PUBLICATION: National Post
DATE: 2005.04.01
EDITION: National
SECTION: Canada
PAGE: A6
BYLINE: Isabel Vincent
SOURCE: National Post
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'I don't want to get into slugfest': Dallaire: Rwandan genocide: New book accuses Canadian General of anti-African bias
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In what is shaping up to be the battle of the Rwanda genocide memoirs, the United Nations former special envoy to Rwanda lashed out at <Romeo> <Dallaire> yesterday, accusing the Canadian general of refusing to recognize his authority and of an anti-African bias that helped fuel the chaos during the 1994 genocide.
"He was the force commander, I was his boss, and he never respected that because he didn't want to take orders from an African," said Jacques-Roger Booh Booh, a former career diplomat from Cameroon and the leader of the United Nations Mission for Assistance to Rwanda (UNAMIR) between 1993 and 1994.
General Dallaire, who was recently appointed to the Senate, denied Mr. Booh Booh's allegations yesterday. He said although he had never been to Africa prior to his Rwanda mission, many of the troops under his command were African, and he has worked on various African-related issues in the years since the Rwandan genocide.
"My first reaction is that I don't want to get into a slugfest," General Dallaire said in an interview yesterday. "I haven't read the book, and I am not sure why it has come out at a time when we have another genocide to worry about in Darfur."
Mr. Booh Booh is the author of the recently released Le Patron de Dallaire Parle (Dallaire's Boss Speaks), which will be released in Canada next week. Mr. Booh Booh, who was appointed by former UN secretary general Boutros Boutros Ghali to oversee the ill-fated Rwanda <peacekeeping> mission in 1993, says he decided to break his "professional diplomatic silence" to write the book after he read General Dallaire's best-selling memoir Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.
Mr. Booh Booh says he was enraged by General Dallaire's "negative portrayal" of him in the book. "I found his book ill-intentioned and nasty," said Mr. Booh Booh, a former ambassador and foreign minister in Cameroon. "It portrays me in a very negative light."
Mr. Booh-Booh is portrayed as a do-nothing UN bureaucrat in General Dallaire's book, who orders Persian carpets and a brand new Mercedes while the military side of the UN mission is unable to secure desperately needed war materiel and troops during an escalation in violence in Rwanda that would result in the mass murder of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus by June, 1994.
Mr. Booh Booh left Kigali for Nairobi in the midst of the genocide, in May, 1994, and a month later, UN officials did not renew his contract with the international body.
But he insists that he continued to do his job in Nairobi, lobbying African leaders to help Rwanda as the country descended further into chaos,
In his book, Mr. Booh Booh reproduces a cable from Boutros-Ghali dated May 10, 1994, in which the then secretary-general praises him for his "profound knowledge of the situation in Rwanda," his "impartiality and professionalism."
Mr. Booh Booh blamed his force commander in Rwanda, General Dallaire, for not keeping him properly informed, and not understanding the internal politics of Rwanda, a country the general admits he knew little about before taking up his duties there in the summer of 1993.
"He went over my head, he thought he was the commander of the mission," said Mr. Booh Booh, adding that General Dallaire did not tell him of the downing of an airplane on April 6, 1994, that killed the Rwandan president and major general Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, until three hours after it had occurred. The incident signalled the beginning of the Rwandan genocide.
For his part, General Dallaire said he did not find out about the plane until two and a half hours after it had occurred, and immediately communicated the news to Mr. Booh Booh.
Furthermore, Mr. Booh Booh alleges that General Dallaire did not inform him that the Belgian <peacekeepers> sent to protect the Rwandan interim prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, were under threat. In the end, the 10 <peacekeepers> along with the prime minister and her husband were executed -- an event that is one of the most controversial incidents of General Dallaire's tenure in Rwanda.
"Look, I'm critical of him and he's critical of me, and he has every right in a democracy to write his book," said General Dallaire, who said he planned to read Mr. Booh Booh's book as soon as it becomes available in Canada.