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DIFFERING VIEWPOINTS ON DARFUR: ROMEO DALLAIRE VS JOHN WEISS
Annotated Transcript prepared by Dr. John Weiss
Professor of History, Cornell University
Original Text Delivered by
Lieutenant
General Romeo Dallaire
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
FEBRUARY 5, 2005
CONCLUDING REMARKS AND ANSWERS TO STUDENT QUESTIONS AT A COLLEGE STUDENT
LEADERS’ CONFERENCE ON THE DARFUR CRISIS SPONSORED BY THE COMMITTEE ON
CONSCIENCE OF THE UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM. FEBRUARY 5, 2005
[Comments by
John Weiss, who, after Dallaire signed the standard release form, videotaped and
transcribed the speech, are in double brackets and bolded]
What about the Darfur situation?
We've got to put the effort into bringing a
solution to Darfur in providing protection and assistance to the Darfurians, and
treat it as it is, the cause célèbre of our era. And it must be a
commitment to provide that effort there and not continue to let the festering
scenarios of diplomatic manipulations of interactions, prevent us from assisting
people who are dying now, raped now, suffering now, and continue to do so.
One of the arguments why I never got a new mandate
in Rwanda during the genocide in Rwanda was because China would veto any mandate
in regards to providing forces for intervention in the genocide, or in human
rights, and we heard early on that China is not the only one right now showing
its hand that maybe it would veto a mandate that is going to set up the African
Union as it's doing now to great failure and embarrassment and weaken the
possibility for the African Union to bring resolution in its own region.
We should call their bluff.
[[Good idea still? I would
say yes]]
If you’re going to veto about intervention in the
genocide, let's see you show your hand. Let's put the blood in the hand, and
take it from there, and not continue to hedge bets on whether they will or not,
and in so doing use ineffective instruments to bring solutions.
The African Union is going in to fail because it's
going in to "report and observe." Ladies and Gentlemen, during the genocide my
mandate, when they were able to articulate [one], was to "report and observe."
For what? For whom? To what avail? And even when in Rwanda they called it a
genocide, in six weeks over 300,000 people killed already...and they called it a
genocide. And this government has called it [the Darfur crimes] a genocide. And
as this report [of the UN Commission headed by Judge Anthony Cassese] has
called it "everything short of a genocide." ...so what? Did anybody intervene?
In '94, I needed 5000 soldiers to stop the genocide before even less than ten
days. Only the developed nations could do that. And when they agreed in the
Security Council to give me 5000 troops, not one developed country provided me
with troops.
It took two months for the Ethiopians to get
there. It was the first time in their life they wore a [blue, UN] beret. They
had just come out of their own civil war. And by the by the civil war and the
genocide in Rwanda had already been over for a month. You can call it what you
want, but if you don't commit....if you don't commit, if you don't go in to
protect [civilians, a function currently excluded from the AU mandate], to
assist, then all you're doing is letting a lot of people do a lot of posturing
and a lot of ink being thrown and a lot of trees being cut down all the while
people are dying and suffering.
There was discussion about this responsibility to
protect.* When we introduced the responsibility to protect three years ago,
nations that we thought would embrace it were the first ones to not
embrace it. In fact, developing nations saw this as an instrument of the
developed nations to intervene in their country and in fact pooh-poohed the
process.
*The General refers to the important report by
Gareth Evans, President and Chief Executive Officer of the International Crisis
Group and former Foreign Minister of Australia. Mohamed Sahnoun, Special Adviser
on Africa to the UN Secretary-General and a former senior Algerian diplomat.
They co-chaired the International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty (ICISS), whose report, The Responsibility to Protect, was
published in December 2001 and is now available on www.iciss-ciise.gc.ca.
It was a modern Africa that we were trying to
bring about, and in fact the reforms that have been articulated recently--and I
was at Northwestern University discussing the use of force and the
responsibility to protect as part of the reforms--are I think going to be
instruments that are very useful and are going to give us the tools we seek.
