“Allons-y.”
9 January 2008Yesterday I finished reading Shake Hands With the Devil: the Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. It’s by Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, who was the military head of the UN peacekeeping effort in Rwanda in 1994, and is his account of the genocide that he tried - and that the world failed - to stop.
The book made me angry. I don’t think that any reader could help but be angry at the indifference of the world to a small African nation that was slaughtering nearly a million of its own men, women and children for stupid reasons of ethnicity. It’s easy to be angry at the soulless perpetrators of genocide and rape inside Rwanda. It’s easy to be angry at the colonial power, Belgium, who provoked the crisis by exacerbating ethnic differences decades before. It’s easy to be angry at UN bureaucracy that stymied every effort by Dallaire and his team to prevent the crisis they saw so plainly all around them. It’s easy to be angry at the US and France, who actively campaigned to prevent the UN from acting on the genocide. It’s easy to be angry at all those nations of the UN who provided few troops and even less money or equipment. It’s easy to be angry at the media who didn’t report the story to the world until far too late.
The reason it’s so easy to be angry is because Dallaire seems to be such a caring, unprejudiced, earnest leader. He berates himself throughout the book for not doing more, for not being able to stir the will of the world’s nations to help. But it’s clear from his book that he did more, and went farther, than I could believe any person would. He faced down guns, didn’t bathe or eat properly for weeks, and paid for things out of his own pocket. He saw children mutilated, and dogs and rats feast on their corpses. He crossed rivers on bridges choked with dead. He lost men under his command. He nearly ruined his own mind and life during his year in Rwanda. And he stayed neutral throughout it all. It made me understand how and why things happened as they were shown in Hotel Rwanda.
This book made me realise that we don’t yet live in a world where a human in Africa is worth a human in Europe, but that I’d like to live in one where that is the case. And so does he.
I understand there’s now a film about Dallaire’s story. I’m not sure if I could watch it.
EDIT: according to Dan, in the comments, I guess there’s two films: the documentary I linked to, and a dramatisation.
I haven’t seen the theatrical film based on the book (it premiered at last year’s film festival here in Toronto), but I have seen the documentary. I’d recommend watching it, actually, because it’s about Dallaire returning to Rwanda and trying to deal with everything that happened.
One small footnote though: while watching the documentary may be a good companion piece to the book, it will NOT make you any less angry at the Belgians. You will, in fact, feel the desire to fly to Belgium just so you can kick the nearest bureaucrat in the junk.
I’m waiting to see both films - they’ve been talked up a bit on CBC and look very compelling.
The whole genocide thing freaks me out. I have been watching Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State on PBS and it’s incredibly morose and unbelievable. But I find the discussion pretty interesting - the fact that this dark side of humanity has materialized time after time for all of recorded history in nearly every civilization. And the fact that it’s happening now and we’re still not doing damn near enough about it.
It really angers up the blood.