Hero, Failure, or Casualty? A Peacekeeper's Experience of Genocide

Shake Hands with the Devil:
The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
by Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Roméo Dallaire
(with Maj. Brent Beardsley)
Random House Canada, 2003 562 pp $19.95

Hotel Rwanda
screenplay by Keir Pearson and Terry George
directed by Terry George
United Artists, December 2004

In late April 1994, Roméo Dallaire, head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), drove through a village outside the Rwandan capital, Kigali, stopping repeatedly to clear corpses from the road.

The putrid smell of decaying bodies in the huts along the route not only entered your nose and mouth but made you feel slimy and greasy. This was more than smel...

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] *A point not mentioned in the film but recorded elsewhere in profiles of Rusesabagina is that he sent several detailed reports to the office of President Bill Clinton, which appears to contradict Clinton’s mantra since the genocide (and repeated in his 2004 autobiography) that he didn’t know what was happening in Rwanda until it was too late to save anyone.