A peace agreement in Darfur is a major step towards ending a conflict responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. But retired Canadian general Romeo Dallaire said a United Nations peacekeeping force is crucial to ensure the violence stops.

"These people are dying now and they need us now, not next year," Dallaire told CTV's Mike Duffy Live Friday.

Decades of low-level tribal clashes over land and water in Darfur erupted into large-scale violence in early 2003. Rebels took up arms against the Sudanese government, citing discrimination against Darfur's black residents.

The government responded by unleashing pro-government militias, allegedly including the Janjaweed -- ethnic Arab militia accused of the systematic killing and rape of Darfur's black residents.

At least 180,000 people have died in the violence. Another 2 million are homeless, staying in refugee camps in an effort to escape the militias.

About 7,000 African Union troops are struggling to relieve the situation in Darfur, but Dallaire said they are in far over their heads and need outside help.

"The African Union troops that are there can't sustain the operation and provide the level of protection needed, let alone get the people back home, so the UN has got to start to move in," Dallaire said.

"But this is the Achilles' heel: how fast can the UN respond? That is to say, are the countries willing to send troops?"

He said even with a Security Council resolution in the next few months, UN troops would not set foot in the region until September at the earliest.

Meanwhile, the 7,000 AU troops can barely maintain their six-month rotations in the region, Dallaire argued.

Currently, Canada has about 50 soldiers in Darfur acting as advisers to the AU troops, or otherwise providing support. In addition, Canada has sent about 100 armoured vehicles.

Critics have said sending battalions of white European UN troops into Darfur could escalate the ethnic violence. But Dallaire said the UN should have deployed troops more than a year ago.

"If we go back about 20 months or so ago, when we saw what looked like a genocide but that ultimately became an ethnic cleansing ... I had called for the deployment of 44,000 troops that absolutely required troops from around the world," he said.

However, at the time there was another conflict raging in Sudan where UN troops were operating, and politicians in the Sudanese capital Khartoum did not want more European troops sent into Darfur.

"The Sudanese government had some serious reservations about 'out of region' or non-African countries going into Darfur, and at the time, because of the sensitivity regarding the other mission, I had agreed with others that there was no value in starting a political fight with the hardliners in Khartoum," Dallaire said.

At the time, UN troops were helping to end a decades-long civil war between Sudan's Islamic government and the animist and Christian South, resulting in an estimated 2 million deaths.

Dallaire differentiated ethnic cleansing in Sudan from genocide by saying the crisis no longer involves a sustained operation of killing, but rather isolating Darfur's people into camps.

He is an unfortunate expert on genocide. Dallaire led a UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda between October 1993 and August 1994, during the mass killing of Tutsis by Hutu extremists.

Despite pleas to his UN superiors for more troops, Dallaire was told not go get involved. He could only watch as more than half a million people were slaughtered.

After returning to Canada, he battled severe depression -- even thoughts of suicide -- to write a harrowing account of his experience: Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.