To Boldly Commit Genocide...

Warning: the following post contains significant spoilers about the film Star Trek. Those still interested in seeing this film should consider themselves forewarned.


Dark historical overtones at heart of Star Trek film

Franchise re-boots are all the range recently, with film franchises like Batman scoring big hits at the box office in the wake of previous disappointing film releases.

It's in this particular vein that it should be less than surprising that Paramount films would re-boot Star Trek. What should be even less surprising -- to those intimately familiar with the franchise -- is that JJ Abrams, the man behind the Trek re-boot, would fashion a Star Trek that resembles human history a little more closely than Gene Roddenberry's original series.

Yet the film retains the general theme of Roddenberry's original -- the triumph of the human spirit.

The film daringly and decisively re-shapes the Star Trek universe when Nero (Eric Bana), a revenge-seeking Romulan, destroys the planet Vulcan -- one of the backbones of the United Federation of Planets -- in order to take revenge on Ambassador Spock for failing to save planet Romulus.

Spock -- who appears both in younger and older forms (played by Zachary Quinto and Leonard Nimoy, respectively) -- speculates that as few as 10,000 Vulcans may have survived the destruction of the planet.

Genocide is a theme that Star Trek has previously addressed, but rarely in terms so horrifically similar to human history.

As those intimately familiar with Star Trek are doubtlessly aware, Vulcans and Romulans look very similar to one another for important reason -- they share a common heritage on the planet Vulcan. As revealed in the Next Generation episode "Unification" -- in which Spock is targeted by Romulan assassins for his efforts to reveal this common heritage to citizens of the Romulan Star Empire -- Romulans were Vulcans who left the planet to follow a different path, and forge a militaristic empire.

It's in this vein, considering that Vulcans and Romulans are actually the same species, that the destruction of Vulcan isn't merely a genocide -- it's actually a fratricide as well.

Naturally, this will beg comparisons to Adolph Hitler -- who is believed by many to have had a Jewish heritage -- and to the genocide in Rwanda, where Hutus and Tutsis were not only virtually indistinguishable to most visitors to that country, but had on many occasions inter-married, making it incredibly likely that many of those participating in the Rwandan genocide were actually killing their own family members.

As Bruce Wilshire theorizes, many genocides are motivated by a mortal terror -- the belief that the existence of an ethnic rival poses a threat to the survival of one's own ethnicity or race.

Nero seems to embody this particular motivation, as he intends to continue on to destroy every Federation planet -- including Earth -- believing that is the only way he can ensure the survival of Romulus.

(Then again, considering that Romulus was destroyed when its sun went supernova, one can certainly find fault in the reasoning of this particular madman.)

Human history is full of all kinds of instances in which genocidal leaders went to shocking lengths in order to defend otherwise inconsequential ethnic differences. Wherever the Star Trek franchise may now go, one can imagine that it will very closely resemble human history.

Some may question if this remains true to Gene Roddenberry's original optimistic vision of human history, and its message that the human triumph can triumph over petty greed and racism.

By the same token, however, one would have to agree that a triumph without a challenge is hardly a triumph at all.

A Sobering Reminder

Rwandan immigrant shares his stories of the 1994 genocide

When the Rwandan genocide began in earnest on April 17, 1994, Eugene Mbonyinshuti was just two days shy of his fifth birthday.

If Rwanda's Hutu militias and Interhamwe had gotten their way, he wouldn't have survived to see it.

Speaking recently about the genocide to his classmates at Welland Ontario's Notre Dame College, Mbonyinshuti provided a sobering reminder of the atrocity that unfolded in that country, much to the indifference of the so-called developed world and the United Nations.

“Local print and radio media fuelled the killings, while the international media either ignored or seriously misinterpreted events that were really happening,” Mbonyinshuti explained. “The local media used names such as exterminate all the cockroaches or kill all the snakes. A baby snake is still a snake. Kill them all.”

The Rwandan genocide was precipitated over ethnic differences that were largely inflated by Belgian colonists, who favoured Tutsis over Hutus because of their moderately lighter skin.

Prior to the arrival of Belgian -- and, previously, German -- colonists, it's generally believed that the Hutus and Tutsis were one people, and that the minor differences between them were exploited so the Tutsis could be used to control the Hutus.

“The two ethnic groups are actually very similar,” Mbonyinshuti continued. “They speak the same language and share the same culture, eat the same foods, worship in the same churches, study in the same classrooms and living in the same neighbourhoods.”

Indeed they did. And when the genocide turned really ugly, Tutsis were butchered in the very churches in which they worshipped alongside Hutus. Alongside the foreign governments and United Nations agencies that failed to substantively intervene in the atrocity was the Catholic Church, who failed to issue an edict condemning the carnage and those perpetrating it.

The general public consensus surrounding the genocide holds that it was largely the result of a mob mentality mobilized by inflammatory radio broadcasts which mixed Rwandan rock and roll music with hate propaganda.

According to Mboyinshuti, the truth is very different.

“The actual genocide was planned for many years, much like Hitler planned the killing of all the Jewish people. It was well planned,” he explained.

And, indeed, it had to be. Hutu militias and Interhamwe had brought weapons into the country and stored them in convenient caches. These weapons varied as widely as semi-automatic assault rifles to machetes.

Furthermore, these weapons were no secret. When UNAMIR commander Lt General (ret) Romeo Dallaire planned a raid to seize some of these weapons stocks, he was ordered to stand down by UN commanders.

Mboyinshuti expressed his admiration for Dallaire's commitment to trying to halt the carnage. When told to leave the country, Dallaire would not. "He refused. He stayed."

He also paid a tremendously deep personal price for doing what no western government would do: the right thing.

“There were unspeakable horrors,” Mbonyishuti said. “Little babies suffered the most, some of them were my little cousins. The babies were tossed against walls, others barbecued alive ... I know it is hard to believe, but what I don’t understand is why?”

It's difficult to understand how and why a genocide takes place. In his book Get 'Em All! Kill 'Em!, Bruce Wilshire offers a theorem of cultural mortal terror as justification for genocide -- explaining that, in many cases, an ethnic group perpetrating ethnic cleansing or a genocide do so because they perceive their victims as threatening to the ongoing survival of their culture.

Sometimes this kind of terror leads to distinctly irrational actions. In Rwanda, Interhamwe and Hutu mobs attempted to kill Tutsis on their way to being evacuated from the country.

If the genocide were being carried out under rational conditions, one would have expected that Tutsis leaving the country would have served Hutu purposes just as well as annhiliating them. Then again, genocides are rarely carried out under rational pretenses.

Even under the fear of extinction a genocide is difficult to justiy -- one has to remember that justification rests on a foundation of opinion, and thus cannot be accomplished objectively.

Eugene Mbonyishuti and his family arrived in Canada in 2008. It's unlikely that any of them will ever fully leave the Rwandan genocide behind them.

This is unfortunate for them, but very important for the rest of the world. The best way to ensure that horrors such as that which began in Rwanda 15 years ago today is to allow them to be forgotten.

The world needs these sobering reminders.

Witness the New Holocaust Denial

Black Star News denies Rwandan genocide

15 years ago, the Rwandan genocide slowly began to unfold.

The events began on April 6, 1994, and by April 17, 1994 had escalated into the wholesale slaughter of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

The atrocities that unfolded during the Rwandan genocide have long stood as an example of why the western world needs to be prepared to intervene in order to prevent such human catastrophes.

But not to individuals like Keith Harmon Snow. Like the various loons who deny -- or at least conflate -- the Holocaust, Snow has a political agenda that is ill-served by the Rwandan genocide. Like Holocaust deniers (and 9/11 "truth"ers), Snow is so intent upon pushing that agenda that he's prepared to revise the history of the Rwandan genocide.

