Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire - Reviewed by Joni Hillman

Shake Hands with the Devil

It takes only good men to do nothing for evil to triumph. But what if one man wants to do something but is hampered at every turn by people who prefer to do nothing? Canadian Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire was th UN commander in Rwanda in the period preceding the 1994 genocide. For months, he wrote reports to his superiors warning of the impending violence that was to claim the lives of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in only 100 days. But the UN was still smarting from the disastrous Operation Restore Hope in Somalia and had no desire to involve itself in another complex African situation, leaving Dallaire with just a few blue helmet ‘peacekeepers' and UN HQ's attention focussed on the Balkans.

The rest of the story constitutes one of the bloodiest episodes in twentieth century history. But Dallaire's involvement in Rwanda did not end with the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the establishment of a semblance of stability. He returned to Canada a broken man, disgusted and angry by his superiors' disinterest and failure to prevent death on such a vast scale. The nervous breakdown he suffered found him drunk under park benches and reliant on sleeping pills to get through the dark nights when the tragedy he felt responsible for would not leave him.

Dallaire has written a stark and difficult book, revisiting a personal and professional experience most would wish to forget. His anger at the international community is justified and understandable but one cannot help feel that he allows himself to shoulder the entire burden of responsibility for the genocide.

Peter Raymont's documentary follows Dallaire and his wife back to Rwanda and reveals a man still in deep shock at the horrific incidents he witnessed. His visit to a memorial, where skulls and bones lie in serried ranks, brings home the shocking human cost of the combination of a carefully constructed political campaign to stir up ethnic divisions in the Great Lakes region, and an international community reluctant to involve itself in a small, poor African nation. The film does not fall into the trap of portraying Dallaire as a saint, rather it depicts a professional soldier, an occasionally arrogant man, finally undone by witnessing man's inhumanity to man while his hands were tied, like some horrific form of torture. For a brutal, personal insight into the genocide and an introduction to the politics of both Rwanda and the UN, Raymont's film ranks far higher than the box office fodder of Hotel Rwanda.