Nightline: U.N. Soldier Struggles With Past
O T T A W A, Feb. 7 -- Romeo D'Allaire is a three-star general in Canada's army, a former U.N. commander and today, a man who needs therapy and nine pills a day to control his shattered mind.
D'Allaire and 2,000 other U.N. peacekeepers were witness to genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
"You never forget this stuff. It has imposed itself on your brain forever," he says. "The best you're hoping for is the ability to discern when you fall into the spiral of depression and suicide."
The story of D'Allaire is more than simply a tragedy of a broken man. The U.N. commander found himself alone in the middle of forces too powerful for one man to overcome — a nation in the madness of genocide and a world largely indifferent to it.
Peacekeeper's Nightmare
When the U.N. peacekeepers started arriving in Rwanda in the fall of 1993, it was for a routine mission to monitor a cease-fire between the two warring sides: the Hutu-led government and the Tutsi opposition.
It didn't last. Within months, U.N. soldiers were being ambushed and killed. And Western governments panicked, ordering their soldiers to abandon the mission.
At the U.N. peacekeeping compound in Rwanda's capital, D'Allaire tried to regain control "My force was withering," he recalls. "I had no capability to defend the onslaught."
D'Allaire began hearing reports that the Hutu authorities were registering all Tutsis in the country for the purpose of "their extermination." He notified U.N. headquarters in New York with the warning of the genocide that would begin three months later.
But D'Allaire's warning was ignored. Hutu extremists butchered Tutsis and Hutu moderates by the hundreds of thousands. The roads were soaked with blood and littered with bodies. Bloated corpses floated in rivers. Terrified refugees ran into camps so vast there were people as far as the eye could see. The killers entered the camp and murdered more.
His desperate appeal to intervene was rejected by U.N. peacekeeping headquarters, at the time led by current Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who did not believe there was support among members for more involvement.
Related Stories
ABC News Live