General Roméo Dallaire served as force commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. He is an author, public speaker and former Canadian senator. His latest book is The Peace: A Warrior’s Journey, written with Jessica Dee Humphreys, from which this essay has been adapted.
Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark.
In April, 1994, the lush and beautiful country of Rwanda – where I had been tasked with a United Nations mission to assist in the implementation of a peace accord where peace did not exist – descended into genocide. Eight hundred thousand dead in a hundred days. Millions mutilated, orphaned and displaced. Cycles of generational trauma set in motion. All a full half-century after the Holocaust, despite the world’s relentless refrain “never again.”
Rwanda and its people, and my peacekeeping mission, were abandoned to the killing. When I begged for help, I was reminded that there was no oil in Rwanda, no diamonds, nothing else of strategic importance. There were only human beings – Black lives that didn’t matter. For decades after the mass slaughter ended, I was haunted by the spirits of the dead, the cries of the abandoned, the anguish of survivors, and the guilt of being powerless to stop the slaughter. And I struggled to find answers to impossible questions: How? Why? What if?
The genocide of the 1990s left Rwanda marred by mass graves, like the one these bones were recovered from under houses in Kabuga in 2019.YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP/Getty Images
If I had not lived the experience of Rwanda, I would have carried on serving in the Canadian Armed Forces, eventually retiring as a general with three stars, a fishing rod and a plaque. I would have gone on to a civilian job and volunteer work, like so many of my colleagues trained in the Cold War era did. I suppose I could have forced myself along that predictable path when I got back from Rwanda – my family and my commanders clearly hoped I would get back to “normal” – but the genocide had completely shifted my perspective on who I was and what I stood for. It shocked me into a profound realization of the precious frailty of life and a deep consciousness of my relationship with the whole of humanity.
In other words, I found my soul. I came home injured, yes, and went on to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and an even deeper moral injury of a scale and duration that several times brought me to the brink of suicide. But I was also imbued with a vision of our shared humanity and my own responsibility to it. This vision drove me to recognize that I had been going in the wrong direction – and not only me, but the military, the whole system. Rather than continuing to focus on winning wars, we needed to set our minds on shaping peace.
The genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda prompted a generation of scholars, politicians, soldiers, lawyers and humanitarians to seek new ways to prevent another such failure of humanity. We set up tribunals, crafted doctrine and produced countless reports on how to protect civilians from massive abuse, including genocide. But these efforts have not brought the peace we sought; instead, they’ve served as temporary and often superficial truces, briefly silencing guns and stabilizing frictions without resolving their fundamental causes.
Rwandan refugees join Roméo Dallaire and other Canadian officers to celebrate 1994's Canada Day.Corinne Dufka/Reuters
Over the past 30 years, the genocide has been the driving force behind my relentless advocacy work on the prevention of mass atrocities and the protection of civilians, my efforts to end the use of children in armed conflict and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and to help lift the taboos around operational stress injuries like the ones I suffered. I’d also been given the mandate to conduct a full reform of the officer corps, so that going forward no Canadian officer tasked with leading a UN peace mission would be as unprepared as I was for what they would encounter.
I engaged in endless initiatives: the Will to Intervene guidance aimed at implementing the new Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine; founding the Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security, which drafted the Vancouver Principles on Peacekeeping and the Prevention of the Recruitment and Use of Child Soldiers; and partnering with the United Nations, the Government of Canada, Kofi Annan’s genocide prevention advisory board, Wounded Warriors Canada, the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS), the Harvard Kennedy School, the Pugwash conferences, and the international Principles for Peace (P4P) commission to provide a covenant for lasting peace. My engagement in these efforts was directly linked to my guilt over witnessing mass murder on an unimaginable scale without being able to stop it.
My inner torment during those decades after the genocide is well documented. Coming from a military family and a career spent preparing for war, I worked with punishing zeal – lecturing, advising, writing, berating, all with the aim of uncovering a new understanding of peace. Long after the international community had put the incredible atrocities into the past, content to move on to the next crisis, I continued to dedicate my days and nights to these efforts. Yet over and over, as various doctrines and initiatives were launched and fell short, I saw that we had still not cracked the code. Though humanity kept trying to get far enough ahead of catastrophes to prevent them, we kept failing.
Today, polarization, proxy wars, hybrid warfare that combines conventional tactics with online propaganda, geopolitical tensions, large-scale violations of human rights, and the erosion of representative government all make peacebuilding increasingly complex. The recent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and war on supply chains and food and energy prices highlights the interconnectedness and interdependence of a globalized world. Over all, we seem to be barely managing crises as they pop up, rather than acting to prevent such massive suffering. I still hope to be part of the wave of thought and activism that changes that.
