Romo Dallaire And The Rwanda Genocide

The Rwandan genocide was a mass slaughter of the Tutsi population that lasted 100 days from the 7th of April to the 15th of July in 1994. Although the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda existed at the time, Canada and the international community still failed to help Rwanda as a whole, as individual countries, and by not doing what they could to aid Roméo Dallaire.

As an international community as a whole, there was far more that could have been done to help Rwanda through the United Nations and as individual countries. UNAMIR, or United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, was made to keep peace in Rwanda and started a year before the genocide occurred. Notably, the UNAMIR and other UN sites helped aid the shelter the 15 000 Rwandan

After the genocide, Canada marked April 7 as a Day of Remembrance of the victims, but all their empathy towards Rwanda seemed to appear only after the genocide ended. Canada received, but did not act on, multiple detailed messages and warnings about the killings happening. Canadian attention was not drawn to what was happening in Rwanda, and many networks like CNN were not in Rwanda or reporting the events. A Canadian military Major, Brent Beardsley, said “Africa and Rwanda were not a priority,” and “The government never let on it had information,” referring to Canada 's lack of action during the genocide. Out of all the countries that could have helped Rwanda during their time of need, Canada’s trademark of being peacekeepers made them seem like a country that should have provided large amounts of assistance. Sadly, Canada did not upkeep their high standard of peacekeeping and only helped Rwanda in small ways. Even though Canada did not aid Rwanda fully, a Canadian commander, Roméo Dallaire was one of the heros during the

While Roméo Dallaire worked hard to help the people of Rwanda, his countries and other developed nations hardly aided him. When asked about the genocide in later years, Dallaire said, "Since nobody else was offering to send troops, we had to take what we could get." This is exactly what him and his troops did. They worked hard to try and get more media coverage, since, as previously explained, the international community was turning a blind eye to Rwanda. The equipment they were receiving in Rwanda was sub-par. Dallaire explained, “The vehicles progressively broke down- eventually all of them did. After much wrangling, the United States authorized its mission to Somalia to “loan” UNAMIR six old, stripped-down (no guns, no radios, and no tools), early Cold War-era APCs in mid-April.” Dallaire was forever changed by what he witnessed in Rwanda, and said, “Rwanda will never ever leave me. It’s in the pores of my body. My soul is in those hills, my spirit is with the spirits of all those people who were slaughtered and