Shake Hands With the Devil

by Roméo Dallaire

  I put my nose to the grindstone and managed to reasonably distinguish myself academically, producing a research paper on circumpolar threats and the nature of Arctic warfare, which was later used by National Defence Headquarters when it was seriously considering setting up a permanent garrison of army, navy and air force personnel along the Northwest Passage.

  Immediately upon returning to Canada I was appointed executive assistant to the deputy commander of the army, Major General Doug Baker, a privileged position. He was known to everybody as “Two Gun” Baker because of his straight-shooting style of command. As the army’s senior serving gunner, he was the godfather of the artillery. The war in the Falklands was on, and we seemed to be constantly zipping around the country or back and forth to Britain and the United States, with the general munching on chocolate bars, immersed in one of the several horse operas he always carried with him, while I dutifully read Clausewitz’s On War.

  General Baker was a hard taskmaster with a demanding work ethic and extremely high standards. He never counted his hours and I learned not to count mine. Paperwork was limited during regular working hours, as that time was reserved for decision-making and for his troops.

  In the summer of 1982, I was promoted to lieutenant colonel and our daughter Catherine joined the growing ranks of the Dallaire family. I spent less than a year as the deputy chief of staff of a militia area headquarters in Montreal. In March 1983, I returned to Valcartier as the commanding officer of the 5ième Régiment d’artillerie légère du Canada, with a troop strength of over six hundred. It was a very different outfit from the struggling young regiment I had joined as a young lieutenant. For the fifteenth anniversary of the regiment, we were to receive the Freedom of the City of Quebec. Gunners had been a part of the old garrison town’s history since 1608 and, during our day of celebration, we marched through the streets of the old walled city with our guns to receive the honour from the mayor, Jean Pelletier.

  But there was a feeling in many quarters that because the 5ième was one of the specially created French units, it had never been really tested. In April 1985, there was going to be a big army exercise in Alberta called RV85, and I was determined that during this two-month exercise, my gunners were going to outshoot and outmanoeuvre the rest of the Canadian artillery.

  Nine months before the exercise, I brought in a couple of my operations staff officers, Captain André Richard and Captain Michel Bonnet, to devise a training plan guaranteed to produce the best artillery regiment in the army. During the first week of September, I assembled the whole regiment into the big theatre on the base, sat them down and said, “I think it is high time that we show the rest of the artillery that we are not second-class citizens.” A hush fell over the room. Although soldiers had muttered these kinds of sentiments to themselves, no senior officer had ever had the temerity to get up and publicly acknowledge that this is how we were viewed. At the very end of the speech, I said, “I need every single one of you there, body and soul, for that exercise, and I don’t want to see any of you having to pull out because your wives are expecting.” There was much laughter, but those words came back to haunt me.

  For the next six months we worked hard. I scrounged ammunition, equipment, more training time in the field, more winter exercises with the guns. I kept pushing the troops to go beyond their own expectations to reach what I believed was their potential. My soldiers were magnificent, focused, diligent and totally committed.

  When we arrived in Suffield, Alberta, the largest training area in the country, we were technically and tactically ready. As the exercise went into its second month, the army and divisional commanders confirmed that my regiment was not only the best artillery regiment in the corps, but one of the best combat units in the division.

  Two days before the end of the exercise, I got a phone call. Beth was pregnant with Guy at the time and was having complications. The doctor had moved her into the hospital because he was concerned she might lose the baby. I knew I had to be with Beth. I went on the radio net to tell everyone in the regiment that I had to leave. My voice was breaking, and I was keenly aware that I was doing something I had asked them not to do. Later, back in Valcartier, I lost track of the number of gunners who came up to me and thanked me for not keeping a stiff upper lip, for being human, for sharing my life and my struggle with them.

  Guy was born a few days later, and both he and Beth came through in fine shape. I bought a beer for every member of the regiment.

