General Roméo Dallaire is a celebrated advocate for global human rights, as well as a highly respected author, public speaker, leadership consultant, international advisor, former Canadian Senator, and founder of la Fondation Roméo Dallaire and the Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace, and Security. Throughout his distinguished military career, Dallaire served most notably as Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda during the 1994 genocide where he provided the UN with information about the planned massacre, which ultimately took more than 800,000 lives in less than 100 days; yet the UN ordered him not to intervene and demanded his withdrawal. Dallaire, along with a small contingent, including Canadian, Ghanaian, and Tunisian soldiers and military observers, disobeyed that order. They believed they had a moral obligation to stay, to help where they could, and to—at the very least—bear witness to what the rest of the world chose to turn its back. Dallaire’s courage and leadership during this mission earned him the Order of Canada, the Meritorious Service Cross, the United States Legion of Merit, the Aegis Award on Genocide Prevention, and the affection and admiration of people around the globe.
After Rwanda, Dallaire found a path back to personal peace. Can the world do that? Decades after the Berlin Wall fell, the international order has fallen back into a web of alliances where truces are more fragile than they have been in decades. We need a new perspective and new solutions. Humanity’s problems are increasingly borderless. Too many of us react to this reality by putting up walls that allow us (we think) to protect ourselves and forget about others. But putting one’s faith in state power, nationalism and the use of force to keep us “safe” behind our home borders is a bet that won’t be won. Such narrow thinking is no longer possible in our interconnected world. We need strategic local and global leadership to actively predict and prevent problems before they turn into catastrophes. Only in this way can we prevent suffering and insecurity and look toward a state Dallaire calls The Peace.
Whether as military commander, humanitarian, speaker, or author, Dallaire works to bring national and international attention to situations too-often ignored, whether the prevention of mass atrocities and the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict, the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder on veterans and their families, or strategic solutions for lasting peace.
Drawing from his latest book, The Peace: A Warrior’s Journey, Dallaire shows us the past, present and future of war through the prism of his own life. The battered, tortured warrior who emerged from the Rwandan catastrophe grew determined to help repair the new world disorder—to prevent genocide, abolish the use of child soldiers, and find ways to intervene in, even prevent, conflicts in defense of humanity. Dallaire helped advance the doctrines of Responsibility to Protect and the Will to Intervene only to witness those initiatives falter because of the same old power politics, national self-interest and general indifference that had allowed the genocide in Rwanda to unfold unchecked. In The Peace he calls out the elements that undermine true security because they reinforce the dangerous, self-interested belief that “balance” of power and truces are the best we can do. Too often we say we are “at peace” because the bombs are falling elsewhere and we, ourselves, are not under attack. Dallaire shows us a path, instead, to what he calls “the peace,” a state where, above all else, humanity values the ties that bind us and the planet together—and acts accordingly.
General Roméo Dallaire's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College.