In an article appearing in Black Star News, Snow strings together a convoluted conspiracy theory in which human rights activists colluded against Hutus.

"The genocide label applied by Alison Des Forges and certain human rights bodies in May of 1994 was misdirected, used to accuse and criminalize only the majority Hutu people and the remnants of the decapitated Habyarimana government," Snow writes, "much as the genocide and war crimes accusations have been selectively applied against President Omar al-Bashir in Sudan."

According to Snow, not only did no genocide take place in Rwanda, but no genocide is currently taking place in the Sudan. Instead, as it turns out, these genocide charges are part of an American imperialist plot.

"The Clinton Administration refused to apply the genocide label," Snow explains. "To do so might have compromised an ongoing US-backed covert operation: the invasion of Rwanda by the Pentagon’s proxy force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front."

Interestingly, Snow has very little to say about the French involvement in the genocide. France had supplied weapons to the Rwandan government before and during the civil war that took place in accordance with the genocide. Many of those weapons were passed on to the Interhamwe by sympathizers within the Rwandan military's Hutu militias.

Moreover, Snow suggests that the plane crash taht killed Alison Des Forges may have been the work of Paul Kagame.

"According to U.S. intelligence insider Wayne Madsen, Des Forges’ criticisms of the US-brokered pact between Rwanda's President Paul Kagame and the Democratic Republic of Congo's President Joseph Kabila in December 2008 'earned her some powerful enemies ranging from the murderous Kagame, who will not think twice about sending his agents to silence critics abroad, and international interests who want nothing to prevent them from looting the DRC’s vast mineral and energy resources.'"

But Snow's conspiracy theory makes little sense. Although Des Forges' criticisms of Kagame's deal with Kabila -- -- was damaging, Des Forges' invokation of the genocide label marshalled a surplus of international sympathy for Kagame and the RPF.

Furthermore, Snow accuses Des Forges of helping unjustly indict the Habyanmara government.

"Billed as a 'tireless champion' and 'leading light in African human rights,' there is much more to this story than the western propaganda system has revealed," Snow muses. "Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch (HRW) provided intelligence to the US government at the time of the 1994 crises, and they have continued in this role to the present. Des Forges also supported the show trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), institutionalizing victor’s justice and shielding the Kagame regime."

"Alison Des Forges came across to many people as a wonderful human being with great compassion and impeccable integrity," Snow writes. "In the recent past, Alison Des Forges spoke—to some limited degree—against the war crimes of the Kagame regime."

"In life she did not speak about the deeper realities of 'genocide in Rwanda', and she had plenty of chances. In fact, she is the primary purveyor of the inversion of truth that covered up the deeper US role in the Rwanda 'genocide', and she spent the past 10 years of her life explaining away the inconsistencies, covering up the facts, revising her own story when necessary, and manipulating public opinion about war crimes in the Great Lakes of Africa—in service to the US government and powerful corporations involved in the plunder and depopulation of the region."

All of this, of course, is submitted without evidence.

"Kagame, Rwanda’s one-party president 'elected' through rigged elections, sued Charles Onana for defamation in a French court in 2002; Kagame lost the original trial and the appeal," Snow continues. "Kagame was the commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and a leading agent—with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and their US, UK, Belgian and Israeli backers—behind the massive bloodshed and ongoing terrorism in Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Congo, Sudan and Somalia."

Snow insists that the events of the Rwandan genocide -- which were not a genocide, despite the perpetrators' intent to kill every single living Tutsi -- were a conspiracy between human rights organizations, the United States, Britain, Begium and Israel.

"In his book, Onana accused Kagame of being the principle instigator of the missile attack of April 6, 1994 that brought down the plane carrying Rwanda's President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi's Cyprien Ntaryamira," Snow continues. "Unlike the UN's ongoing high-profile investigation of the murder of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik Hariri, no major power has pushed for a similar probe into the murder of the two African presidents."

Yet much of the evidence that Kagame was responsible for shooting down Habyanmara's plane was actually rejected by a French parliamentary inquiry -- and considering France's bloody hands in relation to the genocide, the French had every motive to point the finger of blame at somebody else.

"But the U.S. military was heavily backing the RPF tactically and strategically already," Snow continues. "Key to the operation were 'former' Special Operations Forces (Ronco Company) providing military equipment and ferrying RPA troops from Uganda to Rwanda; the Pentagon's logistical and communications support; Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA operatives. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), was also collaborating with the RPF, serving the Pentagon interest."

Snow would have done well to look into the circumstance Dallaire and UNAMIR found themselves in during the genocide. If UNAMIR were really a proxy force acting on behalf of the United States in support of the RPF, it was the smallest and most poorly-equipped proxy force in the history of proxy warfare.

Dallaire spent the bulk of his time convening between Rwandan political leaders while attempting to keep himself, his troops, and as many Tutsi refugees as possible, alive.

That meets a very odd definition of outright collaboration.

According to Snow even the news media were part of the conspiracy.

"Genocide in Rwanda became a massive psychological operation directed against media consumers using ghastly images—produced by RPA-embedded photographers like James Nachtwey and Gilles Peres—to infer that all cadavers were Tutsi victims of an orchestrated Hutu genocide," Snow insists, "meanwhile the text was racist disinformation produced by Joshua Hammer."

This despite the fact that journalists operating in the region secured footage of Hutu militias slaughtering Tutsis, and Red Cross workers active throughout the region shared many of the same stories.

According to Snow, Des Forges was central to the media conspiracy.

"Des Forges constantly influenced the US media through special briefings to the editorial boards and reporters of the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and Associated Press, and she was frequently presented as an 'expert' on genocide in Rwanda for CNN, 60 Minutes, Nightline, All Things Considered, BBC, Radio France Internationale, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company."

"Such relations explain the mass media’s consistency in producing the monolithic disinformation about Rwanda that shielded the illegal U.S.-backed and covert RPF- Ugandan guerrilla insurgency," Snow continues. "The blanket media coverage falsely situated the 'Rwanda genocide' as it is now widely misunderstood: 100 days of genocide, 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis killed with machetes; the 'highly disciplined' RPF stopping the genocide."

Even on the basis of its most basic arguments -- that the Rwandan Patriotic Front was an external invader -- falls flat in the face of the fact that Paul Kagame and the other members of the RPF were all natives of Rwanda, and were acting against a government that was actively oppressing Tutsis.

Like Holocaust deniers, Snow plays fast and loose with the truth in the course of spinning a conspiracy theory that essentially "invented" the Rwandan genocide, despite the existence of nearly 1,000,000 Rwandans, the vast majority of them Tutsis.

Like the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide is most effectively commemorated by the mass graves of its victims. Anyone who cares to examine the evidence of the genocide first-hand can travel to Rwanda and tour the killing fields. In many cases, the bones of the victims remain where they were piled.

Like Holocaust deniers, Rwandan genocide deniers like Keith Harmon Snow have to ignore the strongest evidence for the events -- the corpses of its victims, and the nearly 1,000,000 Rwandans who, in the course of a media-broadcast 100-day slaughter, ceased to be.

One wonders how individuals like Keith Harmon Snow can look themselves in a mirror.

The Perils of Providing a Refuge Amidst Genocide

Paul Rusesabagina provides a model of courage for the entire world

15 years ago today Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana died when his plane was shot down just short of the landing strip at Kigali airport.

The incident sparked the beginning of the Rwandan genocide, in which at least 500,000 people -- mostly, but not limited to, Rwandan Tutsis -- were butchered in an onslaught of racialized hatred.

In 2004, on the 10th anniversary of the genocide, UNAMIR commander Lt General (ret) Romeo Dallaire marked the occasion by returning to Rwanda to meet with survivors of the genocide, and witness the reconciliation taking place in the country.

In the same year the atrocity was also commemorated in Hotel Rwanda.

