Romeo Dallaire's Shake Hands with the Devil and Keir Pearson and Terry George's Hotel Rwanda
Clark, Phil
SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL: THE FAILURE OF HUMANITY IN RWANDA by Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Romeo Dallaire (with Maj. Brent Beardsley) Random House Canada, 2003 562 pp $19.95 HOTEL RWANDA screenplay by...
...Instead, when survivors believe that they are ready to talk and that an empathetic audience is ready to listen, they want a chance to tell their story...
...Nobody was taken away...
...Rusesabagina is a bourgeois, suit-andtie hotel manager whose peculiar heroism is DISSENT / Spring 2005 119 BOOKS to save lives simply by acting as a courageous and cunning middleman...
...Kagame's main aim, Dallaire argues, was not to save civilians but rather to overthrow the Hutu government...
...The colonel looks like the pock-faced, angry, bewildered commander that Dallaire describes himself as in his book...
...As Dallaire shows throughout this book, the genocide was planned meticulously over several years...
...The questions that Dallaire asked himself during his mission still haunt him: Should he have disobeyed his superiors' orders and intervened more directly to protect civilians...
...George and cinematographer Robert Fraisse both claim in interviews that they spent weeks studying reels of footage and written accounts of the genocide before making the film, and their preparation shows: one scene of Tutsi being hacked to death on a roadside was so precise a reenactment of rarely-seen footage shot by a Belgian cinematographer from a hotel window during the genocide that I initially thought the original footage had been spliced into the film...
...Dallaire's need to get it all down on paper is sometimes tedious: One of my last duties before leaving [UN headquarters in New York] was to create the name of the mission...
...We think you're dirt, Paul...
...Since our task was to assist the parties in implementing the Arusha agreement [between the government and the RPF], "Assist" seemed a good term...
...He describes the red, dusty streets of Kigali and the iridescent green hills surrounding the city as so choked with rotting corpses that rats grew to the size of terriers from feasting on human flesh...
...We may focus on what the international community didn't do in 1994 and therefore neglect the things that the key actors did do, whether the Hutu regime's planning and inciting of the genocide or the courage shown by individuals such as Rusesabagina who refused to participate in the killings and even saved others...
...Paradoxically, this moment crystallizes Oliver's and Rusesabagina's common predicament: They are both hamstrung middlemen— the military officer operating under the proceduralist mandate of his weak-willed UN superiors, faced with a genocidal regime that he is powerless to stop, and the businessman with his fax machine pleading with faceless men in another hemisphere, most of whom care nothing for Africa...
...As Dallaire emphasizes repeatedly, the true heroes of the genocide are those individuals who were killed while attempting to protect others...
...Shake Hands with the Devil is not an easy read, both because of Dallaire's stilted writing and because of the nature of the events he describes, but his deep personal engagement with the people and places of this tragedy gives momentum and emotional impact 116 DISSENT / Spring 2005 BOOKS to his firsthand account...
...The church's record during the genocide is far from unblemished, however, with several church officials already convicted for participating in the genocide, most notably two Rwandan nuns who were found guilty in a Belgian court in 2001 of assisting in the murder of around five hundred Tutsi refugees discovered sheltering in their convent in southern Rwanda...
...I think some part of me wanted to join the legions of dead, whom I felt I had failed...
...Does Shake Hands with the Devil paint Dallaire as a hero, as many have characterized him...
...Bagosora threatened that if he ever saw Dallaire again he would kill him...
...As with Dallaire's book, Hotel Rwanda is a damning indictment of the West's knowledge of the genocide but refusal to intervene in order to halt it...
...Dallaire on occasions acted heroically in Rwanda, defying his UN superiors in order to save civilians and confronting Bagosora and his coterie with evidence he had gathered of the genocide they had masterminded...
...Rusesabagina is now the subject of Hotel Rwanda, a suitably unsettling Hollywood portrayal of the genocide, directed by Terry George (co-writer of In the Name of the Father) and starring Don Cheadle as Rusesabagina...
...Dallaire argues that the RPF not only committed crimes of its own in attempting to halt the genocide, but that it could have saved many more civilians by crossing government lines earlier rather than encircling the country and waiting for a strategic moment to strike at the heart of the genocidal regime...
...Rusesabagina offers a comforting whiskey to Oliver, who feels personally responsible for what has just happened...
...UNAMIR—the acronym was refined on a napkin in a Manhattan restaurant...