So, responsibility to protect is an overriding
factor in human rights, and the ability of people to live in serenity and be
able to build their nations and provide the leadership they need for their
country.
And the solution right now is activism.
Activism on your campuses, outside your
campuses, in the United States, in Canada, in the developed world, throughout.
We must shame those who
still have the blood of Rwanda on their hands [[J.W. comment here: RD is
apparently referring to the US, Canada, France, and other developed nations.]]
and make them very very conscious that there is a whole new set of blood coming
on their hands.
And who can provide some of those solutions that
activists should generate?
Well, right now it is my opinion that no, we don't
want the Americans, or the French, or the British in Darfur and yes, there is a
concern with the Muslim community. So what should be going in and what we should
reinforcing and supportering is Middle Powers, like my country[Canada] and
Germany and Japan to reinforce the African Union. And in the Security Council to
call the bluff of those countries, in order to get the mandate, and should we
not get the mandate to intervene, that is, to provide protection and
assistance and support, then we should join the African Union and go in with
them, under their mandate,
[[The
audience heard this as a mandate that would really protect civilians and aid
workers, which is NOT true of the current mandate and rules of engagement,
despite Dallaire’s recent claims to the contrary. (See also JW’s Petition Speech
of 7 August 2005). I have evidence from Darfur, on Part 4 of the DVD Darfur
Crimes 2004, that the Nairobi Security Council emendations to the mandate,
touted by RD as effective protective solutions, are actually ineffective and
ignored. I will turn in my own commission in the US Army if I cannot convince
you that even the Nairobi emendations, if they were implemented in
practice, have very little value in reversing the genocide in its current
manifestation]]
and reinforce them. Because as it stands now, the
African Union will be humiliated, will fail, and will continue to have an
incredibly difficult time establishing its own credibility in its own region.
So we don't abandon “Africa to African problems”
as in 1994 they told me to do. And we don't go then to take on a responsibility
when we do not have the capability of doing it, let alone getting there and
sustaining the forces. In fact, we reinforce them, we commit, and, if necessary,
we relieve..[inaudible].....in the assistance of humans who have the same
fundamental rights as we do. All humans are human. There isn't one who is more
human than the others.
Thank you very much. [Applause]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANSWERS TO
STUDENT QUESTIONS
[Student question, inaudible]
That is exactly the alternative that I'm
proposing. If we can't get it through the UN, then in fact we reinforce that
mutual capability that Boutros-Ghali [UN Secretary-General] advocated in the
1990s...building up regional capabilities. So, yes, we reinforce the African
Union and support it in accomplishing the mission, and let that debate [occur]
and [confront?] that humiliation that happened inthe Security Council. So yes,
fund it, support it, and go with it.
[[And this is the current
justification for not taking actually effective measures: the AU, with NATO as a
taxi and highly limited trainer, can build its capacity to where it becomes a
respected force.
This is also the
position of the ICG, but NOT for the near term, where they advocate instead a
“bridging force” of African and non-African troops who can take protective
actions that the AU clearly cannot. The plan is that once this bridging force
has “established an atmosphere of security”, which CANNOT be done without
robust proactive measures against the Government security forces and the
janjaweed militias it controls, then a trained and upgraded AU force, one
which had somehow introduced sufficient amnesia into the Darfuri population to
efface the memory of its disastrous and pathetic first year of deployment in
that region, would take over.
Why would the ICG be
ready to accept the possibility that the AU could ever become a serious
intervening force (i.e., in a non-permissive environment)? It may be because
Salim Salim, secretary-general of the old Organization of African Unity and now
the AU’s representative at the Abuja talks between Kht and the rebel groups, is
also a board member of the ICG. Salim and other civilian AU leaders are clearly
committed to an AU capacity building exercise, regardless of whether it comes at
the expense of Darfuri genocide victims. This is also, arguably, the position
of the American and Canadian governments.
