Episode Overview

Author: Romeo Dallaire
Book Title: "Shake Hands With The Devil"
Original Broadcast Date: December 2, 2003

Hot Type with Evan Solomon in conversation with L. Gen. Romeo Dallaire.

Introduction
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Conclusion

INTRODUCTION

How do you go on living, knowing that under your watch, the genocide in Rwanda raged unabated?

That is the terrible question Romeo Dallaire lives with every day, a question that has driven him close to suicide.

But it may not be a fair question at all...

Yes, in sept of 1993, Dallaire was asked by the un to oversee its peacekeeping in Rwanda...what the UN believed was supposed to be an easy little success story..

And yes, it's true Dallaire knew nothing about the country when he arrived--in fact, when he got the call to go he said, famously, "Rwanda, that's somewhere in Africa isn't it?"

But does the failure to stop the massacre of 800 000 Rawandans in 100 days rest on Dallaire's shoulders, or were there many others who must ultimately take responsibility?

In his new book, shake hands with the devil, Romeo Dallaire describes with brutal honesty the events, the decisions and the failures that led to the genocide --a slauguther that cost the lives of Rawandans, soliders serving under Dallaire and almost Dallaire's life as well.

DALLAIRE READS FROM “SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL”:

It is time I tell the story from where I stood literally in the middle of the slaughter for weeks on end. A public account of my actions and reactions during that most terrible year may be the crucial missing link to understanding this tragedy both intellectually and in our hearts.

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PART ONE

EVAN QUESTION: You know when I saw the book “Shake Hands with the Devil” I thought you’ve spoken about this for years but finally you’ve done, it you ’ve written a book. Why the book now? 2003 ? After almost a decade?

ROMEO DALLAIRE: Well it took over six years. Between still working and working injured and then totally crashing in 98 where for months I was a zombie as they tried to rebuild me into a human a thinking human again.

And ultimately what it ended up by being we had entered into hell and so it we had to go another visit into hell to relive it and write it cuz without reliving it there was no way you could write it.

EVAN QUESTION:
When you got the mission if I’d said to you, the day before you got your mission by the UN, if I’d bumped into you and I said tell me about Rwanda what would you tell me?

DALLAIRE:
Think it’s in Africa. Now that is an indictment I think to me personally for my lack of culture and knowledge of geography of the world. But it’s also an indictment to a western nation that has considered these things so peripheral that it wasn’t worthy the attention.

EVAN VOICE-OVER:
Rwanda was a Belgian colony until 1962. The Belgians were always more sympathetic with the minority Tutsi's than the Hutus, simply because they saw the tall and light-skinned Tutsis as closer to Europeans. Pure racism.

And so when the Belgians were kicked out in a bloody Hutu uprising, the Hutus took power and forced the Tutsis to flee into neighbouring countries.... Like Uganda, Burundi and Zaire.

DALLAIRE:
And there was always a desire to go back of course by those Rwandan Tutsis.

The uh extremists or the government in Rwanda which was the majority which was Hutu having been oppressed by the Tutsis through the colonial period in previous was scared that these people come back. Because they tell the people had so much power and capabilities that they would take over the country again.

EVAN QUESTION:
Now when you get this mission let’s just kind of walk through because it’s really interesting. Someone throws you the ball and they say Dallaire, we want you to head this little mission to Rwanda.

DALLAIRE:
No problem.

EVAN:
Let’s just keep in mind that rwanda is undergoing essentially civil war right.

DALLAIRE:
Correct. In fact uh the civil war started in 1990. And also the scenario in which we find ourselves is the Somalia problem and the debacle of the American forces black hawk down gang in Mogadishu had made the Americans exceptionally gun shy.

EVAN V/O
After taking casualties in the Blackhawk Down episode in 1993 Bill Clinton pulled out his forces after18 American soldiers were killed in a failed ambush. The Canadian experience in Somalia was a disgrace with the aggressive form of racism that was played out by the Canadian Airborne against a Somalian civilian teenager when he was tortured and murdered. This Rwandan mission lead by Dallaire was meant to be simple and clean. A "cakewalk".

