To hell-not back

Shake Hands with the Devil

The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

Romeo Dallaire

Random House, $25.95, 584 pp.

It all started on April 6, 1994. When a plane crash killed Juvenal Habyarimana, the president of Rwanda, the tenuous hope that peace was possible between the country's two tribes evaporated like the mist of the Rwandan hills. In one hundred days nearly a million people were to die from bullets, grenades, machetes, and knives. And watching it all unfold was a Canadian general sent by the UN to keep the peace, Romeo Dallaire.

Dallaire was an unlikely soldier to witness genocide. He had spent most of his career dispatching troops, not standing on the front line. When first given the assignment to lead a peacekeeping force to Rwanda, he responded enthusiastically if naively, asking, "Rwanda, that's in Africa, right?"

Ten years on and Rwanda is still with Dallaire. At a ceremony in Kigali commemorating the anniversary of the genocide, Dallaire railed against the assembled leaders for allowing it to happen. He insisted that Rwanda demand reparations from the international community and warned that genocide in Africa could happen again. Dallaire is not a dispassionate analyst; he is an engaged, articulate, and wounded observer. To read his memoir is to ride his emotional roller coaster, to share his tears, to understand his guilt.

The year 1994 was not a good one for peacekeeping. The UN was stretched to the limit, largely because of commitments in the Balkans. The massacre of U.S. troops in Somalia had occurred six months earlier, so the Clinton administration was wary of involvement in Africa. At the time Rwanda had a population of 9 million. It had been a Belgian colony until 1962, and the Belgians had used a nasty divisive tactic to insure control. The population was roughly 15 percent Tutsi and 85 percent Hutu. The Belgians granted the Tutsi a favored status. The rules of the game changed when Rwanda became independent. For the next thirty-two years the Hutu dominated and discriminated against the Tutsi. In 1994 Tutsi refugees gathered outside the borders of Rwanda and created a menacing and potent rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front.

Dallaire was sent to Rwanda to help keep the peace between the Hutu and the Tutsi. His mission--a halfhearted effort grudgingly agreed to by the UN and the big world powers--was doomed from the start. With a minimum of poorly trained and poorly equipped soldiers, he was under orders to remain neutral and to avoid confrontations, except if non-Rwandans were endangered. When the massacre began, his repeated pleas for troops, equipment, or even a simple strategy for stopping the bloodshed fell on deaf ears. Everyone who could have stopped the slaughter and devastation in the spring and early summer of 1994 did nothing. The UN squabbled and deliberated and fretted and delayed. To this day the motivations for this failure are in dispute if the result is not.

What Dallaire witnessed and encountered shocked him: the fresh killing grounds; the desperate pleas of thousands to be guarded; the slaughter of a dozen Belgian troops under his command; the miles of refugees trying to escape; the hard killer instinct in teenagers' eyes. His memoir is a cri de coeur of a man who has been dragged helpless through hell. All around him people were dying--his ears filled with cries and moans, his nostrils breathing air heavy with the stench of death. He and his men worked eighteen to twenty hours a day in a futile bid to block out the horror with exhaustion.

The most positive way of looking back at this tragedy is that the international community didn't act because it believed that the peacekeeping system was on the brink of collapse. Nations were stretched to their military and philosophical limits. One more large-scale operation could bring the underfinanced and poorly equipped UN command structure crashing down. A more cynical observer might conclude that the world simply didn't care. Rwanda was an insignificant place with no strategic importance. Besides, genocide in Africa was nothing new, it was what Africans did to one another.

It is hard to be less than cynical. In the growing body of literature tackling the Rwandan genocide, from Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families to Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell, the explanations are stark and devastating. These books are unsparing in their descriptions of the horrors that filled the days and months of unrelenting violence and the deadly bureaucratic machinations within the halls of power.

In 2000, the UN and the Security Council admitted responsibility and declared April 7 International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda. Dallaire is not impressed. He believes that even today the world would react more quickly to a slaughter of Rwandan gorillas than to the outbreak of another mass slaughter of human beings. And there is evidence that he is right. As speeches are made and blame cast, Kofi Annan warns that in Darfur, Sudan, a humanitarian catastrophy is in the making.

Dallaire believes, rightly or wrongly, that if he had been a better man, a stronger man, something might have gone differently. As it is, he is racked by depression and has tried suicide. He believes his failure may be due to incompetence, and he survives with a regime of prescription drugs.

Dallaire writes that he met two types of evil while on his doomed mission. In the weeks and months leading up to the genocide, he talked, negotiated, and dined with the men who would unleash the killing. They were ordinary in every way, which made their actions all the more terrifying. The other evil was institutional paralysis: marked by faxes, detailed analysis and cost-benefit calculations, obfuscations, and sheer indifference.

Dallaire grew up a French-Canadian Catholic, an altar boy, and a soloist in the choir. He was not a pious man, but Rwanda changed that. Catholicism provided him with a language to express the reality of the evil he saw. On returning from Rwanda, someone asked him how, after what he had experienced, he could still believe in God: "I answered that I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him, and I have touched him. I know the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God."

Trying to comprehend genocide seems to require some reference to God, Evil, and Hell. Any other language is truly inadequate. Genocide also demands judgment, accountability, and resolution. Any other response is truly inadequate. Genocide also demands the silence of tears, the equivalent of "and Jesus wept." Romeo Dallaire weeps.

Peter Kavanagh is a senior producer on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio program, Current Affairs.

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