Directed by Terry George, Hotel Rwanda told the true story of Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), the manager of a hotel in Kigali who shelters Tutsis amidst the storm of carnage unfolding just outside the hotel gates.

Nick Nolte plays Colonel Oliver, a poor cariacture of Dallaire, who attempts haplessly to keep Rusesabagina and his charges safe from the Hutu militias and Interhamwe killing squads roaming throughout the country.

Rusesabagina places himself at great personal risk in sheltering these would-be victims. At times, Rusesabagina has to resort to bargaining with the militias. At other times, he must resort to blackmail. At the worst of times he must dodge mortar fire from outside of the hotel premises.

As a Hutu himself, Rusesabagina placed himself at extreme peril in the name of providing these individuals with sanctuary. As a Hutu sheltering Tutsis from harm, he often faces the prospect of being labelled a traitor by Hutu extremists.

The risks faced by Rusesabagina appear in their starkly perilous reality when weighed against the options of foreign nationals in the country, who had the option of leaving the country. The manager of Rusesabagina's hotel immediately leaves Rwanda as soon as the trouble begins, leaving him in charge. British journalist Jack Danglish (Joaquin Phoenix) braves the carnage to secure footage that will reveal the extent of the horror to the rest of the world. But even he returns home when given the opportunity.

As the 100-day conflict draws on Rusesabagina's luxurious hotel begins to take on the look of a war zone much more slowly than the rest of the city around it. Yet the daily chores of ensuring his charges' survival forces him to constantly look the spectre of genocide in the face, including when his driver strays down a street covered in dead Tutsis on the way back from a trip fetching supplies.

In Rwanda, the so-called developed world failed to put a stop to the killing. It wasn't due to any lack of courage on the part of our soldiers. General Dallaire served faithfully, admirably and courageously in the face of the carnage.

The western world's failure to intervene in Rwanda was due to the failure of moral courage of the leaders who could find no value in intervening in the conflict. The courage of men like Dallaire and Rusesabagina should shame them.

Particularly, the courage of Paul Rusesabagina. Dallaire's UNAMIR force was underequipped and poorly supplied but at least still had the benefit of their meagre arms to defend them.

Rusesabagina had no such luxury. Rusesabagina faced the perils of building a refuge amongst genocide and did so entirely unarmed and largely undefended.

Any leaders who may think that intervening in atrocities such as that continuing to unfold in the Sudan to be unimportant should remember Paul Rusesabagina and remember the example of courage he set.

And they remember the mantra repeated so often in the aftermath of genocide:

Never again.

Shaking Hands With the Devil Redux

In the coming year, the world will mark 15 year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide.

As we approach this solemn marker of what very much was "Humanity's failure in Rwanda", as Lt General (ret) Romeo Dallaire's book insists, the time is always right to remember how the tenth anniversary of that atrocity was marked.

The original Shake Hands With the Devil film -- a documentary, as opposed to a docu-drama -- is the tale of Dallaire returning to Rwanda to confront what he continues to regard as his failure there.

In the course of the film -- which reassembles much of the media coverage of the genocide so adroitly that one almost feels as if they are actually there -- Dallaire encounters, and is in turn confronted by, not only his own defeat and by the Rwandans who survived (and surely some who participated in) the genocide, but by the very realpolitik that contributed to the horrors of 1994.



Even moreso than Roy Dupuis' portrayal of the general -- or even Nick Nolte's thinly-veiled misrepresentation in Hotel Rwanda -- Dallaire's journey in Shake Hands With the Devil provides Canadians with a window into Dallaire's soul.

It's nearly impossible to come away from this film not empathizing with Dallaire, even if only a little.



Shake Hands With the Devil is as important a chapter in the Canadian government's (and the United Nations') failure to stand by the espoused humanitarian principles of its foreign policy as Grant Dawson's Here is Hell (a book about the Canadian mission in Somalia).

More than anything, it's important for Canadians to understand that Canadians were engaged in Rwanda while the genocide unfolded. Canadians strived against the grim reality of the situation to put a halt to the killings, and were insufficiently supported by either their own government or by the United Nations (who had sent them there in the first place).

Canadians can never allow such a thing to happen ever again.

Shaking Hands With the Devil

Shake Hands With the Devil is a reminder of the importance of Canadian values

In 1994, the world witnessed one of the worst genocides in human history unfolding in Rwanda.

Sadly, Canadian Lieutenant Governor (now retired) Romeo Dallaire witnessed those events from a front-row seat as the world did next to nothing to stop the horrific massacres unfolding in that country.

Shake Hands With the Devil -- named after Dallaire's book of the same title -- is the story of those massacres.

In any year, it is a sombre reminder of the fragile nature of peace in many parts of the world, and of the responsibilities that come with undertaking an effort to try and keep it.

The film presents the story in a brilliant bilingual style reminiscent of The Rocket, with the characters frequently slipping back and forth between French and English. Although the subtities are extremely sloppy, to the extent that they often cannot even be read, this bilingual style lends authenticity to the film.

The film opens with Romeo Dallaire (Roy Dupuis) in his civilian clothes, seated in an office with an unnamed defence ministry bureaucrat. The environment in the room is tense -- to put it lightly -- as Dallaire doesn't speak. Instead, he keeps himself locked up with his thoughts. As he comments on the flashbacks he has been suffering of his time in Rwanda -- which Dallaire has often remarked seem less like memory and much more like he is literally re-living the events -- Dallaire speaks to many of the individuals he dealt with in Rwanda.

The film follows Dallaire very closely throughout his tour of duty in Rwanda, and offers very deep glimpses into his soul as he conducts the business of his peacekeeping mission in that country. Dupuis masterfully depicts the disgust the real Dallaire almost certainly felt when shaking hands with the leader of the Interahamwe -- and the heightened disgust Dallaire must have experienced when it seemed easier to do it again.

The moment that Dallaire made his tragic turn toward suicidal behaviour contrasts starkly with the Dallaire in the rest of the film. It's saddening to witness Dallaire, a very proud and honourable man, mutilating himself with a razor.

Paul Kagame (Akin Omotoso), meanwhile, is portrayed as a consumate realist. While he seems to abhor the fact that the Rwandan Patriotic Front's retaliation will only lead to more killing, he seems to understand that such things were necessary. Perhaps the greatest difference between Dallaire and Kagami is that Kagami was allowed the option of doing the things he knows to be right.

Romeo Dallaire was allowed no such option, and it seems that Roy Dupuis understood this. Dupuis grasps the full fury that Dallaire must have felt when he was denied permission to sieze illegal weapons caches in Kigali. The film makes it seem like mere days before the fighting broke out. In fact, this occurred in January 1994. The killings would not begin until April 7, 1994.

The film doesn't back down from any of the grisly details of the genocide. Anything that could be fit into the just-under-two hours of the film seemingly was. However, those looking for an absolutely faithful historical flic may be disappointed. Some key figures, such as Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh and Faustin Twagiramungu, are missing.

Films like Shake Hands With the Devil are important -- particularly for Canada, and our underexplored history. Right now, films such as this are especially important, as Canada pursues a rotating seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Certainly, a seat for Canada on the Security Council would be a very good thing. But Canadians need to understand precisely why Canada is seeking such a position. There must be a reason.

One such reason seems obivious: international prestige.

Another is international influence. This is the motive Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon recently alluded to while speaking on the subject.

"Today, Canada is contributing to peace and security and making sacrifices in places as diverse as Afghanistan, Haiti and Sudan. Each of these Canadian engagements flows from a UN mandate. For Canada, a seat on the Security Council is a further way of stepping up to our global responsibilities," Cannon said. "With your support on the Security Council, Canada will push for greater transparency in the Council work, which I believe would be beneficial to the whole international community."

