Dallaire Advocates for Human Rights

Canadian senator and retired Lieutenant-General Roméo A. Dallaire delivered the Kennedy School of Government’s (KSG) Graduation Address to graduating KSG students and their families yesterday.

In his speech he discussed a variety of topics, including the Rwandan genocide and human rights, the tribulations of a career in public service, and the need to manage natural resources.

“Human rights are the basis of our future,” said Dallaire, who hails from Canada and served as the Force Commander for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Rwanda from 1993 to 1994, during the brutal genocide which left more than 800,000 dead.

Dallaire said that graduates should recognize the importance and equality of every human life—and illustrated his point with a story from his time in Rwanda.

He told the crowd, which filled the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum to capacity, of how he had been driving through the Rwandan countryside in 1994 and came across a three- or four-year-old boy standing in the middle of the road.

Dallaire got out to look for the boy’s home, and found that he had been living for days in his family’s house with the “decaying and half-eaten” bodies of the child’s parents.

He said he carried the boy out of his house and looked into his eyes.

“What I saw was the same thing I saw in my three-year old son,” said Dallaire, a father of three. “They were the eyes of a human child, and they were both exactly the same.”

“All humans are humans, and there’s not one human more human than the other,” said Dallaire, adding that the citizens of powerful nations have an obligation to help those who are poor or suffering.

And Dallaire, who was also fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy this past year, spoke to the future careers of the KSG students, many of whom will go into public service.

“You’ll never be rich...but it will be a good challenging life,” Dallaire said, repeating words his father had told him when he entered the Canadian Army. “You won’t work with the expectation of someone saying ‘thank you.’”

And he gave the students advice for their future leadership roles.

“Leadership is not crisis management. It is an ability to be ahead of [crises],” he said.

Another theme of Dallaire’s speech was that an “Era of Revolution” is sweeping the world, in areas including the environment, information technology, and security.

“We’re leaping more often than not into an unknown,” he said. “There is no such thing any more as status quo. Too much is shifting too fast and too quickly.”

Dallaire devoted a portion of his speech to discussing the environment, and the drastic shift from his parents’ views on the environment to his generation’s views.

“There was no direct concern or limitation” on the use of resources in past generations, Dallaire said. “[But] we will be held accountable for this misuse. Humanity is going to be affected by the decisions of today.”

He also discussed the importance of combating threats such as modern terrorism without forfeiting civil liberties.

“Today, the threats do not play by any of the rules,” he said, but he warned against moving towards a time when “we have security but we’re in a police state.”

At the end of his 45-minute speech, Dallaire was received with a standing ovation.

—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.