Within months, the situation grew more worrisome. In January 1994, Dallaire received a report that Hutu extremists were preparing to exterminate large numbers of Tutsi, and he requested permission from the United Nations (U.N.) to take action.

Dallaire quickly heard back from the U.N.: he was to do nothing to stop rumored weapons shipments. The U.N. said it did not think that powerful nations like the United States would support a forceful intervention.

On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying the President of Rwanda was shot down— setting off a collapse of the nascent Rwandan government. Extremist Hutus killed the Prime Minister and the 10 Belgian troops who were protecting her, and a campaign began to rid the country of Tutsi.

Less than three weeks later, the U.N. decided to withdraw its troops from Rwanda. By that point, tens of thousands had already been killed.

Dallaire insisted on staying behind, and for the next three months he watched as the body count rose higher and higher. His stubborn force is credited with saving thousands, but the genocide continued until July, when the RPF finally took control of the capital from the RGF.

THE PATH TO RWANDA

Dallaire spent most of his life in a world far removed from the instability of Rwanda.

He was born into a military family, in 1946, in Holland. His father was a non-commissioned officer in the Canadian Army who moved his family back to Canada shortly after Dallaire’s birth.

As a child, Dallaire decided that he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, and he enrolled in the Collège Militaire Royal de Saint-Jean in Quebec. He eventually moved onto the Royal Military College in Ontario, from which he graduated in 1969.

For the next 25 years, Dallaire rose through the ranks of the peacetime Canadian Army, commanding larger and larger artillery forces.

On June 27, 1993, he was asked by his superior, Major-General Armand Roy, whether he could deploy overseas to lead a United Nations peacekeeping mission to the nation of Rwanda.

“I confess that when General Roy called, I didn’t know where Rwanda was or exactly what kind of trouble the country was in,” Dallaire writes in his book.

But what was unfamiliar territory at the time was to become a defining experience, transforming Dallaire into the human-rights advocate who will address this year’s KSG graduates.

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