where art thou?

So, a while back, I went to a presentation by one Romeo Dallaire who was the commander of the UN force in Rwanda.

Wikipedia says "His actions are credited with directly saving the lives of 20,000 Tutsis. There is speculation that Dallaire's forces deliberately sabotaged equipment to slow their UN-mandated withdrawal from the combat zone."

Wikipedia also says "At home, Dallaire was medically released from the Canadian Armed Forces on April 22, 2000, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. At the time of his retirement he held the rank of lieutenant-general. Blaming himself for the failures of the mission, he began a spiral into depression, culminating on June 20, 2000, when he was rushed to hospital after being found under a park bench in Hull, Quebec. He was intoxicated and suffering from a reaction with his prescription anti-depressants, and the mixture almost put him into a coma."

When he came to talk to us, we had heard that his previous speeches were extremely emotions and that he was going to tone it down. We had heard almost correctly. The basic speech was one on leadership and was relatively basic. But it was during his frequent anecdotes, exclusively introduced with “let me give you an example,” that were the most shocking.

The two that I remember best:

The Rwandan army was recruiting children to fight. A UN army troop came across a church which, surprising, held a number of living tutsis. As the army went into the church to rescue the survivors, a number of child fighters appeared and opened fire. The commander had to decide then and there whether to order his soldiers to return fire. He did.

Dallaire used this story as an example for planning ahead. Like, the commander should already have known that he might encounter child soldiers and should have known whether to fire back or not. He should not have been making that decision on the field. Okay, that is a pretty heavy example for planning ahead.

The second story was also about planning ahead. Apparently, rape is used as an act of war, more to intimidate the opposing side than to get any pleasure. After raping whole villages the women, usually dead but sometimes barely alive, would be thrown into pits. Occasionaly, UN troops would come across these pits and find the dead and dying women. The first time it happened, the commander had to radio back to Dallaire to ask whether the soldiers should just move along (the women were going to die regardless) or to jump in the whole and comfort the women as they died. The HIV rate is incredibly high and the soldiers would be putting themselves at very high risk of exposure by jumping in the pit.

Dallaire said before he could make a decision, the commander called back to say it was inconsequential because the Canadian soldiers had already jumped in (afterwards, Dallaire asked all the commanders of the countries that had sent troops to Rwanda – all said that they would just move on except Canada, the Netherlands and Guyana.)

Those were the anecdotes. Now for analysis:

It was obviously terrible over there. The UN tried to help (Dallaire did not blame the UN in his speech, in fact he specifically removed blame from them - he blamed countries for not sending their mandated troops and mainly the US) but public opinion was not pro-intervention (because of Somalia).

What this comes down to, according to Dallaire said, is feelings of relative worth. As crazy as it seems, 900,000 foreigners may not be worth, according to public opinions, the lives of a few of your own citizens.

In fact, from wikipedia:

“Dallaire ordered ten Belgian soldiers (whom he considered his best men) to protect the new prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana. The soldiers were intercepted by Hutu extremists and taken hostage, after which Madame Agathe and her husband were killed. Later that day, the Belgian soldiers were found brutally murdered. Belgium was outraged that Dallaire had put its soldiers in such danger, and promptly withdrew its forces.”

Belgium withdrew its forces?

This is a really important topic, because this relative worth thing comes up constantly. The excess of energy we use, the toxic waste we ship to china, the farmed food we consume. All of it makes our lives a little better and make the lives of foreigners and the lives of our future generations (pseudo-foreigners – they don’t live here yet) much worse. This is not as immediately drastic as not sending troops to save lives, but it will have the same effect.

The more passive murder we can work on, and hopefully will, although I certainly like my creature comforts. The more active murder we have to deal with.

My friend Jon Cooper writes in his blog, “We are failing the “Rwanda Test”. In response to well-documented ethnic cleansing, resulting in massive human suffering and mortality, the response of the UN and the international community has been appallingly, comprehensively impotent. The AU Peace and Security Council has the “The preparedness of the Government the Sudan to accept the deployment of a UN operation in Darfur” as its first condition for a UN deployment. Given the active role of Omar Bashir’s government in instigating and perpetuating the massacre, it is unlikely this condition can be met any time soon.”

He also writes, “Even as thousands die every day, we bow to sovereignty.” He thinks, and perhaps rightly so, that this is more a policy thing, a problem dictated by laws and mandates. I think it is much worse. I think that our inability to care about those not directly linked to us is going to be our downfall. This is all economics. Externalities are not being taking into account. The suffering of other people is a big fucking externality.

Read Jon’s post.