Shake Hands with the Devil

Content Warning: This section contains graphic description of violence, sexual assaults, and human remains. 

American journalist and diplomat Samantha Power begins the Foreword by citing Night, an autobiographical account of the Holocaust by Elie Wiesel. Power compares Roméo Dallaire’s experiences to Wiesel’s story of Moshe the Beadle, a Jewish man from Sighet, Transylvania. Moshe the Beadle was forced into a cattle car along with other Jews and sent out of Transylvania. The Jews were then forced by Nazis to dig their own mass grave while others were shot. Miraculously, Moshe the Beadle survived and returned to Sighet, but his story was not believed. Similarly, Power sees no one believing Dallaire’s own account of the events he witnessed. When Dallaire tried to warn authorities of the horrors that lay ahead and described atrocities as they happened, he was ignored and written off as a “loose cannon” (ix).

In her Foreword, Samantha Power focuses on the issue of Bureaucracy and Political Needs versus Humanitarian Intervention. She argues that Dallaire had foreknowledge of the Rwandan Genocide but was ignored by the United Nations. However, she suggests the UN did not act because of the reluctance of member states to risk the lives of their own citizens following violent incidents involving peacekeepers in Somalia, referred to as the “Mogadishu Line” (x). While Power describes Dallaire as riddled with doubt and guilt as a result of The Dilemma of Moral Culpability that he faced, she still presents him as a heroic figure who continues to speak about the ongoing need for governments to work together to prevent atrocities and to offer humanitarian aid where it is urgently needed.

Power describes the “primary artifact” of the Rwandan Genocide as the “fax written by Dallaire three months before the start of what would become the fastest killing campaign of the twentieth century” (ix). Dallaire composed the fax on January 11, 1994 and sent it to Kofi Annan, who was at the time the head of the UN peacekeeping office in New York, called DPKO. Dallaire described how an anonymous informant named “Jean Pierre” working for the Interahamwe, a Rwandan militia, reported that members of the Tutsi ethnic group were being registered and marked for death by extremists from the Hutu ethnic group. In addition, Jean Pierre warned of a plot to assassinate several Belgian peacekeepers to pressure the Belgian government into withdrawing their soldiers from the peacekeeping mission. As Power recalls, Annan suppressed the fax because he believed the U.S. and its allies would be unwilling to cross the Mogadishu Line, i.e. to turn the peacekeeping mission into an armed conflict.

Power notes that Dallaire gives himself an “unsparing reckoning” (xiii) in the memoir, questioning his actions and his compliance with orders to stand down. As a result of what he witnessed during the Rwandan Genocide, Dallaire developed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and became suicidal. In the years following the Rwandan Genocide, Dallaire testified at human rights tribunals where participants in the genocide were being tried. He refused to stop testifying, even at the risk to his own mental health and even though he was discharged from the Canadian military for medical reasons. Dallaire persevered because, Power says, Dallaire sees reminding the world of the Rwandan Genocide as his mission. Since the world’s governments do not wish to be reminded of Rwanda, Dallaire “refuses to go away” (xvii).

Power’s situating of Dallaire’s book reflects her own political and ethical ideology. Power was the United States’ ambassador to the UN under President Obama. She remains a staunch advocate of foreign intervention for humanitarian reasons. Most notably, she played a pivotal role in convincing President Obama to help intervene militarily in 2011 against the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. By comparing Dallaire’s experiences to the Holocaust, Power argues that such interventions are necessary and justified if they prevent atrocities or human rights violations. Power exhorts governments to listen to the people who warn about potentially developing genocides, and supports Dallaire’s position that this should be done even at the expense of the “reasoned self-interest” of world governments (xiii).