Content area
Full Text
Military Histor Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda By Roméo Dallaire $25.95, 584 pages Random House, 2003 ISBN: 0679311718
It took less than twenty days in the early summer of 1994 for Rwanda to move from obscurity into the bright flood-lights of the world's mass media. The slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans, the exodus of millions towards the borders, the failure of the UN system and the unwillingness of rich and powerful nations to intervene have become the subject of films, books, academic research and harrowing tribunals to apportion culpability.
In this growing catalogue a key testimonial has been missing. As commander of the United Nations force in Rwanda (UNAMIR), General Roméo Dallaire is both an authoritative observer and a principal actor in this event. During the killings, his freedom to move around in Kigale and its adjacent territories, as well as his constant dialogue at every level from the Pentagon and the UN Secretariat in New York down to the blood-spattered killers, place him in a very special category of witness.
Before he could begin to write however, he needed to come to terms with harrowing sensations, his sorrow and the solitary journey of personal recovery, punctuated by breakdown and illness. Returning to confront these memories and recount them for a wider international audience has been painful and emotionally draining.
Dallaire's stated intent has not been to write an academic study, nor a definitive military chronology, but more to fill what is for him an emotional space by combining his perspective as commander with the sounds, smells and intense images of genocide. This is in his words, a cri de coeur for Rwanda's slaughtered people. His lengthy narrative of 522 pages can be summarized in stages - his early life, preparations for the Rwanda mission, deployment of UNAMIR, the weeks of intense crisis as the genocide unfolded and finally the international intervention.
Narrowly educated within the military system, Dallaire was promoted to Brigadier without experiencing the pressures of active service or the realities of a political environment beyond the domestic cut and thrust of the Canadian military. By July 1993 he moved to the UN Secretariat in New York to start preparations for the reconnaissance mission to Rwanda. Nothing could...