To his astonishment, he was turned down flat by the triumvirate then in charge of peacekeeping: Kofi Annan, then Under-Secretary General of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (dpko); Iqbal Riza, his deputy; and General Maurice Baril, a Canadian who had been seconded to dpko as its military advisor, by the Canadian government.

Iqbal Riza signed the code cable from Kofi Annan. Not only did Riza reject Dallaire’s plan, but he insisted that Dallaire share the plan with the then president of Rwanda, who was a man completely beyond trust. Dallaire was stunned.

It was, on the part of the trio in New York, an appalling error in judgment.

But it also revealed the excruciating weakness at the heart of dpko, for which dpko was not primarily responsible. They couldn’t handle Rwanda. They had absolutely no capacity to run all the peacekeeping operations then in play (from the Balkans to Haiti). They were shockingly under-staffed, supernaturally bureaucratic, whipsawed by the Security Council, short of troop contingents, pathetically briefed by their political staff, and overworked to the point of self-immolation. Worse, they laboured under a Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who had shown himself, where Rwanda was concerned, to be both uninterested and autocratic.

This impossible situation shackled Dallaire at every turn. On a daily basis, he confronted the questions that gnawed at his soul: What possible justification is there for continuing the facade of a real peacekeeping operation in Rwanda when you know it’s not working? When you ask for 5,000 troops and are reduced to half that, and then to a tenth of that; when the storm clouds are gathering; when scenes of massacres and atrocities are regularly reported even before the genocide begins. It is to Dallaire’s everlasting credit that he stuck it out, that he would not be bullied into submission by those in New York who felt that Rwandans were somehow not worth protecting.

Let me pause here to say that, for me, Dallaire’s book is, in places, a revelation. For two years, from 1998 to 2000, I was a member of a panel, appointed by the Organization of African Unity, to investigate the genocide in Rwanda. We did the best we could, hampered by time, budget, and access to secret materials. We interviewed Roméo Dallaire in two sessions over seven hours, and he greatly influenced our collective view of the genocide. But he wasn’t, understandably, able to share with us the confidential code cables and internal information that, as they appear throughout his book, provide telling, often definitive, insight into the events of 1994.

We’re still far too close to the Rwandan genocide—next year, after all, is but the tenth anniversary—to make final judgments. But Dallaire paints a picture that is both sweeping and persuasive. And he paints it with such obvious agony, regret, and personal trauma that it’s impossible to attribute malice to the interpretation.

It wasn’t just the problems at headquarters. The Americans used the Security Council to block any possible troop expansion, thereby dooming Rwanda. They played games with Dallaire, promising equipment and never delivering. They prevaricated about every transaction. They were so paralyzed by the deaths of the American marines in Somalia in 1993 that they were determined to compromise every other potential military intervention in Africa. Dallaire is so frustrated in his recounting of American behaviour that he actually blurts out, “Clinton’s fibbing dumbfounded me.”

The French, in particular, draw his ire, and they, in turn, couldn’t stand Dallaire, at one point actually writing the Secretary-General to ask that he be replaced. The denouement in the relationship, however, comes at the end of the genocide, when the French government launches “Operation Turquoise,” an alleged humanitarian intervention that was but a mask that allowed the genocidaires to escape into what was then Zaire, carrying artillery, heavy armour, anti-aircraft guns, and anti-tank systems. Well over a million people crossed the border, with no effort made to separate the civilians fleeing Kagame’s advance from the soldiers or gendarmerie or militias who were prosecuting the genocide. I have to say that providing safe haven for the butchers, and deliberately making it possible for them to continue the conflict on the other side of the border, was one of the most contemptible moments in the flow of horrific events.

The Belgians were a sad case. They lost ten soldiers in a brutal ambush on day two of the genocide, and then, reminiscent of the U.S. in Somalia, decided to pull out entirely, leaving Dallaire with perhaps 2,200 soldiers and military observers for the whole country.