...What does the experience of the genocide say about the willpower of the UN and the rest of the international community to intervene in countries of no strategic interest to the West...
...You're not even a nigger...
...He illustrates the national ravages, but also the very personal destruction, of the genocide...
...The patient seeks order and control over the past and for the time being is incapable of assembling the fragments of memory into a comprehensible pattern for fear that too much reflection will increase trauma...
...Dallaire fought against the indifference and proceduralism of his superiors at UN headquarters in New York (several of whom lobbied for the disbanding of UNAMIR soon after the violence escalated) to save as many civilians as he could from the genocide and ultimately to save himself from going under...
...Shake Hands with the Devil is nonetheless much more than a military man's glacial rendition of the events surrounding the genocide...
...Hotel Rwanda's one structural weakness is to be too Kigali-focused, hinting at, though failing to give full account, of the horror that engulfed the Rwandan countryside...
...The extremists hardly needed the RPF's incitement to carry out genocide, and they had the personnel and the weapons to do so...
...Dallaire also criticizes the UN for having stuck strictly to that mandate even when it became clear that what was happening in Rwanda was no ordinary civil war...
...Fortunately, the bravery and ingenuity of Rusesabagina shine throughout the film, putting Rwandans back at center-stage of what— despite the West's unquestionably important role—is essentially their story...
...The next time Bagosora saw Dallaire was in January 2004— after the publication of Shake Hands with the Devil—when Dallaire was called as a key witness to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Tanzania, where Bagosora is currently being tried for genocide and crimes against humanity...
...120 DISSENT / Spring 2005 BOOKS IT IS POSSIBLE that the issue of the West's non-intervention in Rwanda will (for Western audiences anyhow) become the overriding narrative of the genocide...
...Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu who became temporary manager of the Belgian-owned luxury Hotel des Milles Collines in Kigali at the beginning of the genocide, was chiefly responsible for maintaining the security of the hotel, which became UNAMIR's headquarters soon after his arrival...
...The difference between them is that the hotel manager immediately recognizes and embraces his limited role, whereas the colonel believes, erroneously as it turns out and with long-term personal consequences, that he should be able to do more...
...Cheadle in particular infuses his character with genuine humanity, displaying the complexities and vulnerability of an ordinary man acting extraordinarily in overwhelming circumstances...
...Arriving in Rwanda soon after the signing of the Arusha accords in August 1993, which created a power-sharing arrangement between Hutu- and Tutsi-dominated parties (a political transition that UNAMIR was mandated to oversee), Dallaire describes feeling optimistic about the chances of fostering ethnic harmony in Rwanda...
...0 NE SURVIVOR of the genocide who has a greater claim to the title of hero and without whom Dallaire's mission would have collapsed entirely garners almost no mention in Dallaire's book...
...In a besieged city, where supplies are running out, Rusesabagina smuggles in beer and liquor to bribe the Hutu military leaders who come to the hotel threatening to kill him, his family, and the Tutsi sheltering inside...
...PHIL CLARK is a Rhodes Scholar and doctoral candidate in politics at Oxford University...
...Dallaire details the numerous occasions in early April in which he fielded telephone calls from desperate Tutsi living in Kigali, begging him to send UNAMIR troops to save them, only to hear screams as the Hutu killers burst into their homes and slaughtered them as they were telephoning for help...
...This was more than smell, this was an atmosphere you had to push your way through . . . .With no real protection and amongst a population that had epidemic levels of HIV/AIDS . . . our hands became more covered in dried blood, in pieces of flesh...
...In a startling passage at the end of the book, Dallaire wonders whether the RPF, which consisted largely of descendants of Tutsi who had fled to Uganda after anti-Tutsi pogroms in the 1960s, may have incited the genocide (for example, as some observers have argued, by shooting down the Hutu president's plane, a claim that the RPF denies vigorously) in order to justify a counteroffensive that would allow them to take over the country...
...0 NE OF THE MOST controversial parts of Shake Hands with the Devil is Dallaire's criticism of the actions of the RPF, the anti-genocidal force and now the ruling party in the Rwandan government, led by Major-General Paul Kagame, now the president of Rwanda...
...After the Hutu extremists, Dallaire identifies France and the United States as next in the order of the culpable...
...Dallaire's brutal honesty in assessing both his own actions and those of the individuals and governments he considers to be complicit in the violence overcomes his literary deficiencies...
