Humanitarian Intervention and Peacekeeping

Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire

Senator

Thank You, Tom. Ladies and Gentlemen, President O’Brian, I think that it is rather gratuitous that we are doing this. To end up this evening in this holy place and the last time that we had a crowd like this, I think it was during the visit of his holiness the Dalai Lama. So General, you’re in the presence of good company. The AHRC and the St. Thomas University community are honoured to welcome and introduce as the year 2001 Bernie Vigod lecturer on human rights, an extraordinary Canadian and a true international hero.

Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire, retired, is special advisor to the Minister of International Co-operation in the area of children affected by war. A soldier who served the Canadian Armed Forces with distinction throughout his remarkable military career, General Dallaire held a number of command and staff positions in Canada and Germany, including director of land requirements for the Canadian Land Force and director of artillery. While commander of the Fifth Mechanised Brigade group at Belle-Cartier, he assumed in 1993 command of the UN Observer Mission to Uganda and Rwanda, the acronym UNOMUR, which was subsequently renamed the UN Assistance Mission In Rwanda (UNAMIR). It was tasked with the implementing of a peace accord. Having apprehended whilst in Rwanda the detailed preparations that were being made by the Hotu extremists for the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Tutsi minority, General Dallaire warned the United Nations headquarters in New York, and in particular detailed the threat in his famous coded cable sent on the 11th of January, 1994.

With the death of the Rwandan president in a mysterious plane crash on April 6th, 1994, the massacre of the Tutsi’s began with over five hundred thousand persons being killed in the worst case of genocide in recent times. On the ground in Rwanda and abandoned by the international community, General Dallaire saved thousands at great risk to himself and his small unit of soldiers, including many brave Canadians. He did not abandon his post, but rather this remarkable leader came face to face with the heart of darkness. He did not abandon the foundation of human rights that rests on the footings of the unethical dignity and work of every human person; rather, he stayed at his post and did what he could against impossible odds while the international community stood idle. When once asked how he is able to remain loyal and faithful and optimistic where he has seen the heart of darkness, our guest lecturer of this evening replied, I know there is a god, because I actually shook hands and negotiated with the devil. And I know what he looks like, and I know what it does, I know its character, and I know the horror that can come from paradise turned into hell. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome General Romeo Dallaire.

General

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for the invitation to speak here to a packed crowd. The only thing missing is the chorus line or the clown. I am not an academic; I am a practitioner who’s trying to scribe a book of the horrors of the incidents of the past seven or eight years. I am going to speak not in my native tongue of French Canadian, I am going to speak in North American English and I am going to power talk, as my American colleagues tend to use. And that is to try to give you enough information to excite the interest in the subject that I will speak of, which is conflict resolution, and I will leave time afterwards for questions. Now I recommend that someone should have a bun or something to throw at me, because if you just make a sign I won’t see it. I respond very well under fire. So I can make sure I don’t go over in time too much. I learned English when I was a young boy. My Mom she decided to send me to an English Protestant school, I speak of the early fifties, and I was a young French Canadian Catholic of course. So on Tuesday I would go to this English Protestant School to Cubs, and on Wednesday I would go to confession. In order for the sixers, those who have lived through the experience, to be able to win at least a few times the achilia pennant, being strapped with this uni-lingual French Canadian, he decided, with the rest of the six, to teach me a rhyme, which I hope won’t offend, but it is just old boy talk. When you’re out with your honey and your nose is a runny, don’t think it’s funny cause it’s not. It took me a year and a half to figure that out. This imposing setting makes me remember the days when I was an altar boy, for a number of years and making five cents a day at every mass. I do hope that I don’t come across as a preacher, as a person who has lost his sense of objectivity in front of such an unusual and catastrophic set of circumstances that my troops and myself had to live in the early nineties. Now, I am not known for my humour very much. I just want to put this point up first. It is one of the thematics of this evening. Does national self-interest, do our individual self-interests, dominate our thoughts, our efforts, and our sense of responsibility to humanity? Secondly the question I pose, the question, are all humans human, or are some more human than others?

