The ghosts of genocide

Politics: You may not have heard of him, but Romeo Dallaire is one of the great tragic heroes of the late 20th century. The 47-year-old French-Canadian general had never seen active service, let alone been in Africa, when he found himself commanding a ragtag United Nations force dispatched to keep an uneasy peace in Rwanda in 1993.

Great evil was about to erupt in this overcrowded equatorial backwater and Dallaire, for all his inexperience, could see it coming. Yet when he shouted for help, none came.

The result is described in unflinching detail in this memoir of one of the world's great atrocities. As he summarises: "In just one hundred days over 800,000 innocent Rwandan men, women and children were brutally murdered while the developed world, impassive and apparently unperturbed, sat back and watched the unfolding apocalypse or simply changed channels." Before the killing started in earnest, Dallaire asked for 5,000 men to enforce the peace and head off the looming catastrophe. But no-one was interested in risking soldiers in an obscure African dispute, especially the country that could do the most, the US, which was still smarting from a disastrous intervention in Somalia.

Dallaire had to make do with 2,500 staff, drawn from 26 countries, to police a country of eight million. The mission was run on a shoestring, equipped with hand-me-down vehicles from the UN's Cambodia mission and bereft of spare parts and even ammunition.

Even this minimal force saved scores of lives in daring rescues. However, the UN troops were prevented by a restrictive mandate from taking more decisive action that would have discouraged the machete-wielding Hutu extremists intent on murdering all Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

"While most nations seemed to agree that something had to be done, every nation seemed to have a reason why some other nation should do it," Dallaire recalls bitterly. "So there we sat, waiting for a promise to be kept, reduced to the role of accountants keeping track of how many were being killed." And when the world finally woke up to the genocide - when it was too late - Dallaire was damned as one of the chief scapegoats. Instead of being feted as a hero, he ended up a broken man, haunted permanently by the ghosts of genocide.

Consumed by guilt, he was unable to live a normal life on returning to his post with the Canadian army. Testifying subsequently at the "never-ending" war crimes tribunal on Rwanda brought back the nightmares, and Dallaire had to take stress-related leave from the army. In April 2000 he was forced out of the army and given a medical discharge.

Things got worse. In June that year he was found unconscious on a park bench in Quebec, having drunk a bottle of scotch on top of his medication for post-traumatic stress disorder.

This decline is only hinted at in Shake Hands with the Devil, which concentrates on events in Rwanda from the time he first arrived on a reconnaissance mission in July 1993 to his premature departure in September 1994.

The book has been a long time coming, partly because of Dallaire's mental problems. In the interim, a fine body of literature, both fiction and non-fiction, has been inspired (if that is the word) by the Rwandan genocide, from Alison des Forges's forensic examination of the killing to Samantha Power's exposé of US inaction.

Dallaire's book falls somewhere in between, combining as it does a blow-by-blow account of his 14-month tour of duty with an angry denunciation of those who let the killing go on.

Descriptions of the Rwandan genocide call for a strong stomach on the part of the reader, but thankfully Dallaire's narrative is not gratuitously explicit. Even so, there is no escaping in these pages the gruesome reality of mass murder, where his men regularly miscount the victims because their corpses have been cut up so much, and where pools of semen on the bodies of dead girls tell of gang rape as well as killing.

"They died in a position of total vulnerability, flat on their backs, with their legs bent and knees wide apart," he writes of one group of victims. "It was the expressions on their dead faces that assaulted me the most, a frieze of shock, pain and humiliation. For many years after I came home, I banished the memories of those faces from my mind, they have come back, all too clearly." When it comes to appropriating blame, Dallaire lets loose in a manner he would never have been allowed to when in uniform. He describes the UN as "an organisation swamped and sinking under the dead weight of useless political sinecures, indifference and procrastination". Kofi Annan, who ran the UN's department of peacekeeping operations in New York, is depicted as decent but ineffective.

He attacks aid agencies, when they eventually arrived, for getting "caught up in assessment missions and photo opportunities" and criticises the "over aid" that flooded into Rwanda when the world's conscience was pricked.

Ultimate responsibility for the genocide lay with those Rwandans who planned, ordered, supervised and conducted the killing, he asserts. However, Dallaire also targets France and the US for their lack of political will to enforce peace in the country, as well as his own failure to persuade the international community that Rwandan lives were worth saving.

"I couldn't help but feel that we were a sort of diversion, even sacrificial lambs, that permitted statesmen to say that the world was doing something to stop the killing. In fact we were nothing more than camouflage."

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo Dallaire Arrow Books, 562pp. £8.99

Paul Cullen is development correspondent of The Irish Times. He reported extensively from Rwanda in the 1990s