...Between January and April 1994, however, Dallaire received intelligence reports that the Hutu government in Rwanda was training youth militia, drawing up lists of Tutsi in communities around the country, and stockpiling machetes...
...That's three hundred and thirty-three and a third murders every hour—or five and a half lives terminated every minute . . . .{Now} you can grasp what it meant that the Hotel des Milles Collines was the only place in Rwanda where . . . as [Rusesabaginal said very quietly, "Nobody was killed...
...Philip Gourevitch, in We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, heaps praise on Rusesabagina: Take the best estimate: eight hundred thousand killed in a hundred days...
...In one of the film's most powerful scenes, the West's single-minded dedication to protecting its own citizens rather than the local population is starkly shown when Western paratroopers land in Kigali to evacuate foreign nationals...
...Prominent among the orchestrators of the genocide was chief of staff Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, who upon the death of the Rwandan president in the plane crash on April 6, assumed control of the army and political affairs...
...You should spit in my face," Oliver says to a shocked Rusesabagina...
...DISSENT / Spring 2005 121...
...You're African...
...And lastly, we were doing it "for Rwanda" . . . . UNAMFR did not sound right...
...Perhaps, though, the most heroic thing that Dallaire has done is to confront his own feelings of guilt and futility in order to produce a detailed, personal record of the genocide...
...Numerous commentators have lionized Dallaire for his fight to keep his mission afloat against the genocidal and UN-imposed odds...
...with them, are told that all Rwandans must stay behind...
...THE TONE and language of Shake Hands with the Devil belie the emotional and psychological battle that Dallaire must have fought as the sick veteran became an author...
...I found myself thinking such dire thoughts as whether . . . the genocide had been orchestrated to clear the way for Rwanda's return to the pre-1959 status quo in which Tutsis had called all the shots," Dallaire says...
...The staccato sentences, packed with technical detail, often devoid of emotion or reflection, pile up like a patient's recounting of painful memories to a therapist...
...The West, all the superpowers, they think you're dung...
...With the exception of the too-westernized, too middle-class locations in South Africa used for the hotel and the houses of Tutsi targeted by Hutu militias—one of the film's few technical flaws—the film was shot entirely in Rwanda, perfectly capturing the heavy equatorial atmosphere hanging over the densely populated Kigali hillsides, creating a pervasive sense of foreboding...
...If UNAMIR was unable to save innocent Rwandans, should it have been in Rwanda in the first place...
...Only by listening to these stories will we learn how events like the genocide were possible and what can be done now to help survivors rebuild their lives...
...Had the Hutu extremists been bigger dupes than I? Ten years later, I still can't put these troubling questions to rest...
...As Dallaire himself mentions in this book, the French government—whom many (including Dallaire) accuse of providing training and logistical support to the Hutu leaders of the genocide—demanded midway through the genocide that he be replaced as head of UNAMIR...
...As Samantha Power writes in her 2002 book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, "It is both paradoxical and natural that the man who probably did the most to save Rwandans feels the worst...
...He symbolizes, perhaps, the small number of European priests and nuns who remained in Rwanda throughout the genocide and who, along with their Rwandan colleagues, helped save hundreds of Tutsi...
...The most guilty, Dallaire says, are the Hutu extremists who "planned, ordered, supervised and eventually conducted" the genocide...
...This decision rendered UNAMIR impotent when, on April 6,1994, a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down over Kigali, sparking the first waves of killings that swallowed the country and would have obliterated the Tutsi population if not for the RPF intervention to halt the genocide...
...Both governments used their position on the UN Security Council to lobby for either the curtailing or complete abandonment of DISSENT / Spring 2005 117 BOOKS UNAMIR...
...Although Dallaire claims this book "is not a story of heroes and villains," he is quick to praise those who he believes acted heroically during the genocide, particularly the ten Belgian peacekeepers and other members of UNAMIR who sacrificed themselves for the mission, and an array of local and international officials and everyday Rwandans who risked their lives in order to save others...
...Hotel Rwanda skirts close to making the failures of the international community the central theme of the genocide narrative...
...There is no doubt that the RPF committed war crimes while attempting to halt the genocide and that, when it gained political control over the country, it was afforded a moral carte blanche by the international community...
...In Steven Silver's 2001 documentary The Last Just Man, Linda Melvern's A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide, and Carol Off's The Lion, the Fox and the Eagle: A Story of Generals and Justice in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, Dallaire is a source of steadfastness and redemption in a sea of violence and UN intransigence...
