Left to right, Michael Ignatieff, Romeo Dallaire and Greg Barker participate in a panel discussion on the genocide in Rwanda at the Institute of Politics yesterday.

Romeo Dallaire, the former force commander for the United Nations mission to Rwanda, last night condemned the U.N.’s and United States’ failure to intervene in the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Dallaire was one of three speakers in a panel titled “Ghosts of Rwanda” at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Institute of Politics. The Forum featured the FRONTLINE documentary “Ghosts of Rwanda.”

The forum started on a sober note with a clip from the documentary.

“Lots of those eyes still haunt me,” Dallaire said in the clip. “How come I failed? How come my mission failed? How come I lost my soldiers and 800,000 people died?”

During the event, Dallaire discussed his dealings with U.N. bureaucracy and his efforts to “stymie the progress” of the Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by the Hutu government. The Hutus were the ethnic majority in Rwanda.

Dallaire also discussed the ethical quandary he faced when negotiating with Hutu leaders responsible for the genocide.

“I noticed some blood on them...and suddenly they were no longer humans,” Dallaire said. “I was literally talking with the devil.”

“Is it okay to negotiate with the devil to save people, or do I wipe them out right there?” he continued.

The other panelists—“Ghosts of Rwanda” producer Greg Barker and Kennedy School Lecturer and Pulitzer Prize Winner Samantha Power—stressed institutional denial of the genocide and the reasons for the United Nations’ failure to intervene. Carr Professor of Human Rights Practice and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Michael Ignatieff moderated.

The forum featured a seven-minute clip from “Ghosts of Rwanda” in which journalists and Red Cross volunteers recounted how the Rwanda mission was “devoid of support from New York,” where U.N. headquarters is located, and that “everyone knew what was going on in the country.”

After the clip, Power praised Dallaire for his leadership in adverse conditions.

“The man who did the most feels the worst,” Power said of Dallaire.

She said lower-level U.N. bureaucrats had vital information concerning Rwanda, but that the highest level “had other national interests.”

“Rwandans were just a cost-benefit equation...a statistic,” Power said. “Their institutional interest was saving the U.N., even when saving the U.N. meant pulling troops out of Rwanda.”

All three panelists said the U.N. Security Council and U.S. government failed to intervene because they did not want to commit troops to a dangerous conflict in Africa.