The failure of humanity in Rwanda was the failure of more than just the UN: Dallaire
Former UN commander says his own country let him down in the midst of the genocide while the international media misplayed the story
Media has a role to play in converting its coverage of mass atrocity into prevention.
That’s the message Romeo Dallaire had for a roundtable of academics, journalists and students gathered at the Media and Mass Atrocity roundtable at Carleton University.
The retired general knows all too well the dangers of inaction. As Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda in 1994, he failed to prevent the genocide that claimed the lives of more than 800,000 Rwandans.
Frozen by administrative red tape and blocked by his own chain of command, Dallaire and the UN failed to intervene as the ethnic cleansing began.
“My own country refused to give me information,” he told the roundtable. Shut out from reliable intelligence, Dallaire says he was forced to purchase intelligence from other agents in Rwanda, which he could not always afford. He says the lack of reliable intelligence left him in the dark as madness set in on across the country.
“It was infantile compared to what we should have had,” he said, explaining that he’s still “pissed off” by it all.
Dallaire says he knew that he needed to capture the international community’s attention if he was going to stop the violence. To do so, he says he relied on the media.
“The media can be an exceptionally effective weapon, if you wish to use it,” he said.
But at first the genocide barely made headlines.
“I wondered how OJ Simpson got more time on ABC, NBC, CBC and CNN than the Rwandan genocide,” said Dallaire.
In order to keep the world’s eyes on the atrocity, Dallaire said he opened up his headquarters to the media and provided them with all the assets and resources he could afford, even putting soldiers at risk so the reporters could get what they needed. The risk was not without reward.
“As much as I was giving, I was getting information in exchange,” he said, “because they were mobile and could get to areas that I didn’t have access to.”
But the symbiotic relationship was complicated.
Dallaire said the information the media was spreading around the world only told a part of the story.
“You needed to have much more backdrop to understand the extent of what was happening,” Dallaire said. “We weren’t on anybody’s radar until shit hit the fan.”
The lack of in-depth coverage, he argues, was due to the absence of international media in pre-genocide Rwanda.
“(The coverage) did not move, as I would have hoped, the international community to action,” he said. To the rest of the world the story was viewed as “just ‘Africans going after Africans’ again.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Paul Watson echoed Dallaire’s sentiments, recalling a conversation he had at the time of the genocide with his editor.
“I said, ‘I have to go back to Rwanda,’” Watson remembers. “My editor said, ‘It’s just tribal killing.’”
The problem, Dallaire said, was that the media focused on the sensationalism and horror of the violence without focusing on the political process that could have been employed to stop it.
Watson challenged Dallaire on that point, asking why the former commander didn’t go off-the-record to inform journalists of the reality of why his mission was being rendered ineffective as the genocide set in.
“I think that was the failure of my command,” Dallaire replied. “Not talking to you guys or feeding you information, or flying to Washington or New York or Paris to influence the political circuits there.” He said at the time he felt he had to work “within the system” and the chain of command to bring about change.
In the future, Dallaire says commanders need to be educated on the complexities of dealing with conflict and need to open up to the media.
“We cannot bring resolution until we are multi-disciplinary,” he said, and the media must be a part of that.
Photos by Maureen McEwan.
