Sois Courageux: Utter Despair

In the context of my "Hotel Rwanda" email to my faculty, she sent me an amazing reply.. Here you go:

"Dear Darshan,

... You can't imagine my alarm at reading this email subject heading today: interestingly I actually found myself glad to read this version of despair (as opposed to the one I had wrongly imagined).

My Dad is actually waiting in the car for me now, but I didn't want to leave without letting you know I got this email and how much I understand why you would feel so utterly forlorn. I have been there many times. Most human rights advocates and lawyers have (in fact I would say every last friend of mine has).

For me, the point of our being alive is to find a way to respond to the very real problems (much more horrifying than even Hotel Rwanda chooses to depict or than N&Z had the space to lay out) without giving up. There's a strong value in being an idealist rooted in reality. In my view any other kind of idealist or idealism won't last. You will never have the long term strength to fight for what you believe in if you don't confront--in varying doses--the barriers that lie before you.

Don't be thrown off by the "just pretty words" point. All ideas come in words, and all words can be as fleeting as the paper or emails in which they're written, but people give "the full measure of devotion" to make certain words reality.

Don't be thrown off by the enemies point. It's true generations of work can be destroyed "in a NY second." For me that means we have to be more savvy about our enemies and even more determined to outrun, outorganize, outwill them.

I know what I'm saying will strike you as more words. You will find the lifelong fire for such words in your own way. Trust that in your heart, mind and stomach, stories will reside to give you strength. If not stories, some other form of deeply rooted en-courage-ment.

Everything you believe in is at stake here: that's why I know you will hold both despair and courage close to your being.

My favorite French phrases is sois courageuse.

Sois courageux, my big-hearted and determined Darshan.
"

:)

Gen. Romeo Dallaire

This is the article "The General and the Genocide" by Terry Allen, published in Amnesty NOW magazine in winter of 2002. I am not sure about copyrights, but I could not stop myself from uploading it on the blog... It speaks much more about my last post.

(26 July 1994, Kigali, Rwanda: Peter Hansen (third from left), Emergency Relief Coordinator and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, is briefed by Major-General Romeo Dallaire (left), Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR). Second from left is Shahryar M. Khan, Special Representative of the Secretary-General. (UN Photo #186761))

"

Gen. Romeo Dallaire defied U.N. orders to withdraw from Rwanda. Without the authority, manpower, or equipment to stop the slaughter, he saved the lives he could but nearly lost his sanity.

***

In an indifferent world, Gen. Romeo Dallaire and a few thousand ill-equipped U.N. peacekeepers were all that stood between Rwandans and genocide. The Canadian commander did what he could-did more than anyone else-but he sees his mission as a terrible failure and counts himself among its casualties.

After a 100-day reign of terror, some 800,000 Rwandan civilians were dead, most killed by their machete-wielding neighbors. Dallaire had sounded the alarm. He'd begged. He'd bellowed. He'd even disobeyed orders. "l was ordered to withdraw...by [then-U.N. Sec. Gen. Boutros] Boutros Ghali about seven, eight days into it. .. and I said to him, 'I can't, I've got thousands' -by then we had over 20,000 people-'in areas under our control,"' Dallaire said in a recent interview with Amnesty Now. The general's hands, always moving, rose beside his face as if to block the memories. "The situation was going to shit....And, I said, 'No, I can't leave."'

The U.N. had sent Dallaire and 2,600 troops, mainly from Bangladesh and Ghana, to Rwanda to oversee a peace accord between the region's two main groups, Hutus and Tutsis. But on April 6,1994, eight months after the peacekeepers arrived, a plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents, both Hutus, was shot down over Kigali, the Rwandan capital. Hutu-controlled radio blamed the Tutsis and immediately began calling for their extermination, as well as for the murder of moderate Hutus considered friendly to the Tutsi "cockroaches." The broadcasts gave details on whom to kill and where to find them.

Dallaire and his troops were about to become spectators to genocide. As bodies filled the streets and rivers, the general, backed by a U.N. mandate that didn't even allow him to disarm the militias, pleaded with his U.N. superiors for additional troops, ammunition, and the authority to seize Hutu arms caches. In an assessment that military experts now accept as realistic, Dallaire argued that with 5,000 well-equipped soldiers and a free hand to fight Hutu power, he could bring the genocide to a rapid halt.

The U.N. turned him down. He asked the U.S. to block the Hutu radio transmissions. The Clinton administration refused to do even that. Gun-shy after a humiliating retreat from Somalia, Washington saw nothing to gain from another intervention in Africa, and the Defense Department, according to a memo, assessed the cost of jamming the Hutu hate broadcasts at $8,500 per flight-hour.

