From a safe distance, a display of heroism in the face of impossible odds can be uplifting. Up close, the result can be quite different. Such is the experience of Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general in charge of the UN mission to Rwanda in 1994. It was a trip to the heart of darkness as Dallaire tried to stop the murder of 800,000 Tutsi, while the UN and the rest of the world did nothing to help him.
The feature film Hotel Rwanda recounted the genocide from the point of view of the real-life hotel manager who saved more than a thousand by sheltering them in his 5-star hotel.
Shake Hands with the Devil, a documentary by Peter Raymont, tells the story from Romeo Dallaire’s vantage point.
You see, by all objective accounts Dallaire saved thousands of lives in the most untenable of situations (I’ll get to that shortly), yet alcoholism and depression, not a state of being uplifted, was to be his reward. He blamed himself for those he couldn’t save.
With the distance afforded by ten years, one memoir and daily doses of psycho-pharmaceuticals, Dallaire was able to revisit the scene of the crime and attend the Rwandan government’s memorial ceremony a decade after the slaughter.
By now, most are familiar with the grand horror of Rwanda; Shake Hands with the Devil acquaints you with the many smaller crimes that contributed to the big one.
We learn how the UN sent Dallaire and his troops to Rwanda with no support, no briefing and no background, to enforce a peace agreement between the Hutu government and the Tutsi rebels. We see how Dallaire learned of a third force, extremist militias intent on sabotaging the peace agreement and slaughtering the Tutsi, something the UN never bothered to tell him.
We learn how the Catholic Church was complicit in the racist mythology that created the (false) ethnic division between Hutu and Tutsi, and how the French trained the army that would carry out the slaughter.
We learn how Dallaire was told of the impending massacre, even the location of the weapon stockpiles which would be used to carry it out- and how UN headquarters in New York refused to let him raid the arms caches.
After the slaughter is underway, we watch as Belgium withdraws its peacekeepers and turns the civilians under their protection over to the killers. We watch as 2,500 heavily armed European troops come to Rwanda to extract the Europeans- and do nothing to stop the carnage going on in plain sight around them.
Through it all, Dallaire soldiers on, trying to save as many lives as possible, even as he runs out of food, supplies, and medicine. He promises the few journalists he finds that he will protect them as long as they stay and file a story a day. But most of the world is fixated on the OJ Simpson trial.
Shake Hands with the Devil shows us the many forms that human evil takes- the bureaucratic and human indifference as well as the piles of corpses. It also shows us the enormous price one man paid for heroically resisting human evil in the face of hopeless odds.
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