  In 1986 I was in Ottawa at National Defence Headquarters as a section head, learning the ropes of project management and procurement. Promoted to full colonel, I was appointed the director of the army equipment and research program, a job I relished, since one of the overwhelming problems facing the Canadian military was the lack of expenditure and rational plan for the acquisition of the systems we needed to remain operational. It was a perfect job, with a tolerant boss, Major General Richard Evraire, who gave us guidance, a team of near-workaholics, and the advice of a small inner cabinet to help us keep within the tolerances of the friction war we were fighting with the air force and navy, and with the federal bureaucrats.

  In response to increasing pressure from the United States, which under Ronald Reagan was spending trillions to win the Cold War, Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government announced that it was committed to increase defence spending. The government asked for a white paper that would plot a fifteen-year strategy to bring the Canadian military up to scratch. At National Defence Headquarters, we were jubilant. Finally we could start to think about real defence budgets, maybe in the $18-billion range for the army alone, and about increasing the forces from about 72,000 to 90,000 regular members, and doubling the reserves from 45,000 to 90,000. Instead of being a shop-window force with no sustainability, we had a chance to become a truly credible defence force able to live up to our NATO commitments.

  We worked constantly on the white paper. We believed that if we could come up with the right arguments and the right fiscal package, we might actually persuade the government and the country of the wisdom of supporting a larger, better-equipped and better-financed military. I worked with my small inner core of about sixty dedicated staff of captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels and my sterling deputy, Howie Marsh. We worked nights, weekends and statutory holidays (some of us had cots in our office) for eight months.

  Then on March 17, 1987, word came down from the Department of National Defence that cabinet had decided that our plan was not affordable. Some of us cried in shocked anger and disbelief. Still, the young and ambitious minister of national defence, Perrin Beatty, decided that we should continue work on the policy document, and table it in the House of Commons, even though he knew it would never be implemented. We expected an outcry from the senior generals and admirals who had persuaded us that this battle for a new policy base and funding line was the closest we would get to the high stakes of war, but none of them uttered a peep of protest.

  I had never seen morale drop so fast and so violently in a group of experienced officers as it did on that day in March 1987.

  I sat in the gallery of the House of Commons on June 5 when Beatty tabled a toothless and even hypocritical document. Over the next two years, the Conservatives hacked and slashed what was left of our acquisition programs. I finally left Ottawa in disgust in the summer of 1989. I wouldn’t say I was disillusioned, but I had suffered a loss of innocence.

  My family and I moved back to the Montreal area. I was promoted brigadier general to take up the position of commandant at the Collège militaire royal. I adored the job. It was not only a magnificent challenge, but it brought me back to the place I had started from and gave me a chance to reappraise myself. The routine helped heal some of the wounds of Ottawa, and my wife and I also revelled in the social life with its extraordinary mixture of academics, officers, and cadets, integrated in one institution and pursuing the same objective: the development of future officers. The principal, Roch Carrier, was an acclaimed writer
who hid his strong will and determination behind a calm and serene manner. Our two years together were an absolute joy.

  My interest was to try to improve leadership training. When I arrived, little formal military leadership material and experience were being passed on to the future officers. The task was immense, since the Canadian Forces at the time had little to no formal material to provide. My generation had been on the receiving end of experience passed down from our elders, who got theirs from Second World War and Korean War veterans. As the guys with the combat medals retired, with very little of their experience put to paper, leadership training became more and more difficult for those who had not been in battle. It was simpler for most to teach physical fitness or conciergerie. The principles of military leadership remain difficult to teach.

  Before my work at the college was complete, I was selected to attend the Higher Command and Staff course in Camberley, England. The Gulf War had just started, so we dubbed the course “How to Do Schwarzkopf’s Job.”

  When I returned to Canada, I was appointed commander of the 5ième Group Brigade Mechanisé du Canada at Valcartier. I was taking charge of about 5,200 military personnel, 1,200 civilian support staff and related historic garrison duties in Quebec City, the oldest capital in North America. I was the first officer who had started his career with the 5ième to command it; Valcartier was a superb operational posting at the height of the Gulf War and the beginning of a new era of peacekeeping and conflict resolution for the Canadian military.