DAG member Elvir Camdzic,
studying reports from the Chinese Xinhua news agency, has found that during an
initial period of planning for troop deployments in Darfur NATO offered to send
a Rapid Reaction Force to Darfur. At least according to sources in the Lagos,
Nigeria, Institute for International Studies. But AU leaders apparently argued
that such a move would be a kind of insult to their desire for “African
Solutions to African Problems” -in the context of Darfur, the most lethal of
slogans –and an indication of “disrespect” for African regimes and their
collective military peace-creating forces. The DAG says to those AU leaders
using this kind of implicit reverse racism and appeal to Western guilt from the
colonialist period: If you want respect, you need to earn it, not just claim
it. And you have a long way to go to earn that respect. Meanwhile, you should
ask for truly effective aid from wherever you can get it and conquer your
obvious fear of confronting strongly your fellow AU member, the Bashir-Taha
regime in Sudan.]]
[Student question inaudible on sound track.]
The force now being committed is inadequate, in
order to do the mandate even that it's called upon to do, which is to observe
and protect [its own monitors]. And there is a certain argument that says that
if we're there observing and reporting, that by, as John [Prendergast, ICG
staff] was saying earlier on, by [?inaudible] the judicial processes, such as by
bringing these people up in front of the ICC or just launching the Sudanese
judicial system, that you can attenuate significantly their actions on
the ground.
However, in my estimation, that's a phase down the
road from the initial phase of establishing as much as you can an atmosphere of
security. But the mandate that they've got now is a mandate of watching people
be raped--- "I am standing there and watching it" -- and not being able to
intervene. Their authorizations [to use force] are purely in self defense. And
that's what they gave us in Rwanda, the Security Council. The three major powers
that took the ultimate decision of intervention or not in Rwanda were the Brits,
the Americans and the French and they refused us the capabilities of doing it,
not only on the ground but also by resources [?].
[[Post-April Dallaire now
apparently considers the current mandate in no need of change. Evidence that the
AU has ever made such an intervention in a case of directly witnessed crime is
hard to come by, however. One might also add that in the United States, at
least, one doesn’t need a mandate from anybody to intervene when a crime is
being directly witnessed: the practice of “citizen’s arrest” is authorized on
the statute books of almost every state. It has been used many times. ]]
So Rwanda is prepared to send a brigade of troops,
right now, very effective troops. But unless the African Union gives more weight
to the mandate than they've done, they will simply be part of that process. And
what's worse is that they could get sucked in to intervening and then ultimately
be called upon to stand for their actions which were outside the mandate and
then be rebuked for having intervened.
[[An interesting insight
into Dallaire’s mentality here. He apparently cannot imagine a situation in
which a commander might take responsibility to intervene to stop a genocide
against the wishes of his UN bureaucratic superior, and then suffer the “rebuke”
and possible dismissal, and the end of his career as a UN or AU employee, in
order to avoid disgracing his own sense of a soldier’s duty by failing to
protect when it was possible. Shake Hands with the Devil suggests that he
was highly reluctant to make such a career-ending—but life-saving -- move in
Rwanda, as well.]]
And that is the kind of limitations that we have
to deal with. That is why we pressure, we argue, for our countries to make the
UN produce an effective mandate, and we provide the assets to support the AU
and believe that a great statement of the maturity of the AU is to take upon
itself to articulate a new mandate and to maneuver, yes, with more
determination, [against?] the Government of Sudan.
Yes, it may be a hostile environment to go into.
But what's the price of other people and what are the arguments that you could
present against it? I mean hundreds of thousands are dying or killed, and
millions are displaced, so if we go in without the authority of Sudan, what
worse can happen?..Another million? another two million? It the issue .........
what's going to happen? So the argument that [we should] continue to maneuver
with and be....[outwitted?]....by the Sudanese government is completely
unacceptable and was unacceptable six months ago, when the [UN ] Special
Representative who was there eight months ago, who got FIRED because he said
intervention was essential, was essential then.