Seeing what has happened to us all since the eleventh of September, seeing the reaction that we have for our own security, our concerns, the elimination of an element of tyranny which is terrorism, and looking at how we reacted in previous years to human catastrophes in other places of the world. If one does step back for a moment and wonder if all humans are human or if some are more human than others. So I would like to use the civil war and the genocide in Rwanda as a reference point to not only review the post-Cold War era, the last decade in particular, but these complex missions. Humanitarian missions, missions of imploding nations. I also want to move you into the future and ask you to ponder that future.

Now over the last decade, and certainly since the end of the Cold War, every year that went by we started to discover that this was a truth: that we seem to be always caught off guard. There seem to be new dimensions thrown at us at a rhythm that we haven’t seen during the Cold War, be they economic, be they international politics, be they security, be they humanitarian. We seem to be moving into an era that didn’t turn out as George Bush senior said, an era of world order, but more and more
seems to be an era of disorder. An era of complex situations, of scenarios to which we seem to be always just behind those who are launching these complex situations. We can never regain the initiative. I believe one of the reasons for this is that we’ve
been through four revolutions. The nineties have put us through four revolutions, of which some are still ongoing.

Now there’s a revolution in social structures in this nation that exploded in the early 90’s, but also that revolution brought into question all our staid conservative institutions. People were questioning the educational structures, the religious structures, even the humanitarian efforts. Young people not taking it for cash, but in fact querying why we did things this way and why are we not doing it another way. And certainly the military found itself very much behind the eight ball, having lived under the principle that we would be the most conservative pillar of our nation. So we entered the 90’s, 60’s, and 70’s, philosophy, leadership and methodologies of making people work together and feel that in fact they were being treated fairly. And so you have the massive assault of transparency, of interest into these institutions, and the media was nothing but an instrument to help people wanting to look inside. And we gave excellent opportunities like Somalia and a couple of other horrific scenarios to simply accentuate the interest that people have in our conservative institution, whether or not it’s playing by the rules and is responding like it should within the Charter of Rights of our nation.

We had a massive change in resource management. In fact the world went management effectiveness. We in the military went through a demobilisation similar to the scale of that which happened in 1946 with the end of World War II. But the whole area and effectiveness of management took on a non-human dimension. We started throwing people away and firing them and cutting and cutting more and adding more work. Increasing the volume and the demands on the quality. Then all of a sudden we started to discover that with better leadership we’d be able to take these people and guide them through these changes and be far more responsible of the human beings involved with our processes. That revolution of now realizing that leadership will go far beyond what the science of management think is possible is just coming to the floor. The human being is becoming a dominant factor within our structures of business and our various institutions including government.

The information technology revolution has barely started. That will be just like the air in the year 2020. It will be like being in a new median. When we did studies for the reform of the Canadian officers core in 99-00, we went to Putrice, and we said lets try to gather a picture of 2020. It’s not too close that people can use the current references and it’s not too far for use to be called whackos although that could be the case. So when we presented the argument that by the year 2020 this revolution of information systems will be so strong that potentially our deductive reasoning methods will simply not be affective anymore. That the interfacing with machines will put into question that methodology of decision making, and replace it by something that we are not sure of what it is. Well none of the scientists to whom we presented this to fell off their chairs. It may be embryotic, it may be prototype. But the movement of this massive activity can have that much influence, potentially on us into the future. And we’re gonna live that revolution, I hope, collectively and not reactively.

The fourth revolution is what I’ll speak of principally. It’s the revolution in operations, it’s a revolution into the use of force, it’s the revolution of conflict, and it is a new dimension that is not necessarily war, although we seem to like to use the term very liberally currently. This is what we were prepared for- this is a Gulf War chart. Classic warfare, enemies on enemies. Different uniforms, different equipment and tactics, and somebody whistles and we go at each other. And at one point one side wins and one loses and we work out a Marshal plan. Classic warfare, upgraded to the new realities of some of these transformations, these revolutions, but still classic warfare. And the Gulf War, in fact, after the Cold War, reinforced that classic warfare is the way to go. Because everything that we studied in the Cold War was applied in the Gulf War and it worked, magnificently. So, the robo cops of the future, and so on, were here to stay. The tanks and the massive equipments, the classic warfare dimensions of user force were here to stay.