Dallaire's pain is palpable as he remembers his yearlong mission. His words, raw as a wound, make a grim contrast to the carefully parsed regrets of the world leaders who actually had the power to stop the genocide but turned away. He has just spoken at an Amnesty-sponsored conference in Atlanta on law and human rights, and he looks tired- older than his 56 years. His eyes are close set, raptor-like, but his gaze is warm and direct. "When you're in command, you are in command," he says. "There's 800,000 gone, the mission turned into catastrophe, and you're in command. I feel I did not convince my superiors and the international community," he says. "I didn't have enough of the skills to be able to influence that portion of the problem."

Three days after the Rwandan killings began, with Dallaire's troops running short of rations as well as ammunition, about l,000 European troops arrived in Kigali. The general watched with frustration as the well-armed, well-fed Westerners landed and left again as soon as they'd evacuated their own nationals. Then, after Hutu militias killed ~o Belgian paratroopers, Brussels withdrew all of its peacekeepers (the only significant Western contingent and the only one that was properly equipped) from the U.N. mission. Dallaire's depleted force was on its own.

Even as the already desperate situation worsened, Washington called for a complete withdrawal of peacekeepers. On April 21, after international pressure, the U.S. agreed to a limited force and supported a Security Council resolution slashing the force to 270 peacekeepers. U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright accurately described the tiny force as enough "to show the will of the international community."

Remarkably, with scant resources-indeed, with only one satellite telephone for the whole mission-Dallaire was able to maintain safe areas for those 20,000 terrorized Rwandans. But he could do little else, and the killing continued.

Eight years later, in daylight and in dreams, Dallaire still hears the cries of wounded children, the weeping of survivors, the voice of the man who died at the other end of a phone line as the general listened. He still can't escape the smell of death, the memories of hacked-off limbs scattered on the ground, and worst of all, he says, the "thousands upon thousands of sets of eyes in the night, in the dark, just floating and looking back" at him in anger, accusation, or eternal pleading.

With counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder, and a handful of pills a day, he is working to use his experiences to prevent another Rwanda. But the baleful ghosts remain, and the book he is writing about the slaughter is rousing them. "As I go over what I have written," he says, "more and more I see lost opportunities; more and more I see errors because of lack of intelligence or simply from mis-assessing a situation. I'd take a decision on the phone, and people would die within seconds. I was getting pressure from everybody not to use my soldiers." His voice fades to a whisper . "It's horrific because every day decisions were taken on life and death. Every day. Real people, real people."

We are sitting in a dark taxi and I can't see his face. He maybe remembering when the Belgian senate blamed him "at least partially" for the deaths of its paratroopers. Or he may be listening to his Rwandan voices. As we near his hotel, he says, "l always have people with me. Like tonight, I'll ask the guys at the desk to just check on me because I'm not supposed to be alone because it can go to extremes."

Dallaire says that about 20 percent of troops and humanitarian workers on missions like his suffer much the same thing, as do 5 to 10 percent of diplomats. "They are casualties," he tells me. "High suicide rates, booze, drugs, pornography, finding themselves on skid row."

When Dallaire returned to Canada from Rwanda, he tried to drink himself into a stupor of forgetfulness. He raged at his family. He tried to kill himself In 2000 a few months after he was medically released from the Canadian Forces, he was found passed out drunk under a park bench in Hull, Quebec. "He was curled up in a ball," photographer Stephane Beaudoin, alerted by a police report, later told the Ottawa Citizen. "I never took a photo. I felt sad for him. I thought, 'This man has done so much for us. How did he come to be here?"'

Dallaire's reluctance to give himself credit for what he managed to accomplish certainly contributed to his breakdown. Asked directly, he admits saving people, "sometimes by the thousands, you know, just by giving appropriate orders to my troops." Past and present merge as Dallaire remembers one day when he, his driver, and aide-de-camp "were making our way through a large population move in the hills. It was raining and cold because it's fairly high up. And there this woman was, right there by the road, and people are walking around her, and she is giving birth. And so, as we're inching, the child came out. The woman, already emaciated, sort of picked up the child and then fell back. So we jumped out, you know, because nobody was stopping. The mother was dead. We tried to wrap the baby up as best we could, brought it back, and then other people sorted it out."

But Dallaire quickly returns to the people he failed to save and to the limits of his skills. "Thirty years ago when I joined the army, if somebody mentioned human rights, we immediately equated them with communists," Dallaire now says. The former career officer has come to believe that, along with the ability to attack and kill, soldiers must learn peacekeeping, negotiation, and human rights preservation. That belief is reflected in the war stories he chooses to tell. Rather than tales of derring-do, he offers anecdotes that plumb the moral ambiguities of modern soldiering.

