"But they were ambushed, taken prisoner and later tortured, mutilated and murdered."
How is Dallaire responsible for an enemy ambush? Did Dallaire conspire with the enemy to kill those Belgium peacekeepers or did Dallaire underestimate the threat and risk? No doubt your hindsight is much better than Dallaire's foresight. Looking back, I guess Dallaire should have sent more than 10 Belgiums to the PM's house. Maybe he should have sent a battalion. Unfortunately he didn't have a battalion. All he had for that mission was 10 Belgium peacekeepers. Lots of people were dying that night and Dallaire lacked the forces to deal with every threat. If I recall, Dallaire asked for re-enforcements repeatedly for months during the run up to the Rwandan genocide and now you blame him for not having enough soldiers???? Also if he didn't sent the Belgium peacekeepers the PM would have been killed for certain. If he moved reinforcements to assist the Belgium contingent, then another slaughter would have happened somewhere else.
If Dallaire was a selfish prick, he would have pulled out of Rwanda along with the UN and let the slaughter happen. A good chance far more than 800,000 people would have perished. Instead he stayed and did the best that he could with the limited resources at his disposal.
There were early signs that something was amiss when, on January 22, 1994, a French DC-8 aircraft landed in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, loaded with ammunition and weapons for the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR). (FAR was the Hutu army under Habyarimana's control.) Through an informant, Dallaire learned that these weapons were to be used for an attack on Tutsis after the Belgians would have been forced to withdraw by violence orchestrated by the Interahamwe.[citation needed] Despite his telegram to the UN, Dallaire was not permitted to seize the weapons, as this was deemed to be an action beyond his UN mandate. The Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army told Dallaire that since the munitions were ordered before Arusha, the UN was not allowed to detain the shipment, and displayed paperwork showing that the weapons had been sent by Belgium, Israel, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Egypt. In addition to the arms deliveries, troops from the Rwandan government began checking identity cards which identified individuals as Hutus or Tutsis. These cards would later allow Hutu militias to identify their victims with accuracy.[citation needed]
Following the withdrawal of Belgian forces, whom Dallaire considered his best-trained[5] and best-equipped, Dallaire consolidated his contingent of Pakistani, Canadian, Ghanaian, Tunisian, and Bangladeshi soldiers in urban areas and focused on providing areas of "safe control" in and around Kigali. Most of Dallaire's efforts were to defend specific areas where he knew Tutsis to be hiding. Dallaire's staff — including the U.N.'s unarmed observers — often relied on its U.N. credentials to save Tutsis, heading off Interahamwe attacks even while being outnumbered and outgunned. Dallaire's actions are credited with directly saving the lives of 32,000 persons of different races.[6]
Roméo Dallaire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
How many lives have you Dallaire critics saved?
I have no problems condemning Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks against Israeli civilians as war crimes. I've done so repeatedly, and without goading. I have no problem with the Canadian government's stand regarding Palestinian militant groups, so why would write about it?
I noticed that EagleSmack, DaSleeper and CNDBear can't write a critical thing about Israel even when it involves IDF soldiers using an 11 year old girl as a human shield. EagleSmack can't even say that slaughtering 24 unarmed civilians including seven children, a toddler, three women, a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair and then pissing on their corpses crosses any lines for him.
And you guys have the balls to criticize General Romeo Dallaire for only saving 32,000 lives, even though he asked for and never got re-inforcements or permission to stop weapons shipments from Belgium, Israel, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Egypt.
You guys really have double standards....