Shake Hands with the Devil
SynopsisPlot
When Romeo Dallaire was called on to serve as force commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, he believed that his assignment was to help two warring parties achieve the peace they both wanted. Instead, he was exposed to the most barbarous and chaotic display of civil war and genocide in the past decade, observing in just one hundred days the killings of more than eight hundred thousand Rwandans. With only a few troops, his own ingenuity and courage to direct his efforts, Dallaire rescued thousands, but his call for more support from the world body fell on deaf ears. In Shake Hands with the Devil, General Dallaire recreates the awful history the world community chose to ignore. He also chronicles his own progression from confident Cold Warrior to devastated UN commander, and finally to retired general struggling painfully, and publicly, to overcome posttraumatic stress disorder -- the highest-ranking officer ever to share such experiences with readers.
Story
About this book
In 1993, Canadian lieutenant-general Roméo Dallaire was appointed force commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, known as UNAMIR. His task was to support a peace process between the country's warring factions. What followed bore little resemblance to that mandate. Between April and July 1994, about eight hundred thousand Rwandans were killed in a genocide that unfolded with extraordinary speed. Dallaire and a small UN contingent remained in the country, and his requests for reinforcements went unanswered.
Shake Hands with the Devil is his account of those months, told from the position of the commander on the ground. Dallaire sets out the operational limits his force faced, the political decisions taken at the UN Security Council, and the choices of governments that did not intervene. He also traces his path from Cold War officer to a retired general living with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Much of the book takes place in Kigali and surrounding regions of Rwanda, a small landlocked country in the African Great Lakes area. Alongside the record of the mission, Dallaire describes the effort to shelter civilians at sites his troops could reach, and the gap between what a peacekeeping mandate allowed and what the situation required.