Except we discovered that maybe what we’re talking about is not seemingly going to meet the challenges of that era, because we have got this instead. These are militias, they are not the normal enemy force that one would find. They are not the normal usurper of rights of others through the use of force by demagogues. This is pretty basic use of force. We also discovered that classic peace-keeping, chapter six, a la Cyprus where both sides have decided to stop the fighting to stabilize, needing another force in there to make sure that everybody’s playing by the rules, and prevent the two nations to evolve. We found out that that didn’t work. That, in fact, the conflicts that we were facing were far more complex, more demanding, and we did not have the capabilities to meet these. For we were not able to ignore them. The media and the NGO’s who were barley at two hundred when we were speaking in the 60’s and 70’s are now in the 5, 7, 8 thousand around the world. They are a conscience of us in the field, in the global village in humanity. So, I even attended a seminar that ask the question, is war obsolete? Is it a thing of the past? Are we really speaking of conflict, and if we are speaking of conflict, what is the difference?

What we discovered in the 90’s is that we found our humanitarian and NGO colleges, our diplomats, and our soldiers and policemen in zones where there was war. Internal Civil War. However, entering there was not to fight on one side or the other. We were there to hopefully stabilize the situation to prevent those two nations to evolve their fighting, and we were taking casualties. We were taking casualties in countries that are not even on our radarscope. We entered an era, where in fact, human rights, the rights of the individual, the convention of child rights, humanism, the part of the war that affected children, child soldiers, sex slaves, came to the floor. Our Government, in reaction, sent us and politicians and diplomats and cash into these zones in attempt to gain a certain level of stability.

But, what of the casualties? This country was not at war. Rwanda does not affect the future of Canada. This nation was not in an insecure scenario. However, we are taking casualties. Casualties because we believe in an ideology, of human rights, fair play, humanism, human-security. We entered into an era where it is no more classical warfare of defence of the nation and its self-interests abroad. We actually entered an era where a new job appeared. And this job that appeared was conflict resolution, was going into war zones and attempting to bring another dimension to the conflict that they have, and hopefully help them resolve not for a couple of weeks, but resolve it for etians’ eternal. A new job that the nation wants us to do, however, that is difficultly explained to a mother of a soldier who was chopped in two by an RPG round and brought home in a body bag. How do you explain to that mother, or spouse, or father, that the effort of that individual in that battlefield overseas, where he wasn’t defending the nation, but pursuing a far more distinctive role and that is of hoping to save people? Are we ready for that price? Are we ready for the casualties that it will bring? I will extrapolate that to the current situation. Is the coalition that is fighting in Afghanistan and around it, will it be able to sustain casualties, and how many?

In 1993 the greatest power on the earth entered Somalia, separate from the UN, however, working in co-operation with the UN. It led a coalition in Somalia of many other nations: Italians, Pakistanis, Canadians, Jordanians. That world power built not only on technology but on 1.6 million people in uniform took 18 casualties one day. Casualties that is killed, and 72 injured, and that nation packed up and went home. And that left the Pakistanis, the Canadians and everyone else to handle a situation that was already beyond our capabilities. There is not much credibility left when the biggest player with the most capability has left the battlefield. Americans, as other western nations since Somalia, do not have the will to sustain casualties, even when faced with the most horrific destruction of human life, human beings, in countries that are only 12 hours away by aircraft at the other end of the global village. So, is war obsolete in the classic sense?

You will never hear a general say it is, for ultimately since Westphalia the triumvirate of the government, the people, and the military have established that the military is there to defend that nation. That day eventually may arrive and the first ones that will be court marshalled if we are not ready to defend our self, will be the generals. And so, there is a paranoia in generals, inasmuch as some of our political masters would like to say that is, generals always want war. They don’t ever seem to be satisfied. We have behind here that thought process, that says one day, we will be held accountable for our ability to defend this nation, our people. And in that light we want to have as much capability ready as the nation is willing to risk through whatever it gives to defence in its budgets and so on. So we are into a decade of conflict, complex operations. So with this new job appearing, still not yet qualified, very little even in the new defence strategy 20/20 if you read from defence, there is very little talk about conflict resolution. Lots of talk of the new generation of warfare, very little talk of conflict resolution, although we are spending 90% of our time and taking casualties in conflict. We even asked people of this question, the response to that is, what is soldiering in the modern era? Is it in fact, preparing for the next world war, and maybe have certain skills to be able to handle this conflict stuff as a side show, or in fact, is it two different sets of skills that this nation wants its military to have? Fight a war but resolve conflict, and work within the dimensions of conflict, which are complex and deep seeded. That requires new skills like anthropology, sociology, philosophy, to understand right there what is going through the minds of those people that has been affecting them and their parents and their grandparents for so long.

