Waterstones Shake Hands With The Devil
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Price: £12.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD' Indisputably the best account of the whole terrible Rwandan genocide.' R. W. Johnson, Sunday Times' Angry, accusatory and extremely moving.' Caroline Moorhead, Spectator When Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire received the call to serve as force commander of the UN mission to Rwanda, he thought he was heading off to Africa to help two warring parties achieve a peace both sides wanted. Instead, he and members of his small international force were caught up in a vortex of civil war and genocide. Dallaire left Rwanda a broken man; disillusioned, suicidal, and determined to tell his story. An award-winning international sensation, Shake Hands with the Devil is a landmark contribution to the literature of war: a remarkable tale of a soldier's courage and an unforgettable portrait of modern warfare. It is also a stinging indictment of the petty bureaucrats who refused to give Dallaire the men and the operational freedom he needed to stop the killing. 'I know there is a God,' Dallaire writes, 'because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists and therefore I know there is a God.' Read Roméo Dallaire's profoundly sad and moving book.' Madeleine Albright, Washington Post. Waterstones Shake Hands With The Devil - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9780099478935
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9780099478935
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Author: Edward B. Crutchley
Rating: 5
Review: Although the savagery of the 100-day Rwanda genocide in 1994 tempts one to consign it as something that could only have occurred on the Dark Continent, the underlying problems that set it in motion could have existed anywhere where attitudes had been allowed to become so polarized, people feared so much for their security, and the situation allowed to so degrade. Romeo Dallaire and his modest team on the ground were able to sniff out fairly early who the bad guys were and what they were up to, but somehow nobody outside Rwanda really seemed to want to know. The French, who had previously mentored and supported the baddies, and still furtively maintained some advisors among them, overtly (I choose my word carefully) caught on too late, towards the end, when they put into action operation Turquoise to try to protect their retreating protégés. Belgium, who had once ruled the country, had the best equipped troops on the ground but fled at first blood. Most other nations, even those present in Rwanda, failed their duties, with the notable exception of Ghana and Tunisia whose troops exhibited such bravery and professionalism. It is a damning account of how elements of the large institution that is the United Nations managed to work nine to five in every sense of the term while the Tutsi population was being slaughtered by an astonishing ten thousand a day. Such attitudes might yet be explicable if the UN had been overwhelmed with resources, but Romeo Dallaire never ceases to describe the poor and often shoddy resources at his disposal, and this would make you think that more people in New York and elsewhere, as well as politicians closer to the epicentre, would have stood up to be counted with better result. And then you realise that it may not be as simple as that. If every UN commander on the ground were to have the resources that he felt he needed, his troops would be much more likely to get drawn into the fray and become another belligerent. It is made clear that this risk was foremost in the minds of those in New York. Fortunately, in stating his case, Dallaire avoids this becoming a trap. He shows that he never asked for excessively large means to do his job, and instead refers to a number of specific missed opportunities that could have critically altered the course of events that followed. Too many of the misses appear due to inadequate decision making by the UN at critical times rather than resources. I started this book expecting it to be a condemnation of Kofi Annan and his team, who proved to be excessively cautious and unprepared to make the necessary moves when these opportunities arose. Dallaire chooses to avoid this, but why on earth did Annan not go to Rwanda himself? Why on earth did no-one at the UN get the sack? Dallaire seems to belatedly wake up to the potential role of the media in helping his situation. It may be simply due to the way that he structured his book, but key items such the evil RGF propaganda radio station, RTLM, and on the other side the positive help he got from Mark Thomson of the BBC and the publicity-savvy Bernard Kouchner, only appear half way through the story, once the killings had already been going on for weeks. Impossible to understand is why the RTLM radio that influenced the genocide so much was allowed to continue. It urged Hutus to seek out Tutsis; at one time it even encouraged the assassination of Dallaire himself. Dallaire briefly explains how he personally did not have the means to jam or destroy it, but surely its transmissions were being listened to by countries on the UN Security Council, especially France and America. They did nothing until the body count reached 800,000, perhaps more, by which stage even one of the Americans calculatingly hinted that his country might have accepted the loss of 10 of their (absent) peacekeepers' lives. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has since gone to work to nail the direct culprits. Certain key people outside Rwanda decided not to follow through, even though they must have been aware of what was happening. For the sake of the future they should be asked to account for their inaction; making apologies is not enough.
Author: Simon Clayton
Rating: 4
Review: I love Rwanda but didn't discover it until many years after the genocide. You can sympathise so much with Dallaire's endless frustration and be incredibly angry with the pathetic performance of the first world nations who either let it happen, or (in the case of the French) colluded with the extremists doing most of the killing. Mostly of course, while reading this book, your heart goes out to the Rwandan victims whose only crime was their tribal background. The book I am currently writing has a strong Rwandan element to it and this work has helped inspire me. I hope that Roger can finally find peace from the mental torture that he must must have suffered.