I received my military training in the Cold War. At that time, peace was viewed as a détente between the communist East and the capitalist West, reinforced by the mutually assured destruction of a balance of nuclear weapons between us.
Like many others, I saw the end of the Cold War in 1989 as the opportunity to judiciously draw down armies and defence spending and focus on humanitarian efforts. And Europe, despite its long history of antagonism among nationals, did make strides in establishing and maintaining peace based on economic prosperity, human rights and a union of effort.
At the same time, however, three major powers – China, Russia and the United States – used the end of the Cold War to increase their military might. Russia has since become a giant rogue state, invading Ukraine in 2022 and attempting to gather allies wherever U.S. influence has ebbed, namely in Syria, the Middle East and parts of Africa. China’s true ambitions are still murky, but clearly reach beyond its current borders.
Despite some isolationist moments, the U.S. sees itself as the single entity that guarantees the security of the entire world, deploying its power throughout the globe. In stark contrast to the European doves, American hawks still see the exercise of power as the only way to peace.
So, decades after the Berlin Wall fell, we have stumbled back into a power-based world of alliances, where truces are more fragile now than they have been in decades. History continues to repeat ad nauseam.
Peacekeepers by the tens of thousands are patrolling, observing and sporadically intervening in complex conflict zones, armed with limited resources and, too often, let down by outdated and superficial training, ambiguous mandates and inadequate leadership. Darfur, Mali, Congo, Afghanistan, Myanmar: In every case, the world either turns its back entirely, as it did in Rwanda, or sends thoughts and prayers and guns. In some places, like Syria after the Arab Spring, the international community doesn’t even really try to intervene, or else, as in Libya with the fall of Moammar Gadhafi, it makes the situation so very much worse.
Russian President Vladimir Putin celebrated his return to power in Red Square on March 18, which was also the 10th anniversary of the Crimean annexation.Maxim Shemetov/Reuters
Faced with the unpredictability of Vladimir Putin and his war against Ukraine (and the volatility of the Islamic State, al-Shabab, Hamas, populist white nationalists and all other malcontent extremists), we continually fall back on the same old tools and tactics. So much so that as I write these words, we find ourselves in another cold war, paralyzed into inaction by Russia’s bluff over launching nuclear bombs.
We met Mr. Putin’s threats with sanctions and censure, and a lot of weapons and money for Ukraine (none of which, it should be noted, had been offered to Rwanda), but still we do not dare cross borders to protect the civilians whose country has been invaded, whose homes are being bombed, and who are being abused, displaced and killed.
The hard right everywhere is watching Mr. Putin with interest. To me, this era seems an awful lot like the 1930s: While a majority of middle powers are coming together with ideas for peaceful solutions, nationalists are increasing their power; there is no common ground between progressive ideas around peacebuilding and the “big power” concept of “securing” peace. This creates great uncertainty in the southern half of the world, where countries are not sure which power bloc to play ball with.
The world marked the second anniversary of Russia's invasion on Feb. 24, but a placard in Trafalgar Square reminded Londoners that 2014's Donbas conflict could be considered the war's real starting point.BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images
We had plenty of warning the invasion of Ukraine was coming – the nearly 10 years since the Russians went into Crimea in 2014 – and still we were unable to prevent the escalation. The “classic” tools and metrics used by the international community – the diplomatic exchanges, embargoes, self-interested assessments of resources (are there fuel, minerals and food reserves to protect or only unimportant human beings?), and aversion to casualties (to stay on the good side of media and voters) – none of it has changed. How can we be surprised when the results are the same? If we had really progressed in our united ambitions for peace, as soon as Russia edged its toes up to the border with Ukraine, NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) or the UN member states or both would have reinforced the line with boots on the ground. In our imperfect world today, the only way to struggle for peace is still with a show of willingness to fight.
Surely there has to be something more we can do. I have spent years reaching for that something more – a way to bring true and lasting peace. A revolutionary strategy for conflict prevention. A covenant of respect for the individual human being, instead of the nation-state. A shared understanding that engages all parties, from community groups to international bodies, from pulpits to command posts. An ensemble solution that reflects our increasingly borderless existence on this planet, where we are all equally vulnerable to climate change at the largest scale and to a virus at the smallest.
Conflicts that regenerate again and again after impotent peace agreements keep distracting us from coming together to face the greatest risks to our survival. If we cannot agree on a cohesive strategy to anticipate and mitigate conflicts among ourselves, how can we expect to resolve problems that will affect the whole of humanity?