So, peace-keeping may not even be the term. Maybe it is conflict resolution and the whole spectrum of that. So we now find ourselves in this era, where in the past we had war up here and peace down there and during the past ten years we have been trying fiddle bolt to give solutions that were either often ad hoc or we were on job training. Some failed and some did pretty good. This whole area, the vacuum between war and peace, is now full. It is full of the stuff that we are using today. Isometrics, close to home, influencing our thinking, are we as far as we were in the 60’s where we used to do drills to hide under our desks in school because of the nuclear threat? I don’t think so, but our concerns I think are just as justified. We are in an era that we don’t know from what angle something may happen. And that complexity is here and will remain as we see other nations evolving through their conflicts and are just there waiting to explode even more for our attention. Sudan and the Congo are just two easy ones right now in Africa. It’s not only on the African continent, there are problems in Columbia.

So we find ourselves at this time in a very complex moment. How did we get in there, how did we put people like this gentile man the ex-president of Rwanda, Judenal Habiliamada, in power. He is part of the majority in Rwanda, which makes up 85% of the population. For centuries the minority in that country or that zone, the Tutsi’s were only 14% and there is the Twa Pygmoid who are only 1%, controlled the vast majority of Hutus. And then 150 years ago white colonialists appeared and started ripping off the countries and aligning themselves to who was in power. Teaching these people how to kill women and children to keep control and supported the minority. And then, all of a sudden, finally through the works of missionaries and others the majority was able to build a small elite that could overthrow the colonialist and their lackeys. And you have the revolutions throughout Africa in the late 50’s and early 60’s, and everyone said we’re going to sort it out now. Well not really, because what we did with the Cold War was we walked in and said, all right, who’s the meanest one of the lot? We’ll buy him off, keep him in power and he’ll keep control on the population and we won’t have any troubles while we’re doing serious stuff in Europe. And so that is how dictators, that’s how evil leaders took control of the nations in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s and then all of a sudden in 1989 we said hey the war’s over and we don’t need you any more, so why don’t you sort yourself out.
Well ladies and gentlemen that is exactly what they have been doing, trying to sort themselves out. Trying to throw out these people, trying to bring in democracy. Permit moderates to move in with reconciliation and build these nations, only to find themselves continuously slaughtered, eliminated, decapitated by the extremists, who either use militias, terrorism, or use the military forces that they have at hand. They are now, since the last ten years in particular and it’s continuing, in a state of massive complexity of loyalties, of movements to democracy, of responding to the international community’s impatience and its rules. I was told to bring that nation from a peace agreement, in which the extremists signed under duress, to a democratic election in two years. I did mention that there was a majority of 85%. I didn’t mention that the extremists in that 85% had power. As there were extremists on the other side who had certain power. Two years, so sort it out. Bring it to a democratic election, that’s not even attuned to their culture. It’s what we tell them it should be. Well that imposition of two years was part of the scuffling of the ability to give that nation a chance to advance. We are trying to jump about four centuries in two years. These complex missions, in which we are launched on and will continue to participate, take time. They take integrated efforts by the humanitarian, by the politician, by the diplomat, by the nation builders, by the economist, by the military, by the judicial. And they need 20, 40, 60, 70, 100, 120 years. And what is that period in the life of a nation?

We did a lot in that period, but we came from a pretty solid background to be able to evolve this nation. They are starting from scratch. And the moderates are still fighting to have their place to be able to advance those ideas of democracy, and of human rights, and of the absolute of the rule of law. And so, we’re in this phase where, hopefully, they are being redeveloped, however, they had immense power. And the power and the money was concentrated so you ended up in countries of immense poverty. This is not high-tech.

