The early retirement of Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire has prompted critics to suggest that the Canadian Forces employs a double standard in the way it treats enlisted men and senior officers who suffer posttraumatic-stress disorder.
Gen. Dallaire, 53, the former head of United Nations peacekeeping forces in Rwanda, has been on sick leave since Jan. 24. His retirement -- 15 months ahead of schedule -- was announced yesterday and is effective this week.
In 1994, Gen. Dallaire pleaded with his United Nations superiors for permission to help stop the impending genocide of about 800,000 Tutsi civilians. The pleas, which included a cable to his fellow Canadian, Maurice Baril, at the time a major-general and military adviser to then-UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Gali, went unheeded. Gen. Baril is now Canada's top soldier, the Chief of Defence Staff.
"I am a casualty of Rwanda, an injured officer of the Rwandan war," Gen. Dallaire said in a Defence Department statement issued yesterday in Ottawa. "As a result of my injuries, and after 18 months of medical treatment and employer support, I simply cannot continue to be gainfully employed as a three-star general in the Canadian Forces."
He said he plans to write, lecture, and "do some research in the fields of leadership, conflict-resolution and humanitarian affairs."
Gen. Dallaire, a 35-year veteran of the Forces, said he will also spend more time with family and continue his therapy.
While stationed in Rwanda on Jan. 11, 1994, Gen. Dallaire, sent a classified message to UN headquarters in New York warning that Hutu extremists were making a list of all the Tutsi people in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, and planning to exterminate them. It was the first substantial warning of what was to come: the murder of more than 800,000 people.
What happened to the cable became a symbol for the UN's failures in Rwanda.
At least one report severely criticized senior UN officials for not doing more with the information in the cable, which was not passed on to either Mr. Boutros-Ghali or the Security Council. Neither Gen. Dallaire nor Gen. Baril were blamed.
Gen. Dallaire says he has been haunted ever since by his Rwandan experience. He returned to work as special adviser to Gen. Baril, working reduced hours until earlier this year when he took a sick leave.
Gen. Dallaire said he will now be able to tell his side of the Rwandan story, after years of silence, which is expected of military personnel.
"I need to get that out," he said. "Simply as part, I think, of reasonable therapy. I think a lot of that will be useful to people who command in the future."
But the military treats its stressed-out top brass quite differently than it does the rank and file, said Scott Taylor, editor of the Ottawa-based military watchdog magazine Esprit de Corps.
"People are realizing there's a double standard at play," Mr. Taylor said. "He [Dallaire]was on a three-day week and then had PTSD counselling for himself and his family. The fact is, they throw a lot of guys out of the military if they complain about stress. And they treat a $129,000-a-year general quite differently than a $20,000-a-year private."
One former soldier knows only too well what happens when stress takes over. The ex-officer, a former member of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry who asked not to be identified, was taking prescription pain killers after a parachute accident in 1988, when he robbed a couple at gunpoint in London. He was sentenced by a British court to five years in jail and was discharged from the military, which did not acknowledge his claim that the medication caused a psychotic reaction that led to his actions.
"I was stressed to the max and I just lost it," he said yesterday. "You've still got guys going off their rocker. The military only just recently recognized posttraumatic-stress disorder as a disability."
Gen. Dallaire has "been handled with kid gloves compared with [what]most soldiers go through," the former officer said. "They [the military]do next to nothing. They're getting better, but there's still the stigma that soldiers complaining of stress just can't cut it."
The Winnipeg resident said one enlisted soldier returned home from Bosnia and Croatia and complained of stress.
"The guy said he couldn't do his job any more."
However, the former officer said, the military was unwilling to offer much official help because that would have been an admission that Canadian peacekeepers are subject to unique stress caused by their rules of engagement, which sometimes require the use of deadly force.
Gen. Dallaire has said that soldiers' psychological wounds are as deep and as painful and even longer-lasting than those inflicted by bullets and land mines.
"We're nowhere near the depth nor the proactiveness needed to help . . . the casualties," he said. "That has a major impact on our operational effectiveness."