Film Review

SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL:

THE JOURNEY OF ROMÉO DALLAIRE

Directed by Peter Raymont  (White Pine Pictures, 2005)

Reviewed by: Adam Hunt (March 2006)

It was springtime and America was obsessed with murder. The year was 1994, and on the minds and TVs of the nation was a tragic tale of human failing, a grisly story of slaughter. Hundreds of thousands of dead Africans littered the fields and roads of Rwanda – murdered for no other motive than because they belonged to the wrong ethnic group. But it wasn’t the atrocity of Rwandan genocide that so captured the sympathy of Americans. It was the alleged murder of a pretty young woman and her lover by a former American football star that gripped the nation.

While Americans were following each installment of the OJ Simpson drama, the Rwandan genocide was claiming nearly a million victims. Most American citizens were oblivious. The American government – and that of other developed nations – was not. But the international community failed to act. They stood by and allowed terror to swallow the small African nation.

More than 10 years later amidst the saccharine wilderness of American pop culture and the heft of Hollywood commercialism, the genocide again screams for attention. This time it’s through the megaphone of film. First came last year’s Oscar nominated Hotel Rwanda. Now a soberly powerful documentary attempts to highlight this lowlight of human history.

Shake Hands with the Devil is an important warning to the world about self indulgence, misguided priorities and racism. But like the news of the genocide itself, it has had trouble competing with the dazzle of made-in-Hollywood fare. It has gone largely unnoticed in its limited release at the box office. This, even though the film revolves around a protagonist so utterly human, so full of good and so tragic that he could power a dozen Hollywood dramas. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire was commander of UN forces in Rwanda during the genocide that saw the killing of 800,000 people in 100 days. Dallaire began his mission in October of 1993 as head of a UN mission sent to help stabilize the country as they ended their civil war. His is a story that embodies both immense triumph and dreadful failure.

Through Dallaire’s emotional description of history, Shake Hands with the Devil takes us to where the problems began, noting that the Belgian colonizers had largely generated the racial tensions by assigning ethnic identity cards to Rwandans in the mid-20^th century. The taller, more-Western appearing citizens were generally assigned a “Tutsi” identity and served as administrators under the Belgian regime. Meanwhile the stout, broad-faced Rwandans were designated “Hutu” and were relegated to positions serving under the Tutsis. Audiences will be shocked to learn that the colonial racism of the time was so blatant that official nose measurements could determine a person’s destiny.

Flash forward to 1993 and through narration and conversation, Dallaire takes us through the grim modern day results of institutional racism. After years of strife between the Hutus and Tutsis, a peace accord was reached. The UN sent forces to monitor and implement the agreement between the largely Hutu government and the Tutsi rebel army.

With UN peacekeepers in place, the world community had a chance to prevent or, at least, arrest the genocide. But the UN refused to send new forces and denied the existing ones the ability to confiscate weapons or even defend themselves. Still stinging from nightly news clips of American soldier corpses being violated in Somalia, the US and others were unwilling to risk their own troops for the lives of Rwandans. So, while neighbours killed neighbours with machetes, neutered UN forces stood by. And ultimately stood down, knowing that those they left behind were consigned to death.

But Dallaire stood firm and did what he could with limited authority and ill equipped soldiers. He probably saved thousands of lives before accepting his orders to pull out. But this is no simple story of heroism. Dallaire has lived with the tortured memories of a failed mission. From the initial phases of the assignment, the UN tied Dallaire’s hands. Tipped off on the location of an important weapons cache, the UN bureaucracy forbid a raid that could have confiscated thousands of machetes and arms. Later, after the grisly killing of 10 Belgian peacekeepers the UN voted to shrink its contingent. Dallaire and his blue helmeted squad were forced to retreat from the country, leaving the Rwandans to the spreading bushfire of genocide.

Much of the film traces Dallaire’s return tour of the country 10 years after the UN bureaucrats pulled him out. After a decade of battling harsh memories, he returns to the country in a quest not just to show the world what happened, but to serve as therapy for his unforgiving conscience. The decade has not been kind to Dallaire. But after multiple suicide attempts, dizzying emotional turmoil and constant drug and booze therapy, he seems ready to face his past.

