Shake Hands With the Devil is a frustrating, horrifying and terribly important book, written by a reluctant eyewitness to the Rwandan Genocide: Lt Gen Roméo Dallaire, Force Commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). His account of the meager mandate and resources given to him by the UN to monitor a peaceful government transition in the unstable country, and the organization's refusal to respond to his pleas for more men and matériel as the situation began to spiral out of control, confirmed what I've long thought about the UN: it's a great idea that fails to live up to its promise, bogging swift action down by bloated processes and allowing the world's most despotic regimes an equal voice in humanity's collective response to injustice. I've spent years wondering why we keep ourselves committed to the charade that the UN is an impartial arbiter, not least of all when Cuba and China are allowed to wag their fingers at us in Canada as despicable human rights abusers. What I found most remarkable in this book is that Dallaire concludes that the UN is a vital instrument that simply requires a renaissance, a recommitment to its founding principles. As I hope to never experience the General's intimate knowledge of the UN's indifference and its barbaric consequences, I will defer to his analysis.
I sought out Shake Hands With the Devil after reading Running the Rift, a fictional account of the Rwandan Genocide. That book left me wondering about the root causes of the genocide, primarily because it failed to explain how neighbours could take up machetes against neighbours, slaughtering the people that they have lived amongst for years. Naturally the answer to that question is complicated and Dallaire offers some insight, beginning with his angry contemplation upon the withdrawal of Belgian troops after ten of their soldiers were murdered:
Images of my father and father-in-law wearing their Second World War battledress seemed to leap out of the darkening sky. They looked tired, muddy and haggard and were in the midst of fighting for the liberation of Belgium. As Canadian soldiers fought tooth and nail against the Germans, King Baudoin of Belgium and his ruthless lackeys kept millions of black Africans in Rwanda and all of the Great Lakes region of central Africa under subjugation, raping these countries of their natural resources…Fifty years after my mentors had fought in Europe, I had been left here with a ragtag force to witness a crime against humanity that the Belgians had unwittingly laid the spadework for.
So there are roots for the conflict that go back to colonialism but Dallaire also has a harsh analysis of the modern citizens of Rwanda:
I sometimes let myself think about the evil that men such as Bagosora wrought -- how the Hutu extremists, the young men of the Interhamwe, even ordinary mothers with babies on their backs, had become so drunk with the sight and smell of blood and the hysteria that they could murder their neighbours…I rejected the picture of the génocidaires as ordinary human beings who had performed evil acts. To my mind their crimes had made them inhuman, turned them into machines made of flesh that imitated the motions of being human. The perpetrators on both sides had their "justifications". For the Hutus, insecurity and racism had been artfully engineered into hate and violent reaction. In the RPF's case, it was willing to fight to win a homeland at all costs, and its soldiers' rage against the genocide transformed them into machines.
And although it was the Hutu extremists who committed the genocide, Dallaire knows that the RPF leader, Paul Kagame, intentionally allowed many thousands of his fellow Tutsis to be sacrificed during his slow advance, for his own political reasons:
I found myself thinking such dire thoughts as whether the campaign and the genocide had been orchestrated to clear the way for Rwanda's return to the pre-1959 status quo in which Tutsis had called all the shots. Had the Hutu extremists been bigger dupes than I? Ten years later, I still can't put these troubling questions to rest, especially in light of what has happened to the region since.
Despite losses on both sides of the conflict, Dallaire clearly states that there is no moral equivalence, saying: The myth of the "double genocide" was now in full swing -- some people actually bought the line that the racial war had cut both ways.In my further research I've found that there are people who believe it was the RPF, or other radical Tutsis, who shot down President Habyarimana's plane initially, provoking the massacre of their own people. I suppose there are conspiracy theorists tied to every tragedy (the American government orchestrated 9/11 and other such idiocies) but I will again defer to Dallaire's analysis of the situation, as an impartial witness on the ground, when he categorically states that this atrocity was genocide perpetrated upon the Tutsis by the Hutus. I will also accept his analysis of the failure of the UN to appropriately respond:
Ultimately, led by the United States, France and the United Kingdom, [the UN] aided and abetted genocide in Rwanda. No amount of cash and aid will ever wash its hands clean of Rwandan blood.
That is a damning statement, for sure, but backed up with Dallaire's detailed account of his daily experiences -- his reports to the UN and their slow and indifferent responses -- it seems ultimately fair. After Somalia and Bosnia, the West had no stomach for intervention in Central Africa (and as the cynical said at the time, Rwanda has no oil or minerals or strategic position that makes the country important). Currently, after Iraq and Afghanistan, we have no stomach to intervene in Syria -- and what if we did? Would we be handing the country over to the jihadi extremists? This situation seems doomed to follow in Rwanda's footsteps -- if we had intervened early and overwhelmingly, there was a chance for the moderates to have assumed control, but it's too late for that now. With over 100 000 dead and 7 million Syrians displaced, at what point are we morally obligated to intervene despite the consequences? Why is Russia pulling all the strings at the UN over this? Isn't this more proof that the UN just isn't workable?
The following two excerpts describe some of the horror of the Rwandan Genocide, reader beware:
From the memoir of Shaharyan Khan (who took over as force commander from Dallaire), The Shallow Graves of Rwanda: The Interhamwe made a habit of killing young Tutsi children, in front of their parents, by first cutting off one arm, then the other. They would then gash the neck with a machete to bleed the child slowly to death but, while they were still alive, they would cut off the private parts and throw them at the faces of the terrified parents, who would then be murdered with greater dispatch.
For a long time I completely wiped the death masks of raped and sexually mutilated girls and women from my mind as if what had been done to them was the last thing that would send me over the edge. But if you looked, you could see the evidence, even in the whitened skeletons. The legs bent and apart. A broken bottle, a rough branch, even a knife between them...Some male corpses had their genitals cut off, but many women and young girls had their breasts chopped off and their genitals crudely cut apart. They died in a position of total vulnerability, flat on their backs, with their legs bent and knees wide apart. It was the expressions on their dead faces that assaulted me the most, a frieze of shock, pain and humiliation. For many years after I came home, I banished the memories of those faces from my mind, but they have come back, all too clearly.
Lt Gen Dallaire suffered from PTSD for many years after leaving Rwanda, even attempting suicide. One can only imagine the impact that the genocide had on the citizens of Rwanda, and especially upon the children, 90% of whom are said to have witnessed the murder of someone they knew. What this means for the future of Rwanda can't be imagined. Dallaire concludes:
Many signs point to the fact that the youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in the demobilization camps in Sierra Leone to the suicide bombers of Palestine and Chechnya, to the young terrorists who fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can no longer afford to ignore them. We have to take concrete steps to remove the causes of their rage, or we have to be prepared to suffer the consequences.
This leads me back in a circle to where I began: root causes. I don't know if, despite all of the historical information, Shake Hands With the Devil fully explains to me how neighbours could massacre each other in such an inhuman fashion, and failing this understanding, how can such a horror show be prevented from happening again? I sincerely hope that Dallaire's faith in the UN and its ability to move forward into a "Century of Humanity" is well placed since at this point it's the only show in town. This is a book that left me shaken, feeling powerless, but I am not sorry to have read it.
