![\"Romeo](\"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Romeo_Dallaire.jpg\")
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He sent a one-page fax to the United Nations warning them exactly what was coming. They told him to stand down. Three months later, it happened exactly as he said it would.<\/p>\n
On January 11, 1994, Rom\u00e9o Dallaire received an informant. The man had trained the Hutu militia. He told Dallaire his people could kill 1,000 Tutsis in 20 minutes. He showed Dallaire a secret weapons cache. He revealed that every Tutsi in Kigali was being registered \u2014 and that he believed the lists were for killing.<\/p>\n
Dallaire wrote to United Nations headquarters in New York that same night. One page. Marked most immediate. He asked permission to raid the weapons. He ended the fax in French. Peux ce que veux. Allons-y. Where there is a will, there is a way. Let’s go.<\/p>\n
The reply came back the same day. Do not raid anything. Stay inside your mandate. It was signed through the office of Kofi Annan \u2014 then head of UN Peacekeeping Operations. Annan would become UN Secretary-General in 1997 and win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001. He has since publicly accepted responsibility for the response. Remember that reply.<\/p>\n
Rom\u00e9o Dallaire was born on June 25, 1946, in Denekamp, Netherlands. His father was a Canadian sergeant. His mother was a Dutch nurse who had watched friends die in the Holocaust. The family moved to Montreal when Dallaire was six months old. He grew up French-speaking in an English country and knew from childhood what it felt like to be the wrong kind of person in the wrong place.<\/p>\n
He joined the Canadian Army. Artillery. A career soldier. When he asked for a UN posting, they gave him Rwanda.<\/p>\n
The job looked straightforward. Two sides had signed a peace agreement. His mission was to watch them keep it. Dallaire asked for 5,000 troops. He received approximately 2,500 \u2014 lightly armed, short on fuel, food, medical supplies, and functioning vehicles. His rules of engagement did not permit the use of offensive force.<\/p>\n
He arrived in Kigali on October 22, 1993, as Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda. What he found over the following months alarmed him deeply. The January 11 fax was not a guess. It was a warning with a source, a location, a method, and a timeline. New York read it and told him to take his concerns to the President of Rwanda. The President’s own party was arming the militia. UN officials warned Dallaire about “unanticipated repercussions” and rebuked him for exceeding his mandate.<\/p>\n
On April 6, 1994, at approximately 8:20 in the evening, a missile struck the plane carrying President Juv\u00e9nal Habyarimana over Kigali. The killing began within hours \u2014 exactly as the informant had described three months earlier.<\/p>\n
Dallaire sent 10 Belgian paratroopers to protect Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. Government forces intercepted them, disarmed them, tortured them, and killed all 10. The Prime Minister was murdered the same morning. Belgium withdrew its remaining forces. Other nations followed.<\/p>\n
On April 21, 1994, the UN Security Council voted to cut Dallaire’s force from 2,500 soldiers to 270. He was ordered to leave Rwanda. The order came three times. He refused three times. He called it an immoral order.<\/p>\n
He kept approximately 450 men \u2014 Ghanaian soldiers, Tunisian soldiers, a handful of military observers. His deputy, Ghanaian General Henry Anyidoho, refused to withdraw his troops either. Dallaire wrote back to New York: it would be unethical to leave this terrible scene.<\/p>\n
So he stayed. With 450 soldiers and no mandate to fire their weapons.<\/p>\n
He packed civilians into a stadium, a hospital, a church, and a hotel. That hotel was the H\u00f4tel des Mille Collines. You may know it as Hotel Rwanda \u2014 the 2004 film in which Nick Nolte plays the UN colonel who keeps showing up to pull people back from the edge. That character is Dallaire.<\/p>\n
He drove into towns at night and extracted people. He sat at tables with the men directing the killing. He shook their hands. He kept people alive an hour at a time.<\/p>\n
In Washington, officials were still debating vocabulary. A Pentagon document dated May 1, 1994 \u2014 now declassified and publicly available \u2014 warned staff to avoid using the word genocide, because a formal genocide finding could legally commit the United States government to act. The CIA had internally classified the situation as genocide on April 23. The word was not said publicly by US officials until late May.<\/p>\n
The killing lasted 100 days. More than 800,000 people were murdered. Two million became refugees. Dallaire and his 450 soldiers saved an estimated 30,000 lives.<\/p>\n
Then it came for him. He later wrote that death became a desired option. The Canadian Army medically released him in 2000. In June of that year, at age 53, he was found in a park in Quebec City \u2014 under a bench, drunk, alone.<\/p>\n
He got back up.<\/p>\n
In 2003 Dallaire published Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. It won Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2004. He testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda against the men who planned the genocide. In 2005, Canada appointed him to the Senate. In 2007 he founded what became the Rom\u00e9o Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative at Dalhousie University \u2014 an organisation that trains soldiers and police across Africa and Latin America to recognise and protect child soldiers. It is still running today.<\/p>\n
Rom\u00e9o Dallaire is 80 years old. He is still working.<\/p>\n
He warned them three months in advance. In writing. With a name, a location, and a method. They told him to stand down. They cut his force. They ordered him to run. He stayed with 450 soldiers who were not allowed to fire their weapons and saved 30,000 people anyway.<\/p>\n
The fax he sent on January 11, 1994 is a public document. Anyone can read it. It is one page long. The last line is the only one written in French. Where there is a will, there is a way. Let’s go.<\/p>\n
New York read that line and wrote back no.<\/p>\n
Thirty-two years later, he is still going anyway.<\/p>\n
Tag someone who needs to know this name. Like and share for Rom\u00e9o Dallaire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
He sent a one-page fax to the United Nations warning them exactly what was coming. They told him to stand down. Three months later, it happened exactly as he said it would. On January 11, 1994, Rom\u00e9o Dallaire received an informant. The man had trained the Hutu militia. He told Dallaire his people could kill … <\/p>\n