When I received 400 jeeps for my mission, that came from Cambodia, they drove from dansselam touchigally about a thousand kilometres down one of the worst roads you could find, where people were used to driving mopeds and bicycles. I had about 80 left. Of the 80 there was no windshield, not much lights, no radios, nothing. There was no Canadian Tire helping. The UN doesn’t have the capability of reacting that rapidly. It is not ready to respond in three months to move a complete force and a whole massive infrastructure to help a nation. It’s there because it can take a twenty-year program of building an education system in a nation and work on that gradually. And why is the UN not capable of providing that capability? Well, ladies and gentlemen, because the sovereign states that make up the UN don’t want it to be effective. You’re gonna say wait a minute. That does a lot of good here, and we do put money to it. However, if we are talking about the evolution of the structures of nations that need fast response and considerate response from all these disciplines, UN does not have a rapid reaction capability. The UN is also a very scapegoat for world powers who don’t want to get involved. Let’s keep it ineffective. We really don’t want Kofi Hannen to have a small fore to be able to intervene, then we will get sucked in. They take decisions in the security council, where I get my mandate, and then I go down to the fifth committee, that’s the committee with dollars, same people represented down there, and they say we have no dollars. So no matter what the politicians say upstairs you’ve got no mission. And ultimately six months into my mission I still didn’t have the budget. I was scrounging money from Mozambique, Somalia, and Cambodia.

It meets requirement of the para-fold to keep the UN ineffective. It’s got its internal problem but it suffers from a lack of will of the nations, particularly the developed nations, to want to intervene, to want to pay the sacrifice, to go into areas where humanity is being destroyed, and taking the risk of casualties to advance humanity. Particularly in zones where there is no self-interest. So we tried the UN, but we must look at the capitals of the nations and look at what direction they were seeking. The morning of the seventh of April, when the civil war commenced, in the Security Council discussion room a powerful neighbour stated roughly, we will not go into Rwanda, and we will support no one who wants to go in. And they held that position for a hundred days and eight hundred thousand people died. Nearly a million were injured and sick, two and a half million were refugees, and a million and a half were displaced within their own country. That’s more people killed, injured, displaced and refugee, than the nine years of the Ex-Yugoslavian War. I couldn’t keep 2000 troops in the hills, nor get food, medical supplies or fuel. And there are still tens of thousands of troops in Yugoslavia.

Are all humans human, or are some more human than others? What makes the difference? Why is there a difference? This is the threat, an orshermen, half doped up or drunk, with a machete or a grenade. Not a threat to ten Canadian soldiers, and at times, not much of a threat for some of the hard-nosed humanitarians who are in the field. However you never see just one, you see them in hundreds and thousands. Nations that are overpopulated, where the children have no place anymore in the family structure, where there is no room for them. And they move into the urban areas where there is no jobs, there’s nothing for them. And some guy walks by and says listen, do you want some beers, some drugs, they’ll go to the extreme like we’ve seen in Serleva, where they actually cut open their veins and insert the drugs. We got a few dollars and we’ve got a very important cause. You see these people over there, they’re different from us. They want to take everything from us, I know it. So lets go and get rid of them. And by the tens and tens and tens of thousands, boys 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18 enrolled because they got a right full and became all powerful and somebody, they enrolled because of the money, they enrolled because of duress and fear.
What we discovered in Rwanda and in other places is, that children are now instruments of war. Children kill. Over three hundred thousand children were killed in a hundred days in Rwanda. The most effective troops behind the lines to do the killing were the youths. They’re inexpensive, they’re disposable and there’s lots of them, don’t need many adults to keep control of them. Just give them the rifle, give them the machete and let them go at it. Children were used to kill, girls were used to satisfy the morale of the troops as sex slaves, boys were used to satisfy the morale of the troops as sex slaves. Children were sent to the mine field in order to find a safe lane for the rest of the force. Not really a sophisticated mine field, but deadly to kids. Children were used as instruments of protection for the adults behind them who were shooting at us. Shooting at the humanitarians, they killed 56 international Red Cross workers in Rwanda. Pulling them out of the ambulances slaughtering them and slaughtering everyone in the ambulances. What do you do when you face kids protecting people who are shooting at you?
We also entered a new era of very complex moral and ethical dilemmas. A 19 year-old corporal with four military people with him came to a village. And in the middle of the village there were about 3 or 4 hundred people milling around, encouraging a girl of about 14 with a child on her back and a machete in her hand about to kill another girl of the same age with a child on her back. What does a soldier do? Does he open fire on the crowd to disperse them, killing God knows how many to get the girl to save her? Does he tell the sniper to shoot the girl with the machete, killing her and probably her child? Does he walk away, by seeing nothing? Does he try to intervene? And within the rules of engagement the limitations of the political mandates and the use of force being limited, he is ignored and he witnesses that slaughter. The child picked up by the feet and the head chopped off. And they see it tens of times a day.