[student question about internation peace force
training together, to act as a rapid reaction force. This would nullify
arguments of US and others that too few troops are available or that the troops
are underprepared to deal with such situations:]
Sometimes I'm convinced that the big powers are
quite happy to use the UN as a scapegoat for not doing something, and saying
it's ineffective, all the while [themselves] rendering it ineffective.
On the other side, as I argued, I think that
sovereign states who are, who have the capability of providing assets and
capabilities that are not purely military--- there are humanitarian
[capabilities] ,there's nation-building, there's political diplomatic, and
human rights, judicial capabilities ---should make to the UN a standing
commitment of providing what the UN calls for. Right now we beg and borrow.
When I went into Rwanda, I went on reconnaissance
in August [1993], when they signed the peace agreement. I came back for a
month. I lobbied inside the UN for the mission. And all the while I begged and
borrowed from countries to commit themselves for Rwanda. And nobody wanted to go
to Rwanda. It was of no significance. So we ended up with the force we ended up
with because nobody wanted to come.
But what has happened in the 90s, which is even
worse, is that many in the developed world are abdicating their responsibility
to the developing world where the troops don't have the capabilities, they don't
have the assets, and as such prove [to be] less than effective forces on the
ground. In that circumstance, I totally agree with creating regional
capabilities.. One of the proposals in 95 that I was participating in and did
win in the General Assembly was creating what was called at the time a “rapid
reaction” capability, and what it was: you set up regional centers in which
battalions of troops, diplomats, and humanitarians go to these centers and work
together and do contingency planning and are brought up to speed with the
complexities of these missions. And so you build up that capability.
You know, one of the answers we got for not
building that capability was that "if we give these [troops in Africa too much
training and effectiveness and a modicum of equipment, you might simply be
training the next palace guard to conduct a coup.
Four countries in Africa were prepared to send me
battalions right off the bat, to reinforce my mission and stop the genocide.
They couldn't get there. They didn't have the equipment, although they were
trained by Western countries. When we tried to link up equipment with them, the
overriding comment that we got from the developed countries that could have
provided the equipment was that we don't really want them to have the equipment
because we're not sure what they are going to do with it afterwards.
So we treat them as infants and in a highly
irresponsible way and say "it's an African problem, so let the Africans solve
it.
"[[which is, of course,
the effective result of Canadian and American policy at the present. 5000 more
troops, or a mix of soldiers and police, will certainly not have a resolving
effect on the terrorization of populations and the radical diminishing of their
cultures. But we will soon be told, of course, that such is in fact the case.
Whether it is Pronk or Zoellick or Rice, the announcement of the end of the
genocide will be made before October 1st. It has already begun]]
We're not allowed to set them up like that. It's...it's...unethical...to create
scenarios like that and to use those, depending on what newscast you're in,
what argument you're in the political sphere, to be inactive. I don't need
excuses four years after. “We're sorry 800,000 people died”: That provides no
solace at all to anyone. We certainly don't need it six years after
that....seven years after that [referring to 2005, seven years after the
apologies made by Clinton and others in 1998,four years after the Rwandan
genocide]..in stating that we really can’t go in. We'll call it a genocide, but
we really can't go in because we're occupied elsewhere. And we're not ready to
put political capital out to create the capability to go in.
So get out there and fight it. And embarrass the
decision-making processes in which people can get away with outright crimes
against humanity. And I consider it a crime to not intervene, a crime to
observe, and report [only]. That's my short answer.
[Applause]
[question from Stanford student...]
I think we gotta set an overarching grantee
conference.....[???]