Cannon also spoke of the pragmatic role that Canada has previously played in the Security Council.

"With a seat on the Council in 2011 and 2012 we would continue this tradition, pursuing an active agenda for the United Nations in such areas as peace building, conflict prevention and conflict resolution. Activities, as you know, that contribute to global stability and security are common goals that we all share," he announced.

But we as Canadians need to be mindful of the important responsibilities that come with Security Council membership. Romeo Dallaire and his haunted mental state stand as sombre reminders of what can happen -- both on an international basis and on an individual basis -- when the Security Council shirks its responsibilities.

The United Nations Security Council had a responsibility to stop the genccide in Rwanda. Wrapt up in petty politics, it shirked this responsibility. But it did not do so alone.

When it became obvious that the United Nations was not living up to its responsibilities in Rwanda, Canada -- having been committed to the mission -- should have done everything within its power -- both diplomatically and militarily -- to fill the breach.

Years of intransigence by Conservative and Liberal party governments in Canada sadly rendered the country unable to do enough. Canada's shirking of its responsibility to the Rwanda mission sadly began decades before the tragedy officially occurred.

If the Canadian government really wants a seat on the UN Security Council, it has to be prepared to live up to Canadian values and live up to its responsibilities as a member of that body.

If our government is only seeking a Security Council seat as part of quest for international prestige and influence, then we are truly shaking hands with the devil.

The New-Age Political Dilemma: Leadership or Management?

Canada needs to correct historical leadership deficit

If one were to ask Canadians, there would be little question: Canadians want to lead the world.

Paradoxically, if one were to ask Canadians, they may receive a contradictory answer: Canadians feel as if their country has failed to ascend to a position of leadership in the world, and has instead been relegated into the ranks of the followers.

For one, Lieutenant General (ret) Romeo Dallaire would wistfully agree. And as disappointing as this state of affairs may be for many Canadians, those many Canadians may also have to agree with Dallaire when he points out that we may ultimately only have ourselves to blame: Canada's failure to lead on the global stage may have come about as a result of a deficit of leadership at home.

"We have been a very well-managed country, but we have not been well led," Dallaire recently told an audience in Peterborough, Ontario. "We are within the power structure of the world, what are we going to do with it?"

"We've got to move to change the future," he added.

Anyone who has ever been privileged enough to hear Dallaire, who continues to serve his country as a Liberal Senator, speak understands the depth of his faith in Canadians. This is a man who not only fervently believes that Canadians can lead on the global stage, but rather knows we can.

He's done it himself. In 1994, he sacrificed too much of himself trying to avert the genocide that took place in Rwanda, where Hutu militia slaughtered nearly 1,000,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Dallaire and his UNAMIR peacekeeping force struggled against the superior numbers of the Hutu militia, insufficient supplies and ammunition, and scarcity of even the most basic necessities while waiting for the world to wake up to what was taking place in Rwanda.

By the time the civil conflict in Rwanda began to wound down and a reinforced UNAMIR 2 mission began to deploy, Dallaire was utterly spent. Suffering from the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome that would frame the next few years of his life.

Both Dallaire's message and his example are crystal clear: leadership on the world stage isn't a right -- it's a privilege that must be earned. Furthermore, it comes with a price.

Sadly, it seems that all too often either Canadian leaders, or Canadians in general, aren't willing to pay the price for leadership on the world stage. Global leadership comes with various costs: financial, political, personal, and human.

Throughout much of the postwar period, Canada's political leaders proved unwilling to pay the financial cost of global leadership. Under Pearson, Trudeau, Mulroney and Chretien, funding of Canada's armed forces continually declined until after 9/11, when security-related pressures forced the Chretien government to start to take the issue seriously.

But by the time the 1994 conflict in Rwanda rolled around, Canada's military was approaching dire straights. While many other countries came to admire Canada's armed forces, it was largely because they were accomplishing tremendously impressive feats with tremendously sub-par equipment.

The argument could be raised that even if Chretien's government cared enough about what was happening in Rwanda, it was still unable to respond due to the neglected state of Canada's military.

Yet remarkably many of those who would have been most eager to send a significant contingent of Canadian troops into Rwanda have actually decried recent military spending that, once upon a time, would have made such a rescue operation possible.

It's hard to fault blinkered ideologues such as Linda McQuaig for such an inconsistency. They literally have no understanding of what most modern peacekeeping missions actually entail.

Even those who may otherwise profit politically from denouncing the Harper government's military spending understand why it's so crucial. As Michael Ignatieff notes:

"One of the things I have learned in 15 years out there in the killing fields of Africa and the Balkans, is that you can't protect human beings with blue berets and a sidearm. I'm fiercely proud of our peacekeeping tradition. Where peacekeeping of the traditional Pearsonian sort can be practiced we must practice it. But in a lot of cases now, in situations where you want to protect human beings, you want to prevent them from being ethnically cleansed or massacred because of their race, religion or ethnicity, you've got to have bulked up capabilities. You gotta go in there with flak jackets, you've got to have armour, you've gotta protect them."

What individuals such as Linda McQuaig -- in fact, the entire core of writers publishing via Global Research have willfully overlooked is the nature of modern conflict. The days of the idealized Pearsonian blue beret have long passed.

Even when one considers the current situation in Afghanistan and the often-idealized alternative mission in the Sudan, one encounters serious shortages of realistic thinking on the part of such ideologues. Once again, from Ignatieff:

"The problems in Darfur, however, are extremely serious. Sometimes people can say that "if I can just go there. Why Afghanistan? Why not Darfur?". The only thing to bear in mind when you say that is just think about what a deployment of Canadians in Darfur would look like.

It's 55 degrees centigrade. There's no cover anywhere. Do you think the Janjaweed are going to get off their camels and walk up when they see a Canadian flag and shake our hand? No. It's a combat mission."

But there's a reason why McQuaig and her contemporaries prefer peacekeeping missions such as the one they imagine in Darfur to the less pleasant business of conducting warfare -- peacekeeping comes with virtually no political price for them. Unless peacekeepers are killed in a Mogadishu-style ambush, peacekeeping is considered to be a politically nonthreatening activity -- generally considered to be a noble cause.

Warfare, on the other hand, is seen quite differently, even when the cause being fought for is in line with Canadian interests and values. Even when a withdrawal from the theatre of conflict would result in the ascension of a regime -- such as the Taliban -- so antithetical to Canadian values.

Even when the potential triumph or defeat of Canadian values -- so often claimed by individuals such as McQuaig as their values -- is at stake, these are people who are unwilling to pay a political price for them.

Sadly, sometimes even those Canadians who claim to support missions such as that in Afghanistan are unwilling to pay a political price for it. Little else remains to be said about Stephen Harper's recent decision to end the mission altogether in 2011, whether the mission is accomplished or not.

Sometimes leadership on the global stage carries a tremendous personal cost. As previously mentioned, Dallaire himself has paid that personal cost in spades -- and paid not only his own share, but that of an entire country.

It's only natural, however, that many people would be reluctant to pay the human cost of global leadership. No one enjoys the prospect of sending troops overseas to die. When they are sent, every prayer is uttered that they'll return home safely.

But even as those who would end up paying that human cost with their lives or health continue to support their mission despite the loss of their comrades, it serves a reminder: our service men and women volunteer knowing that the price of global leadership may be their lives.

This does nothing to undermine the responsibility of political leaders to ensure that the lives of our service men and women are risked only when necessary. But it should also remind them that such risks are truly inevitable, regardless of the anxiety that accompanies making decisions that may very well turn out to be matters of life and death.

Dallaire understands this. The current road of global leadership is not an easy one to traverse. "We are in a new era and it's not necessarily the easiest era," Dallaire said. "If you are a leader, part of your job is to anticipate the future. We are in a time of revolutions and not in an era of change."

