Eating with a journalist must be a thankless proposition for the retired lieutenant-general Romeo Dallaire. The conversation will inevitably turn to his futile mission as commander of a United Nations post in Rwanda, where in 1994 his peacekeepers weren’t allowed to stop a genocide. Sitting across a table and giving a first-hand account of the unfathomable horror, how could he eat? I couldn’t help but wonder if that dilemma influenced his decision to choose breakfast over lunch.

For more than a decade, the 58-year-old Dallaire has battled profound depression over what he, and the world, should have done to prevent Hutu extremists from slaughtering more than 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates. To a large extent, he blames himself. The French-Canadian had intelligence that the genocide was being planned but couldn’t get the resources or the permission from the UN to intervene. Though Dallaire and his men probably saved thousands of lives by remaining in the country, his mind became a bleak landscape of guilt, shame and rage when he returned to his native Canada.

Had he disobeyed orders, he could have saved more lives, including Belgians from his own force. Had he abdicated and fled with the rest of the international community, maybe his torment wouldn’t be so unremitting. Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, he attempted suicide. Eventually deemed unfit for command, he was given a medical discharge from the Canadian armed forces in 2000, and seemed doomed to become a prisoner of his own memory.

As he constantly revisits his past, history has been visiting him, most recently in the film Hotel Rwanda, which features a Dallaire-like UN commander, played by Nick Nolte.

When we sit down for breakfast on a blustery morning at the Beekman Tower Hotel, near the UN building, Dallaire dismisses the movie: it was okay, he says. “I don’t want to get into the nuts and bolts of it,” he adds in soft, accented English. “But anything that keeps the Rwanda genocide alive meets my lifelong ambition.”

Wearing a black blazer, a blue pinstriped shirt and a dark tie he received from Unicef, Dallaire doesn’t have to worry about that. As the UN continues to deliberate over what many see as a genocide in the Sudanese region of Darfur, the ghosts of Rwanda are coming back to haunt the world, and Dallaire is finally being heard. The 2003 memoir he co-wrote with Brent Beardsley, Shake Hands with the Devil, won a big literary award in Canada. An eponymous feature-length documentary film about Dallaire’s return to Rwanda a decade later won the audience prize in its category at the influential Sundance Festival two months ago. Sources in the Canadian government told me that the Montrealer is a serious candidate for governor general when the current titular head of state, broadcaster Adrienne Clarkson, steps down this November. At home, where international peacekeeping is a national badge of pride, Dallaire is a hero.

Gazing over a meagre plate of fruit that he fetched from a nearby buffet, Dallaire says that he would rather be considered a humanist than a hero. Heroes are national figures, and Dallaire views himself as part of an international community of activists. “I’m working to advance human rights, to come up with a new way of looking at conflict resolution. I don’t hold myself to borders or to sovereignty.”

A fellow at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy until the end of this year, Dallaire wants to find a way to persuade rebels and governments to stop using children in their armies. Even more ambitiously, he is trying to come up with a new way of looking at conflict resolution, of peacekeeping. “We need a new conceptual base,” he said. “We’re using methods of the past -humanitarian, diplomatic and military-to fit very complex scenarios. We don’t have the lexicon to fit them.”

But isn’t this too quixotic, too hopeful? “My optimism comes from the fact that I faced whether or not I was going to stay in this world, and ultimately I decided that I would,” he says, a pill resting beside his right hand. “I believe that we can actually achieve a point in humanity when we won’t have conflict because of our differences.”

Almost genetically designed to be a UN Blue Beret, Dallaire is the son of a Catholic French-Canadian second world war veteran and a Dutch Protestant mother who identified more with English-speaking Protestants. Straddling what’s often called “The Two Solitudes” of the country’s Anglophone and Francophone cultures, Dallaire grew up speaking both languages and retained friends on both sides of a sometimes vicious conflict. “I was totally committed to and involved with one group, but I always had this other voice in my head. Always one foot on one side, one foot on the other.”

