Shake Hands With the Devil
Read Shake Hands With the Devil Online
Authors: Romeo Dallaire
CONTENTS
1. My Father Told Me Three Things
2. “Rwanda, that's in Africa isn't it?”
3. “Check out Rwanda and you're in charge”
9. Easter Without a Resurrection of Hope
10. An Explosion at Kigali Airport
13. Accountants of the Slaughter
Glossary of Names, Places and Terms
When Lt. General Roméo Dallaire received the call to serve as force commander of the UN mission to Rwanda, he thought he was heading off to Africa to help two warring parties achieve a peace both sides wanted. Instead, he and members of his small international force were caught up in a vortex of civil war and genocide. Dallaire left Rwanda a broken man, disillusioned, suicidal, and determined to tell his story.
An award-winning international sensation,
Shake Hands with the Devil
is a landmark contribution to the literature of war: a remarkable tale of a soldier's courage and an unforgettable parable of good and evil. It is also a stinging indictment of the petty bureaucrats who refused to give Dallaire the men and the operational freedom he needed to stop the killing. âI know there is a God,' Dallaire writes, âbecause in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists and therefore I know there is a God.'
Lt. General Roméo Dallaire served as force commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda from July 1993 to September 1994.
Shake Hands with the Devil,
his eyewitness account of the Rwandan genocide, won the Shaughnessy Cohen Award and the Governor General Award.
The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire
with Major Brent Beardsley
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To my family and the families of all those who served with me in Rwanda, with deepest gratitude
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Matthew 5:9
To the Rwandans, abandoned to their fate, who were slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands
To the fifteen
UN
soldiers under my command who died bravely in the service of peace and humanity
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To Sian Cansfield, researcher, journalist and dear friend, who died on June 1, 2002, while working so hard to tell this story
This book is long overdue, and I sincerely regret that I did not write it earlier. When I returned from Rwanda in September 1994, friends, colleagues and family members encouraged me to write about the mission while it was still fresh in my mind. Books were beginning to hit the shelves, claiming to tell the whole story of what happened in Rwanda. They did not. While well-researched and fairly accurate, none of them seemed to get the story right. I was able to assist many of the authors, but there always seemed to be something lacking in the final product. The sounds, smells, depredations, the scenes of inhuman acts were largely absent. Yet I could not step into the void and write the missing account; for years I was too sick, disgusted, horrified and fearful, and I made excuses for not taking up the task.
Camouflage was the order of the day and I became an expert. Week upon week, I accepted every invitation to speak on the subject; procrastination didn't help me escape but pulled me deeper into the maze of feelings and memories of the genocide. Then the formal processes began. The Belgian army decided to court-martial Colonel Luc Marchal, one of my closest colleagues in Rwanda. His country was looking for someone to blame for the loss of ten Belgian soldiers, killed on duty within the first hours of the war. Luc's superiors were willing to sacrifice one of their own, a courageous soldier, in order to get to me. The Belgian government had decided I was either the real culprit or at least an accomplice in the deaths of its peacekeepers. A report from the Belgian senate reinforced the idea that I never should have permitted its soldiers to be put in a position where they had to defend themselvesâdespite our moral responsibility to the Rwandans and the mission. For a time, I became the convenient scapegoat for all that had gone wrong in Rwanda.
I used work as an anodyne for the blame that was coming my way and to assuage my own guilt about the failures of the mission. Whether I was restructuring the army, commanding 1 Canadian Division or Land Force Quebec Area, developing the quality of life program for the Canadian Forces or working to reform the officer corps, I accepted all tasks and worked hard and foolishly. So hard and so foolishly that in September 1998, four years after I had gotten home, my mind and my body decided to give up. The final straw was my trip back to Africa earlier that year to testify at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The memories, the smells and the sense of evil returned with a vengeance. Within a year and a half, I was given a medical discharge from the army. I was suffering, like so many of the soldiers who had served with me in Rwanda, from an injury called post-traumatic stress disorder. With retirement came the time and the opportunity to think, speak and possibly even write. I warmed to the idea of a book, but I still procrastinated.