  I worked constantly. We lived in the brigade commander’s historic official residence on the Plains of Abraham; my kids attended Catholic private schools, run by religious orders in the old city; I was driven the twenty-six kilometres to the base in an impeccable black staff car; my wife was a pillar of the community and worked hard to support the families of soldiers away on missions. I was excited by the wealth of possibilities that lay before me, but I was also completely and utterly alone. I never seemed to have an extra moment to spend with my children, and only now do I realize how much they suffered as they watched me work at my desk or at the dining-room table during the rare hours when I was at home.

  Commanding such a large contingent of soldiers in a bastion of Quebec that had nationalist sympathies was a delicate balancing act. That was never clearer to me and my headquarters staff than during an exercise aimed at training a 1,600-person contingent for a high-risk peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia. We were training the troops in escort tasks and convoy protection, and to provide a little more realism, we had planned manoeuvres in local communities on a specific day, alerting the police and the town councils as to what we were doing. It turned out that on that very day Prime Minister Mulroney was in town with other premiers to negotiate the Meech Lake Accord, which was designed to reconcile Quebec to staying in Canada under special status. Someone told the media that the prime minister was trying to intimidate the separatists by ordering up a huge display of military force.

  I was ordered to stop the exercise and move the blue berets back to barracks with our tails between our legs. Caught by journalists later that day, I apparently created a small storm in Ottawa by accusing the media of fostering Quebec paranoia and of jumping to conclusions without making the effort to find out what was really going on. Someone in Ottawa must have stood up for me, because I never heard about it again.

  From 1991 to 1993, the brigade sent more than four thousand troops on peacekeeping missions in places all over the world, from Cambodia to the Balkans to Kuwait. At one point I called the commander of the army to suggest that my whole brigade headquarters be moved overseas, since it felt like I was the only one left at home. He thanked me for the moment of levity, but told me I should prepare for even more UN taskings. I couldn’t figure out where I would get the troops.

  We were sending our soldiers, who were ready for classic chapter-six peacekeeping missions, into a world that seemed increasingly less amenable to such interventions. Chapter six of the UN Charter deals with threats to international peace and security. In the fifties, Lester Pearson, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs at the time, had come up with a concept of peacekeeping that had been implemented in conflict areas throughout the Cold War (and had won Pearson a Nobel Peace Prize). In these operations, lightly-armed, multinational, blue-helmeted, impartial and neutral peacekeepers were deployed and interposed between two former warring factions, with their consent, either to maintain the status quo, as in Sinai from 1956 to 1967, or to assist the parties in implementing a peace accord, as was at that time the case in Cambodia. The key principles of these operations are impartiality, neutrality and consent. Classic peacekeeping had worked well during the Cold War, where the two camps had used peacekeeping to diffuse conflicts that could draw in the major superpowers and lead to nuclear Armageddon. This was the type of peacekeeping that I had been trained in and the principles with which I was most familiar.

  But we were increasingly less certain of the effectiveness of the classic approach. Not only were we stretched in finding enough personnel, but on top of everything else, we started to receive casualties—some even killed in action. On June 18, 1993, one of the soldiers from the brigade, Corporal Daniel Gunther, died on active duty in Bosnia. The report I was given at the time suggested that a mortar bomb had exploded near his armoured personnel carrier and that he had been killed by flying shrapnel. Beth and I attended his funeral, which I found simple to the point of disrespect. Corporal Gunther was buried with a minimum of peacetime honours, and he and his family were treated as if he had been killed in a road accident. I remember his devastated father coming up to me after the service and asking me what, if anything, his son had died for? I had no answer to offer him and the rest of the shocked and grieving family.

