Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Genocide's horrors still live within Canada's Dallaire
Receives top honour from Holocaust museum
By: Melinda Henneberger
Posted: 05/4/2014 1:00 AM | Comments: 0
WASHINGTON -- Twenty years after the Rwandan genocide he tried to stop
and stayed to witness, Roméo Dallaire still has gory flashbacks.

Sen. Romeo Dallaire (PATRICK DOYLE / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES)
In an interview before the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum dinner last
week at which he received the museum's highest honour, the Elie Wiesel
Award, the former commander of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda
talked about the times his post-traumatic stress disorder has made him
relive the slaughter.
A dozen years ago, Dallaire said, he saw a street vendor in Sierra
Leone raise a machete to chop a coconut in two and "went absolutely
(berserk)" at the sight of the weapon that had been wielded with such
efficiency in the massacre of more than 800,000 people in only 100
days. "It took three guys to hold me down and for 15 minutes I (was)
reliving the genocide'' in vivid detail.
At his home in Ottawa on Easter last year, his toddler granddaughter
fell and hit her head on a coffee table. "Everybody else leapt to
their feet to help her, but I couldn't move," he said. Because in
1994, "I saw hundreds of children killed,'' many of them by soldiers
who were only children themselves. And at the sound of the little
girl's cry, "they all came back.'' It took him three weeks to dare to
pick her up again, for fear that if she cried, he might freeze and
drop her.
Only a few months ago, in December, he dozed off at the wheel one
morning en route to Parliament, where he serves as a senator, after a
sleepless night of flashbacks triggered by a rash of suicides by
Canadian veterans of the war in Afghanistan. "I'd argued we should
have been much more proactive'' in treating and supporting the vets,
but once again, he said, his warnings had been ignored.
The Nick Nolte character in Hotel Rwanda was based on Dallaire,
although he has said the film was truer to Hollywood than to Kigali.
The Holocaust museum's website praises him as someone who in Rwanda
"did his utmost to warn the United Nations of the potential outbreak
of large-scale ethnic violence. Even when his warnings were went
unheeded, he refused to give in to international apathy. He
continually called for the use of force, and although unable to stop
the atrocities, he and his unit nevertheless managed to protect more
than 30,000 lives."
In Greek mythology, Cassandra had the gift of seeing the future but
the curse of never being believed. And although real-world Cassandras
are more often avoided than honoured, "that's exactly our job at the
museum,'' said its director, Sara Bloomfield, to hold up to the light
the actions that "could have made history different" -- in Europe in
the 1930s, Rwanda in the 1990s and in the Central African Republic
right now. Muslims in CAR are being targeted by Christian-dominated
militias intent on answering atrocities attributed to a
Muslim-dominated former government.
"We could smell what's happening now in the CAR four years ago,''
Dallaire said, because the recruitment of child soldiers "is a
telltale sign, because they can be pushed beyond the limits" of most
adults, "that a place is going to go to massive abuses."
The world has learned a lot in the past 20 years about the precursors
of genocide, and Dallaire's work focuses on how to pull child
soldiers, 40 per cent of whom are girls, out from under the control of
those who've scared and manipulated them into service. Yet in some
ways, he says, we've gone backward since then.
"What hasn't changed is there's no political will" to head off
atrocities. "So we're still stuck with politicians willing to manage
these problems, instead of statesmen" who could prevent them.
At 67, the Dutch-born Dallaire says he's trying to "make therapy 'in.'
" The author of the books Shake Hands With the Devil and They Fight
Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children, he's now working on a book
about his PTSD. He says people continue to struggle with understanding
it because "the developed world is very visual, very Cartesian. If
you're shot... you can see that, and it's an honourable injury. But
the guy in the corner who's moody and getting drunk every night has an
injury that's perceived as not as honourable."
Dallaire, who is in his 14th year of therapy, no longer drinks, and he
takes nine pills every day, including antidepressants and "something
that stops me from dreaming.''
Isn't that a loss, too? "Your greatest enemy is the night, so you pray
for first light,'' he said, but yes, there's a trade-off involved in
suppressing nightmares because "the psychologists need those dreams to
help you move on."
At the dinner, UN ambassador Samantha Power, who wrote a Pulitzer
Prize-winning book about the Rwandan genocide, said she was grateful
for the "chance to give one of my heroes an award named for another of
my heroes," Wiesel, an activist and author who survived the Auschwitz,
Buna and Buchenwald concentration camps.
Honoring Dallaire, Power said, was one way to remind the world of a
time in which a congresswoman noted she was getting a bunch of calls
about the threats to Rwanda's famed gorillas, "but no calls about the
people."
Though, today, too, Syrian President Bashar Assad "is deliberately
targeting his own people, denying civilians food and practising
systematic torture, we must not give up" on efforts to feed the
starving and end the bloodshed, she said.
"You, General,'' Power said before slipping the medal around his neck,
"have stood between killers and their prey" and "were doing your job
when no one else was willing to do theirs."
Escorted to the lectern by Holocaust survivor Nesse Godin, Dallaire
accepted the award "in the name of the 454 African soldiers and 11
Canadians who stayed when everyone else left."
-- Washington Post-Bloomberg
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 4, 2014 A16
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/canada/genocides-horrors-still-live-within-canadas-dallaire-257833821.html?device=mobile
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