...Nobody was beaten...
...Shake Hands with the Devil records the horror of the genocide, as the Tutsi minority was engulfed in violence...
...I could not face the thought of leaving Rwanda alive after so many people had died...
...European priests, nuns, and aid workers, thinking that they will be able to take desperate Tutsi orphans, colleagues, and friends A point not mentioned in the film but recorded elsewhere M profiles of Rusesabagina is that he sent several detailed reports to the office of President Bill Clinton, which appears to contradict Clinton's mantra since the genocide (and repeated in his 2004 autobiography) that he didn't know what was happening in Rwanda until it was too late to save anyone...
...Dallaire's right-hand man in UNAMIR, Colonel Luc Marchal, was later court-martialled by the Belgian army but found innocent of negligence contributing to the paratroopers' deaths...
...As Dallaire describes vividly in Shake Hands with the Devil, this blood—accompanied by an overwhelming sense of helplessness and guilt and the terrifying memories of the genocide—will stay with him forever...
...When Rusesabagina becomes excited that two foreign journalists will broadcast into living rooms all over the West their footage of Tutsi being butchered in the streets, one of the journalists (played by Joaquin Phoenix) tells him, "People will see these pictures, say `Isn't that awful?' and go on eating their breakfast...
...While the ultimate responsibility for the genocide lies with the Hutu extremists, Dallaire argues, the hands of the UN and its member states, especially France and the United States, also drip with blood...
...The putrid smell of decaying bodies in the huts along the route not only entered your nose and mouth but made you feel slimy and greasy...
...Despite the Milles Collines's constant encirclement by Hutu militias, it also provided sanctuary for more than one thousand petrified Tutsi, all of whom survived the genocide...
...These questions so overwhelmed Dallaire that by the end of his time in Rwanda he drove regularly into the countryside with "a death wish...
...The French argued that Dallaire was acting outside his UN mandate by attempting to save civilians rather than simply DISSENT / Spring 2005 115 BOOKS keeping the "peace" and, more crucially, by criticizing the French and other UN member states for refusing to provide him with the necessary troops and equipment to fulfill his mission...
...George successfully tells a large and complex story through the lives of a small number of characters whose compelling plight draws us in...
...My troops and I]," says Dallaire, "watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the blood of the people we were supposed to protect...
...Like Dallaire, most survivors do not want to be considered heroes...
...After the Europeans have left, Rusesabagina and Oliver sit in the empty bar of the hotel...
...Wracked by visions of the killing of nearly one million Tutsi and Hutu moderates and the failure of his peacekeeping mission to stop the genocide, Dallaire left the mission early, one month after the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) defeated the Hutu-led government in July 1994 and halted the genocide...
...Through a combination of misinterpretation of the situation on the ground, indifference toward countries of little strategic importance to the West, and at times outright racism toward Africa, the UN and the international community as a whole failed to live up to the principles of protection for the vulnerable that had guided the formation of the UN in the aftermath of the Second World War...
...This book," says Dallaire, "is a cri de coeur for the slaughtered thousands, a tribute to the souls hacked apart by machetes because of their supposed difference from those who sought to hang on to power...
...It seemed that traces of this blood stayed on my hands for months...
...Elevating Dallaire to the status of hero (especially considering the fact that his trauma is a consequence of his feelings of failure) is simply another form of detachment, when what Shake Hands with the Devil shows clearly is that what Dallaire—and all survivors of the genocide— need most is others' understanding of what they have endured...
...He has conducted extensive field research on conflict and post-conflict societies in Africa, particularly in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo...
...Dallaire's RPF conspiracy theory, shared by the French and others, is far-fetched...
...Sophie Okonedo as Rusesabagina's Tutsi wife, Tatsiana...
...I hoped I would hit a mine or run into an ambush and just end it all," he says...
...Dallaire sent a now-famous telegram to UN headquarters in New York, where Kofi Annan was head of Peacekeeping Operations, warning that mass violence was imminent and calling for a bolstering of UNAMIR's troop force and mandate in order to protect civilians...
...He twice attempted suicide, most recently in June 2000, when he was found half-conscious on a park bench in Hull, Quebec, after swallowing a cocktail of alcohol and anti-depressants...
...Dallaire is also unequivocal in his identification of the "villains" of the genocide...
