Please indulge me, friends.

Yesterday, Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire, was found dead drunk and unconscious in a park in Hull, Quebec. He was taken to hospital, and later released. Dallaire was the Commander (Canadian) of the United Nations Mission in Rwanda in 1994, and was betrayed by the United Nations (and the Western powers specifically) when he desperately warned them of the impending massacre of the few Belgian troops he had charge of and the nearly a million Hutus and Tutsis that he was supposed to protect with totally inadequate resources.

This warning was ignored, and the small contingent of Belgian troops (out in the jungle) were macheted to death by a mob, followed by the eruption of the feared massacre of a million people. It is now widely accepted that if Dallaire's plea for reinforcements had been answered at that critical moment, hundreds of thousands of people might have lived. Later on, various people, including the Belgian government, attempted to pin the blame on him personally for the deaths of the troops involved. He has since been completely exonerated, but was put through bureaucratic hell, to match the physical hell he had witnessed. He has been tormented with a sense of personal guilt and horror ever since he returned from Rwanda.

In April of this year he announced that he was taking early retirement, because he could not cope with his memories, the piles of bodies, and the rest -- "hearing people die at the end of the phone because I could not send troops in to reinforce them. There are many days in the past, less so now, when I wish I had died there too". Friends say that the now retired General has simply been unable to cope, and is in near constant turmoil. He has tried to commit suicide a couple of times, and is so traumatized by the sights that he witnessed -- the smell of fresh fruit in a supermarket once triggered a seizure -- that he suffers from flashbacks and overwhelming grief.

A news cameraperson who came on the scene when he was found said that she refused to take his picture -- "I didn't shoot it because I was depressed that a man like him could be there and not have help. He was so important for Canada when he was in good shape."

This story won't perhaps mean anything to non-Canadians, but it is devastating to us to see such an honourable man, who was trying to do his best in the midst of a primeval horror, now, so swiftly, broken down. I just wanted to pay homage to him among friends -- some of whom have had some similar griefs -- and wish him whatever healing there is.

yours, Peter T.