Shake Hands with the Devil by Romeo Dallaire
Dallaire, Peter
TO HELL-NOT BACK Shake Hands with the Devil The Failure of I-lunianity in Rwanda Romeo 11(1111 i' Peter Kavanagh t all started on April 6, 1994. When a plane crash killed Juvenal Habyarimana,...
...He had spent most of his career dispatching troops, not standing on the front line...
...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...
...Dallaire writes that he met two types of evil while on his doomed mission...
...He was not a pious man, but Rwanda changed that...
...It had been a Belgian colony until 1962, and the Belgians had used a nasty divisive tactic to insure control...
...Besides, genocide in Africa was nothing new, it was what Africans did to one another...
...I know the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God...
...And there is evidence that he is right...
...Dallaire grew up a French-CanadianCatholic, an altar boy, and a soloist in the choir...
...The year 1994 was not a good one for peacekeeping...
...Nations I Commonweal 3 2 September 10, 2004 were stretched to their military and philosophical limits...
...The Belgians granted the Tutsi a favored status...
...In the weeks and months leading up to the genocide, he talked, negotiated, and dined with the men who would unleash the killing...
...His memoir is a cri de coeur of a man who has been dragged helpless through hell...
...Also, our unique Cost Assurance Program ensures a community's payment of treatment...
...Peter Kavanagh is a senior producer on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio pro-gram, Current Affairs...
...While we understand that most women's religious communities prefer to pay for the care of their sisters needing treatment, no religious is turned away because she or her community cannot pay full treatment costs...
...The UN was stretched to the limit, largely because of commitments in the Balkans...
...The rules of the game changed when Rwanda became independent...
...the hard killer instinct in teenagers' eyes...
...The Door is the KeyThe Beginning o1Gre3tet Life At ~at`Zfarra~ there ,7re mmny floors...
...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...
...Ten years on and Rwanda is still with Dallaire...
...In 1994 Tutsi refugees gathered outside the borders of Rwanda and created a men-acing and potent rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front...
...To read his memoir is to ride his emotional roller coaster, to share his tears, to understand his guilt...
...He and his men worked eighteen to twenty hours a day in a futile bid to block out the horror with exhaustion...
...A more cynical observer might conclude that the world simply didn't care...
...Genocide also demands judgment, accountability, and resolution...
...Any other language is truly inadequate...
...he is an engaged, articulate, and wounded observer...
...He insisted that Rwanda demand reparations from the international community and warned that genocide in Africa could happen again...
...Call us 24 Hours a Day, 7 Days a week at 1-800-626-6910 www.guesthouse.org Commonweal 3 3 September 10, 2004...
...One more large-scale operation could bring the under-financed and poorly equipped UN command structure crashing down...
...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 Never again...
...At the time Rwanda had a population of 9 million...
...To this day the motivations for this failure are in dispute if the result is not...
...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...
...They were ordinary in every way, which made their actions all the more terrifying...
...Trying to comprehend genocide seems to require some reference to God, Evil, and Hell...
...Dallaire believes, rightly or wrongly, that if he had been a better man, a stronger man, something might have gone differently...
...The UN squabbled and de-liberated and fretted and delayed...
...troops in Somalia had occurred six months earlier, so the Clinton adminisRWANDA.NETtration was wary of involvement in Africa...
...At a ceremony in Kigali commemorating the anniversary of the genocide, Dallaire railed against the assembled leaders for allowing it to happen...
...What Dallaire witnessed and encountered shocked him: the fresh killing grounds...
...In 2000, the UN and the Security Council admitted responsibility and declared April 7 International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda...
...Catholicism provided him with a language to express the reality of the evil he saw...
...He believes his failure may be due to incompetence, and he survives with a regime of prescription drugs...
...Dallaire is not a dispassionate analyst...
...All around him people were dying—his ears filled with cries and moans, his nostrils breathing air heavy with the stench of death...
...Genocide also demands the silence of tears, the equivalent of "and Jesus wept...
...witness genocide...
...Everyone who could have stopped the slaughter and devastation in the spring and early summer of 1994 did nothing...
...Rwanda was an insignificant place with no strategic importance...
...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...
...His mission—a halfhearted effort grudgingly agreed to by the UN and the big world powers—was doomed from the start...
...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...
...The massacre of U.S...
...So we welcome them here to begin the process of regaining their physical and emotional health along with their spirituality and commitment to their ministry...
...They need help too...
...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...
...the miles of refugees trying to escape...
...We understand that sisters, just like the general population are not immune from addictions...
...For the next thirty-two years the Hutu dominated and discriminated against the Tutsi...
...the desperate pleas of thousands to be guarded...
...When the massacre began, his repeated pleas for troops, equipment, or even a simple strategy for stopping the bloodshed fell on deaf ears...
...As speech-es are made and blame cast, Kofi Annan warns that in Darfur, Sudan, a humanitarian catastrophy is in the making...
...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...
...Romeo Dallaire weeps...
...As it is, he is racked by depression and has tried suicide...
...the slaughter of a dozen Belgian troops under his command...
...All are welcome, regardless of ability to pay...
...In one hundred days nearly a million people were to die from bullets, grenades, machetes, and knives...
...The other evil was institution-al paralysis: marked by faxes, detailed analysis and cost-benefit calculations, obfuscations, and sheer indifference...
...Dallaire was sent to Rwanda to help keep the peace between the Hutu and the Tutsi...
...When first given the assignment to lead a peacekeeping force to Rwanda, he responded enthusiastically if naively, asking, "Rwanda, that's in Africa, right...
...And we do so with great respect and care for the dignity of our clients with a firm reliance on the grace of God...
...The population was roughly 15 percent Tutsi and 85 percent Hutu...
...I have seen him, I have smelled him, and I have touched him...
...Guest House pioneered holistic treatment, spiritual, physical, emotional and mental for alcoholism and other chemical additions and continues to this day to address the needs of its guests in their whole person...
...It is hard to be less than cynical...
...Any other response is truly inadequate...
...Dallaire is not impressed...
Vol. 131 • September 2004 • No. 15
