Romeo Dallaire Analysis

Senator Romeo Dallaire was a Lieutenant-General in the Canadian army in 1946. He was sent to Rwanda in 1993 to enforce peace agreements between the Hutu’s and the Tutsis. He was more or less set up for failure however because he did not have nearly as much soldiers as he needed. The inevitable happened and Senator Dallaire found himself as a witness to one of the greatest tragedies we have seen this century. The result of this “peace agreement” ended up with over 800,000 people dead and about 1.4 million in refuge. The most griping story that Dallaire told was when he was getting out of his army truck and was greeted by an eleven year old boy pointing an AK-47 (rifle) into his nostril. To this day Senator Dallaire swears the only reason this boy did not kill him right then and there was because he was holding a candy bar in his hand. The last story I mentioned brings up a very important part of this genocide. That is how to deal with little children being used as soldiers and weapons. Children are serving as weapons in over thirty conflicts that are now taking place in the world. Now the problem lies therein, for instance do you kill children who kill? Do you to a child pointing a gun at you
the way you would for an adult? Another important point Senator Dallaire touched on was the difference between the natural disaster, tsunami, and the human disaster, Rwandan genocide.
People were so quick to rush to the aide of those who were affected by the tsunami not only financially but also in several other ways. We abandoned Rwanda, no one took care or notice. It took hundreds of thousands of dead bodies to realize the mass genocide that is currently happening. Our reaction was much different to as many didn’t think much of it. Some even looked at it like, they are just Africans they always do this. Even some may have thought that since they were black that they didn’t matter as much. Dallaire can even be quoted as saying, “Are some humans more human than others?” referring to the previous
sentence. The main problem we are now facing is how to fix this for the future. There is no political incentive to put soldiers into Africa, no oil or other resources we need, just humans so we don’t take the risk. Instead we just throw money at them hoping it will fix itself. The truth is can we really expect money to fix this? How do you feed and secure 1.6 million people scattered across a country? There is also a fear of sending soldiers into a battlefield like this one in that if they die everyone is going to be pointing the finger at those who sent them there, so no one really wants to take that risk to help these poor people. We can say it’s not our responsibility to infringe upon their civil war, but when do you intervene on mass abuses of human rights? The question should no longer be if we take action and do our best to stop this genocide but how soon we could actually manage to help this people that are fighting for their lives every minute of everyday.