CNN reports:
In 1993, Romeo Dallaire was full of hope for the future of Rwanda.
The Canadian lieutenant general and son of a soldier was about to take up the biggest command of his career — leading United Nations peacekeepers in the central African nation.
A year later he left Rwanda a broken man, having watched helplessly as more than 800,000 people perished in Rwanda’s genocide despite his pleas for more troops to stop the massacre.
“We could have actually saved hundreds of thousands,” Dallaire told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour for “Scream Bloody Murder.”
“Nobody was interested.”
Today Roméo Dallaire is a senator, an outspoken anti-genocide activist, and a shining example of the very finest Canadian ideals. During his time in Rwanda, his repeated calls for more international troops and supplies fell time and again on deaf ears, leaving him desperately undermanned, under-gunned and unable to protect more than a few Rwandans with his tiny force of mostly Senegalese and Ghanan troops. With minimal resources and few troops worth their salt, he was forced to watch while hundreds of thousands of innocents were murdered, most hacked to death with machetes — the Rwandan genocide’s weapon of choice.
Badly shaken by his experience, Dallaire broke down after returning home in 1994, disappearing for days before eventually being found, unconscious and broken, on a bench in a park near Ottawa. Following a failed suicide attempt, he eventually resolved to tell the story of the murdered thousands, and enlisted ghostwriter Sian Cansfield to help with the task. After the completion of their book, Shake Hands With the Devil, Cansfield took her own life, overcome with the same grief that nearly killed Dallaire. The book is powerful and perspective-changing and I recommend it highly — both as a record of the world’s indifference and because of its strange power to instill both inspiration and blind fury in almost equal doses. I’ve never had a book make me so angry and so hopeful at the same time.
Main image via the Ontario College of Teachers.
Book image via Amazon.com.
1 response so far ↓
1 Gen // Dec 29, 2008 at 10:02 am
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