or cut some wood or move some earth,
in return for food. It's like walking in paradise.''
Dallaire still can't sleep without pills; the spirits come
back often and without warning, but he knows that his
suffering can never compare with all of the innocent people
who died. ''Maybe going back I'll find some way to live
with my guilt,'' he said. ''The guilt of failure of my
command. The guilt of failing Rwandans.'' The general's
gaze was direct, as ever, blue eyes ringed by red, glassy
and bewildered and filled with terrible knowledge, and
always, somehow, far away.
Guy Lawson is a writer at large for GQ.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/magazine/04RWANDA.html?ex=1082384492&ei=1&en=b1614b7f7eb8afca
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