DALLAIRE:
So the opportunity for a success story in Africa is presenting itself and in fact both sides are presenting themselves as fully wanting this peace agreement and we had from all the western powers and of the UN people that the negotiations and there was a sense that this thing could work if we acted rapidly.

EVAN V/O
Dallaire's mission in Rwanda was to monitor the Arusha Peace Agreement, which was supposed to put an end to the long and vicious civil war.

The Arusha Accord had been struck between the Hutu-dominated government lead for 20 years by the dictator president Habyarimana and the Tutsi rebels who had been driven out in the Hutu take-over and had been living in refugee camps in neighbouring Uganda. Now, the UN believed that there was motivation on both sides to find a lasting peace and to create a democracy. So Dallaire's job was simply to oversee the process

EVAN QUESTION:
So they send you on this mission to monitor what should be a crucial time in these peace talks…

DALLAIRE:
Canada was not into that zone of Africa. Uh and it goes with our background, Europe oriented and we were up to Yugoslavia up to our ears we had learned lessons because we had troops in Cambodia the middle east we’d been sending them there so uh and the focus of the intelligence was not necessarily Africa.

EVAN:
So the answer is no?

DALLAIRE:
Rwanda, no one even wanted the mission to happen except the French…..under wraps…it’s kind of hard to convince a country to go and spill blood somewhere where there’s no security problems there’s no strategic interest. …..only humans….it’s tribalism….this is outwardly ….

EVAN:
Institutionalized racism.

DALLAIRE:
Because… the profiling that we do of them is profiling that comes from the most racist of periods which is the colonial era.

EVAN V/O:
Dallaire was under orders to follow a classic Chapter Six Peacekeeping mission to the letter, which meant that he could play a defensive role only.

EVAN QUESTION:
When does it dawn on you this mission is not going to be a nice little example of the un doing its Chapter Six mission that things are going to slip out of control?

DALLAIRE:
It’s a sort of a um… accumulation of events. But I think if you want the first one, I’d been there 3 weeks. [11:49:36] And uh it was the opening of my headquarters building uh and the president was invited and came and his belief that the UN was absolutely essential to move the peace process and it was you know what you sort of dream as the best of circumstances. That same night 5 massacres happened. In the northwest. Not big ones. 7 or 8, 9 people killed in each site. And the next morning it was reported that the rebels had conducted those massacres.

And so all of a sudden we’re I entered into an arena that’s not clear. And that’s real. I mean this is reality

EVAN:
Because the bodies are there.

DALLAIRE:
You got it. The hacked bodies are there. And when we go in to investigate there is nothing to really prove that it was done by the rebels in fact it is tactically and it is strategically ridiculous that they would do that. And so we all of a sudden find ourselves in the reality that people not only have divergent points of view, they're willing to kill each other to do it. To win. And the reality…

EVAN:
Kill their…

DALLAIRE:
Their own. Over the next couple days come to realization that this was not done by the rebels but this was a frame up.

EVAN:
A frame. They're killing Hutus killing Hutus to frame… the Tutsis and to spark… the war.

DALLAIRE:
And so you see a germination in my mind and in that we’re we got we know the hard line party which is the president and they’re still working with me…… but then we start to discern that there's something more evil something even stronger behind the hard line party. That are willing to conduct their operation to scuttle the peace agreement.

EVAN V/O:
The fragile peace was destroyed by a series of killings and assassinations conducted by a third force--what Dallaire calls a shadow force--which turned out to be part of the Hutu Power.

DALLAIRE:
The lot of the militia were disenfranchised youth and we’re not talking about people in their 40s and 50s killing all the time we’re talking about 17s and 16s and 18s and 20s and so on who were many of them had absolutely no future. There was nothing left for them. Uh there was no opportunities in the country and so by the tens of thousands many of them were simply left idle and so the militia the youth wings of the extremist party gave them uniforms, gave them a cause a focus made them feel very proud and so when you give them a machete and you give them the easiest of causes possible, those people are different and you gotta watch out for them.