...In the final category of the culpable are Belgium and the UN, the former because it withdrew all of its UNAMIR troops after the deaths of its peacekeepers and the latter because it failed to provide the necessary equipment and troops to allow UNAMIR to fulfill its limited mandate...
...If Bagosora is found guilty he will be sentenced to life imprisonment...
...Dallaire himself rejects the label of hero and instead describes himself as yet another "casualty of the genocide...
...In the final weeks of the genocide, Dallaire encountered Bagosora in a Kigali hotel...
...Alt its heart," Dallaire says, "the Rwandan story is a story of the failure of humanity to heed a call for help from an endangered people...
...Belgium withdrew all of its peacekeepers, the best-trained members of UNAMIR, from Rwanda soon after the murder of the paratroopers...
...Dallaire holds the international community accountable for failing to respond adequately to the plight of the Rwandan population and in many instances for seeking actively to block the efforts of UNAMIR to save civilians...
...However, Dallaire's argument that the RPF may have deliberately incited the genocide contradicts his own evidence that the extremists had been plotting the genocide for years and had begun to prepare the Hutu population for the killing spree by training youth militia and stockpiling machetes...
...RUSESABAGINA is also one of the few voices of the genocide able to reach the outside world...
...A lone white priest stands in the pelting rain, watching disconsolately as the bus pulls away from the hotel...
...The relish with which Oliver takes the whiskey is a portent of Dallaire's drinking through the remainder, and especially the aftermath, of the genocide...
...This aside, the film offers a historically accurate version of the genocide without falling into didacticism or preachiness...
...Cheadle and Okonedo were nominated for Oscars, for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress respectively, while George and Keir Pearson were nominated for best original screenplay...
...The Belgian government has sought unsuccessfully to interrogate Dallaire for his failure to save ten Belgian paratroopers under his command who were captured and killed by Hutu militiamen while protecting the Rwandan prime minister, a Hutu moderate...
...So I decided to take the I from the second letter of "Mission...
...Annan and his colleagues rejected Dallaire's calls for a strengthened mission, emphasizing the need to stay within the limits of the original mandate...
...The "United Nations" part of it was a given...
...Such episodes underscore two points made in Dallaire's book: the French government had close connections with key elements in the genocidal regime, and Western officials had the clout to influence events in Rwanda when they saw fit to intervene...
...Many of the people who now lionize Dallaire were among those who failed to grasp, or simply did not want to know, what was happening in Rwanda in 1994...
...Dallaire accuses France of aiding Hutu preparations for the genocide and of protecting génocidaires after August 1994 through a French-led UN peacekeeping mission known as Operation Turquoise, which oversaw the mass movement of refugees from Rwanda into Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), including many of the leaders of the genocide, who found safe havens in the jungles and refugee camps across the border...
...Not everyone, though, considers Dallaire a hero...
...and Nick Nolte as the Dallaire-inspired character Colonel Oliver...
...Many of the nuns have children wrenched from their arms and have to be dragged screaming onto a bus waiting to take them to the airport...
...Using the hotel's telephone line and the city's only functioning fax machine, he updates Western government and business leaders on events on the ground and pleads with them to help save the hotel's guests.* On one occasion depicted in the film, Rusesabagina contacts through an intermediary the director general of the French Foreign Ministry, who convinces Hutu military officials to call off a planned attack against the Milles Collines...
...The problem here is that the narrative of nonintervention is all about the West, in the same way that the cowardly motivations behind non-intervention were all about the West...
...Upon return to his native Canada, Dallaire spiraled into despair and depression and was diagnosed with acute post-traumatic stress disorder...
...You're dirt...
...Too often making heroes of individuals such as 118 DISSENT / Spring 2005 BOOKS Dallaire distracts us from identifying the ignorance and indifference that allowed the international community to ignore Rwanda at its most desperate hour...
...Brent Beardsley) Random House Canada, 2003 562 pp $19.95 HOTEL RWANDA screenplay by Keir Pearson and Terry George directed by Terry George United Artists, December 2004 1 N LATE APRIL 1994, Romeo Dallaire, head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), drove through a village outside the Rwandan capital, Kigali, stopping repeatedly to clear corpses from the road...
...DALLAIRE REMINDS US repeatedly that his personal suffering is minuscule compared to the agony and loss of the hundreds of thousands of Rwandans whose family and friends were killed in the genocide...
Vol. 52 • April 2005 • No. 2