Four years ago, when I decided I'd stay on this
earth, I took a perspective of the future in an optimistic spirit inasmuch as in
my opinion, it will only take maybe two centuries, so that one day we will not
have conflict because of our differences, and that between now and then there
will be many setbacks and that millions will die as we try to find exactly those
formulas, those instruments. But I believe that fundamentally we will achieve
that, I believe that the movement of hum rights, I believe that the momentum is
there and that the awareness is there we are not, in conscious hiding from the
information that is there, and pertinent. And so right now the nations of the
world, the developed world, [allocate] point 7 per cent of their GDP to
international development. We're at point 38. [referring to Canada This country
[referring to America] is at point 19. Now imagine, point 7 per cent of our GDP
to go towards 80 per cent of humanity. And so even if you are a person who is
very dominated by your self interest it would seem to me to be a wise decision
that if you could go out there and eliminate that rage at its source that your
security would be probably be better and you don't have to trip over yourself in
eliminating some of the fundamental rights and conventions that exist. And so it
is very easy for people to say, “you know, we punched in all this money and it
produced nothing, and look, they exploded and we've got to start over
again....so what!
When we went into Haiti for the first time, in the
90s, The American forces went in, and then the Canadians took over the mission
for the UN afterwards. We were there for two and a half years, and all of a
sudden the NGO community says We’ve been ...........maybe
It’s time to get out because it isn't stable...we don't want to create a
dependent state. And so they started to pull out, the UN pulled out, and there
was nothing underneath that veneer, and the country went into catastrophic
failure, and we're back. By the by, the country has been devastated that much
more, people have been killed, there's a lot more suffering. So we're a long way
from creating "dependent states"...and we're a long way from neocolonialism. I
think we are far more astute. And [today those].....nations are far more astute
and far more aware of what is required.
But we can't do it on the cheap. It must be
significant, and it must be mainstream, and it must not be a marginal
capability, and just like the NGOs, they must move away from being a marginal
entity in the argument of politics and humanitarian effort and become a
mainstream player in the decision-making in the international community.
This is the first real test of the new AU. And the
troops that are on the ground, some of them are very effective, but
exceptionally limited in what they can do. I was with the Rwandan foreign
minister the other day and we discussed the deployment of their forces and what
they're doing. There have been some successes in certain areas by merely being
there. I believe that there are a number of nations in Africa that are very
effective and only need support. The Ghanaians, the Senegalese, most of the
Nigerians.
[[German officers charged
with transporting the new Nigerian forces to Darfur have reportedly concluded
that these soldiers will not be ready for deployment for a long time]]
There are the
South Africans who are just starting to look at more and more this type of
mission. I think that ECOMOG is doing a reasonable job in Liberia and in the UN
force in Sierra Leone.
[[A long
debate with RD might be undertaken here. Darfuris, with whom he has yet to
consult about anything, argue that the key to the Liberian outcome was the
presence offshore (with scouting parties onshore) of several hundred American
marines. The combination of African and non-African forces was the key, just as
is recommended by the ICG for a bridging force. Amity B. Weiss has made a close
study of the Sierra Leone case and would certainly argue that many other forces
other than UN units were the key to the resolution of the conflict
there]]
And so there are precedents that are existing
.......but what you can't afford happening is that they get set up for failure.
Because it's so fragile. And so it is essential that they be given a mandate
that CAN be effective. and that they get the capabilities to do it.
[student question not audibale on track]
[student question inaudible on track, but
discussing other conflicts in world]
WE don't pick and choose fights...We have the
right to establish, I believe, the leadership of a country that is being set
up.....that is nurturing itself into this new era of multiparty systems and
trying to adapt democracy and trying to protect moderates to be able to create
institutions of the rule of law. In the arenas where despotic abuses still
exist....do we support them or...I think that attempting to bring support into
those countries is...a million times better than creating sanctions. So the
parameters around which the support and the development could be brought into
those countries is in fact an area where we have found ourselves to be not
particularly effective in judiciously providing or creating accountability
for...but all the while the population was suffering. So that's why I think
there is enormous potential in the NGOs for taking on a lot of that role. I
often am concerned about the IMF and the World Bank and those types of
institutional base structures set up. At the last G8 meeting in Canada, Canada
asked to create the IMPAD where an African fund was established to build up
control and so on and....I'm not sure that the instruments of government are
necessarily the most effective in order to provide those assets. Nor do they
provide continuity very much. But NGOs can.
