Roméo Dallaire

It was April 6, 1994, in Kigali, Rwanda.

That day, President Habyarimana's plane was shot down over the city. That day, the genocide against the Tutsi began.

The commander of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda was a Canadian general. His name was Roméo Dallaire.

Ten Belgian soldiers of the mission were assigned to protect the prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana. She was killed. So were the ten soldiers.

Roméo Dallaire had seen the danger coming. He had warned UN Headquarters in New York that a massacre of the Tutsi was being prepared. He had asked for permission to act.

He was refused.

He was born on June 25, 1946, in Denekamp, in the Netherlands. His father was a Canadian non-commissioned officer, his mother a Dutch nurse.

On December 13, 1946, at six months old, he arrived in Halifax with his mother. He grew up in the east end of Montreal.

He became a soldier. He went through the Royal Military College in Saint-Jean, then the one in Kingston.

In 1993, the UN gave him its mission in Rwanda: UNAMIR, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda.

He estimated that 5,000 well-equipped troops would be needed. The Security Council refused. It even cut the mission down to 270 troops.

He and his staff are credited with saving some 32,000 people.

The genocide lasted from April 6 to July 16, 1994. About 800,000 people were killed.

He came home to Canada. In 2004, he would say: "Rwanda will never ever leave me."

He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, insomnia. He chose to speak about it openly.

In April 2000, he left the Armed Forces.

In January 2004, he testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, against Théoneste Bagosora.

In 2003, he published his account: Shake Hands with the Devil. The book won the Governor General's Award.

He stood for one simple idea, which he summed up this way in 2006:

In 2005, he entered the Senate of Canada. That same year, he received the Pearson Peace Medal.

Then another cause took over: child soldiers. In 2010, he devoted a book to them, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children.

In 2014, he left the Senate. He wanted to give himself fully to one mission: to end the recruitment and use of children in violence.

In 2016, he published one more book, about his battle with post-traumatic stress.

This conviction of a soldier from Quebec echoes Ubuntu, without being the same thing.

What remains of him is the image of a general who could not stop everything. And who, ever since, has devoted his life to telling the world what he saw.