Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

Liz L’Heureux is a public service librarian in the Science and
Technology Library at the University of Alberta.

“In just one hundred 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.”

In Shake Hands with the Devil, Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire
powerfully recounts his experience of being seconded from the Canadian
military to be Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission
for Rwanda (UNAMIR) with the same passion with which he commanded the
peacekeeping mission. This is not an analytical retelling of a military
manoeuvre, although keen insights are offered into how the killing could
have been avoided. Instead, it attempts to accurately and vividly
portray the devastation of a country by acts of genocide and the
devastation of the man who desperately tried to save Rwanda from itself,
but failed to do so. In Dallaire’s own words: “It is the story of a
commander, who faced with a challenge that didn’t fit the classic cold
war–era peacekeepers rule book, failed to find an effective solution
and witnessed, as if in punishment, the loss of some of his own troops,
the attempted annihilation of an ethnicity, the butchery of children
barely out of the womb, the stacking of severed limbs like cordwood, the
mounds of decomposing bodies being eaten by the sun.”

His purpose in writing the book is clearly to end the apathy that
allowed Western nations to stand by and do very little as genocidaires
exterminated nearly a tenth of Rwanda’s population. The book is also
likely to give readers a deeper appreciation for Canada’s peacekeepers
and the sacrifices that they and their families make for Canada’s
sake. Not only are peacekeepers’ lives at risk, but so is their mental
well being when forced to witness horrific events and their aftermath.
Dallaire is a true hero, for his efforts during the genocide, but also
for finding the strength to write this story despite his severe
post-traumatic stress disorder.