A day with Dallaire

Cornfields surrounds a restored rural Quebec farmhouse nestled between the Appalachian and Laurentian mountain ranges.

On a blue-sky, late summer day, international humanitarian icon Lieutenant-General (retd) Roméo Dallaire is feeding his backyard chickens.

“Oui, oui, oui,” Dallaire coos as he scatters mealworms for the three copper chickens who follow, like good soldiers, at the heels of his well-polished shoes.

This pastoral property, a couple of hours outside Quebec City, is where General Dallaire, now 78, spends his days reading, writing, dreaming, healing from PTSD and searching for lasting peace — in his life — and in the world.

He and his wife, Marie-Claude Michaud, have renovated an old farmhouse and, he says, signed “a 25-year contract.”

The UN mission in Rwanda

It’s been three decades since Dallaire witnessed the largest genocide since the Holocaust as the force commander of United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR.) Within three bloody months in 1993, more than 800,000 Rwandans were killed.

“I warned them that this thing was going to explode and create massive killings,” Dallaire said, adding he asked the UN for logistical support and an extra 2,000 soldiers.

His requests were denied and he then defied orders to pull his troops out. Dallaire came back to Canada shattered by what he witnessed. “There was no victory parade,” he said.

“When you lose troops and you see them injured for life, the sense of guilt of having survived and others not, the mission failing and living with the impact of that. All those things are real. You can't expect that society can grasp what you have gone through.”

“I was scaring my family, I was ill-tempered and non-communicative and difficult. The guy that came back from Rwanda was not the guy that left—I was a different person.”

Many Canadians are familiar with parts of Dallaire’s military service story. He joined the Canadian Armed Forces in 1963 at age 17 because he wanted to help Canadians feel safe and secure. The night before he left for military college, his father, a career soldier who had also suffered the lasting impacts of war, expressed his pride.

“He told me ‘you're entering the service of others. Don't expect them to say thank you. Don't serve because you want them to thank you. Serve because you want to serve’ and that has been the backdrop of my whole career,” he said.

During his career, he commanded the 5^e Régiment d'artillerie légère du Canada, where he was promoted to Brigadier-General. He then commanded the 5th Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group. He was the commandant of Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean from 1990 to 1993 when he received his commission as the Force Commander of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Rwanda.

At the time Dallaire received the life-altering assignment, he couldn’t pick Rwanda out on a map. The landlocked eastern African country had been in a civil war for three years and the UN was sent to help implement the Arusha Accords.

But when a plane loaded with ammunition landed in the capital of Kigali, Dallaire quickly realized big trouble was brewing. Chaos ensued when the plane carrying the Rwandan president was shot down and Hutu extremists used the assassination as justification to begin executing Tutsis.

“We could see people with lists going to different houses to kill Tutsis—they were wiping out all the families. The UN was not interested. They didn’t believe it was a genocide,” he said. The United Nations decision not to send support has haunted him—and he has spoken out against it—ever since.

PTSD diagnosis

Arriving back in Canada in 1994, Dallaire was crushed by despair. At first, he coped by throwing himself into his work—from September 1994 to October 1995 serving as deputy commander of Land Force Command and commander of the 1st Canadian Division.

“One of the honorable ways of killing yourself was to work yourself to death and that’s what I was trying to do,” he explained. While he kept himself busy, the horrors he witnessed in Africa, like “human limbs stacked like cords of wood” kept flashing back in his mind.

PTSD symptoms can come on suddenly and transform pleasant rituals into invasive thoughts and memories. Dallaire said the smell of a summer barbeque brought him back to piles of bodies burning in Rwanda. “I was literally paralyzed in place. The nights were the worst,” he explained.

“I could never go to bed. I couldn’t stand the sound of silence. “All this stuff doesn’t go away, it’s just managed and realigned and controlled and adjusted.” He medically released from the Canadian military in 2000 due to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Dallaire talks openly about how with years of therapy, he survived suicide attempts and was eventually able to accept his injury. He encourages Veterans today to treat this type of injury with the same urgency as physical injury.

In the years since, he has dedicated his life to advocacy to several notable causes, mainly Veterans’ mental health. As a Senator from 2005 to 2014, Dallaire helped reform the assistance provided to the new generation of Veterans affected by PTSD through an updated Veterans’ Charter.