The challenge for Canadians will be to decide whether they want their leaders to lead, or to settle for "leaders" who promote themselves more as public managers.

If Canadians want to lead on the global stage, we'll need to understand that such leadership has to start at home. And it has to begin with both leaders and citizens who are willing to pay that price.

Dallaire to Canadian Youth: Become Activists Again

Retired Lieutenant General and sitting Senator impresses need for Canadians to get involved in foreign policy

By almost any regard, Romeo Dallaire is a hero.

Moreover, Dallaire is one of the few examples of individuals hoisted up to this hallowed status by virtue of having tried but failed to prevent an inhuman massacre.

Of course, it helps that his failing was not of his own making. In 1994, severely undermanned and underequipped, Dallaire led a United Nations peacekeeping mission into war-torn Rwanda. When Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana was assassinated. (Sitting president Paul Kagame -- a Tutsi, and former leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front that effectively ended the genocide in Rwanda -- was fingered as responsible for the assassination by a recent French report, but that is a story for another time.)

While Dallaire pleaded for a UN intervention force, various countries central to the UN refused to intervene for a variety of -- largely domestic -- political reasons.

Against nearly impossible odds, Dallaire struggled to keep his troops and Tutsi civilians alive in the midst of a country that very much had declared war against them. When the genocide was finally over, Dallaire returned to Canada suffering from a severe case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In time, Dallaire managed to conquer his demons -- although he himself notes they'll always remain with him -- and in 2005 was appointed by then-Prime Minister Paul Martin to the Canadian Senate.

On Thursday, February 21, Dallaire addressed an audience at the University of the Alberta as a keynote speaker for the Global Voices conference. This is what he had to say.

"Today, we're going to be talking about you and about the environment we're in, but not necessarily the environment of the planet and how the planet and human beings are attempting to keep a communion going between them and not the friction that can lead to catastrophic failures for both in the future. We're going to talk about the environment in which humanity is now, we hope, evolving, and where humanity is in need of support and assistance.

Particularly, the large portion of humanity that are, in fact, living in inhuman conditions. My target audience, if I will be permitted, tonight, will be those that are called "youths".

If we are talking in UN parlance, a youth is under the age of 25. I tend to think of the youth of a nation as up to 30. In the '60s, we never trusted anyone above 30.I talk to youths up to 30, and in particular, anyone of the age of 18 and beyond.

I want to talk to you because you hold the balance of power in the country. You literally hold the power of the politics and the orientation in this country.

It's a numbers game.

After you (of course) decide to vote, the voting population between the ages of 18 and 30 in Canada represent about 35% of the total volume of population. However, to start I speak mostly of the federal situation, although at the provincial level it's quite similar, but at the federal level, only about 15% of that startling number vote.

Imagine if all of you decided to vote. Imagine if you, all of you youths of this nation, who's future is not something 25 years down the road. When I was 22 or 23, some older individuals said to me "well, what do you want to do with your future?", well to me, that was something like 45 years old. Something like that.

Today, because nothing is constant, because we are continuously in flux, because we're not in a state of change, we're approaching a state of revolution; by technology, by globalism, by grander designs, and so on.

Your future is five, six, seven years down the road. It's shifting that fast.

What you do now, while you're still a youth, is going to significantly influence your life while you're still a very young person.

So you can go out, and actually start a new party. Say "we want a party that's going to do this. It's going to do this inside the country, it's going to do this outside the country."

"We're going to create a party that's going to answer the question: what will we do with Canada?". Or "What is Canada for?".

Is it because we have citizens and we are taking care of ourselves and we are responding to our own ambitions? Or is there something else that has happened to Canada in this era? That all of a sudden has it stumbling beyond its borders? And is stumbling into areas that are uncertain? Sometimes uncharted, and what has happened?

Technology today is being mastered. There is no seemingly fear of going to those other borders or other areas, but we're not sure exactly what to do.

Churchill said "when great nations acquire power they also acquire a responsibility beyond their borders."

And so, ladies and gentlemen, you could create a party that does what you want it to. Or you could shift some of the parties that exist now to what you want it to do, if you massively coalesced to vote.

That is the raw, real power that you have that is not being exercised.

In this country, you are having all kinds of opportunity to exercise it. Just watch the numerous federal elections, one after another. And you're allowed to sort of ponder one party or another because what happened is the political parties really responded regarding you youths.

You've shown them! We've been well managed over the last years. We have been able to continue to stabilize our own internal capabilities and we're working on the outside on the economics and so on, and we're working on the outside. We're working in different realms of internationalism.

But we've been well managed. And so it's okay. And when you look at the campaigns of the last while, at the federal level, how many politicians have come out and said "what do you think we should be doing on the planet? Where do you think we should be going?"

"What grand focus, what grand design should we have, or do we need one?"

Or let's go on, let's do what we've been doing so much, working on our regionalism. On our parochialism. On our taxations, and so on, meeting our needs.

That being of a great needing middle power in the world?

We are not the 160th country out of 194 in the UN. We are part of the nine most powerful nations in the world. This province is participating in that power base. Even if only by the energy capability.

Our north has been touched. What happens when we open up the third big canal in the world? Suez canal, Panama canal, and the Northwest Passage? What happens then?

There is seemingly no limit to the potential here, intellectually and as far as its recourse base and its ability to sustain it, through the technology and application of knowledge.

You can't belong inside this incredibly powerful nation with its belief in human rights, it's vast technology, it's worth ethic -- its strong work ethic -- and without this desire to subsume anyone else, to be an imperial country -- we, messed up how we've handled the first nations and the aboriginals, but we have no grand design anywhere else in the world to take over any place.

The fundamental law of the nation is a Charter of Human Rights. And it says all humans, no just those who have the cash, are human. No one is more human than the other.

And so, this nation is this era of the post-Cold War, in this complex era has stumbled upon the responsibility beyond its borders which it hasn't risen to, necessarily. It hasn't articulated its grand design into this global, and at times volatile, environment.

It hasn't come to you, the youth of the nation, and said "how are we going to maximize the incredible potential that you and this nation have to do significant changes in the world?".

I'm not talking to couch potatoes tonight. In the end I hope to give a little more energy to that finer point that you have in regards to your perception of what you should be doing in this world.

I hope to be able to create activists.

Imagine if Canadian campuses suddenly became activists. Like in the '60s. That doesn't mean you take over the President's office every week. But every now and then you could give them a little scare. You could say "hey! We don't agree with this, and we want to do something about it."

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking to you not as people who are aloof, it's not in the nature of the beast in this country. I'm not talking to people who are void of any potential. I'm talking to you as individuals who have not yet maximized the synergy of our collective capabilities by your individual commitment, and have not even come close to maximizing what this nation has as a responsibility in the world.

We're talking here not here in past tense. We're not seeking to study history, we're seeking to grasp history, and it's a little farther than CNN -- further than last week, but not that far back.

We want to project ourselves into the future. One thing's certain about the future: it's all uncertain. [Yogi Berra] really had it. There's no small reference anymore. And yet he said ["the future ain't what it used to be"] sixty years ago. So you could imagine if he were around today and trying to figure out what was going on today.

That's what we're trying to work with. Now, you can either bounce around in the future that somebody else is making for you or you can participate. You can mold it. You could actually become leaders in that future.

For somebody to do the implicit thing -- to try to vision, to try and get a feel for something, to get proactive -- that's what they do. And so, they don't survive the future, they maneuver. They take the advantage to advance what they hope they believe is right.

And so, this era in which we find ourselves is not an easy era. It is not easy like the old days when we were all eurocentric and all we had to worry about were millions of Warsaw Pact troops and nuclear weapons on the other side. We had a whole bunch of people and we just balanced that out, and that's over there in Europe and we can just keep on doing our thing and every now and again we just invest a little bit more in the military and the diplomats and conferences but essentially it was out there -- way out there.