The dual allegiances of his early life helped him to rise through the very English Canadian military establishment, and may have been a blueprint for his later life mission: sympathetic to both sides, allied to neither. But today, Dallaire believes that remaining on the sidelines isn’t going to help the people who need it most.

”This is the end of the era of Chapter Six peacekeeping,” he says, referring to the rules of non-engagement that he followed when he was UN commander in the Rwandan capital of Kigali. “In every scenario there is a moderate and then there is an extremist, and the extremists are prepared to abuse their own people and subvert the peace process.”

To counter genocidal belligerents, Dallaire advocates a “Chapter Six-plus,” a neutral force that protects people at risk and can respond to humanitarian demands unimpeded. Part of this plan involves a reconsideration of the term “crimes against humanity”: murder should not be its only interpretation. “If you’re a convoy with food and medical supplies and some idiot doesn’t want to let you through, then that’s a crime against humanity. With my plan, we’d be able to blast our way through it.”

In Dallaire’s estimation, the military must change from top to bottom, beginning with his own rank. “The era of a general who only knows how to fight is gone, especially with the middle powers,” he says, adding that a general must know how to be a diplomat and a humanist, skilled in politics and nuances and nation-building. “Generals who argue that we only go in with clear mandates and time frames -sorry. We’re in an era of complexity and ambiguity, and if you can’t operate in ambiguity, you’ve got a problem.”

Dallaire sees no ambiguity when it comes to the atrocities in Darfur. According to him, they constitute genocide. But the situation in Rwanda isn’t entirely analogous to Sudan where, he believes, economic interests hold back the Security Council. “In Rwanda there was absolutely nothing. Darfur still has oil, and there are members of the security council who are in cahoots with the Khartoum government for oil,” he says.

Dallaire excuses himself and comes back with a bran muffin and a corn meal muffin and after some picking, leaves a moat of untouched crumbs around them. After he swallows a pill with tea, I ask him about his medication. One sounds like a mood stabiliser, the other a deep-sleep facilitator. “The other I take so that I can sleep and not go into those dreams and fits.”

Recently, though, he has revisited the nightmare in a real way. Two months ago, he gave testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal against Theoneste Bagosora, the alleged henchman of the Hutu genocidaires. “It took months of preparation for that,” he says. “Just the facts alone.” To help him through the trial he enlisted psychologists.

When I asked him what was going through his mind during the trial, he grabbed his heart, his head tilted back, and then regained his thoughts with a small, unintelligible noise. “My overriding emotion was that I would enter the court and he’d be sitting there in that dock and then I would simply go up to him and shoot him, or leap over and pummel him to death.”

When he finally entered the court, Bagosora was in a remote area of the room, and during the week-long testimony, their glances seldom met. But when the proceedings ended, their paths finally crossed as they were leaving. “I was welling up, wanting to beat the [shit] out of him, and people must have sensed this because they got in front of me. But for four or five minutes I was out to lunch. I was back there reliving it all. The genocide came pouring back.”

As tumultuous as that event was, his greatest act of closure may be a return trip to Kigali, Rwanda, where he and his wife, Elizabeth, plan to live for a year. “My principal aim is to walk the hills, a communion with the spirits. To mourn.”

By the time our interview finishes, I feel as if I want to do more than simply shake hands with Dallaire. I almost want to reach over to him and comfort him somehow. There is something frail but indomitable about this general, who inspires both soaring hope and profound pessimism, who represents all that could be noble but is dysfunctional about the United Nations.

We shake hands.

On the way out, Dallaire and I exchange titbits about our native Canada, and as we reach the cashier, he insists that he pick up the tab. But as we’re about to leave the room, he gently points out my lapse in etiquette. “Why don’t you leave the chap a tip?” he whispers. Ever the peacekeeper.

Beekman Tower Hotel, New York

2 x buffet breakfast

$22