And so we’ve discovered to our horror, a new set of casualties, a new group of veterans. Not so many killed or injured by bombs and bullets and shrapnel, but by the thousands affected between the two years. With post-traumatic stress syndrome, they live in digital colour nearly every day what they saw six or seven years ago or, eight or nine years ago in Bosnia. It doesn’t go away, it gets clearer, and many kill themselves. They break up marriages, they take drugs, they take up booze, leave the forces. Reservists in their little towns with no support, they are walking time bombs. We have out of the 28 or 29 thousand troops that have been deployed since 1991 about 3 to 3.5 thousand troops affected at different levels. We’ve discovered a new casualty, a casualty of conflict resolution, a casualty of the mind. Also the casualty of one who lives with the stigma of being affected in the mind. How many times we would prefer to lose a leg, an arm, an ear, an eye, to be recognized by the hurt, instead of trying to explain or hide from friends and colleagues, family and others, that we have gone totally beyond our ability to sustain logical and reasonable ways of life. That’s the cost of conflict resolution.

The enormity of that problem, the preparation of the NGO’s, the diplomats, to be able to operate in those countries is critical to the continuance to this nation taking the leadership role that it must in resolving conflict. Of pushing that ideology of human rights, of human security, of every human being that same.

A three year old kid was in the middle of the road between the two lines. We stopped and started yelling around, to see if there was anyone around to find out if there was anyone there, and a soldier from one of the forces came down. So we said we would take the child and move it to an orphanage we have set up, and he said no that’s OK leave him there. While we were going into this debate the child disappeared. When we find him he is in a hut on the side of the road, sitting at ease as if that is his home, amongst his father and mother, brothers, even dog decomposing. The horror of those scenarios, that 3 year old child is no different than my 3 year old child. They’re exactly the same, except they are seen differently. Who really cares about Rwanda?

Who really cares about their plight? We’ve got enough problems with education, with unemployment, with our hospitals. Why, why be involved in that arena, where they simply keep doing that barbaric action? Well the colonial period taught a lot of how to kill women and children, of how to keep control on people. We did pretty good in the Second World War, as Judeo Christians, of wiping out a whole different group, they learn those lessons. Those people came to our schools, they know how to influence people, they know how to make an operation work, they know how to manoeuvre the international press. Why is it, that when a nation’s representative came into my headquarters three weeks into the genocide and the civil war and started asking my staff officers in the operations room all kinds of questions- like how many loyalists were killed so far? Do you know how many last week? Do you know how many might be killed today, or do the next week, and how many weeks of killing to anticipate this is going to go on for?

And so, the few Canadians who had come in reinforcing as the Belgians, having taken casualties, had abandoned the mission. When I met the individual, I asked him why he was doing? He said he was doing an assessment for his nation as regards to a decision of his government to get involved or not, in trying to stop this destructive time. And I said well you’re working on statistics aren’t you, he said absolutely. I said what are the statistics? What are you using as a reference? He said the government of his nation, having assessed the mood of the country, felt that they could handle one soldier either injured and or killed for every 85 000 Rwandans killed. Are all humans human, or are some more human than others? And they didn’t come, and they continued the slaughter.

