Dallaire describes carnage he saw during Rwandan genocide

Former general Roméo Dallaire told a landmark Canadian war crimes trial how he saw thousands of bodies fill Rwandan rivers and ditches after the country's president was assassinated in April 1994.

Within hours of the death of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, deadly roadblocks appeared around Kigali and in outer regions, Dallaire testified in Quebec Superior Court on Tuesday.

"We started to see bodies beside the roadblocks, people killed with machetes," said the retired general. "People were literally killed on the spot."

He remembered warning Rwandan military officer Théoneste Bagosora that the roadblocks had no strategic value.

"They were simply there for ethnic cleansing … It was simply to destroy human beings."

The retired general and senator was testifying at the Montreal trial of Désiré Munyaneza, a 40-year old Rwandan charged with genocide under Canada's Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, enacted in 2000.

The prosecution called Dallaire as a witness in the trial to establish a wider context for the Rwandan genocide.

The April 1994slaughter claimed the lives of more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Dallaire stood frequentlythroughout his testimony to refer to a large map of Rwanda hanging behind him, as herecounted the death and destruction to which he bore witness.

But he showed little emotion except a small sighnear the end of the day."We passed village after village where there was no one left except the bodies. Almost all the churches and monasteries were full of massacred people," he said.

Unlike eyewitnesses who dominated the trial's early hearings in the spring, Dallaire doesn't know the accused, but he has intimate experience of the genocide as head of the failed UN mission.

Munyaneza's defence lawyers are expected to hone in onthe retired general'stenuous connection to the accused, when they have a chance to cross-examine the senator later this week.

"He's going beyond [establishing] the existence of the genocide," said defence lawyer Richard Perras, during a break in Tuesday's hearing. "He's talking about how it happened. That's something else."

Munyaneza, a failed refugee claimant, was arrested at his Toronto home in 2005 after a six-year RCMP investigation.

The father of two children is accused of being a Hutu militia leader who raped and murdered Tutsis in Rwanda's Butare region.He's pleadednot-guilty to the charges.

Dallaire says UN troops unprepared for Rwanda

Dallaire also told the court how he was leading hastily assembled and largely unprepared peacekeeping troops in the months prior to the 1994 genocide.

Hetold Quebec Superior Court that he had inherited poorly trained and under-supplied troops from developing countries as he tried to establish his peace mission in Rwanda in the months leading up to the 1994 slaughter.

When he arrived in Rwanda in October 1993, Dallaire said he had only three soldiers with him, and was forced to wait for international troops from various continents to arrive.

Belgian troops first arrived in November 1993, and then Bengalese soldiers touched down in Rwanda, but were under-equipped as well. "They had very little munitions," and the first question they asked was what they were going to eat for dinner that night.

Then Ghanian troops turned up without vehicles, Dallaire told Judge André Noël. "Their equipment was still on a ship," he said.

Dallaire was sent to Rwanda to lead a mission to support the Arusha Accords, brokered between the African country's government and the rebel Rwandese Patriotic Front, which fought for three years.

He told the court how he witnessed escalating tension between Rwanda's interim government and various political parties invited to form the country's new transition government under terms outlined in the accord.

Political protests turned into riots in the late weeks of 1993, and his informants told him about weapon caches discovered in demilitarized zones.

In March 1994, the situation stabilized and Dallaire went on a short holiday. When he came back, the political situation had changed "significantly," he said. "I should have never gone on break."

The experience exacted a high price on Dallaire, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and has to take a daily pill cocktailto help him function.

His testimony continues Wednesday.