Shake Hands with the Devil - Roméo Dallaire - Part 10 of 10

2020 Reading Challenge - Day 200

July 20, 2020

Book 55 - Shake Hands with the Devil
Roméo Dallaire
 Part 10 - pages 448-505 (e-book)
Reading Time - 60 minutes

And we're in the final stretch. This last chapter seemed quite disjointed and I can only guess that it's meant to reflect Dallaire's own mental decline at the time or... it's due to the fact that his ghost writer committed suicide in the late stage of drafting the book. Either way, it's a tragedy.

Chapter 15 - Too Much, Too Late

Dallaire finally received a new political liaison guy, Khan, from Pakistan, and took him on a tour which included hospitals where dead and dying were packed in. Khan was utterly shocked and wrote in his own book: "The fact is that never in living history has such wanton brutality been inflicted by human beings on their fellow creatures [as in Rwanda]... even the killing fields of Cambodia and Bosnia pale before the gruesome, awful depravity of massacres in Rwanda." Khan was brilliant and Dallaire wondered how different things might have been had he been with them since the start.

The RPF wanted to set up a ceasefire after they had essentially won the war. They set up a new government minus the extremists. Millions of Rwandans fled to Zaire creating a whole new humanitarian crisis as Zaire was unable to handle the influx of refugees. And there were refugees still in Rwanda. Dallaire and Khan feared that the RGF, the génocidaires and the extremists would just set up shop in Zaire, strengthen themselves and resume the war in a few years. Millions in aid flowed into Zaire and hardly anything into Rwanda. RPF government in Kigali was trying to get refugees to come back. Some tried to leave the camps and were attacked by extremists with machetes. When others came into RPF territory, Dallaire suspected that there were secret tribunals as people were summarily executed by the RPF.

Thirty days after the reinforcements were to have been deployed, Dallaire was still waiting. He met with the American military who promised help in supporting refugees to come back... but the American administration pulled back. They didn't want to help if there was a risk of American casualties. All they did was help unload aircraft at Kigali and refused to leave the airfield.

Finally some reinforcements started arriving but they were outsiders and had not been part of what the others had witnessed. French implied that the UN mission had failed and laid blame at Dallaire's feet. The months of stress were taking its toll on Dallaire and on August 3, he asked to be relieved of his command. He had planned for his second-in-command, a Ghanaian, to take over, but learned that another Canadian would be appointed to replace him. Felt incredibly guilty for abandoning mission before it was done, but he had become a casualty. He left Rwanda almost a year to the day after he had arrived.

Conclusion

For Dallaire, one of the biggest impacts of such a civil war, is its effect on children - the ones killed or injured, the ones turned into child soldiers or soldier wives. In visiting Sierra Leone, he came to question the impossible task of disarming and reintegrating child soldiers. In his mind, the best way to avoid such a situation was to prevent future Rwandas.

Dallaire believes his UN mission could have prevented the resumption of the civil war and the genocide - with enough troops and logistical/administrative support. He believes that France and the US held the solution for the Rwanda crisis. They also did not help the refugee issue but worsened it.

As for his own role: "I was unable to persuade the international community that this tiny, poor, overpopulated country and its people were worth saving from the horror of genocide--even when the measures needed for success were relatively small."

Since 1994-2003, 4 million human beings have died in the Congo and Great Lakes region as a direct result of the Rwandan crisis. UN needs a renaissance from the Secretariat down to the member nations.

The youth of the developing world won't tolerate it anymore - Dallaire saw so much rage and it won't go away when human beings have no rights, no security, no future, no hope, no means to survive. Do we believe that all humans are equal? Or are some better than others. An American officer told Dallaire that 85,000 dead Rwandans were worth one dead American soldier. We have to move beyond national self-interest to human interest. We have to move from the 20th century (century of genocide) to the 21st century (century of humanity) when we can rise above race, creed, colour, religion and national self-interest.

And it's true... it's what needs to happen. Inequality is rampant, within countries and around the world. Something needs to shift as the rich get infinitely richer and the poor get poorer. And we can't be part of the solution if we are, inherently, part of the problem.