Shake Hands with the Devil--General Dallaire, the UN, and the Heart of Darkness

The story of the UN fiasco in Rwanda is well known. Even in its broadest outlines it engenders disgust and despair. The numbers of people slaughtered and the brief time span of its occurrence is so numbing that we can hardly contemplate it. And this was no shadowy conflict with invisible terrorist armies; no this was openly played out on every city street and every rural hamlet. The killing was brutal and personal. Neighbour killing neighbour, Ostensibly an ethnic conflict, it was one where the frenzied killing targetted any moderate Hutu, as well as the Tutsi. So extremist were the Interahamwe--the rag-tag youth militia, that even being part Hutu didn't save you.

Lt. General Romeo Dallaire saw this holocaust in its infancy and despite his numerous, detailed reports, was to see it in its grotesque adult form. Besides the gut-wrenching descriptions of refugee churches being bulldozed and the casual mutilations of women and children, there was the cynical, power jockeying of the UN personnel and their leaders. From the begining, Dallaire's mission was an orphan. Even some of the basic necessities to carry out his limited role were withheld. The peacekeeper component was flawed. There were Bangladeshi troops, who were only sent for the pay they would draw from UN coffers; then there were the Belgian commandos, who had come straight from fighting in Somalia. The latter were tough, but undesciplined. On top of those impediments, there was political intrigue. The only countries that could field an emergency rescue force had been bloodied in Somalia and Bosnia. There was no stomach for committing tens of thousands of soldiers to this backwater with no strategic interest. The French did have an interest however. They went so far as to demand Dallaire's removal, because he had pointed out that the French had military helping the Revolutionary Guard, a Hutu extremist segment of the army. In fact, the French were the only one's who seemed to care about Rwanda.

The signs that something horrible was brewing could be seen everywhere. For me, one of the most chilling scenes was the student registration process. Suddenly, for the first time ever, students were asked to give their ethnic backgrounds, so they could be targetted for extermination later. Dallaire found out from an informer that the President / military strongman, Gen. Juvenal Habyarimana, was secretly arming various bands of militia for a future elimination of his political foes, along with the entire Tutsi population. Dallaire also discovered a plot to ambush Belgian UN troops. When he transmitted this knowledge to the UN's Kofi Annan and Canadian General Baril, they told him to stay out of the internal hostilies. Annan went as far as to demand Dallaire immediately tell President Habyarimana about the plot. As the president had probably authorized the ambush, doing that would be nonsense; besides, it would put his informer in grave danger. Dallaire knew where some of the hidden militant armories were and could have seized them. Much like HItler could have been stopped in early 1932, swift action might have nipped this massacre in the bud. Instead, when the signal was given over the radio in Kigali, the weapons were handed out and the vast butchery began. Mind you, much of the death came at the end of a machete or club. "Ridding Rwanda of the Inyenzi"--the Tutsi cockroaches--was seen as righteous by the mobs.

To read Shake Hands with the Devil, is to understand why nothing is going to happen in Darfur. It follows that old adage, "A black killing a white is homocide; a white killing a black is justifiable homocide, and a black killing a black is...really, who cares." The extent and savagery of the African civil wars have hardened our hearts. Three million dead in the Congo, children with amputated limbs in Sierra Leone, finally peace in the southern Sudan with the Christian blacks, immediately followed by ethnic cleansing of Muslim blacks in Darfur. It gets to be too much. There is no sliver of light piercing that Heart of Darkness. Even if we could stop the dozen or so wars now raging there, HIV/AIDS, a slow Black Plague, is wiping out millions--this after 20 years of the Uganda example as a gallows sermon Perhaps Dallaire's message is that only swift intevention has a hope. Once the bloodlust gets the upper hand, intervention is doomed.

A documentary was made of the hundreds of thousands of prisoners in Rwanda, who participated in the mass murders. Even though an admission of guilt and a repentance would have reduced their sentences, almost all refused to comply. Their unrepentant hate stare was the image that stayed with me. Those were the faces that haunted Dallaire long after he came home.

© Bud Talkinghorn




Abortionist accused of eating fetuses Kansas City clinic closed as grisly house of horrors June 14, 2005, WND.com via Cotillion.

---