Embraced by his past, looking to the future

His warnings of an impending slaughter were ignored. The United Nations continually rejected his pleas for reinforcements to prevent the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis killed at the hand of reigning Hutus. And while he was in command of a UN peacekeeping force in the East African nation, rivers ran red with the blood of massacred innocents. An estimated one million lives were lost.

Retired Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire has never fully recovered from these events. His personal life and military career fell apart publicly as he wrestled with nightmares and flashbacks associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. He has attempted suicide twice, trying to forget Rwanda. Once, after being reported missing days earlier, he was found curled in the fetal position and unconscious on a park bench in Hull, Quebec.

Lt.-Gen. Dallaire is using those experiences to the benefit of children affected by war. He will deliver the annual University of Alberta Visiting Lectureship in Human Rights on March 25 at the Myer Horowitz Theatre. He's in good company: the lecture series opened four years ago with Archbishop Desmond Tutu delivering the inaugural address, followed by Louise Arbour, named the UN Security Council's Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. And amidst the terror of Rwanda's genocide, Dallaire met last year's speaker, Dr. James Orbinski, past president of Doctors Without Borders.

"I know him (Orbinski) very well," Dallaire said. "He was in Kigali with me. He arrived during the genocide and we worked closely together. He took over a hospital in Kigali that had, at one point, probably 5,000 people hanging all over it."

Dallaire now serves as special advisor on war-affected children to the Canadian International Development Agency. Children are affected by war in many ways, he says. Some are displaced. Some are killed. Some are forced into sexual slavery. Some become killers.

"There are many young kids scared half to death or drugged up and killing as front-line troops. And that is a completely new dimension, actually using 12, 13, and 14-year-olds as front-line crack troops."

The fact that children are unable to handle heavy weapons doesn't deter those who command them. Dallaire is also working for the department of foreign affairs on the issue of international control of small arms -- the weaponry of choice for child soldiers. Dallaire knows this first-hand. He has seen child soldiers in action and recently met with former child soldiers in Sierra Leone.

"These are kids who are 12 or 15, going on 30," he said. "You can't settle on sending them to school and teaching them Dick and Jane. They have controlled such power that you have to give them a more advanced education, something more attuned to adult education."

He's worried that too much faith is being put in the ability of family and community to heal children who return from the front lines.

"There is reasonable help there but not to the depth that we will be able to handle some of these young people who were leaders in the bush. You see them in demobilization camps and they are still leaders and you really want them to be healthy and concentrating on new education so they will pursue justice in the world and not go back into the bush.

"There are very few therapists and a number of these children, particularly girls, have suffered rape and have been scarred and suffer horrific post traumatic stress disorder. There is a lot of hurt there that is going to come out one day . . . my experience is that they still have got to bring in longer-term therapists."

The practice of using children as soldiers is relatively new, says Dallaire, who knows it's difficult for most people to comprehend such an unthinkable act when, in our own culture, many people cringe at the sight of a child playing with a toy gun.

If the mere concept is difficult to grasp, the reality is almost impossible to accept. "If you've got a young boy, uneducated and coming from a difficult period of conflict, give that kid a rifle and you've created a pretty strong man there, even though he might be 13 or 14," he said. "And that machismo coming from having the weapon makes some of them just enjoy what they do."

Did Dallaire see that sort of thing in Rwanda? "Oh yeah. Many, many people were killed by children or young adults."

Yet the old soldier, a career military man, didn't see killers when he met with the children. He didn't recognize anything that created a common bond between himself and the so-called soldiers.

"I did see my own kids in them, though," he said. " I believe that every child is the same."

Dallaire admits he found his recent journey to Africa was difficult to make, opening old wounds.

"I had a couple of flashbacks," he confides. "But generally speaking I thrived on it and saw a number of things, things I've seen before, yet I didn't shun it or react in such a way as to become ineffective. I felt I had strength. I wasn't surprised by anything, so I could cut through it and get to the problem areas."

The trip made him think of Rwanda, a country he fell in love with despite the horrors visited upon it. Dallaire has made no secret of his admiration for a country he once confused with Hell, as tribal warfare raged.

"My soul is still there with the hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom I knew, many who expected us to do much more," he said. "The country is like the third week of June all the time. It's a paradise. The birds are so beautiful they look like flowers. It is a lush country with beautiful, extraordinarily deep, cultured people . . . I do believe that, given the right circumstances, they can reconcile even these horrific things. I believe the women and children are those who will bring about reconciliation.

"I hope to go back and become, as one says, a pilgrim -- to go to the different schools and stuff like that."

He speaks of his soul, and he speaks of evil and although he was raised in a Catholic family, he doesn't claim to be a man of especially strong faith. But in the midst of the Rwandan genocide he came to believe in the existence of God. "I felt there was the reality of a presence of another entity, particularly after I had been negotiating with the devil -- the militia leaders and so on."

Dallaire now spends time reviewing documents and making policy recommendations, approaching the same old problems in a bureaucratic manner. This fall, he will join the Carr Centre for Human Rights policy at Harvard University and will publish his memoirs from Rwanda. He will continue to deliver lectures to raise awareness of the horrors of war. He is anxious to visit Afghanistan, feeling the sooner help is provided the more effective it is. And although the fighting between Palestinians and Israelis is being conducted in a modern city, Dallaire says children on both sides of that conflict are suffering the same ill effects as they would in a more traditional battlefield.

"It's different in nature but just as horrific," he said.

Dallaire believes he was, to a degree, effective as a peacekeeper in Rwanda, and that his new line of work will make a difference as well.

"Everything makes a difference," he said. " The timeframe I work in is decades and centuries with people joining the forces of humanity. We will come to a time when people respect each other. We will eliminate conflict. As a middle power Canada has all sorts of opportunities to lead in this area."