The Horror Of The Genocide

"In Rwanda today there are millions of people who still ask why the United Nations Assistance Mission for (UNAMIR), the United Nations (UN) and the international community allowed this disaster to happen. I do not have all the answers or even most of them." Lt.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire

But Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire did also write that this tiny land-locked country within the greater Continent of Africa, with no natural resources and a troubled tribal-conflict history was of little real concern to the advanced countries of the world; it was just another dysfunctional African country, and the world had latterly been transfixed by a very similar set of events in Bosnia.

The Government of Canada offered up the services of one of its stars in the firmament of the Canadian military hierarchy, and that star, seeing an advanced trajectory into an even more elevated position within the Canadian military as a potential after his duty in Rwanda, accepted the position with UN mission in that country. Romeo Dallaire arrived in Rwanda as head of the United Nations Observer Mission in Uganda and Rwanda.

Under his command was a meagre eighty-one unarmed military observers. Lt.-Gen.Dallaire reported directly to another Canadian ensconced in UN headquarters in New York, Major General Maurice Baril, head of the military component of the UN Department of Peace-keeping Operations. Maurice Bail mentored Romeo Dallaire, informing him that his aspirations must be maintained at a very, very, low level.

Preparing him for the fact that the only zest in the mission, the full concern for what would occur and what might be done to prevent the worst, would remain with him; that his requests for back-up, for materiel, for needed additional forces should be kept to an absolute modest minimum. And then, to be prepared to receive much less than even that modest minimum. And this was precisely what occurred.

As Lt.-Gen. Dallaire watched events unfolding from the sombre to the critical to the absolute desperate, his attempts at amelioration, at becoming a trusted and listened-to interlocutor, failed at every level. And when events deteriorated to the point of imminent collapse and the unspeakable atrocities began, and he desperately begged for assistance from the UN, none was forthcoming.

Did Governor-General Michaelle Jean ever read Romeo Dallaire's 2004 Shake Hands With the Devil; the failure of humanity in Rwanda? Did she personally assess the timeline and the anguish and the unforgettability of human depravity? Did she consider beforehand what she was saying before making those remarks, offering Canada's apology for our response to the atrocities visited upon Rwanda by Rwandans?

For is this not the crux of the matter? That inter-tribal detestation in Africa has been, is being, and may always be responsible for the population of that Continent to prey upon one another and commit murder and mayhem, extinguishing millions of Africans from existence in the process. Where is the responsibility of Africans in Sierre Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia, South Africa and elsewhere, to themselves as decent human beings?

"The world's failure to respond adequately to the genocide is a failure in which Canada, as part of the international community, readily acknowledges its fair share of responsibility", Michaelle Jean pronounced, seated beside Rwandan President Paul Kagame, in Kigali. "I think we could have made a difference. I think we could have prevented the magnitude of the horror of the genocide here."

Might we have? There are so many areas of the world in conflict or near conflict, and so many of them exist within the African Continent. When will Africa police itself, when will Africans set aside their violent responses to one another, when will Africa take its place in the assemblage of nations responsible for their actions, and teach their tribal people that constant bitter warfare advantages no one?

By continuing to defer to African feelings of imperialist disentitlements having left them incapable of civilizing themselves rather than demanding that African countries make an effort to shed their primitive war-cultures and heritage of inter-tribal suspicion and hatred, nothing positive will be accomplished. Western countries mumbling ashamed mea culpas are absurdly self-contemptuous.

But their self-abnegating eagerness to accept responsibility for historical wrongs, and for current-day ineffective interventions in the affairs of African states only serves to validate Africa's willingness to remain in a state of comfortably-blameless apprehended maturity. As long as African can continue to cast blame elsewhere for its dysfunction, it will have no inspiration to move forward.

It was Africans, not the international community, who slaughtered 800,000 Rwandans. Deplore the propensity of Africans to slaughter one another in a frenzy of blood-lust occasioned by tribal disaffections.