Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

DALLAIRE, MAJOR GENERAL ROMEO
96
Consequently, foreign workers were impressed to work in Daimler’s factories (they numbered
about one-third of all Daimler’s workers by September 1942), as were concentration
camp inmates. In early 1944 Governor Hans Frank (1900–1946), head of the Polish Generalgouvernement
(the territorial unit in Poland, created by the Nazis on October 26, 1939,
to which was added Eastern Galicia in the summer of 1941, following Nazi Germany’s
attack on the Soviet Union) visited one of the Daimler-Benz factories in his territory,
describing it as “the model factory” of the Generalgouvernement. With the advance of
the Allies through Germany in April and May 1945, Daimler-Benz premises were progressively
occupied and closed down. The company was reconstituted and rehabilitated
during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Dallaire, Major General Romeo (b. 1946). Born in the Netherlands to a Canadian
father and a Dutch mother, Dallaire grew up in Montreal, Canada. Prior to, during, and
following the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Dallaire was the force commander of the United
Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) (October 1993–March 1996)
peacekeeping force in Rwanda. UNAMIR’s mandate was to keep the peace in Rwanda
after the power-sharing agreement known as the Arusha Accords was signed. As part and
parcel of keeping the peace, the UN peacekeepers were mandated to oversee the cease-fire
arranged by the Arusha Accords (a set of five agreements signed by the Hutu-dominated
government of Rwanda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front [RPF] in Arusha, Tanzania on
August 4, 1993, it was intended that the Arusha Accords would end the civil war between
the two parties and help to establish both demilitarization and demobilization in the
area). What Dallaire was not informed of prior to his posting was that the extremist Hutu
were intent on annihilating the Tutsi and had said as much in media broadcasts, newspaper
articles, and declarations. In January 1994 a Hutu informant, reportedly a person of
influence in the higher echelons of the Rwandan government, contacted Dallaire in order
to inform him of the frantic effort by extremist Hutu to arm and train local militias in
preparation for the decimation of the Tutsi. In a fax to the United Nations, which has
been alternately referred to as “the Dallaire fax” and the “genocide fax,” Dallaire asserted
that the informant informed him that Hutu extremists “had been ordered to register all
the Tutsi in Kigali” and that “he suspects it is for their extermination.” Dallaire also
informed the powers that be at the United Nations, that he, Dallaire, was planning an
arms raid on the Hutu cache of weapons. The UN, however, cabled back ordering him
not to carry out the raid out of fear of exacerbating the situation. As the crisis in Rwanda
worsened, particularly in early 1994, Dallaire came to the conclusion that the constant
stream of murders he and his soldiers were discovering and witnessing was not a result of
warfare between the former combatants, but rather crimes against humanity by one group
(Hutu) against another (Tutsi). Initially he referred to such killing as “ethnic cleansing.”
Dallaire continued to fire off one urgent message after another to UN headquarters in
New York City requesting more forces, supplies and the broadening of his mandate (from
a Chapter VI or peacekeeping mandate to a Chapter VII or peace enforcement mandate)
in order to quell the violence perpetrated by the Hutu extremists, but it was to no avail
as the UN Security Council would not countenance such a change. Ultimately, in late
April (some two weeks after the genocide had actually begun), Dallaire came to the conclusion
that what he was witnessing was, in fact, genocide, and reported such to the international
press and the United Nations. The international community, though, failed to
respond, and within one hundred days between five hundred thousand and 1 million Tutsi