My foundation supports projects in Africa as an
example that are based on religious orders....nuns. The only reason that I do
that is because I know there is no waste.
[[The issue
is more than waste. RD seems here unaware of how difficult it would be to give
aid money to Sudan in such a way that it would benefit anyone but the Khartoum
elite and its agents. Sudanese NGOs are certainly the last place to expect any
assistance actually delivered to the population:They are staffed entirely with
Taha’s security police agents. The willful naiveté of American diplomats who
expect to be able to benefit the Sudanese population with aid offers is not an
edifying spectacle for this particular taxpayer]]
They will be there, always........and they will be
consistent
And they are............not the religious
dimension, but the...................will continue to develop and build.And some
of us will get beaten up and thrown out and so on in the process in those
countries. And so what, we will keep on going. This is a Long Term Affair.
Conflict resolution is a matter of years. As many
of us know. Well, we had Dayton and in one year we're going to sort this
situation out. We're into processes of decades. Success and failure must be
assessed in decades and not in Cartesian political parameters.
[Inaudible student question.]
The research I'm doing now is based on the
following: It is my opinion that we need a whole new conceptual basis of
conflict resolution, that what we've been doing is adapting the nation-state;
Westphalian, classic war, classic peace instruments and we're trying to adapt
them to fit these conflicts which are far more complex and far more ambiguous.
And what we've done is we’ve not invented any new lexicon of action verbs to
meet these new challenges. I'll give you an example. In the military I spent
thirty years with NATO, which is an instrument that we should get rid of
[[RD should be asked to
justify in detail this recommendation. NATO, after all, intervened in Kosovo to
stop a nascent genocide, and did it successfully –even if Kosovo is not exactly
a Switzerland today –WITHOUT any authorization from RD’s employer, the United
Nations]]
and get the Europeans to build their capability.
In the thirty years in NATO we all learned action verbs--act, defend, withdraw,
and so on. We all knew what it meant. In fact, even the Russians knew exactly
what that meant. However, in 1993 when I got my mandate to go into Rwanda, the
mandate was" establish an atmosphere of security."
Now, what does "establish" mean? Does it mean that
I should be demobilizing both armies, that I defend the country against a third
party? Does it mean I watch them? And what's an atmosphere of security? No
weapons? Or weapons secured?
[[One certainly would
welcome any more detailed observations from RD regarding this crucial question.
The continuing violent incidents, the reports from the few independent NGOs
that the camps are becoming centers of unmanageable conflict and cultural
decline, and the extraordinary and virtually universal mistrust of the AU,
indicate the need for this kind of thing]]
And so the terms that are coming out are terms
that seem from the past, that are trying to be put together to give the
diplomats and politicians a sense that they have done something. However, when
it comes to the interpretation of that, all the way down to the corporal or the
humanitarian, or the diplomat in the field, we find that the analysis is totally
wanting, that those terms don't meet the requirements. And that we're operating
in vacuums and in ambiguity, and so my argument is that yeah, we gotta reassess
the whole conceptual basis of how we make solutions to these complex problems,
that if genocide is a great term, but if it means absolutely nothing, then why
use it? Why let lawyers and countries argue over NOT doing something because
they have a term there that they're fiddling with.
For the spirit of genocide says you intervene. But
why go with the spirit if you can argue over all kinds of ways of not doing
anything, of not taking risks, of political capital in going in. And it's the
same thing with sovereignty. Sovereignty is now an instrument that is dividing
us. And recently I gave a lecture about the complicity of the Catholic and
Anglican churches in Rwanda in the genocide, at Boston College. And I ended it
with the following:
Will the great religions of our time be
instruments of reconciliation of humanity or instruments of conflict? And right
now I would say that the jury is out.