"A young officer is entering a village," Dallaire recounts. "The village has been wiped out except for a few women and children still alive [in a ditch filled with bodies]. There is 30 percent AIDS in that area. There is blood all over that place, no rubber gloves. Does the platoon commander order his troops to get in there, into the ditch risking AIDS, and help?" The question, it turns out, is not an exercise in armchair ethics. "When I asked the platoon commanders, those from 23 of the 26 nations that sent forces said they would order their troops to keep marching. Commanders from three nations- Holland, Ghana, and Canada-were saved the complexity of the question because by the time they turned around their troops were already in the ditch."

Dallaire continues, his hands alive, his eyes still, the Gallic-tinted accent of his native Quebec growing more pronounced. "Or a soldier is watching two girls, 13 or 14, both with children on their backs, with a crowd spurring on the one with a machete to kill the other girl because she is different. What does the soldier do? Shoot the girl with the machete, possibly killing her baby? Shoot into the crowd? Do nothing?"

"Should I myself," he asks, "negotiate with a militia commander with gore on his shirt and his hands from the morning's work, making a joke, to get him to withdraw his gang so I can move thousands of people [to safety] Or do I pull out my pistol and shoot him between the eyes?"

"The corporal," says; Dallaire, returning to the soldier watching the machete-wielding girl, "tried to negotiate his away through the crowd to stop the attack but headquarters in his home country ordered him not to intervene. That corporal is now an injured ex-corporal," Dallaire says, and like the ex-general himself, a casualty of post-traumatic stress.

For all the blame he heaps on himself, Dallaire also faults the strictures that bound him in 1994 and that will have to change if the world is to avoid another Rwanda. The institution of peacekeeping missions, he says, is deeply flawed. Even if he had received the political and humanitarian training the job demanded, the U.N.'s rules would have robbed him of the ability to use his military skills. With thousands of civilians begging for protection as they were hunted down in their homes and churches,

"I could tell [the peacekeepers] to do things," he says, "but they would check with their country. The troops are under my operational command, but they remained under the ultimate command of their nations, so. . . if a national capital feels that a [rescue] mission is unwarranted, or too risky, or something, the soldiers can turn around and say, 'No, I can't do it."'

Asked to name one of the countries that ordered its soldiers not to move injured Rwandans to safe areas, even when Dallaire told them to, the general hesitates for a long time before saying, "Bangladesh." It was the Ghanaians, he adds, who performed most humanely.

(Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali made a visit to Nyarubuye, Rwanda. He talked to survivors, and visited the church where hundreds of Rwandans had been massacred the year before. (UN Photo #187139 by C. Dufka) )

With the exception of the Red Cross, the non-governmental organizations were clueless, Dallaire says. "When they started sending people in, they kept sending me assessment teams. Assessment teams! 'Listen, I don't need a goddamn assessment team. I need food, medical supplies, water for 2 million people, and I've got to feed them twice a day. Get the shit in here. We'll sort out the distribution.' "

If Dallaire's anger at those who did too little is fierce, his fury at world leaders who feigned ignorance and did nothing is white hot. He cannot forget, for example, that President Clinton stopped for a few hours in Kigali in 1998, after it was all over, and with the engines of Air Force One running, said he was sorry; he didn't know.

Or that David Rawson, the U.S. ambassador to Rwanda at the time of the mass murders, waited a month before declaring a "state of disaster," and then dismissed the slaughter as "tribal killings." Calling what happened in Rwanda "tribal" conflict made intervention seem futile. U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Prudence Bushnell, who had pushed hard for the U.S. to "neutralize" Hutu hate radio, later explained to author Samantha Power, "What I was told was, 'Look, Pru, these people do this from time to time."'

The designation of "tribal" conflict also nicely avoided the word "genocide." Had a major power or the U.N. invoked that term in time, all states that were signatories of the 1948 convention on genocide would have been obliged to condemn the slaughter and act to stop it.

Avoiding the word did not however avoid the fact. "They knew how many people were dying," Dallaire says, no matter what word they used. "The world is racist," he says bitterly. ,' "Africans don't count; Yugoslavians do. More people were killed, injured, internally displaced, and refugeed in 100 days in Rwanda than in the whole eight to nine years of the Yugoslavia campaign," he says, and there are still peacekeeping troops in the former Yugoslavia while Rwanda is again off the radar. f "Why didn't the world react to scenes where women were held as shields so nobody could shoot back while the militia shot into the | crowd?" he asks. "Where... boys were drugged up and turned into child soldiers, slaughtering families?...Where girls and women were systematically raped before they were killed? Babies ripped out of their stomachs? ...Why didn't the world come?"