However, that all shattered when the Cold War ended. When it shattered, it created a whole new era. Not what George Bush senior said -- an era of order -- a world order I would contend is disorder.

We have become more and more conscious that 80% of humanity are living in inhuman conditions. We're conscious of that when we realized we believe in and were established under the law of human rights, humanitarian law, and 80% are in inhuman conditions.

And they keep doing this. Even some pretentiously say "hey, look at that, we're off into space, we're out to Mars".

The only reason why the Americans are off to Mars is because the Chinese are going to the Moon, and they want to stay one step ahead.

Because we're mastering technology, we're actually saying that humanity's advancing? How is that, when 80% are in inhuman conditions? How is it that the 20% are so pretentious that they say humanity is advancing? And ignoring the fact that they're not looking at all this, they're just looking to be treated as human beings.

We've not only seen and become aware of that suffering, but we've also seen how it's been destroying itself. Massively. And we've even participated or watched it these catastrophes that we thought had gone away.

Like the Holocaust! Certainly we aren't going to go into these massive catastrophic failures.

We've also seen the introduction of a new weapon they call terrorism, and how that has created an incredible paranoia in the developed world. It has created a massive paranoia in our neighbours to the south.

Which is not easily comprehended, particularly, by the Europeans. We're figuring it out.

In 2004 when George Bush was being reelected I was at the Kennedy School at Harvard, and I was amazed that even that sort of liberal environment how little America's population really questioned the very right-wing position that was being taken by the Bush administration. There was no debate because the Americans had been found vulnerable. They feel, in their soul, a vulnerability that had never existed there before.

That vulnerability has created a paranoia which ultimately has created a panic with all kinds of things like the Patriot Act, and Guantanamo Bay, and civil rights being thrown left, right, and center, and so on.

This paranoia has advanced. If a world power is in paranoia, of course it's going to influence the rest of the world, including the developed countries, including us. They've found themselves vulnerable.

I've gone to speak in American military colleges, or war colleges. I like to go there. They have these huge stages, and there 1000 to 1500 students in these big institutions. When I go there, I like to imitate Patton. Not pretentiously, but really George C Scott in the movie Patton. If you remember that, he comes on the stage with this humongous American flag behind him and he's got all of his bells and whistles on and he stands there and he says "the aim, gentlemen, is to make the other poor bastard die for his country."

And that's what it was. The old, classic war, up to the end of the Cold War, which was attrition warfare. The side that was left standing won.

So when I go there I used to have my bells and whistles, but now I've retired so I go and I walk up to center stage but as I'm coming on stage I've got a huge Canadian flag behind me. And I go up there and I say "I come from a country that beat you guys twice." Now, you could actually hear the gears turning. "What? When was that?" So I say "1775 and the war of 1812".

However, some of them will say there was a time some would say that both sides won the war of 1812. I say "no, no. We won." I said "because you guys came up to Canada and burned down this place called York, you know, Toronto -- I'm from Montreal, I don't really bother too much about that -- we went to Washington, burned the place down, it was built on a swamp and you guys rebuilt again! I mean, you guys don't learn."

The Americans are vulnerable. In their soul. And that vulnerability is creating panic, still, today.

Global terrorism is part of that instrument of panic that's out there, and with that we are seeing all kinds of responses, even legalizing mercenaries. I mean, we actually hire people to do jobs that should essentially be done by soldiers under the normal law of conflict, but no, we hire these guns out there and they'll do whatever is required under the contract. The use of force without the same rules of engagement. Not the same liabilities, nor the same responsibilities.

Governments use them because its cheaper and its less political. If a mercenaries dead, hey. If a soldier's dead, that's a different story.

And so we've sort of skitted aside some main and fundamental laws that we've created over centuries and tried to establish and now we're fiddling with them because we're worried about this era and how we're going to handle it.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we're in an era where we've sorted out massive war. Nations at war, massive armies and so on. And we're in an era where we're not too sure about all these imploding nations left, right and center, and all these humanitarian catastrophes.

But there's another one that has snuck in there, is still in there, and is rarely raised today. If I asked you "do you believe there are still nuclear weapons out there?", I suspect the answer would be "yes".

What if I told you there were 27,000 nuclear weapons out there today? What if I told you that nearly 3000 of them are on 30 minutes notice to be launched? And they're not aimed at big military targets because they don't exist anymore. They're aimed at civilian cities. What if I told you that if we launched four to five of the humongous ones we can forget about environment, because there won't be any atmosphere left.

And yet, not only are countries massively investing in improving them, into the trillions, but they are preventing other countries from acquiring it for their own defense on the argument that there should be no proliferation.

However, when you turn to them and say "maybe leadership by example would be you disarming a bit. Maybe if you start disarming they won't feel that they have to acquire nuclear weapons."

And so we've seen the big powers, still today, with this incredible arsenal, which is absolutely and totally obsolete, modernize obsolescence, out there, asserting all kinds of funds, keeping a lot of technology busy, but putting the whole exercise of our existence under constant threat.

I think that's an abuse of my human right to security, the fact that all of that stuff still exists.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, how many have been out there saying that Canada -- yes, we could build nuclear weapons, we had the technology in the '50s, we decided not to -- but we're very beaten path in this country. We know how to maneuver. We say "no, we're not going to get nuclear weapons", but we'll stay in the alliance that uses them in the fundamental defense of their organization, NATO.

Now, either we're very smart or we're hypocritical. I'm not sure yet, I'm working that out.

But how is it that is there, but no one's talking about it? No one's talking about it.

Everything worth debating in environment is for not if a couple of these idiots, like Dr Strangelove, launches a few missiles.

And so, an incredible vulnerability that is in the backdrop, and we're just letting it go. Well, why don't we try to look at some of these complexities and see whether or not we have room to maneuver.

Well, we've got peacekeepers! Maybe that's an instrument that can still be used. This is the one good mission: Chapter Six. Good guys in two groups and we stand there as a referee, but no red card, no penalty box, but we can stand there between them if they want to do it right. We're there to observe, and so on. And what happened in the '90s is that met with catastrophic failure.

There is no more peacekeeping. We in uniform were amazed at their reaction when Canada sent troops into nations in conflict or nations imploding, and they're using force, and Canadians are like, "hey! We changed our army. We've changed our philosophy. We are into international involvement."

During the Cold War, when peacekeeping started, in the '50s, Pearson and so on, peacekeeping was only 3% of our activity. 97% was preparing to fight World War Three in central Europe and northern Norway.

We were training to fight World War Three and doing this peacekeeping on the side. Except that in Canada, it acquired 97% of our publicity.

And then when Chapter Six peacekeeping disappeared, all these nations going at each other, imploding nations, where people from the same country are into civil wars inside a country. The Rwandan genocide was done by Rwandans. These nations are imploding and the old methodologies of a time to keep a separation between the combatants and separating the combatants from the civilians is done because the civilian population is one of the principal weapons of conflict now.

Massive abuse of human beings, moving them massively, creating scenarios that make it impossible for resolutions to come to. And so we don't have peacekeeping anymore. It's not there.

So we don't have these big wars we have these new situations behind us, and all of a sudden we don't have peacekeeping. People are not negotiating, they're going at each other by ethnicity, by tribalism, by power-sharing. And so we find ourselves studying and acknowledging, "what are these catastrophic failures of our era?"

"I mean, we've been working at it for the last 10, nearly 15 years, we've seen what creates these reasons for why people go at each other. We could actually watch it. We've studied it. We've actually created genocide and prevention structures."

We've looked at it. But how are we doing so far? In Darfur?

And so we've not only found the tools that don't seem to be working, but we also see tools out there that are, in fact, creating massive disruptions, catastrophic failures within humanity.

