Retired Canadian general a guest speaker at public meeting

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French-Canadian general Romeo Dallaire was thrust into the heart of a genocide when he led a small rag-tag United Nations peacekeeping force into Rwanda in the mid-1990s.

With almost no support from the outside world, Dallaire faced the impossible task of preventing a genocide that would ultimately kill a minimum of 800,000 people in just 100 days.

Although slow to get out at the time, the horrific story has now been elaborated upon extensively, including Dallaire's own award-winning book from 2003, Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, written in collaboration with his aide Major Brent Beardsley. It was turned into a Canadian docudrama released in 2007.

Now a Liberal senator, Dallaire was on hand last week at the cavernous Malvern Collegiate gym to introduce a free screening of the docudrama.

The question, he urged the audience to ask themselves, "is whether or not we should make sacrifices for places where there is absolutely nothing there.

"There's no oil. There's no strategic value. The only thing that's there are human beings. And is it worth not just cash, but is it worth sweat and tears and sometimes, the blood of some of our youth to go in and assist those people?"

The Rwandan Genocide, he said, starkly exposed "the failure of humanity. ... And that's the subtitle of my book."

The failure of humanity was internal: "Rwandans slaughter Rwandans, and raping and mutilating. That's a failure of humanity, them actually deciding - the extremists - that the way to maintain power was to wipe out 1.2 million other human beings because they're from another tribe. And they nearly got away with it. They slaughtered over 700,000, plus 100,000 of their own who were too (moderate)."

And the failure was external.

Every nation in the world, he said, "refused to give the UN the capabilities of stopping it. For the UN doesn't have an army ... it's just an international body. And so in the end, the nations of the world are to be held accountable for that inhumanity."

The free public screening was hosted by Beaches-East York MP Maria Minna.

Back when she was the minister of international co-operation in Prime Minister Paul Martin's government, she had called upon Dallaire, then just retired from the army, to act as an adviser for a conference she was hosting on war-affected children.

Later as a senator, Dallaire served as an adviser to Martin on Darfur, a place he visited twice to get a first-hand look.

"We saw people with absolutely nothing. Two and a half million people. With nothing."

Although interactions on the world stage are primarily between governments, he advised that citizens can play a direct role through support of non-governmental organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross. Organizations such as these, he predicted, will play increasingly more important roles in international relief and support.

Citizens can also ensure the issue remains on their government's agenda.

"Become involved," he urged.

Canada, he recalled, was one of the few countries to provide even a tenuous lifeline to the UN force in Rwanda.

"I did get 12 Canadian officers who were flown in ... to assist me in trying to keep the headquarters together for we had about 30,000 (refugees) we were protecting.

"The second thing is the Canadians committed the Hercules aircraft to fly in to give me some supplies to be able to stay there and to get my wounded and killed out.

"If the Canadians had not done that, then I would not be able to stay."

Former colonial power Belgium withdrew shortly after an ambush that killed 10 of their troops. Another colonial power, France, after conspicuously intervening to save mostly western foreigners, did eventually send in troops, but they were, in the past, closely associated with the side that perpetrated the genocide.

The U.S., meanwhile, had cold feet after a disastrous, failed humanitarian engagement in Somalia just prior to the Rwandan genocide.

The nature of UN intervention, he said, has drastically changed.

"We have mutated from the old Blue Beret scenario where the two sides decided to have peace, to an era where, in fact, the nations are imploding. And the nations are imploding because they're trying to grasp how to build their nation and there are frictions due to ethnicity and tribalism and religion and even power sharing.

"And in those scenarios it is no more the good guy, bad guy of the past. We face complex and ambiguous situations where we face the problem of trying to solve legal and ethical and moral dilemmas."