Shake Hands with the Devil - Romeo Dallair - Part 1 of 10

2020 Reading Challenge - Day 192

July 11, 2020

Book 55 - Shake Hands with the Devil
Roméo Dallaire
 Part 1 - pages 1-50 (e-book)
Reading Time - 60 minutes

I'm several decades behind in reading this book. I remember when the Rwandan Genocide was happening but I was busy with my own life and Rwanda was pretty far away. Heck, I thought Rwanda was somewhere up in the Gold Coast of Africa, the northwestern part somewhere, south of Morocco. So, if nothing, this book is bringing me up to speed on African geography. Rwanda is a tiny country in Central Africa, just south of Uganda, sandwiched between Tanzania, Burundi and the DRC (a.k.a. Zaire).

This is not an easy book to read. Knowing the outcome of the genocide, with a million killed in 100 days... it's hard to read of the systemic failures that led to those horrific events. And harder still to get that... at the heart of this humanitarian disaster lies systemic racism, on a national scale.

Dallaire made this one statement that stuck with me:

Engraved still in my brain is the judgement of a small group of bureaucrats who came to "assess" the situation in the first weeks of the genocide: "We will recommend to our government not to intervene as the risks are high and all that is here are humans".

Had they been white humans... I wonder if things would have gone differently.

Roméo Dallaire was a Canadian Brigadier-General who was given military command of the UN's Chapter 6 peace keeping mission to Rwanda. The goal was to help the country roll out the Arusha Accord, an agreement signed by all sides after several years of civil war. Dallaire wrote the book several years after the genocide. It was not an easy book to write and his ghost writer actually committed suicide before the book was finished. That should tell us something...

But, we start out easy enough... with an introduction...

Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition

Dallaire knows he isn't perfect and it sounds like he has tortured himself over what happened in Rwanda, second-guessing himself repeatedly. But as I continue through this book, I get the clear message that the fault for Rwanda lies higher up the food chain... with the United Nations and specifically with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: China, USA, France, UK and Russia.

Dallaire has mulled over the events and says we need to get to the essence of the genocide in order to keep it from happening again. We need to address the root of mass atrocities. We need to prevent conflict. That makes complete sense to me... it's treating the disease... not the symptoms. If all the UN does is run around the world treating the symptoms... we are going to get nowhere.

Dallaire hopes that this book will "help inspire people around the globe to rise above national interest and self-interest to recognize humanity for what it really is: a panolopy of human beings who, in their essence, are the same". Given what is happening in the US right now with #BlackLivesMatter... it would seem that we have still not even recognized it at a personal level, let alone a national level.

Dallaire's goal is to "tell the story of how the world abandoned millions of Rwandans and its small peacekeeping force". It's a story of betrayal, failure, naïveté, indifference, hatred, genocide, war, inhumanity and evil. In just 100 days, over 800,000 innocent Rwandan men, women and children were brutally murdered while the developed world, impassive and apparently unperturbed, sat back and watched the unfolding apocalypse or simply changed channels.

And... it would seem that the Holocaust and Cambodia and Rwanda taught us nothing, for Dallaire's fear is that the failure of humanity, as evidenced by the Rwandan genocide, could easily happen again. Dallaire pulls no punches and lays the blame for Rwanda squarely at the feet of the world powers. He wanted to tell the tale of how "the international community, through an inept UN mandate and what can only be described as indifference, self-interest and racism, aided and abetted these crimes against humanity--how we all helped create the mess that has murdered and displaced millions and destabilized the whole central African region." In particular, Dallaire lays the blame at the feet of the US, France and the UK who either watched what happened, pulled out their troops or didn't offer troops in the first place.

Finally... Dallaire reinforces what I, having read several chapters now, recognize--"What I have come to realize as the root of it all, however, is the fundamental indifference of the world community to the plight of seven to eight million black Africans in a tiny country that had no strategic or resource value to any world power." In the grand scheme of world power and politics, a tiny country with no strategic value, no resource value and no white human value... was dispensable.

Chapter 1- My Father Told me Three Things

The first chapter recounts Dallaire's upbringing, born into a military family who demonstrated a model of self-sacrifice. He attended military college but, as a francophone, struggled with a fair bit of discrimination. This was at the same time as the FLQ crisis in Quebec and French Canadians were viewed with a lot of suspicion in the military.

This was a fairly tame chapter and it helped me get a sense of who Dallaire was... of his background and what made him tick.

I have to admit, I am reading this book in the mornings as I don't think it would make for a restful sleep as part of my bedtime reading...