Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire (2005) – PopMatters Film Review )

What must it feel like to be so insignificant in the world’s eyes that your systematic extermination scarcely warrants attention? It’s impossible to conceive of the profound loneliness that Tutsi and some moderate Hutus experienced in 1994 when in 90 days roughly 800,000 of them were hacked to death by machete-wielding extremists. Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian lieutenant-general in charge of the United Nation’s mission in Rwanda, wanted desperately to convince them that we, the West, cared, but he failed to shake our indifference. Peter Raymont’s new documentary, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire, is a somber meditation on one man’s unforgiving conscience.

In the decade since the swiftest genocide in human history, Dallaire has grappled with acute depression largely borne of guilt. His inability to prevent or arrest the machinery of death remains a haunting regret, one that led him to attempt suicide multiple times. The film, based on the book that bears the same title, follows Dallaire back to Rwanda to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the genocide, and this return to the scene of lost innocence offers a chance at a long-deprived catharsis. After all those years of turmoil, he’s finally able to confront the country that left him profoundly traumatized.

Ironically, it is Dallaire who feels the failure of the mission most profoundly. An informant in the Hutu government notified him of the impending bloodbath, and he was convinced he could thwart it if he were equipped with an expanded mandate and more soldiers. Not only did the Security Council dismiss Dallaire’s fears as alarmist, but it also voted to shrink the U.N. troops under his command following the ghastly murder of 10 Belgian soldiers. The U.N.’s capitulation emboldened the Hutu government, who had been revving up its supporters with anti-Tutsi propaganda and training them in the fine points of mass murder.

Dallaire, in an abortive, last-ditch effort to stave off the massacres, met with one of the architects of the genocide, and shook hands with the devil. As he tells it, the Hutu official’s hands were cold, bereft of the most basic human warmth; his eyes, by contrast, burned with the wild-eye determination of the demented. At this meeting, Dallaire threatened serious repercussions by the international community if the Hutu government ordered the interhamwe (civilian militia) to attack Tutsis. But the Hutus knew this was an empty threat, and when Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, the order to commence the slaughter was given. Dallaire was reduced to bearing witness to genocide.

Dallaire harbors unmitigated distaste for the U.N., which forced him to be a spectator to some of the most horrific violence the world has ever seen. A palpable unease sets in when we see the images of marauding genocidaires tracking down defenseless men and women and brutally delivering blows to their cowering heads. In one of the film’s most potent scenes, we watch as Dallaire surveys a room where countless skulls are arrayed neatly on tables, the craniums featuring the cracks created by the impact of machetes. A decade later, as he recounts the scenes of mutilated bodies strewn on the sides of roads and the accompanying stench they emitted, the old footage substantiating his grisly recollections appears before us. We can only fathom the endless repetition of these episodes coursing through Dallaire’s mind on a given day.

It’s when we fully appreciate the irrevocable psychological costs of Dallaire’s experience in Rwanda that we can understand his fierce condemnation of the international community. His remarks at the national university during the official anniversary commemoration, tellingly attended by low-ranking envoys from the world’s most powerful nations, remind us that the widespread indifference to the genocide had its roots in racism and crass political calculation. He instances the world’s rapt attention to the ethnic cleansing that took place in the former Yugoslavia as a comparison. As Dallaire tells the audience, the Rwandan genocide was viewed as just another outburst of tribal warfare between savage blacks in a country of no importance to the world’s leading powers. Though the U.N.’s intervention in the Bosnian War was belated at best, Dallaire notes that the West got involved in large part because the conflict was between white Europeans. The former U.N. man today has little patience for the diplomat’s linguistic obfuscations.

Even more than a decade later, those who could have made a difference during the genocide, like President Clinton, couch their expressions of regret in disingenuous rhetoric. We now know that Clinton followed a conscious policy of avoiding the word “genocide,” fearing such a classification would require him to act under the Convention on Genocide. Yet in his 1998 visit to the country, he apologized for failing to “fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.” By contrast, Dallaire is not preoccupied with attenuating his moral responsibility. To this day, he still grapples with an abiding sense of guilt. He can’t forgive himself, and we shouldn’t forgive ourselves, either.