There are two and a half million people in Darfur with nothing. I've been there twice. It's been over four years and they still have nothing, and the women are being raped and being slaughtered and the men are being killed, and the kids are dying of malnutrition. The humanitarians can't get in and we aren't even close to solving it through the normal processes.

It's not because we're insensitive. Do you remember the Tsunami? Tusnami. Boxing day. This natural disaster, there's a certain vulnerability, so we poured millions of dollars for all kinds of people there. The media went nuts on it. It was incredible.

Did you know there were more people killed and injured, internally displaced and raped in Darfur than all of those countries [affected by the] Tsunami and not a plug nickel went to Darfur.

Not only that, a year later the media went back to see how things were a year later. And during that whole day that they reported back on that Tsunami there wasn't one mention of Darfur.

Is it because it's man-made, we don't seem to be able to respond. If it's man-made, we should be able to control it! If it's a natural disaster, we're all vulnerable to that.

So we've seen massive problems. But we see in particular the youths, the children. In the UN parlance, a child is up to 18. How is it that children seem to be one of the most obvious targets of this era -- of the last 15 to 16 years? They are massively destroyed, orphaned.

In Rwanda they don't even understand the concept of an orphan. There was always somebody taking care of them. Between HIV/AIDS and the genocide, they ended up with over 500,000 orphans. They have no concept of how to sort this out.

The refugee scenario -- I was in my office working with CIDA on orphans and children. The door smashes open and these three guys come in and they have big red noses on them. And I wasn't too sure about this, so I said "what's all this about?"

They said "we're here because we need your support."

I said "well, what are you?"

He said "we are Clowns Without Borders."

And I said, "you're serious?"

And he said "yes."

What they do is they go into refugee camps and they teach children how to laugh. They actually teach them games. They teach them how to be able to forget the environment. How to build walls. And this is my intro to the NGO [(Non Government Organizations)] world, ladies and gentlemen.

Not that they're clowns. I'd get enough critique about that.

The NGO world: I hope that by the end of this evening I will convince you that the NGO world will become the super capability that will in the future influence, massively, public opinion and policies of governments. If it matures, and if it coaleseces. And those are big gifts.

The NGO world is a new part that is exploding out there and looking for recruits and capabilities.

And so we've got not only victims, but in a direct way, participants. We've actually created, in this era, child soldiers. We've always had young boys in these environments, but not being a principal weapon of war.

There are about 300,000 children that are always out there fighting in over 30 countries either for the government or for other organizations or for rebellious structures and they are principal weapon because the machine gun is so easy to carry and shoot and maintain. And it is the most sophisticated low-technology weapons system available today. There's all kinds of light weapons, and hundreds of millions of them. And ammunition.

There's all kinds of children. You just go and swipe them from their school and so on. And you take them and you drill them and you incorporate them and they eat less and they're less problem if you have to get rid of them, there's lots of them.

And in response to everything, it's up front, shooting and aiming, boys and girls. In some of these male-dominated societies where they don't want the midwives in the camps, they're also the sex slaves and the bush wives. You can't find a weapon system that complete.

It's out there. They've been in massive existence since the late '80s. Not only that, but they're being used in Sri Lanka and in a number of countries in armed conflict. Kids: 8, 9.

Some are being used in the drug wars. I was in Rio and thousands of kids are being maimed and killed in the drug wars. They're 8, 9, 10, 12. Boys and girls.

And so, a new weapon, and not much reaction. They're just letting it continue. And so what happened with all the great work we did? I mean all the rules are there.

All the rules are there. There's just one small problem. We've entered an era in which one side is not playing by the rules at all.

During the Cold War we knew who was going to push that button on that nuclear weapon on the other side. We knew what their doctrine was. We knew what their ethos was. We knew that their training was. We knew what their ambitions were.

We have no real grasp of what's out there today that that is creating all this havoc, coming to this rage in the developing world. We've seen it in the Muslim world. There's absolutely nothing that prevents the African world from doing exactly the same. We've been raping them for over 200 years.

The big change in this era is that one of these two sides is not playing by any of these rules and they're dragging us down the same road.

How do you control torture? You're allowed to pull out their toenails but not fingernails? How do you actually control torture? And how far do you push the abuse of civil rights? And how many conventions do you throw out the window because they aren't suiting the requirements? Because we don't have the response to that threat that they've created.

And so they're winning, massively, because we're starting to move down the same road in the panic that has been created in this era. It is not an easy era.

It is not an easy era just looking at what's happening, but also, how we're responding.

We have actually created, in this era, a pecking order in humanity. We actually created a pecking order in humanity. We actually, with all the great concepts and applications of all our laws, the protocols, the humanitarian law, we've said "no, everyone is equal," except sometimes some aren't just as equal. Maybe, sometimes, some human beings on this planet are not as human as us. Maybe we count more.

During the genocide, the extremists used to use very young children to stop the convoys. And if the kids didn't stay on the road to block the convoy, they'd kill them. And then when the convoy arrives, the kids were there and they'd stop and were ambushed. They'd kill everyone, steal everything.

So one day I'm negotiating with people and moving between the lines. I'm in the no man's land between the two warring factions. And up ahead, about two or three hundred meters, is a little boy, a local. So I think maybe it's an ambush. We slow down, nobody should be here. We stop, jump out, no ambush.

So we hunt around and go looking for somebody to take care of the child, and all we find are bodies decaying from being massacred weeks before. While we're looking for somebody to take care of the child, we lose the child. So we go back and find him in a hut where two adults and and kids are all decaying and he's just sitting there.

So I took him and I brought him to the road and my vehicle and I look at him. His stomach is bloated and he's scarred and he's dirty, mangy, there are flies all over. However, I looked into his eyes. And what I saw in that child's eyes, that three or four year-old boy, was exactly what I saw in my four year-old son when I took off for Africa.

They were the eyes of a human child.

They were the eyes of a human child. That is the overriding factor. And so we find ourselves discussing whether or not we should actually consider these people who are killing each other as equals to us. Should we risk? What's in it for us? Why would we want to go and involve ourselves, particularly in an era where we know that rage is fomenting in enormous amounts of frictions in the international community?

And it's got the world leader -- I mean you can't live without them, but sometimes you can't live with them -- "hey! They're our neighours. We have to sort that out."

We've got to stop crapping on them and figure out a way to influence our American neighbours. Because if we don't, no one else is going to do it.

We've got to be proactive in trying to get in there in the entrails of them and influencing them, particularly in this era where there's power flowing, all those components of what we've created over these centuries are scattering to the wind.

And so we find ourselves in an era where we're debating the humanity, these human rights, our commitment and what is in fact influencing the decisions.

What is the political will out there? Were we going to Darfur to fight? To save two and a half million people? What's in it for us? And so the big powers, the ones who have capability the more self-interested companies -- Americans going into Iraq, not sanctioned by the UN. And so why are they there? "Well, they're there because of oil. It's a strategic resource. Oh, they're making democracy. I think maybe they're building bases to surround China. We did it with the Russians in the Cold War." Maybe they've got a perspective out there that they're moving on.

But we're not sure right now. It's not clear why they're there in that operation.

Where's the self-interest? There wasn't the transparency and impartiality of the UN. It was a single-nation-led coalition. So what's our self-interest? Are we dominated by self-interest? Are our politicians guided by self-interest?

Well, Bill Clinton pulled out of Mogadishu in 1993, (those who've seen the movie Black Hawk Down) when he lost 18 professional soldiers in a mission, out of millions in uniform, turned tail because he felt that people would not support his government going into a country where there's no self-interest, the only reason was humanitarian.

Like in Rwanda -- they didn't come in because there was no strategic value, and practically no resources. The only thing that was there were human beings and there's too many of them. It's overpopulated. That's why we're not going. Self-interest.

