Romeo Dallaire: Haunted by Genocide By Jeet Heer Boston Globe-Ideas (April 4, 2004) Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda during the genocide that began there 10 years ago this week, never knows what sight might trigger memories of the nightmare he witnessed. One day, while driving to the beach, Dallaire, a retired lieutenant general in the Canadian Army, saw road workers clearing trees and his mind filled with images of corpses stacked up like cordwood. The memories so overpowered him that he had to stop the car and describe them to his horrified wife and children. Coming across homeless people sleeping on the street, his first instinct is to make sure they are still alive -- because in Rwanda victims of machete attacks were sometimes left half-dead. Smelling fruit in a Montreal supermarket one afternoon, he fainted; in the markets of Kigali, Rwanda's capital, the odor of rotting flesh and rotting fruit mingled in the open air during the slaughter. As the flashbacks continued, Dallaire twice tried to kill himself. In June 2000, he was found in a public park in Hull, Quebec, half-conscious and in a fetal position. The leader of a failed mission who has spoken openly about his mental breakdown and suicide attempts may seem an unlikely national military hero. But in Canada, Dallaire has emerged as something close to that. His memoir, "Shake Hands With the Devil," has been on the bestseller list in Canada since it was published last fall. And he has been the subject of Steven Silver's admiring documentary, "The Last Just Man," which premiered in the United States last summer. This fall he will begin a year as a fellow at The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "What a perfectly Canadian irony," human rights activist Gerald Caplan noted in the Toronto Globe and Mail. "Our own Romeo Dallaire is the genuine article, a world-class hero, and everyone in the world knows but him." As Samantha Power writes of Dallaire in her 2002 book "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" (2002), "It is both paradoxical and natural that the man who probably did the most to save Rwandans feels the worst." In this, Dallaire is perhaps the emblematic modern soldier: haunted by a mass murder he could not stop, caught between internal warring factions bent on manipulating peacekeepers to their own ends and an international community more concerned with saving face than saving lives. Ever since shell shock was reborn as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after Vietnam, much public attention has been focused on the lingering psychological difficulties of combat veterans. But with the rise of UN peacekeeping missions around the world, Dallaire's case casts a spotlight on what may be an emerging phenomenon: the trauma suffered by soldiers required to stand by as horrors go on around them. . . . In the fall of 1993, Dallaire was handed a mandate by the United Nations to enforce a peace agreement between the Hutu-dominated government of Rwanda and the largely Tutsi rebel forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Shuttling back and forth between the opposing parties, Dallaire soon grasped that beneath their professed interest in peace hid an intransigent desire for total victory. In particular, Dallaire detected among the Hutu the disturbing presence of a "third force," a paramilitary militia movement nurturing fantasies of eliminating the Tutsi. Egged on by radio propagandists and carefully nurtured in their resentment by Hutu leaders, a generation of young militiamen were gearing up for mass murder. Dallaire realized that he needed more than the 2,500 troops under his command and requested a force of 5,000. But with ongoing missions in the former Yugoslavia and Cambodia, the UN peacekeeping budget was spread thin. Perhaps more important, the recent debacle in Somalia, where US forces withdrew after a costly battle on the streets of Mogadishu, had made peacekeeping appear politically untenable to many governments, especially the United States. But Dallaire decided to press ahead with the mission, struggling for more than half a year to keep a lid on Rwanda's boiling cauldron despite strained resources and strict UN rules of engagement. But on April 6, 1994, when an airplane carrying Rwanda's president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down by ground-to-air missiles as it approached the airport in Kigali, Hutu extremists blamed the RPF and launched a long-planned rampage against the Tutsi population and Hutu moderates, killing an estimated 800,000 in 100 days. When 10 Belgian soldiers were killed in Kigali the morning after the crash, Belgium withdrew its 440 peacekeepers, the backbone of the multinational force. Yet Dallaire decided that his remaining troops, a mere 500 lightly armed soldiers, mostly from Tunisia, Bangladesh, and Ghana, would stay on. His famous telegram of early May 1994, outlining how a force of 5,500 well-equipped troops could stop the killing, went unheeded. While the UN and the Clinton administration dithered, Dallaire and his troops witnessed unimaginable atrocities. The genocide ended only with the military victory of the RPF in July 1994, which created hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees and destabilized Rwanda's neighbors, contributing to a decade of regional strife. . . . Though Dallaire has been an unsparing critic of those who refused to empower him to act in Rwanda, he reserves no small share of the blame for himself. "I came back with, and still live with, this enormous guilt," Dallaire told PBS's Frontline in the documentary "Ghosts of Rwanda," which aired last week. "I can't find any solace in statements like, `I did my best. . .."' A commander "succeeds or he fails," he continued, "and then he stands by . . . to be held accountable. My mission failed, and that's that." But Dallaire is already succeeding in another mission: awakening the military and medical establishments to the special hardships of what he calls "peacekeeping injury." When Dallaire returned to Canada, fellow officers in the Canadian military urged him to put Rwanda behind him. But they had not seen what he had seen. "How do you get 800,000 people, killed under your watch, out of your mind unless you are some kind of psychopath?" asks Dr. Jacques Gouws, a Canadian psychologist who frequently treats military veterans. Gouws notes that PTSD has not only physiological and psychological but also social causes. He points to American troops in Vietnam, and Israeli troops in Beirut (after the 1982 invasion), who felt abandoned -- sometimes by their leaders, at other times by their fellow soldiers, and occasionally by their countrymen back home. This feeling of forsakenness also characterized the experience of Dallaire and many of his fellow peacekeepers in Rwanda. The UN and their own governments had left them, and the people they were there to protect, to their fates. In addition, says Gouws, because the rules of engagement in peacekeeping operations often prevent soldiers from taking action unless they are fired upon, peacekeepers often stand by as mute and horrified observers to atrocities, which may help to account for the distinct characteristics of peacekeepers' PTSD. Peacekeepers can feel as though they are both perpetrators and victims, notes Gouws, "You are the perpetrator because you're the observer that does nothing, but allows it to happen. . .. They are not allowed to interfere. They have to watch, they have to hear." Samantha Power agrees that the experience of peacekeeping can have unique and troubling aftereffects that are often unappreciated by civilians. "We expect peacekeepers to be fine because we associate them with peace," she notes. That's "an utter failure to understand what people have gone through." To be unable to help those who have depended on you for protection can be "in some ways worse than war." Although Canada has participated in virtually every UN peacekeeping mission since 1948, it is only in the past few years that the trauma of peacekeeping has been recognized by the Canadian military as a problem in need of attention. In 1999, with Dallaire's help, the Canadian military prepared a video entitled "Witness the Evil" that was designed to encourage traumatized soldiers of peacekeeping operations to seek psychological counseling. Yet for all the growing awareness of peacekeepers' post-traumatic stress disorder, openness about the problem can still hold professional and personal perils for soldiers, as Dallaire himself has seen. When he testified against Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, one of the alleged masterminds of the Rwandan genocide, at the war crimes tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania earlier this year, Bagosora's defense attorney raised the issue of Dallaire's PTSD in an attempt to demonstrate that the Canadian general's memory was unreliable. Despite his experience, Dallaire has not retreated into his private misery but has made himself an outspoken advocate for strengthened humanitarian and peacekeeping missions, arguing that the international community must not be allowed to escape the kind of moral reckoning he himself has faced. At the end of his memoir, Dallaire writes, "When I began this book, I was tempted to make it an anatomy of my personal failures, which I was finally persuaded would be missing the point. . .. To properly mourn the dead and respect the potential of the living, we need accountability, not blame."