Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (2003 original; edició 2004)

I wrote about it in my blog here. Please go there to read my notes. All I can add to what I wrote is that this is definitely a must-read. ( )

Dallaire was a Canadian peacekeeper sent by the UN as commander of the peacekeeping effort in Rwanda a few months before the genocide in 1994. It was very interesting (and extremely frustrating at times) to read about what happened from this perspective. It was the perspective of the people on the ground who were trying with what (very) little resources they had (not nearly enough) to find peace in the country before the genocide and civil war broke out. ( )

I found this book very hard to read, not due to the gruesomeness of the events that occurred, but because this book is a very detailed account of Dallaire's mission to Rwanda, which began 9 months or so before the genocide begins. As such, there is a lot of things I found really boring...and frustrating. Frustrating for the most part because of the bureaucratic nonsense that Dallaire was up against every single day of the mission. This is worst than anything Kafka could have come up with.
The intro and first few chapters were really great. The next 2-300 pages I found difficult to get through, since nothing but bureaucratic headaches and dealing with idiots were occuring. The last 1-200 pages were really great, and the last chapter was fantastic. If not for the importance of this book, I would have given it 3/5 stars. ( )

This book has taken me a while to finish because of its complexity and its subject matter which is the 1994 civil war in Rwanda where 800,000 citizens were killed in a few months. The author, Canadian General, Romeo Dallaire, was the head of the UN peace keeping force who tried to maintain the peace between the minority Tutsis and the majority Hutus. The Tutsis, displaced for years in Uganda were trying to regain their territory while the Hutus, with the support of the French, were attempting to remain in charge. The Arusha Accord was a complex peace agreement meant to alleviate the refugee problem and define the governance model through free elections. The Rwandese Patriotic Front (RFP) was the Tutsi dominated, disciplined military movement raised in Uganda led by Paul Kagame. It eventually became the government after the civil war. The Rwandese Government Forces (RGF) less disciplined contained factions that were murderous, drunken hotheads who were clearly responsible for much of the genocide.
Dallaire was caught in the middle of this political, military, humanitarian crisis which unfolded in the spring of 1994. Although he was strongly supported by Canadian, African and some European peacekeepers, his
real fight was with the intransigent bureaucrats at the UN in Manhattan.
After his return to Canada in 1994, Dallaire was haunted by memories and images of the barbarity he had witnessed and suffered from PTSD and suicidal thoughts. He makes some very important comments in the final chapter about the role of peacekeeping today and what the lack of human rights and choices does to the next generation caught up in the repression, poverty and brutality of tyrants. ( )