“We have to be able to take care of the mind as fast as we take care of the body. The mind continues to gangrene itself and to fester, become a cancer and become worse and ultimately can be fatal,” he said.

Eradicating child soldiers

Another cause near and dear to his heart is to end the recruitment and use of child soldiers worldwide. Through the Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he is working to meet this goal.

Part of the moral injury he suffered was facing armed Rwandan children in combat. To look into a child’s eyes and see the fear—a child trained to kill you—is something he could never forget.

“(It) was a lot deeper than PTSD. It was a moral injury. It was something that fundamentally was against every fiber of what you are. It was the realization that the therapy and the medication were not deep enough in my spiritual, moral arena to try to attenuate the pain of that, the reality of it, to be able to look at my own children,” he explained.

The Dallaire Institute conducts research and partners with governments to deliver military and police training on the prevention of children from being recruited and used in conflict. They also conduct training on how to disarm child soldiers.

Finding peace in love

Part of the love story between Dallaire and Michaud is their love of writing (he has penned four award-winning books, she published her first in 2021) and their shared experiences with the fallout from military service on Veterans and their families.

In the open space in their home, they spend their work days at large facing desks so they can bounce ideas off one another. Walls of books surround the couple. In their front porch a sign says “Love.” Dallaire swears that is what has saved his life.

His love for his wife and love expressed much more freely now to his three grown children; Willem, Catherine and Guy, has helped heal his heart. “Nothing is stronger than your head on a pillow at night, lying beside the person you love and to sense that love exchanged. Nothing comes close to that,” he said.

Dallaire and Michaud found an immediate understanding in each other. Michaud, the former executive director of the Valcartier Military Family Resource Centre, an organization that offers services to military families around the world, saw first-hand the impacts psychological injuries have on Veterans and their families. “I was sending soldiers to the front lines; she was picking them up when they came home,” Dallaire explained.

They share a philosophy that in order to break down patriarchal, hierarchical and predominantly male military environments, more women need to be in leadership positions.

“All our institutions have all been built by men, egocentric, male - dominated, macho, misogynist, power-dominated. That can't make lasting peace, only when women and men have integrated, have reformed, have revolutionized and humanity is a world of equals that will happen,” Dallaire said.

Dallaire has found peace in his own life with therapy, medication and healthy relationships. His peace of mind has also improved since he decided to move from a condo in the city to the country where his biggest daily threat is the wily fox intent on raiding his chicken coop.

“You see the animals, and you see the trees, and you sense the seasons, you feel you can breathe,” he said. “There's a safety in the rhythm of the planet, of nature, of life in the rural area.” And then there are his toy trains.

As part of his recovery, his therapist recommended he find a hobby, something he enjoyed as a child. His face lights up as he demonstrates the elaborate model train set which fills an entire room of his home with more than 20 engines, authentic sounds, lights and tracks.

Finding peaceful solutions to global conflicts

Dallaire spends a lot of time writing, speaking and thinking about the military’s role in modern-day conflicts. He believes nations are imploding in civil wars because citizens who don’t feel they’re getting a fair shake turn to banditry, rebellion and revolution.

“In those situations, you don’t have a war in the classic sense of big armies facing big armies anymore,” he said.

“What you’ve got is people that are mixed in with the population fighting each other for power. So what we end up doing is going into very complex, very ambiguous situations that have exploded into mass atrocities, civil war, even genocide.”

Use of force isn’t the answer to these complex problems, he said. Modern militaries need to listen, understand, provide information, work with non-governmental organizations to help resolve conflict and establish an atmosphere of security. “That's the essence of the future. Not power, not a big stick,” he said. “You can’t win wars. You can only achieve truce.”

General Dallaire was appointed with Bishop Desmond Tutu to the United Nations Secretary General’s Advisory Committee on Genocide Prevention in the spring of 2006 and is a Fellow at the Montreal Institute of Genocide Studies, Concordia University, Quebec. He is an officer in the Order of Canada since 2002, a recipient of the Pearson Peace Medal in 2005, a Grand Officer of the Order of Quebec in 2006. He holds honorary doctorates and fellowships from almost three dozen universities in Canada and the United States.

Video: Roméo Dallaire

With courage, integrity and loyalty, Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire is leaving his mark. He is one of our Canadian Armed Forces Veterans. Discover more stories.