Nightline: U.N. Soldier Struggles With Past

O T T A W A, Feb. 7, 2001 -- Romeo D'Allaire is a three-star general in Canada's army, a former U.N. commander and today, a man who needs therapy and nine pills a day to control his shattered mind.

D'Allaire and 2,000 other U.N. peacekeepers were witness to genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

"You never forget this stuff. It has imposed itself on your brain forever," he says. "The best you're hoping for is the ability to discern when you fall into the spiral of depression and suicide."

The story of D'Allaire is more than simply a tragedy of a broken man. The U.N. commander found himself alone in the middle of forces too powerful for one man to overcome — a nation in the madness of genocide and a world largely indifferent to it.

Peacekeeper's Nightmare

When the U.N. peacekeepers started arriving in Rwanda in the fall of 1993, it was for a routine mission to monitor a cease-fire between the two warring sides: the Hutu-led government and the Tutsi opposition.

It didn't last. Within months, U.N. soldiers were being ambushed and killed. And Western governments panicked, ordering their soldiers to abandon the mission.

At the U.N. peacekeeping compound in Rwanda's capital, D'Allaire tried to regain control "My force was withering," he recalls. "I had no capability to defend the onslaught."

D'Allaire began hearing reports that the Hutu authorities were registering all Tutsis in the country for the purpose of "their extermination." He notified U.N. headquarters in New York with the warning of the genocide that would begin three months later.

But D'Allaire's warning was ignored. Hutu extremists butchered Tutsis and Hutu moderates by the hundreds of thousands. The roads were soaked with blood and littered with bodies. Bloated corpses floated in rivers. Terrified refugees ran into camps so vast there were people as far as the eye could see. The killers entered the camp and murdered more.

His desperate appeal to intervene was rejected by U.N. peacekeeping headquarters, at the time led by current Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who did not believe there was support among members for more involvement.

As a peacekeeper, D'Allaire was told to remain impartial and not to take sides. He was ordered by U.N. headquarters to meet with the very same authorities who were sanctioning the killings.

"How can I negotiate with a person who's just finished slashing and hacking people?" asks D'Allaire. "How do I plead with him? How come I didn't take my pistol and blow a hole right in the middle of his forehead? "

'Pretend Both Sides Are Equal'

Institutionalized impartiality is one of the reasons for U.N. failures in Rwanda and Bosnia, according to journalist Carol Off. "The worst the United Nations has done is to create something they call 'moral equivalency' … to pretend both sides are equal. To consider them moral equivalents," says Off.

The current head of U.N. peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guehenno, says many hard lessons have been learned from the failures. But the guiding principle of involvement remains the same.

"You can't say one side is right and the other side is wrong. You have to come to a political arrangement."

For the soldiers involved, being impartial can be personally devastating. In Bosnia, the blue-helmeted U.N. soldiers stood by for years while violence engulfed the lives of thousands. The final horror was when Dutch peacekeepers stood passively as Serbs separated women and children from the men in Srebrenica. The men were then exterminated. It was the same in Rwanda; U.N. peacekeepers were forbidden to act.

Anguish of Inaction

Guilt is one of the most debilitating aspects of what armies in several countries now recognize as "the Peacekeeper's Injury." It can be more profound than traditional battle stress or even shell shock because it affects the soul of a soldier.

"In peacekeeping you are not fighting. An individual sergeant or corporal who witnesses such actions and cannot use force goes through a mental crash. His moral values, his ethical values, his religious beliefs are brought together and they're all crashing," says D'Allaire.

And like any wound, healing takes time. D'Allaire was about to be Canada's next chief of defense staff — the country's top soldier — when the extent of his wound was revealed. He was found this past year in an Ottawa park, an empty bottle of scotch beside him, disoriented and suicidal.

"At that moment, Rwanda was right here," explained D'Allaire. "I was reliving my mission … I was screaming for them to kill me."

Romeo D'Allaire has resigned from military duty, but in sharing his pain he hopes to help change the rules of peacekeeping so soldiers can take sides when the horror of war is so apparent. Being more involved, he believes, may spare others the anguish of inaction he suffers so deeply.