And so even in those realms there's an
overarching...perspective that's gotta be taken. Versus regional purity vs.
national vs. provincial, vs. local.
[.U. of Washington student leading action
workshop. Thanks him for mentioning Somalia. "In Oct of 93 when you were sent to
Rwanda to make your first assessment, I was sent to Somalia as part of a
peacekeeping mission. The guilt and remorse that I felt about that mission
prompted me to be here. Four years ago I.......You did many of us a big favor,
and you saved lives that you don’t know about
I also want to ask, given that intervention
requires troops, and given that most of these students who are dealing with
these issues are not going to pursue that commitment in a military way on their
campuses, and given that........developments in this country suggest that there
will be a decrease in development assistance and an increase in military aid,
what do you say to someone who is considering becoming a soldier and how do you
feel about the profession of soldiering in general and all it means to make a
commitment to that..[Applause]
Dallaire: "I say back home and I'll say it here,
there has not been --short of war in the classic sense -- a more significant
time to serve than now. For service to the military now is not, in my
estimation, is not a service of grand strategic ambitions, but on the contrary,
as we move more and more away from the classic warrior, conservative, to the
intellectually based warrior and conflict resolver, we are moving towards
prevention of conflict, not by the use of force, but by the threat of use of
force, the prevention of conflict, and we integrate the security with the
humanitarian dimension and the political dimension to provide an atmosphere of
security as I described it.
And should catastrophic failure and crisis happen,
soldiers are used in order to establish security. We establish a modicum of
stability, in the context of permitting the local people to begin to
.........[make progress].And so, be you wearing a blue beret, or whatever other
instrument or regional responsibility, soldiering today is not anymore being a
warrior with the experiential capability to go and beat somebody up. It is a far
more sophisticated role.
So if you've got generals who are standing there
and saying" I need a clear mandate, I need a clear exit strategy, I need clear
objectives”, you tell the general that he's living in the wrong era, because
there is nothing that is going to be clear. It's going to be ambiguous and it's
going to be complex. And there's no more room for blue-collar soldiering. It's
not because of the technology. It’s because of the sophistication of the
questions and the problems and the ethical and moral dilemmas they face out
there today and the effects of that.
And so soldiering today is a mixture of a warrior
capability to defend and protect mixed with a more intellectually based conflict
resolution set of skills that come from [studying] things like anthropology and
sociology and philosophy, so that you're not just standing there with a rifle
saying do I shoot or not when in fact you're a value added [when you're ] in the
alleyway discussing with those people and understanding because you've got more
depth and a more disciplined response to be able to help to solve their
[problems]
[[I set
this in larger type because it is one of the most inspiring and insightful
passages. Amity B.Weiss, enrolled in the same Princeton University Army ROTC
unit from which I was commissioned, and who was leading the Princeton effort to
help Darfur, was in the audience and was thrilled to hear RD make the case for a
humanitarian soldier. She plans a career in humanitarian work, and at this
writing is serving with the IRC in Uganda, but she also values highly the
managerial and leadership training, and training in military techniques of
establishing security, that four years as an officer will give her]]
The era of running around Main Street at 50 miles
per hour in an M1 tank waiting for someone to shoot at you is passé. You've got
to be in the jeep, in the alleyway, stopping at the café and discussing. That's
what modern soldiering is in this era.
[Applause]
Dallaire looks at his watch. Conference organizer
Lisa Rogoff thanks him. He sits back down
I say this back home, and I say it to you here, to
your campuses and to your other audiences: Those who are serving in uniform
today ask two things of their fellow citizens. One: once they are committed to
these operations, that they and their families be supported by you individually,
and more often than not they are just missions that they are given. And
secondly, if they come back in a body bag, or injured, that they and their
families be treated with respect and dignity and they don't have to fight
another war to live decently.
[[The arguments and
assertions that RD made when announcing in April 2005 his repudiation of the
policies and actions implied by this inspiring and passionately delivered speech
will be analyzed in a separate document. J.W.]]
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