EVAN V/O:
Dallaire would report to superiors at the United Nations headquarters in New York directly through an old army friend and fellow Canadian, general Maurice Baril--the UN's top military advisor. Baril had the ear of secretary general Butros Butros Galli and Kofi Annan, at that time the head of peacekeeping missions.

EVAN ON CAMERA IN HOT TYPE STUDIO:
When we come back the famous fax he sent to the United Nations senior headquarters in New York in the days before the wholesale massacre began—the warning, come on back for a lot more of Romeo Dallaire.

DALLAIRE TEASE CLIP:
….when I was negotiating with those extremist militia men who did the bulk of the slaughtering. I was not negotiating with human beings anymore.

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PART TWO

EVAN V/O:
In the weeks before the genocide began Dallaire sent a coded cable gram to UN Headquarters in New York to inform his superiors of his intention to raid the huge arms caches which had been discovered.

DALLAIRE:
We finally had these guys where we wanted them. What was the heart of this outfit? Who would really be running it so we can nip it right there and expose it that was the aim. Expose them and then set them uh into turmoil that would throw them off balance and possibly give us more of a capability to then prevent them from ever restructuring again.

EVAN V/O:
He addressed the note directly to his fellow Canadian soldier General Baril. He said he would have to take on a more offensive role.

DALLAIRE:
I said I'm now moving into offensive operations. I should've said deterrent operations. But I mean genocide was a word too. And genocide although we finally used it nobody came anyway so these words are very important in the in the realm of diplomacy and so on but they don’t mean crap in the field. So it was my duty to inform them that I was doing this there was a risk but as I say in the end of my of my uh cable gram I say……Peut ce que veut. Allons y.

You can what you want. What you will. Let’s go. And I was telling that to my colleague who knew very much what all that is.

EVAN:
This is Maurice Baril

DALLAIRE:
General Baril who was part of the triumvirate of decision making in….

EVAN:
And Kofi Annan. And this is where the indictment of the UN kind of begins because just before what the world starts understanding to be the genocide they say do NOT go raid those weapons caches. They ignore your warning that Rwanda is teetering on the brink of something horrific.

DALLAIRE:
Yes.

EVAN:
They do not give you more support they do not expand your mandate. Is this in your mind the first great failure?

DALLAIRE:
Well there is no doubt. That was a major turning point in our ability to stymie the possibility of those massacres and ultimately ended up in a genocide.

EVAN:
You knew there was weapons you cable this to New York you don’t use the word genocide in a fax but

DALLAIRE:
No because the idea, the ability to enter into our mind genocide was in fact impossible because of our cultural background. We had just been attempting to understand ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. Uh we knew of Cambodia but still that was far away, the killing fields. But the word genocide is synonymous with holocaust. And holocaust we’d been educated that it is so evil so impossibly evil so huge, that it’s impossible that it existed again. And so it took me even knee deep in bodies to actually be able to say genocide.

EVAN QUESTION:
Let’s talk about what you saw because, General Dallaire, I’ve read about your story afterwards and you talk about being haunted by the images. I mean this is, you can’t prepare for this. When you close your eyes, what do you see?

DALLAIRE:
The most horrific, I mean going into a church and seeing a couple thousand people slaughtered and dying over days, going into places where they were killed all around you, you’re walking in them. …..it’ s like walking in a pile of dead fish, you know all slimy and so on. It’s the same, same thing.
But the worst of scenes, the most horrific, for me, were the scenes of rape areas, where girls, young girls, young women were raped and then torn apart by all kinds of different things. The horror that was still in their eyes and the suffering that they must have gone through while alive, to be killed afterwards.

EVAN IN STUDIO:
When we come back, the guilt Romeo Dallaire feels.
The General still feels responsible for the deaths of 800,000 Rwandans and for the ultimate failure of his mission. That’s a burden. Come on back for that.