How do we get them to look beyond that? How do we get them above casualties? How is it the debate around Afghanistan surrounds our casualties versus the real goal? How much are we capable of handling? Are we willing to pay not just the blood the sweat and the tears and the cash and the part of our youth not for self-interest but because of humanitarianism?

And so, ladies and gentlemen, we are in an era of enormous legal and moral and ethical dilemmas. There's no more good guy/bad guy. It's not simple anymore. It's complex. It's ambiguous.

So how do you deal with ambiguity? How do you work with ambiguity?

One of the things is you don't sit there and wait for that to happen to you. You have to find solutions. You can sit there and hope that nobody will come, and you can isolate yourself. That's what a lot of Canadians believe.

When I was commanding the province of Quebec, and visiting all the infrastructure in Quebec, a platoon of not-very-capable individuals could go and destroy all the electrical transmission lines going from all those power dams, some to New England states, to Montreal, and so on. We built the infrastructure of this nation with no sense of security.

Real security, we have no sense of it.

Nobody's going to attack us, so we can sit back and say "we're not engaged, we're not involved." All we can do after 9/11, which was a big movement then, we'll build a wall around North America and we won't let anybody in. If you have a black mustache, you're not in. We'll build a police state.

That's really sorting out the problem.

Or we could go for resources. And try to resolve the problem. Go to the source of that rage, and attempt to support a solution in there.

We could go and maybe, one day, prevent conflicts. Because if we don't become experts at crisis response, that's all we've been doing for the last 15 years since the end of the Cold War.

We've also become pretty good at picking up the pieces and investing. I couldn't get 200 million dollars for two years for my UN mission. Within three months of the end of the genocide we had invested over two billion in humanitarian aid. That is not a good business plan. Plus the destruction that it did.

The ultimate aim is preventing conflict, not trying to respond to a crisis. Not picking up the pieces afterwards. But the highest risk is in prevention. Because if you go in and it doesn't go well you could be accused of having instilled it, and if it does go well, you'll get accused of wasting valuable resources.

Well, we're not near prevention. We're not even close to that. We're still fiddling at crisis response. We're still debating it.

We're in an era where we absolutely need reforms. We need multi-disciplinary people. We don't need diplomats who just do a lot of tough diplomatic work. We don't need generals who only know how to fight. We need people who are multi-disciplined, who can bring that stuff together.

We need a whole new set of commitments to the UN. We need to give up a bit of our sovereignty to the UN -- make it an effective capability.

We need to mature the NGOs. They have a new concept of their independence and their neutrality and their employment.

We might want to create a coalition of little powers to offer the UN other options than just the big boys who trip over each other, make a mess of it all, or little guys who, when we give them tough jobs, absolutely can't accomplish it, like in Darfur right now.

Justice and the elimination of intruders: the International Criminal Court is designed to go after those who commit crimes. And so we need a whole new way to get in there and solve these problems. We need ways to help them, bring to justice and eliminate impunity.

We can do that, if we pursue it.

For example, the Americans have not signed up to the International Criminal Court. However, as the case with Rwanda, or number three of the genocide, no one could find him. When the Americans put five million bucks on the table, three weeks later the Angolans turned him in to the tribunal.

So maybe they're not in it. But they're not totally out of it.

And so we must build that capability of responding, of paying that price. And ladies and gentlemen, we invented the new tool. I'm talking specifically about the NGOs.

We invented the Responsibility to Protect. We invented it in 2001, it was approved by the General Assembly in 2005, as the fundamental principle of commitment from nations when people are massively abused of human rights.

There is no such thing as absolute sovereignty anymore. You can't hide behind your borders. We'll go after you to attempt to help suffering people.

So how do we move down the road of prevention? Of trying to, possibly, stop these frictions amongst the different components of nations that degenerate into conflict?

I believe that first and foremost, is that in many of these male-dominated societies, we absolutely have to put power in the hands of women. But that just won't sort it out. They're just too tired of their existence in their culture in the background, even with the child soldiers.

When we demobilize child soldiers, the boys are demobilized and they're integrated easily because they did that warrior thing.

And the girls have been raped and abused and they're shunned. They're totally shunned. And so there's a difference of how to reintegrate them. Their societies are struggling to evolve with the power bases they have and so I absolutely believe that we've got to deal with male-dominated societies by empowering women.

The second thing we've gotta do is we've got to educate, educate, educate.

A few years ago they had the Conference of the Americas in Quebec City. I was delighted at the end of the week to speak to the youth who had come. And so they presented to me their resolutions. The first one, by far ahead of anything else, was education.

"Give us the power to discipline our minds. To be able to master our destiny." That's what they want.

They'll sort it out. Give them that ability to maximize their intellectual potential. So educate them.

I totally disagree with the concept of tolerance. I think it's pretentious. I think respect is the basis and we have to use the term throughout and base much of our arguments on that. And, finally, we have to be prepared to go beyond our borders to prevent, I hope, the massive abuse of human rights. That's absolutely critical. And so this gang ([the NGOs]) is now the new weapon.

When I say that to NGOs, they go nuts. "We are not weapons." You're right, you're not a weapon. But I speak in military parlance. You're an essential instrument of bringing about, ultimately, the prevention of conflict, by a whole series of capabilities. Now, please, cover the whole spectrum of humanity and its needs.

And so, what do you do? Support the NGOs. Don't just throw cash at them. Throw a bit of your brain power at them.

Get involved. Get these movements going. Get them going making peace. Get them into the schools where they can link up internationally.

Harass the politicians. We don't do that. We let the media harass them, and we bounce around with whatever they cover in a day. We don't harass them. How many of your have written your MP day an email? Just say "what are you doing about Darfur? What are you doing about Iraq?"

Every day. Every one of you. Blow apart their servers. You tell them what you want them to do. And not just the little political structures.

In a county, you may have 100,000 people. You probably have about 600 or 700 people who are card-carrying members. They're the ones who are going to decide who's going to represent you and who has the power to change our lives. They have it.

You just pick and choose. And we don't even do that. And so, ladies and gentlemen, you harass the politicians. You get out and tell them we need to have the capability to have a responsibility towards humanity. And in so doing you can bring that humanitarian face to them.

Get involved in the field. Go out there and get your boots dirty. Smell it. Taste it. Feel it. See it. Sense it. You don't have to be there four years. I'm not talking about missionary work. I'm saying you need to go see what 80% of humanity is.

One of the problem we have when we come back from our missions is we have trouble discerning what is reality. Is reality the opulence here or is reality the abject destruction of human life out there?

What is the true reality of humanity?

You go touch it, get your hands and boots dirty, come back. You will never be able to forget it. It will influence you and that influence is absolutely essential.

Our role is leading this middle power into its role in the advancement of humanity and human rights. It is essential. And so, become an activist. Become part of the process.

This is us, ladies and gentlemen. And 50 years from now, historians will say "what a great country. But what did they do? How much did they really put behind the great theories and concepts? Did they suffer to bring about for the other human beings the opportunity to be treated equally?"

We can't hide from it. Because, ladies and gentlemen, we have as the fundamental premise of this nation the belief in human rights. And it says all humans are human. Not one of us is more human than the other.

Senator Dallaire's speech was followed by an hour-long question-and-answer period which will follow in later days.

In the meantime, Dallaire's words give Canadians much to think about. History has long ago come to the point where simply saying we believe in human rights simply isn't enough any more. It's time to start going out and, as Michael Ignatieff put it "put our money where our mouth is".

Opportunities to do this like Rwanda have long since passed us by. Afghanistan demands the same attention, but meanwhile, a similar opportunity in the Sudan is also passing us by.

Canada has to learn to meet the challenges of this new era. Our professed belief in human rights demands it.