Descending into hell in 1994 and then struggling up and out with only the vaguest glimmer of hope to guide me, I did learn many lessons. But I was too wounded and battle-scarred to see beyond the emotional and intellectual purgatory I remained mired in, until I found a way out of my own dark forest through loving and being loved. After I happily married in 2020, I could at last see with clarity the path I needed to take and the lodestars I needed to follow. To guide my thinking beyond the cycles I seemed to be stuck in, I turned – not for the first time – to the poets for inspiration.
Dante Alighieri (1265‐1321) forged the way for an epoch that provides a profound example of the revolutionary human potential that can arise from a period of sustained peace: the Italian Renaissance. In that relatively short era came about a massive shift in fundamental thinking from theological to humanist. Dante’s best known and most beloved work, La Commedia (so revered it was later renamed The Divine Comedy), completed the year before he died, is an epic poem in three parts that follows the poet as he travels through the Christian afterlife, starting in the desperate depths of Inferno (hell), up through the treacherous levels of Purgatorio (purgatory), and then, after he passes through a wall of fire, into Paradiso (heaven). And the journey does not end there. Instead, he continues up and up, learning more and better lessons until he reaches the pinnacle, an unknowable place beyond.
In downtown Kyiv, sandbanks protect a monument to Dante from Russian air attacks. The statue had been unveiled in 2015, the 750th anniversary of the poet's birth.Roman Pilipey/Getty Images
This poem almost literally conveys the arc of my own life’s journey. Dante (as the poem’s main character) found himself witnessing eternal torments divided into distinct and worsening circles of hell: limbo, lust, gluttony, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud, treachery. I, too, was an outsider who travelled through a genocidal hell that was sparked and sustained by human sins of omission and commission: deceit, disinterest, self-interest, ignorance, fear, othering, hate, revenge, denial. These are the failures that engender and sustain all wars.
Once Dante enters purgatory, the sinners he encounters are of a lesser order, but they are in constant danger of slipping back to hell if they indulge in any one of the seven deadly sins. In similar fashion, humanity’s current best efforts to prevent war and aim for peace are undone by stagnant cycles of truce, devotion to the status quo, self-interest, disorder, ethical failures, irresponsibility and inequality. In the poem (as for us today), the suffering in purgatory is tamed ever so slightly by awareness and growth, and therein lies the hope.
I immediately recognized my own late metamorphosis in the image of the terrifying wall of fire Dante must pass through to reach paradise. A few years ago, I went through a similar crisis of transformation after I was faced with the consequences of the path of self-destruction I’d been travelling for 25 years, racing around the world, juggling pro bono efforts on behalf of child soldiers, injured veterans and victims of mass atrocities, living out of suitcases and eating fast food in airports, always alone, always on high alert, devoid of any inner solace, haunted always by the uneasy spirits of the genocide’s victims that invaded my dreams and waking thoughts. Despite my relentlessness, I still wasn’t finding solutions for lasting peace in the world, and the doctors told me if I kept on that way, I would die. And soon.
At that moment of extreme vulnerability, a new dimension of life entered my closed-off world: I fell in love, and through this solace and safe harbour, I gained a new lease and a new perspective on life.
Today I feel I am travelling a path to peace that has previously eluded me.
Protesters unfurl white fabric doves at a Washington march for peace in Gaza, where the Israel-Hamas war has killed tens of thousands since last October.Mark Schiefelbein/The Associated Press
Humanity’s problems are increasingly borderless. Too many of us react to this reality by putting up walls that allow us (we think) to protect ourselves and forget about others. But putting one’s faith in state power, nationalism and the use of force to keep us “safe” behind our home borders is a bet that won’t be won. Such narrow thinking is no longer possible in our interconnected world. We need strategic local and global leadership to actively predict and prevent problems before they turn into catastrophes. Only in this way can we prevent suffering and insecurity and look toward a state I call The Peace.
Of course, I understand that for some there is comfort and even satisfaction in staying true to the status quo. But such a purgatory is not peace. It is merely truce, continuously vulnerable to frictions that have never been addressed, use of force and abuse of power, and the constant overarching threat of annihilation posed by nuclear weapons and climate change.
As Dante hesitates before entering paradise, afraid for himself and afraid of the unknown, his guide smiles at him and shakes his head, asking, “Now, really, do you want to stay back there?”
I know I don’t, and I believe today’s younger generations are similarly impatient with the Band-Aid solutions and divisive inequality of the past. I believe these generations without borders will readily leap through the fire to embrace an entirely new perspective on the human condition.
For the sure and brave, I can’t wait to see where you lead.
Peux que ce veux. Allons-y! Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Let’s go!
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