  According to the often gut-wrenching testimony of my young troops, the situations they found themselves in in the field were far more dangerous and complex than we were being led to expect. For instance, I found out much later that Gunther had actually been hit in the chest by an anti-tank rocket that had been fired from a shoulder-held grenade launcher. He had been deliberately targeted, and murdered. And yet the kind of training I was supposed to offer these troops before they went into the theatre was based on a hopelessly outdated model of lightly-armed blue berets monitoring a stable ceasefire. Lessons learned were slowly beginning to emerge, but not fast enough or with the force needed to stimulate any real changes. I was deeply concerned about the impact the combined effects of extreme stress and brutal violence encountered in the field were having on my troops. I harassed army headquarters to send some clinical psychology experts out to try to come up with solutions. The response that came back? Because of troop limitations, there were barely enough bayonets to do the job, let alone resources for such a low-priority effort. A commander should know how to do what needed to be done.

  On June 27, 1993, I attended a change-of-command parade for one of my units, the 430th Tactical Helicopter Squadron. It was a lovely, cloudless day with just enough of a breeze that the soldiers were not too uncomfortable in their dress greens. I had made my speech of thanks to the departing commander and of welcome to the incoming one and was coming off the dais when an aide rushed up to me and said that Major-General Armand Roy, the Military Area Commander for Quebec and my boss at that time, was on the phone in my staff car and needed to speak with me immediately. I hurried to the car and picked up the phone. General Roy asked me if there was any reason why I couldn’t be deployed overseas in a peacekeeping mission. I said none whatsoever. He said that UN Headquarters was contemplating a mission to Rwanda. I could feel my heart pounding with excitement. I managed to stammer out, “Rwanda, that’s somewhere in Africa, isn’t it?” He laughed and told me he would call the following day with more details. I almost floated back to the ceremony, I was that exhilarated. I leaned over to Beth and whispered, “I think I’m going to Africa!”

  3

  “CHECK OUT RWANDA AND YOU’RE IN CHARGE”

 
I CONFESS THAT when General Roy called, I didn’t know where Rwanda was or exactly what kind of trouble the country was in. The next day, he told me more about the tiny, heavily populated African nation. Rwanda was in the midst of negotiating a peace agreement to end a vicious two-and-a-half-year civil war between a rebel force, the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), and the government. The rebel movement had grown out of a refugee population of Rwandans who had fled north to Uganda in the early sixties, after independence had changed the political balance in their homeland. In the early nineties, the rebel army had twice pushed into the northern region of Rwanda and was now hunkered down behind a demilitarized zone monitored by a group of neutral military observers under the auspices of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). While the parties negotiated the terms of a peace agreement in Arusha, Tanzania, the UN had been asked by the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, to send in a small force to monitor the border to ensure that weapons and soldiers were not crossing from Uganda into Rwanda to reinforce the RPF.

  This was to be my mission, dubbed the United Nations Observer Mission in Uganda and Rwanda (UNOMUR). General Roy described it as a classic peacekeeping operation, a confidence-building exercise designed to encourage the belligerents to get down to the serious business of peace. It was extremely modest in scope and size: I would have under my command a total of eighty-one unarmed military observers, who would operate on the Ugandan side of the border.

  Why pick me to lead this tiny mission in a place I’d barely heard of? I was about to begin an unprecedented third year as commander of the 5ième Brigade Group; in four days we were going to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of its founding with more than a thousand troops on parade. The 5th still faced plenty of challenges, many of them in the area of peacekeeping. We were still too ad hoc in our preparation of troops for deployment on ever more challenging missions. Much of our training was still focused on classic war-fighting, even though the conflicts we were sending troops into usually were not unfolding like classic wars. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t yet time for me to leave, but I was being asked—ordered—to deploy. Whether it was a big force, a small force or just me alone, I was going over. Knowing that Major General Maurice Baril was heading up the military component of the UN Department of Peace-keeping Operations (DPKO), I surmised that there must be more to this mission than met the eye. In the end I decided that this was my chance to learn first-hand what would work in the changing nature of conflict in the post–Cold War world.