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PART THREE

DALLAIRE READING FROM HIS BOOK:
I looked out over the burnt huts, carrion birds over-head, black lumps in rags moving ever-so-slowly downstream as others piled up in the curve of the river. I was filled with a sense of gross ineptness. Ripped apart by failure and remorse.

EVAN:
The book, when I read it, is it starts with guilt; it’s infused with guilt.

DALLAIRE:
Yes.

EVAN:
And a lot of people and a lot of elements that are guilty in this, the UN and the western world.

DALLAIRE:
But I say that too.

EVAN:
And you took on the guilt and we’ve all read about your breakdown and the suicide attempts. But do you feel guilty?

DALLAIRE:
Totally. For the rest of my life. I was the field commander; I was the head of mission. It was my responsibility in the field to make that mission function and operate and I failed. The mission failed. And 800,000 people were slaughtered, three million were displaced and injured and refugeed. There is no solace anywhere in saying: I did the best I can. There could have been more. Either my skill sets failed or my ability or whatever else. I did not convince the world that these human beings were being slaughtered and that they counted.

EVAN:
You didn’t commit the genocide.

DALLAIRE:
I didn’t prevent it. I didn’t succeed in bringing them in an atmosphere of security to the evolution of their peace agreement and that was my mission. My mission was to create an atmosphere of security to commit those Rwandans, the ones that I saw dead, dying on the side of the road by the hundreds as they walked in the mountains, tens of thousands of people and then looking in their eyes and then seeing bewilderment. They ’re dying and they’re saying: the blue beret, what the hell happened?

EVAN:
Is it an indictment of you every time you see one of those images in your head?

DALLAIRE:
That’s why you need therapy. There’ll be no getting away from it.

EVAN:
Do you regret going to Rwanda?

DALLAIRE:
No. Never. I discovered the humans, I discovered culture, I discovered the most magnificent place on earth and I want one day simply to be a pilgrim in that nation.

EVAN:
Do you still believe in God?

DALLAIRE:
Yes because I know the devil’s there and he was with me on a couple of occasions that I can describe and I do in the book.

EVAN:
It’s my pleasure.

DALLAIRE:
Thanks a lot.

EVAN:
My pleasure.

DALLAIRE READING:
Now no matter how idealistic the aim sounds, this new century must become the century of humanity… When we as human beings rise above race, creed, colour, religion and national interest….above our own tribe for the sake of the children and of our future……peut que ce veut. Allons y.

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CONCLUSION

There have been many excellent books about the genocide in Rwanda, but the world has waited to see events through Romeo Dallaire's eyes...

After all, he had the most unique view of what happened--both on the ground and in the back rooms of the United Nations--

Not only is his book a detailed history of how a genocide can unfold without anyone doing anything about it, it is also the personal story of one man's conviction for a cause, his journey to a dark place and his long slow recovery.

Dallaire rightly blames the U.S, France, Belgium, and the UN for their lack of concern about the civil war in Rwanda and for not stepping in earlier to stop the killings.

Of course, there is no shortage of responsible parties.... But mostly, Dallaire still blames himself. Dallaire has taken abuse from all over the world because of the deaths of the soldiers, for his poor military planning and for his political naivete -- all of which is debatable -- but the fact remains that Dallaire stayed in Rwanda and worked almost to his death to stop the killings, and to complete his mission. Not only that, he warned the world of the pending massacre...

In my mind, and in the minds of many others, Dallaire is the hero of this story--but then again, there are no heroes in a genocide--at least Dallaire should sleep knowing he was on the right side of history...

General Dallaire will soon take up a fellowship at the Carr Centre at Harvard where he will be researching and writing about conflict resolution....a subject he knows a little about.

“Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda" is published by Random House Canada. I would implore you to read it.

Next week on Hot Type.....I visit Noam Chomsky to talk about his new book , “Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance”. In it he says our very survival is in peril if the U.S. continues to throw its weight around.
That's next week on hot type. I’m Evan Solomon. I'll see you again in seven

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