Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (review)

A decade has passed since the Rwandan Genocide—have any of its lessons been learned? While this is not a question Lt. Gen. Dallaire (Force Commander of the UN Assistance Mission to Rwanda, 1993-94) asks in his book, it is a question this reviewer was left with. A career soldier and bilingual French-Canadian, the author was sent to Rwanda in 1993 to assume command of the UN force tasked with implementing the Arusha Accords, an agreement between the Rwandese Patriotic Front and the Government of Rwanda to end their civil war, demobilize, and establish democracy and respect for human rights. The agreement collapsed and a nightmare began.

While the conflict is often simplistically portrayed in ethnic terms, a struggle of the majority Hutu against the Tutsi minority which occupied a privileged status under the Belgian colonial regime, it was also a struggle between moderate and extremist factions in both groups, manipulated by some foreign powers (especially France) and neglected by others (such as the United States) who had no direct interest at stake in the conflict. Dallaire's memoir of the failure of the Arusha Accords, and the country's plunge back into civil war and genocide is one of both horror and heroism, selflessness and selfishness, disgusting brutality, and courageous compassion.

The author describes his own background as a French-speaking officer in the Canadian army, including his country's own separatist troubles in the 1960s and 1970s. After tracing his own career as an artillery and staff officer, he focuses on the events following his acceptance of the command of the UN assistance mission in Rwanda. The problems he encountered in dealing with an inept UN bureaucracy, duplicitous politicians and generals, and self-serving diplomats, are balanced with his concern for the people of Rwanda, and his frustrated efforts to first prevent and then stop the madness into which their country descended. Dallaire also honestly describes the toll these events took on him personally, including depression and thoughts of suicide brought on by post-traumatic stress disorder.

When asking the question "have any lessons been learned from this?", I quote pages 498-99:

The original U.S. assessment for UNAMIR 1, which the Americans committed to pay to the UN but never did, would have been no more than $30 million. The cost of UNAMIR 2 would have been only slightly more. By deciding to support the refugee camps in Goma, the U.S. paid ten times that amount—$300 million—over the following two years. If we reduce to the petty grounds of cost effectiveness the entire argument over whether the U.S. should have supported the United Nations in Rwanda, the United States government could have saved a lot of money by backing UNAMIR. As to the value of the 800,000 lives in the balance books of Washington, during those last weeks we received a shocking call from an American staffer, whose name I have long forgotten. He was engaged in some sort of planning exercise and wanted to know how many Rwandans had died, how many were refugees, and how many were internally displaced. He told me that his estimates indicated that it would take the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans to justify the risking of the life of one American soldier. It was macabre, to say the least.

I read these lines after noting the media's outrage over the Bush administration's slow and stingy response to the Tsunami. Where was the the New York Times ten years ago? As far as I can tell, they have not reviewed Dallaire's book.