Romeo Dallaire has greatly enabled the “Butcher of Africa’s Great Lakes” region. The Canadian general’s fairy tale has repeatedly justified Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame who has once again unleashed horrible violence in Congo.
Two months ago a man in front of me at Salon du livre de Montréal asked Dallaire if his “opinion of Rwanda has changed since the M23 movement emerged in the Congo?” The retired general’s response to this question about a Kigali spurred force, which has recently killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands in capturing the Congolese city of Goma, was extreme Kagame propaganda. He said: “No because the M23 is but one group who are trying to save the lives of Tutsis, who are Congolese Tutsis, while the Kinshasa government has a dozen or so rebel forces and so on who are slaughtering them. So the M23 are defending. And then the philosophy of Kagame has always been one to be on the offensive so he’s not going to [be] waiting to cross the border into his country to fight; he’s going to sort them out on the other side. So he’s simply continuing to get rid of the threat of extremists on the Congolese side and the Rwandan extremists who are there in the Congo still seeking the elimination of the Tutsis.”
Twenty-nine years after Rwanda first invaded Congo purportedly to target genocidaires, Dallaire is promoting Kigali’s apologia for mass slaughter. The Globe and Mail, New York Times, and Financial Times no longer even promote this framing of Rwandan aggression.
It’s not a one off. Dallaire has repeatedly called Kagame an “extraordinary man” and raved about his government. In April, Dallaire stated, “the past thirty years in Rwanda have stood as the most profound example of noble and brave peacemaking I have ever witnessed; perhaps that ever existed…. I join you in celebrating Rwanda and its people, who are leading all of Africa by the example of moral strength and commitment to harmony and prosperity.”
Dallaire made that statement two years into a new wave of Kigali/M23 instigated violence against its highly impoverished neighbour. Over the past three decades Rwanda’s repeated invasions have killed millions of Congolese.
Dallaire has assisted the US military college-trained Kagame since leading the military component of a UN mission designed to help end the conflict caused by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)/Uganda invasion of Rwanda. Between fall 1993 and July 1994, Dallaire is credibly accused of favouring the US-backed RPF in contravention of UN guidelines. In response to the Canadian general’s self-serving portrayal of his time in Rwanda, the overall head of the 1994 UN mission in Rwanda, Jacques-Roger Booh Booh, published Le Patron de Dallaire Parle (The Boss of Dallaire Speaks). Almost entirely ignored by the Canadian media, the 2005 book by the former Cameroon foreign minister claims the Canadian general backed the RPF and had little interest in their violence despite reports of summary executions in areas controlled by them.
Dallaire has propagated Kagali’s wildly simplistic account of the Rwandan Genocide. He has ignored the overwhelming evidence and logic that points to the RPF’s responsibility for blowing up the plane carrying the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi (and much of the Hutu-led Rwandan military command), which unleashed the mass genocidal killings in April 1994.
To align with Kagame’s claim of a “conspiracy to commit genocide,” Dallaire has changed his depiction of the Rwandan tragedy over the years. Just after leaving his post as UNAMIR force commander, Dallaire replied to a September 14, 1994 Radio Canada Le Point question by saying, “the plan was more political. The aim was to eliminate the coalition of moderates…. I think that the excesses that we saw were beyond people’s ability to plan and organize. There was a process to destroy the political elements in the moderate camp. There was a breakdown and hysteria absolutely…. But nobody could have foreseen or planned the magnitude of the destruction we saw.”
To a large extent the claim of a “conspiracy to commit genocide” rests on the much celebrated January 11, 1994, “genocide fax”. But, this fax Dallaire sent to the UN headquarters in New York is not titled, to quote International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda lawyer Christopher Black, “‘genocide’ or ‘killing’ but an innocuous ‘Request For Protection of Informant.’” The two-page “genocide fax”, as New Yorker reporter Philip Gourevitch dubbed it in 1998, was probably doctored a year after the mass killings in Rwanda ended. In a chapter devoted to the fax in Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Year Later, Edward Herman and David Peterson argue two paragraphs were added to a cable Dallaire sent to UN headquarters about a weapons cache and protecting an informant (Dallaire never personally met the informant). The two (probably) added paragraphs said the informant was asked to compile a list of Tutsi for possible extermination in Kigali and mentioned a plan to assassinate selected political leaders and Belgian peacekeepers.
Mission head Booh-Booh denies seeing this information and there’s no evidence Dallaire warned the Belgians of a plan to attack them, which later transpired. Finally, a response to the cable from UN headquarters the next day ignores the (probably added) paragraphs. Herman and Peterson make a compelling case that a doctored version of the initial cable was placed in the UN file on November 27, 1995, by British Colonel Richard M. Connaughton as part of a Kigali–London–Washington effort to prove a plan by the Hutu government to exterminate Tutsis.
Incredibly, the “genocide fax” is the primary source of documentary record demonstrating UN foreknowledge of a Hutu “conspiracy” to “exterminate” Tutsi, a charge even the victors justice at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) failed to convict anyone of. According to Herman and Peterson, “when finding all four defendants not guilty of the ‘conspiracy to commit genocide’ charge, the [ICTR] trial chamber also dismissed the evidence provided by ‘informant Jean-Pierre’ due to ‘lingering questions concerning [his] reliability.’”
At the end of their chapter tracing the history of the “genocide fax” Herman and Peterson write, “if all of this is true, we would suggest that Dallaire should be regarded as a war criminal for positively facilitating the actual mass killings of April-July, rather than taken as a hero for giving allegedly disregarded warnings that might have stopped them.”
He’s gone beyond words. As part of his support for the most bloodstained dictator on the continent, the Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security established their headquarters in Kigali. It works closely with the Rwandan military. In August 2023, Dallaire met with Kagame and Rwandan Minister of Defence Juvenal Marizamunda. The Rwandan military’s website has multiple posts about working with Dallaire’s Institute. The institute trains Rwandan forces as part of the 2017 Vancouver Principles on Peacekeeping and the Prevention of the Recruitment and Use of Child Soldiers.
Global Affairs Canada has provided over $20 million to the Dallaire Institute. According to the Globe and Mail, a Global Affairs director wrote a memo raising concerns about funding the Dallaire Institute because it worked closely with a Rwandan military using child soldiers in Congo.
When the regime in Kigali finally falls, the history books will not look kindly on Romeo Dallaire. Rather than a humanitarian who worked to stop violence, he’ll be seen as someone who enabled mass killings in Africa’s great lakes region.