Shake Hands with the Devil - Romeo Dallair - Part 2 of 10

2020 Reading Challenge - Day 193

July 12, 2020

Book 55 - Shake Hands with the Devil
Roméo Dallaire
 Part 2 - pages 50-100 (e-book)
Reading Time - 60 minutes

I covered three chapters in this section, and they were all pretty safe, if you can call it that.

Chapter 2 - "Rwanda, That's in Africa isn't it?"

This chapter covers Dallaire's rise in the army. I thought it was kind of interesting to learn that senior or retired officers remain intimately connected to their regiment. One of their key responsibilities is to select "streamers", young men or women who the elders believe have the right stuff to become future generals. It's like an invisible hand guides the young officer, nurtures their career - through a carefully selected series of command and staff positions that test and prepare the officer for higher command.

Dallaire seems to have been one of those streamers. He was also incredibly dedicated to the army. While other officers would marry and have kids, Dallaire was single and available. When he did get married, it seems that his first relationship was always with the army.

Dallaire was eventually promoted to Brigadier General in 1989 and posted as commandant of  the College militaire royal, training new officers. Those two years, according to him, were among the happiest, not only for himself, but also for his wife. But what he started to notice was that training soldiers for UN peacekeeping missions was problematic. The world had changed since the Cold War when class peacekeeping worked. It was less effective in the modern world and some of the peacekeepers had even been killed (e.g. Bosnia). As he was mulling over how best to train the next generation of Canadian soldiers, he got the call that would change his life, a peacekeeping reconnaissance mission to Rwanda.

Chapter 3 - "Check out Rwanda and You're in Charge"

Rwanda was in the middle of negotiating a peace agreement to end a vicious two and a half year civil war between the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) and RGF (Rwanda Government Forces). Some of the parties had signed the agreement after a great deal of pressure and all sides felt that the UN could help to ensure that subsequent negotiations to form a new government went well. The reconnaissance mission included Dallaire, one other Canadian soldier and 80 unarmed observers.

Dallaire and his fellow Canadian tried to figure out the history of Rwanda from newspaper articles and some scholarly papers. They had no access to intelligence reports from, for example, Belgium, France or the USA. The history of Rwanda is one of colonialism. In 1916, the Belgians chased the Germans out of Rwanda. They found two main tribes, the Tutsi who were tall, light-skinned herders and the Hutu

were shorter, darker farmers. The Belgians elevated the Tutsi into positions of power, since they saw them as more "European" but the Tutsi formed a minority in Rwanda. The Belgians simply wanted to exploit the vast network of coffee and tea plantations in Rwanda.

In 1962, with Rwandan independence, a popular uprising slaughtered or drove out the Tutsi elite and installed a Hutu-dominated government. Over the next decade, violent pogroms against the Tutsi left in Rwanda continued and many more fled to Uganda, Burundi and Zaire (now the D.R.C.). The Tutsi diaspora coalesced into the Rwandan Patriotic Front which was a highly effective military and police movement. Living as unwelcome refugees in neighbouring countries put a lot of pressure on the Tutsi and in 1991, the RPF and the international community put pressure on the Rwandan government.

With this sketch of Rwandan history in his pocket, Dallaire went to New York to learn more about the mission. He found the DPKO (Department of Peacekeeping Operations) to be very underfunded and understaffed. The logistics in overseeing seventeen peacekeeping missions around the world was a nightmare. There was lots of disorder and not a few disasters (e.g. Bosnia, Somalia). Some within the UN thought that a small and quick success story in Rwanda might inspire member nations to place increased confidence in the United Nations' peacekeeping efforts and... be more generous with military and financial resources.

The Rwandan mission started with no support staff, no proper military maps of the area and borrowed laptops. Dallaire got the firm message from the DPKO that the reconnaissance trip to Rwanda needed to be small and inexpenisve... and that their recommendation for a Chapter 6 peacekeeping mission needed to follow the same format otherwise it would not be approved by the Security Council.

Chapter 4 - Enemies Holding Hands

Dalliare landed in Kigali, Rwanda on 19 August, 1993. According to the negotiated Arusha Accord, the UN needed to have the peacekeeping mission in place by 10 September... less than one month later. It was an impossible schedule and fraught with a lot of political uncertainty as the country attempted to transition from an acrimonious civil war to a multi-party, power-sharing, democratic system.

On top of that, as Dallaire conducted his fact-finding mission, he learned that there were extremist elements and militia who had inserted themselves into the youth wings of various political parties, even the moderate ones. He recognized that time was of the essence and that the UN needed to get boots on the ground as soon as possible.

The RPF was very well-organized but had limited logistical support (e.g. vehicles). They were unanimous in their support of the Arusha Accord and portrayed themselves as a group of Rwandan refugees who only wanted to go home and live in peace.

The RGF had less effective leaders but some elite units had been trained by the French and Belgians. Front-line units, on the other hand, were poorly trained recruits who lacked food, medical supplies, weapons. leadership and morale.

As his technical mission drew to a close, Dallaire was convinced that Rwanda could benefit from a Chapter 6 peacekeeping mission. As such, the UN forces would include unarmed observers and armed soldiers who could only use weapons in self-defence. Contrast this with a Chapter 7 peace-enforcement mission (e.g. Korea, Gulf War, Somalia) where the UN forces would come in and take over. But such a mission for Rwanda would never have been approved by the UN Security Council.

Dallaire came up with several different options for a UN force and would have preferred to to have 8000 troops at his disposal but thought the ideal number was 5500. He also came up with a reasonable viable option of 2500. Interestingly, the US, France and Russia thought a force of 500-1000 would be enough.

Dallaire ran his plan by both sides of the Rwanda conflict and gotten positive feedback. He thought that he had come to Rwanda to assess the different parties but, in reality, he was the one being assessed.

"Were they in fact already betting that white Western nations had too much on their hands to attempt another foray into black Africa? Were the hard-liners playing us, and me, for fools? I think so. I believe they had already concluded that the West did not have the will, as it had already demonstrated in Bosnia, Croatia, and Somalia, to police the world, to expend resources or to take the necessary casualties. They had calculated that the West would deploy a token force and when threatened would duck or run. They knew us better than we knew ourselves."

That is a sad commentary on the state of the First World... similar to the quote about the bureaucrats from the previous blog. Rwanda had nothing of value to the West and... when ten Belgian soldiers died in Rwanda... Belgium abandoned the peacekeeping mission. This was a hard section to read... to see the ineffectiveness and in-fighting that happens at the level of the United Nations. It does not paint a hopeful picture for the world. Clearly, given the situation in, for example, Syria, the world has learned nothing about how to prevent/avoid/handle humanitarian disasters.