Free Shake Hands With the Devil by Romeo Dallaire Page B

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, LesterPearson, 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 offerthese 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