Dallaire comes across as a passionate, sensitive, honourable and imperfect hero whose human sympathy collided with the steely deviousness of evil. The evil comes in many forms, from the active murderousness of the genocidaires to the passive indifference of a world unwilling to spend political will to save Africans. Perhaps most startling is the banal form of evil on the part of Rwandans. Hundreds of thousands acquiesced to the campaign – a murderous frenzy with neighbours killing neighbours, friends slaughtering friends and colleagues murdering colleagues. Interviews with UN AIDS ambassador Stephen Lewis and others drive home the message that this is not just an African thing, it’s a human thing. Maybe all of us have the capacity to kill, says Lewis. Maybe all that’s needed to spur it on is fear for our own safety or an appeal to our dark inner instincts. Hutus were forced by their leaders to kill, otherwise they would be killed themselves. As Dallaire asks, how many people threatened with death would not kill?

Director Peter Raymont does not shy from scenes of death and gore. Grotesque shots of bloated corpses floating in a swamp and scenes of mobs hacking at victims with their machetes bring the audience as close as possible to the gruesome experience of genocide. But the film is not voyeuristic. It is painted with startlingly straightforward brushstrokes, most of them centered around the experience and memories of Dallaire. We learn of the events of a disaster and we experience the emotions of a man conflicted, but we never feel manipulated.

Most of the film’s power comes from the story itself rather than the storytelling. We are in a golden age of the documentary, with Michael Moore and others advocating for their politics through film. But Shake Hands is relatively artless and without the modern weapons of irony and glib editing. Perhaps the film could have affected more emotion with mainstream audiences if it had been less straightforward, more willing to exploit its material. Its purpose is to open eyes to the hidden horrific nature of man and the callousness of our system. It does so. But an audience used to quick cuts, emotional manipulation and overt grandstanding may fail to give its attention to this more sober attempt at messaging. Sadly, but in an age where leaders are selected on the emotional impact of their TV ads, the Rwandan genocide might need a stronger ‘sell’ than Shake Hands provides.

The most emotional scenes are not those of killing and corpses. They are of Dallaire himself confronting the past. He visits his former headquarters where thousands of Rwandans hid from the genocidaires.  He recalls playing tapes of Canadian singing icon Stompin’ Tom Conners, while scared Rwandans sang along, attempting to drown out the sounds of murder floating in from outside the compound. He remembers horrors with former colleagues, visits with the Rwandan Prime Minister and painfully surveys a room piled high with the skulls of victims. He recounts the grisly sights of mutilation and death and the stench of corpses. The film’s ghastly footage substantiates these memories and we wonder at how Dallaire coped with a decade of such horrifying memories attacking his conscience.

It may seem tactless to focus on the woes of a Canadian when so much tragedy befell a nation of Africans. But, as in Hollywood productions about international hotspots, Dallaire – as white, western protagonist – serves a vital storytelling function. He allows a western audience to relate to the tragedy. The human ability to write off other peoples as somehow ‘less-than-us’ is all too evident in this Rwandan disaster. But by focusing on Dallaire, the film helps sidestep these ‘-isms’ by allowing westerners to see through eyes of someone like themselves. While effective, it is sad that we can’t find more of ourselves in those of other races or cultures without having to assign ‘one of our own’ the role of dramatic protagonist. Using Dallaire as the focus allows us to better view the effects of racism, but it fails to challenge that racism to its core. The Rwandan experience becomes validated through the suffering of a white man. This ironically echoes the disconnect that led to the world’s inaction in the face of catastrophe.

But Dallaire’s story is important in exposing the developed world’s self-absorption and the broken UN bureaucracy. While he faces his demons in the film, the international community seems less willing to face theirs. Throughout the documentary, western political leaders are hung with the their own words. Bill Clinton claims in a speech that his administration was unaware of the horrible catastrophe as it was unfolding. But Dallaire’s repeated, desperate requests for an increased mandate and more soldiers disprove this. In one ugly scene, a grandstanding Belgian politician accuses Dallaire of abandoning the 10 Belgian peacekeepers to their slaughter. But in the face of so many dead, attacking the one man who tried to fight against his misguided orders appears callus and calculating.

It is Dallaire’s drive to tell the world about the genocide that proves so emotional and gives us this powerful documentary. He seems to understand the communicative power of film and uses it to warn the world that its self-indulgence can kill. We are in a time when millions of Africans are dying of AIDS. Poverty, conflict and disease kill thousands of people every day, all over the world. Yet we are more interested in American Idol than African suffering. We devote our attention to the tribulations of OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson or Paris Hilton. Yet we ignore real pain and misery on massive scales. Our national and personal priorities continue to orbit around self interest. While Shake Hands with the Devil cannot bring us back to the fateful moments when the disastrous decisions were made, it can help us refocus our priorities. And it will force the audience to ask an important question: how can we value one human life above that of another?