I wish I could have been there
for this. I have always wanted to hear Romeo D'allaire speak. I think his voice is critical for the powerful nations of the world to examine their failed commitment to not allow genocide to happen again.
Quote:
The other part of the equation is that the perpetrators of the genocide, among them the Rwandan military, know the political will is not there to stop them, and if they kill a few peacekeepers, a U.N. mission will leave.
And that's exactly what happened, Dallaire said.
In the first days of the U.N. mission, 50 Red Cross workers and a handful of Belgian troops were killed. Also, the governments that sent troops told their soldiers not to engage unless they were defending themselves, so Dallaire was powerless to help the Belgian troops he saw being killed.
"They didn't even give me enough ammunition to sustain a firefight for more than 3 minutes," Dallaire said. "So what was I to do? Open fire and get even more people killed knowing that these countries will pull their troops out later anyway?
"These people learned well the lessons of Mogadishu: Kill some, and the rest will leave."
And the heavy hands of superpowers don't always work because of distrust over their motives, Dallaire said. People have a hard time believing they are there for purely humanitarian reasons.
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I think the last paragraph does a very good job of describing this country and Britain's difficulty in Darfur... on the one hand you have citizens yelling that we should go in and do something about Darfur and then on the other hand, the government is scolded that should we go in and do something about Darfur, it would be only because we're interested in Oil.
I do not envy world leaders in this matter. It's almost as if they need to go somewhere quiet and meditate on this...to try to push aside the political thoughts and criticism to decide what how we can stop the killing in places like the Congo, Darfur and Burundi.
D'allaire is right...the governments allowing these killings in their country KNOW the world will do nothing to stop it. Look at how Khartoum responded when the US merely stepped up and said "genocide"... they responded to the press that the US is only interested in their country's oil.
That's a strawman argument, right?
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