Most Canadians now know the answer to the question general Romeo Dallaire once asked thanks, unhappily, to one of history's great man-made tragedies. Yet for half a century before the 1994 genocide, some Canadians, especially Quebec Catholic missionaries and certain federal civil servants, were close to Rwanda, a country where the elite spoke French. It might have been better were they not, for many of these old Rwanda hands made themselves handmaidens of an ethnic Hutu dictatorship that ended up planning and executing the near-extermination of the country's Tutsi minority.

As one of the few remaining earthlings to happily call himself a socialist, I have now decided that if anything (Stalin and Mao aside) were to drive me away from my lifelong ideology it's the way it's practiced in la belle France. If you jump to the conclusion that I'm referring to the squalid case of "DSK," you are not wrong but only one-third right. (An audience in Rwanda understood instinctively last week when I compared Dominique Strauss-Khan's alleged violation of an African maid to the way the International Monetary Fund has treated Africa for the past many decades.)

Beyond the DSK scandal, it so happens that I have had the great misfortune of running into socialism a la France on other piquant occasions.