Dallaire supplies his own answer: "Because there was no self-interest....No oil. They didn't come because some humans are [considered] less human than others."

Nonetheless, Dallaire still calls himself an optimist. Despite its troubles, he believes that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which operates out of Arusha, Tanzania, "is one of those great potential instruments of the future." His own job, he says, won't be done until the tribunal finishes its investigation. "My duty as force commander who ultimately became head of mission will not end until the Arusha Tribunal says it doesn't need me to testify anymore, or when the tribunal decides to hold me accountable."

There is virtually no chance the international court will blame him. The question is whether he'll one day stop blaming himself. "The work I'm doing helps," he says, referring to his campaign to stop the use of children as soldiers. Counseling seems to be helping, too.

"One day after a couple hours of therapy," he says, "we're sitting there, and, you know, to-ing and fro-ing. I all of a sudden felt joy in my stomach. You know when you feel happy in your tummy? And I had not felt that in the seven years since Rwanda. All of a sudden I said, 'jeez, I feel, I feel better."' Dallaire stopped, tilted his head as if to listen to his own words and broke into a smile as sweet as warm winter sun. "My therapist let me savor that-and then we talked. And at the end of it, I said, I think I have moved from survival to living. And maybe to getting better."

The world, he knows, has not. Without the political will and institutional mechanisms to stop it, "Rwanda" will happen again.

(Terry J. Allen is editor of Amnesty Now. She has reported for numerous U.S. and international newspapers and magazines, including the Boston Globe, American Prospect, and Salon.)

The last sentence of this article summarizes the whole story of powerplay!

Hotel Rwanda

I was watching this movie, and half way through it, I wrote an email to my faculty. This is an excerpt of that email and further continuation of thoughts...

I'm writing you this email in kind of a weird state. I am watching "Hotel Rwanda" right now, and am not sure if I can watch it complete... Saw a documentary on Darfur this afternoon. Was watching "The Pianist" a few days back... For my Rotary Capstone Seminar, have been researching on the Sino-Tibet issue and watching the news videos of Chinese Police and Tibetan interactions...

Where are we headed with all of this around us?

Last year, just before I came to the States... One evening I was done with my office work a bit early, i.e. about 7:30 p.m. So, I visited my Aunt. There, I saw on the news that a local political leader had charged all the non-Maharashtrians (Out of State residents in the state of Maharashtra, implying those who came from other states) of taking away jobs from the locals and so had ordered them to leave the state. The news showed people moving out of Mumbai, at some places riots. I could not see it, so switched off the TV, and then left my Aunt's house to visit one of my college teachers. Thought I would buy her some ice cream, so stopped at a shop. The shop was owned by a Non-Maharashtrian. The moment I ordered the ice cream, I heard a big bang, and screams... Some people had come on bikes and had assaulted a vendor outside the shop. Picked his cart, over thrown it. I could not see the vendor nor did I know what had happened to him. A chill had passed through my spine. I was dumb found.. Stuck on my place for a few minutes... I ran out of that shop, got in my car and straight drove away from main road in a lane. The story continues of how I ended up calling police and how my teacher helped me recover for that moment...

My point is, what is all of this? We discuss human rights, and all the big words. But I am not sure how practical all of it is. One psychotic like Hitler led the whole world in a war. Another psychotic like John Bolton, follows his footsteps to use the same "fear dynamic" to push Americans in other wars. Then there are people who claim the divine right to rule others...

Ma'am, is it worth it what we are trying to do? Would not it be squashed by someone with just one sweep someday?

There are a few moments in my life, when I am utterly unsure of what is the purpose of this life if it is all about the struggle of existence for a few and the leisure of will for some others? These are moments when tears do not part from my eyes. I feel incapacitated and absolutely helpless...

I am not sure what I am thinking. But, whole through the movie,and the other documentaries I watched in last few days, I have been thinking of you and the class discussions, so finally had courage to write.

It is said that we are trained to take up the international jobs, like the UN, the World Bank, so on and so forth. What's the use? After studying the extensive history of the UN and the formulation of the UDHR without any implementing mechanism, or for that matter, as a tool in the hand of the big 5, what's its use? After listening to Fiona Terry and so many others, humanitarian aid also seems a modus operandi. Use it till you can, else leave the people to die...

Did I really dream of an UN job? And would I really be able to make anything work there?

Looking at the utter helplessness of UN Peace Keepers and the way army functions, I am happy I got specs at the right time, which proved me ineligible for army. I am happy, I am not in the phase where my mind would be rendered helpless by some dumb words on a piece of paper, known as "order."

I am better of as an individual, might be a social worker, might be no one...