They don’t play by the rules. They told people to go into the chapels and churches, and they’ll be safe there. This atmosphere brings back a terrible memory, in as much as, one of the chapels we finally able to break through to, they had surrounded the chapel, they had opened up the roof of it, threw a couple of grenades in, and the militia went in with machetes. Women who had money could buy a bullet instead. And they hacked and slashed in that little chapel, that small church, and killing with a machete is a very long task, it’s arduous so you don’t do that many. You don’t hit so often, and so they let them die over 2, 3, 4 days. After counting about three hundred we extrapolated and in a chapel of about this size there were over two thousand people, the priests and the nuns slaughtered. They don’t play by the rules. Which brought us and brings us continuously, certainly for parents, brothers, and sisters of soldier of overseas, of all to ask why we don’t play by the rules? Why don’t we do what Marlon Brando did in Apocalypse Now, probably the seminal film of the Vietnam War, contrary to Duval who used all the high-tech technology, and just blasted away anybody and took casualties. Brando went in with the people, and his principle was the following, the only way to win in these extreme scenarios is to be more ruthless than the other guy. So if they chopped off the left arm of kids because they were inoculated for tuberculosis then we go in and we chop off their heads.

We can’t go against the rules, we’re not allowed to do that. That’s what we work with and they are interpreted as the rules of engagement, and they limit our ability to be proactive. I am testifying in the spring again at the international tribunal for Rwanda that’s in Irucia Tansinia, in which we’ve got the big leaders. My job as a force commander will end when that tribunal is finished prosecuting those people. Now that tribunal is like one of the test cases like in the Hague for the Yugoslavia scenario, where we want to destroy impunity, where we want to make justice the absolute that it should be. It would have been interesting, in fact, post-September 11, if instead of trying to go in to Afghanistan and the area to blow away every one that we suspect of being an international terrorist, but maybe we go in there because we want to bring them to justice in an international court that Canada and a number of nations supported in Rome three years ago. And the leader of the current coalition in this war overseas was the most dominant force against an international court.

It is not possible to continue, and I will conclude on this. It is not possible to continue to let twenty percent of humanity rise and rise in wisdom and knowledge and way of life in consumption and let eighty percent of humanity wallow in their self-destruction, wallow in their inability to rise to the challenges that we are trying to put to them, which are partly expeditious and too demanding. It is simply not right that 20% of humanity will lead humanity into the next century and the 80%, we’ll see! Maybe someday they will have a better chance. However, maybe someday as their being more capable of being self-determinant and to get more there isn’t going to be anything left for them. Kofi Annen, in a seminal paper called we the people, which was a speech at the general assembly of the UN in two thousand the millennia, he said this is the millennium of humanity. This is the millennium, in which humanity will come as an entity, a total entity, to evolve and to seek, the respite to live in the peace and the respect of each other. Well, I remain an optimist and I don’t use time as a factor. If it takes 20, 30, one century, two centuries, three centuries or more, if that spark is there that maybe someday the differences will, in fact, make us greater. If that possibility is there and I do believe it’s there, then it was worth every day in order to pursue that objective. As a colleague of mine said, how do you eat a one-ton marshmallow? You eat it one bite at a time.

Ladies and gentlemen, one day at a time, persevering, determined, open, generous, full of altruism, continued reinforcement of human rights, human security, the rights of the individual, the rights of children to live and not be instruments of war, everyday effort will someday be rewarded. And, I can only hope as an example to the students who are here, to consider their lifetime, consider their ambitions, and maybe consider taking a year of their life before doing their Masters, before they get the big job, and spend a year in those zones where they need some support. Not post-colonial help, not aid, there is nothing more majorative than aid. Theirs is nothing more stupid than looking at that food that’s going into Afghanistan and having a big Canadian flag on it. Saying gifts from the Canadian people, they are not dying there because they want to. They don’t need to be told they’re getting gifts; they’re trying to survive. Why are we trying to make us feel better instead of purely being altruistic and give? There are a lot of nuances in this mission of humanity into the future, you are not allowed, by conscience, to let 80% of the human beings on this earth to continue to self-destruct and wallow in poverty and ignorance.