Ok, I'll accept your condescending comment about my playing "armchair general". I'm not a commissioned officer and I wasn't there, so good to go.
However, the man saw his troops captured and if he did not know, he certainly had a good idea of what their fate would be. The result of the death of those 10 paratroopers was for the entire Belgian contingent to be withdrawn, they being the major portion of his force. Well done to him on having the vision of trying to accomplish his mission with even fewer troops, all of which I am sure were inspired by his performance in protecting his soldiers.
And I am not asking for you or anyone else to call him a coward. You may laud and applaud him to your heart's content, we live in a democracy and that is your right. Have at it. But I have a similar right to call it as I see it, armchair general or no - I am assuming you were there in Rwanda, so you speak with the voice of experience, no?
But no, I do not find that he accepts responsibility for his role. If he wishes to demonstrate that he accepts such responsibility, then I say "Fantastic". When is his flight to Brussels?
As for the facts, well, perhaps I am biased by the bodies of 10 of his soldiers, especially given that he did nothing to try and save them:
Ten Belgian paratroopers murdered and mutilated: Who's to blame?
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - Lt. Thierry Lotin, leader of a 10-man Belgian patrol, shouted into the radio: ''We've been disarmed and taken I don't know where. Two of my men are being beaten. Colonel, they're going to lynch us!''
That was the last communication received from Lotin. Before long, all 10 would be dead - beaten, stabbed, hacked, shot and mutilated by Rwandan soldiers in a frenzy of hatred toward the Belgian U.N. peacekeepers.
Three years later, Sandrine Lotin, widow of the 29-year-old lieutenant, still wants to know why her husband died in that far-away African land. So do the families of the other nine men. So does much of Belgium.
''I could understand my husband dying on a mission,'' says Mrs. Lotin, who was pregnant at the time. ''But they didn't die as soldiers. They were murdered.''
A special committee of the Belgian Senate is holding hearings on the April 7, 1994, deaths the day when Rwanda erupted in an orgy of bloodletting by Hutu extremists. Within weeks, at least a half-million Rwandans were dead, most of them minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Belgians want to know why U.N. peacekeepers made no effort to rescue Lotin's patrol. At one point, according to the committee, Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commanding the U.N. force, drove within 20 yards of where the paratroopers were being held and saw blue-helmeted Belgian soldiers on the ground. Yet he did not stop. He did not radio or telephone his headquarters.
The committee also is asking why the United Nations and the governments of Belgium, France and the United States did not act on warnings passed along by Dallaire that Hutus were planning massacres and might try to provoke or even kill Belgian peacekeepers.
The drama began shortly after the death of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana in a still unexplained plane crash on April 6, 1994. Lotin and his men were given orders about 2 a.m. the next day to take Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana to the radio station to make an appeal for calm.
When the 10 peacekeepers arrived at the prime minister's house, soldiers of the Hutu army opened fire with rifles and grenades. After about two hours, the prime minister ignored Lotin's advice and fled. She was caught and murdered.
A Hutu officer ordered the surrounded and outgunned Belgians to give up their weapons or be killed. Lotin's battalion commander, Lt. Col. Jo Dewez, authorized him by radio to do so.
Lotin and his men were taken to a Rwandan military base, where an officer accused Belgian troops of shooting down the president's plane. Soldiers at the base went wild with machetes, bayonets and guns. Four of the paratroopers were cut down immediately.
Lotin and the rest ran to a building, where another was trapped and killed. A Rwandan soldier tried to break into the room where the survivors barricaded themselves, but Lotin killed him with a pistol he had kept hidden and grabbed the soldier's AK-47 rifle.
The Belgians held out with those two weapons for three hours, when grenades dropped into the room through the roof ended resistance. All the bodies were stripped of valuables and mutilated.
Two weeks later, faced with a shocked and distraught nation, Belgium's government withdrew its 450-man battalion from the U.N. force in Rwanda.
