Canadian Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire was Force Commander of the UN Peacekeeping mission in Rwanda in 1994. When the genocide commenced, he was ordered to evacuate with the rest of the Peacekeeping force. He convinced the UN command to let him stay. Using the UN compound as a refuge, he and his men saved over 30,000 lives by protecting refugees in UN-controlled areas. Without food or infrastructure to house as many as 20,000 people at once, the conditions at the compound were deplorable. Dallaire and his men subsisted themselves on expired canned food. Yet he was unable to convince anyone to send significant supplies or food, let alone soldiers to stop the killing. And try he did. He had a BBC reporter broadcasting live killings, yet the governments of the world chose to ignore the lives lost.
To this day, Lt. Gen. Dallaire suffers from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) with the helpless memories of death and torture. Unlike all the foreign nationals who were evacuated within days of the genocide, he and many others chose to stay and save lives, even if they were not able to stop the killing.
If you have never read the book, Shake Hands with the Devil, or seen the HBO documentary (free on Google video) and movie by the same name, I would highly recommend any or all of them.
Wikipedia
Amnesty Intl article
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