Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Roméo Dallaire, former commander of the U.N. Assistance Mission for Rwanda speaks Oct. 8 to a crowd of nearly 300 invited guests in the Teplitz Memorial Courtroom of the Barco Law Building. Before beginning his remarks, Dallaire quipped that the courtroom brought back memories of his two appearances in front of the International Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania. “I suspect, I’m one of the few authors who had to defend his book in front of an international criminal court for content and voracity,” Dallaire said.: Dallaire's book, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.

Danger surrounded the sergeant. From one edge of the Rwandan village, about 30 boys—ranging in age from nine to 16—approached, armed with AK-47s. Suddenly, this makeshift army opened fire on the sergeant, his small command of U.N. soldiers, and the hundred-plus villagers they were trying to protect.

Adding to the chaos, a group of girls—some of them pregnant, as young as nine and 10— appeared on the scene from another direction. Behind them arrived, in turn, another contingent of boys, guns blazing.

What should the sergeant do? Order his men to kill these children who kill? Complicating the sergeant’s decision was his knowledge that most of the children were killing under duress, having been ripped from their families and villages, drugged, and forced to live in fear.

During Rwanda’s 100-day civil war (1993-94), such scenes played out time and again in front of Canadian Armed Forces Lieutenant General (now retired) Roméo Dallaire, who commanded the United Nations (U.N.) Assistance Mission for Rwanda. In his book, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Carroll & Graf, 2004) and in his Oct. 8 lecture at Pitt, Dallaire recounted experiences from that war, which spawned one of the worst genocides of the 20th century.

He told of a U.N. corporal who came to a village with a handful of soldiers. A large crowd confronted them on the village’s outskirts, blocking their entrance but not their view of the town’s center square. In the square, the soldiers saw a throng of people surrounding a teenage girl with a child on her back and a machete in her hand. The machete-wielding girl threatened another girl who was also carrying a child on her back. “Does [the corporal] open fire on the barrier, then open fire on the crowd, killing God knows how many people, to maybe save this one girl?” Dallaire asked the lecture audience. “Does he tell his best shot to shoot the girl with the machete in order to protect the other girl? Or does he walk way and simply carry on?”

According to Dallaire, in the past 15 years commanders fulfilling U.N. mandates have increasingly found themselves caught between classic warfare—characterized by definable borders and an identifiable enemy—and new conflict parameters, which he attributes to the fact that traditional rules of war no longer apply in the post-Cold War world.

“We have, in so many circumstances, been ‘ad hoc-ing’ responses,” Dallaire said. “And the ad hoc-ing of responses and the on-the-job training we’re doing, and the crisis management we’ve been involved with, have simply not been meeting the challenges of conflict and the destruction of human beings” in countries that were for many years dominated by Western colonial powers and then, during the Cold War, ruled by dictators who, according to Dallaire, were paid by the developed world to maintain control of the countries because, as he noted, “nobody wanted to go into World War III over Tanzania.”

After the Cold War ended, the message sent by the developed world to countries like Rwanda and Tanzania was, in effect, “sort yourselves out, because we don’t need you anymore,” Dallaire said. In many cases, he explained, that is exactly what people in such countries have been trying to do.

According to Dallaire, the U.N. has been ineffective in preventing mass violence because its member nations have been, and remain, dominated by self-interest. “We have established a pecking order in humanity,” Dallaire argued, citing as an example the billions of dollars and tens of thousands of troops that the West poured into Yugoslavia while ignoring Rwanda’s human rights crisis. “We literally have come to the decision that not all humans are human— that, in fact, some humans are more human than others.”

Six weeks into the Rwandan genocide, 300,000 men, women and children had been slaughtered. At that point, the U.N. finally approved a mandate granting Dallaire the reinforcements he had been requesting from the outset. But nobody came. “None of the developed countries signed on to send troops,” Dallaire recalled. So, the killing continued. By the time the war finally ended, two months later, an additional 500,000-600,000 Rwandans were dead.

Dallaire argued that outside military intervention is the only option for ending the current conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region—a brutal, ethnically based civil war eerily reminiscent of Rwanda’s—because no viable political or diplomatic solution is available at this time. “If we continue in our current process, we will work toward the failure of the government in Khartoum and exacerbate a situation that is already complex,” he said.

Dallaire blamed the U.N.’s ineffectiveness on the organization’s “middle powers”—Japan, Germany, Scandinavia, and his native Canada. “The U.N. is ineffective because the bulk of the developed world, in the structure of the middle powers, is not pulling its weight,” he said.

Commenting on America’s go-in-alone invasion of Iraq, Dallaire said “there should have been a maneuver to permit the U.N. to concurrently prepare to move in under the umbrella of the U.S., and with its political support.” This approach might have reduced Iraqis’ suspicions of U.S. ulterior motives, Dallaire said.

According to Dallaire, the United States’ greatest strength lies not in wielding its overwhelming military force, but in its threat of unleashing that force. The Americans, British, and French are the last military forces that should intervene in developing nations to resolve conflicts and keep the peace, he said. Dallaire’s advice to America was, “Don’t be the world policeman. Be the world army and move the middle powers. Force them to show their hand. Work with them through the U.N. to advance solutions that can be innovative, more altruistic—at least in perception—and ultimately, potentially, more lasting, without abusing the incredible capabilities of this nation and the other powers, and as such putting all of us at risk.”

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Some 300 invited guests—Pitt administrators, staff, and friends of the University—gathered in the Barco Law Library Building’s Teplitz Memorial Courtroom to attend an Oct. 8 lecture by Canadian Armed Forces Lieutenant General (retired) Roméo Dallaire.

The guests also were there to celebrate the inauguration of Pitt’s Ford Institute for Human Security and dedicate a newly renovated suite of offices in Posvar Hall for both the Ford Institute and Pitt’s Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies.

Dallaire’s appearance as distinguished lecturer at the event was fitting, said Simon Reich, director of the Ford Institute and professor of public and international affairs. Fitting because, as Reich put it, Dallaire in many ways inspired the founding of the Ford Institute, having spent the last decade advocating humanism as a necessary element in conflict resolution—a cause that echoes the Ford Institute’s own mission.