Since my return from Rwanda in 1994, I had kept in close touch with Major Brent Beardsley, who had served as the first member of my mission and had been with me from the summer of 1993 until he was medically evacuated from Kigali on the last day of April 1994. Brent used every opportunity to press me to write the book. He finally persuaded me that if I did not put my story on paper, our children and our grandchildren would never really know about our role in and our passage through the Rwandan catastrophe. How would they know what we did and, especially, why we did it? Who were the others involved and what did they do or not do? He said we also had an obligation to future soldiers in similar situations, who might find even a tidbit from our experience valuable to the accomplishment of their missions. Brent collaborated at every stage in the writing of this book. I thank him for his prompting and his support. I am also grateful to his wife, Margaret, and his children, Jessica, Joshua and Jackson, for loaning him to me through the initial research and drafting, through the reviews and most recently for his work to help me finish the manuscript. Brent was the catalyst, the disciplinarian and the most prolific scribe; he committed day after day to the work in order that I could complete this project. Even in periods of enormous suffering from the debilitating effects of overwork, lack of sleep and his own affliction with post-traumatic stress disorder, Brent always went well beyond the effort required of him. He has become my soulmate for all things Rwandan; he provides the sober second thought and voice to my efforts surrounding the Rwandan debacle. His willingness to be a witness for the prosecution at the never-ending International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and his support for my own involvement have cemented our lives together in the best tradition of ex-warriors returning from the front. He has saved me from myself, and I owe my life, as well as the guts of this book, in part to him.
I am especially grateful to Random House Canada for taking a chance on a non-author and a sick veteran. I am grateful for their understanding, their encouragement and their support. A very special thanks goes to my editor and friend, Anne Collins. Without her advice, encouragement and discipline, this project might not have been completed. She kept telling me that this book must be written and that it would be written. For many months I did not put in the effort required, but she held firm, showed genuine concern for me and proved to be the most patient person of us all. She is a lady who takes risks, and I admire her courage and determination. I also wish to thank my agent, Bruce Westwood, for his belief that somewhere in me, we would find the man who could write this story. He kept a friendly eye on me and encouraged me every step of the way. He has become a close colleague, and I respect his skills and experience in the complex world of publishing.
I assembled an ad hoc staff for this project, who worked together magnificently in mutual respect and co-operation. Major James McKay, a long-time researcher for my efforts with the tribunal and on matters of conflict resolution, was my “futures” person. I thank him for his support. Lieutenant Commander Françine Allard, a dogged researcher and “keeper of the documents,” worked for me while I was still serving in the Canadian Forces. Fluent and articulate in six languages, she was committed to this book and a cherished member of the team. A special thanks must also go to Major (Retired) Phil Lancaster, who replaced Brent in Rwanda as my military assistant during my final months in the mission area. He helped me draft the chapters on the war and the genocide. A soldier, doctor of philosophy, and a compassionate humanitarian, Phil has worked with war-affected children in the Great Lakes region of Africa almost full-time since his retirement. He has never really returned from Rwanda, and I admire him and the work he does.
Dr. Serge Bernier, the Director of History and Heritage at the Canadian National Defence Headquarters and a classmate of mine from cadet days, provided very personal encouragement and constant contact throughout the project. He reviewed the French version and also provided resources and support for the official history of the mission as debriefed by me to Dr. Jacques Castonguay. He remains a voice of stability in my life.
In addition, there were many extended family members, friends, colleagues and even strangers who encouraged me throughout the writing of this book. I needed that often very timely encouragement and I will be eternally grateful.
In Rwanda today there are millions of people who still ask why the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (
UNAMIR
), the United Nations (
UN
) and the international community allowed this disaster to happen. I do not have all the answers or even most of them. What I do have to offer the survivors and Rwanda's future generations is my story as best as I can remember it. I kept daily notes of my activities, meetings, comments and musings, but there were many days, particularly in the early stages of the genocide, when I did not have the time, the will or the heart to record the details. This account is my best recollection of events as I saw them. I have checked my memory against the written record as it survives, in code cables,
UN
documents and my papers, which were released to me by the Canadian Forces. If there are any errors in the spelling of the names of places or persons, or misremembered dates, I offer my apologies to the reader. I remain fully responsible and accountable for every decision and action I took as the sometime Head of Mission and full-time Force Commander of
UNAMIR
.