GENERAL ROMEO D’ALLAIRE: A Broken Soldier, A Peacekeeper's Nightmare (Transcript) - and review of book "Shake Hands with the Devil"

Yesterday, I came across the following transcript while reading Crazy Canuck's blog Lost Below the 49th

The transcript, courtesy of an ABC online report dated February 7, 2001, is copied here, in full, for future reference.

A Peacekeeper's Nightmare (Transcript) (This is an unedited, uncorrected transcript.)

GENERAL ROMEO D’ALLAIRE I was just like any other person who is left homeless, screaming and yelling and crying and drinking.

TED KOPPEL, ABCNEWS He was a decorated general at the height of his military service. He’d been preparing for just such an assignment his entire career.

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE I am a field commander who had knowledge of the situation on the ground, and I was not able to convince my superiors in taking the proper action.

TED KOPPEL But what happened to his mission left him haunted and nearly destroyed him.

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE You will never forget this stuff. It has imposed itself in your brain forever.

TED KOPPEL Tonight, Broken Soldier, a peacekeeper’s nightmare.

ANNOUNCER From ABCNEWS, this is Nightline. Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.

TED KOPPEL I don’t know whether some times of day are worse than others for Romeo D’Allaire , but if so, this is probably one of the bad times, a time when he might be thinking about going to bed, to sleep. On the other hand, his is a nightmare that rarely ends. The memories are surely as bad or worse than any dreams might be. Romeo D’Allaire is a soldier who was caught in the middle, trapped between what he knew he ought to do and what he was being ordered to do. And no, if you think D’Allaire is a soldier taking cover behind another man’s orders, you are wrong. Almost alone among those who might have shared the blame for what happened, retired Lieutenant General Romeo D’Allaire accepts his blame fully. And the source of his personal anguish is not what he did, but what he failed to do.

He was, in the spring of 1994, field commander of a United Nations peacekeeping force. He is a Canadian. His force of peacekeepers was made up of international troops, a couple of thousand men, sparsely armed, adequate perhaps for policing a cease-fire, if both sides had been committed to observing it, but totally inadequate for stopping a campaign of genocide. General D’Allaire warned his superiors in New York. He predicted what would happen. He begged for help. But when his warnings were ignored, when help was denied, when the US government, which could have made a difference, refused to, then General D’Allaire and his men stood by and watched as 800,000 people were slaughtered. As Kevin Newman reports, Romeo D’Allaire has never been able to get those images out of his mind.

KEVIN NEWMAN, ABCNEWS (VO) It was a mission Lieutenant General Romeo D’Allaire was eager to command. He was at the prime of his military career when the United Nations put him in charge of its Rwandan peacekeeping mission. His command in Rwanda earned him a promotion when he returned to Ottawa. He was about to be Canada’s next chief of defense staff, the country’s top soldier.

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE Did a good job, not too bad. You know, work hard and you’ll get through it. Don’t worry, Romeo because—and all I was doing was driving myself right into the ground.

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) His career unraveled in the spring, the day after his 54th birthday.

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE I walked down one of the main roads here in Ottawa for about an hour. I stopped and bought a bottle of scotch. And I walked to the—to the park, sat on the bench, and I was reliving my mission. The booze was—I mean I was just drinking it like that out of the bottle. And I was just like any other rubby-dub or person who is left homeless, screaming and yelling and crying and drinking. I was screaming for them to kill me.

KEVIN NEWMAN So what happened? Well, the story of Romeo D’Allaire is much more than the personal tragedy of a broken man. As a peacekeeper, he found himself alone amid forces too powerful for one man to overcome, a nation in the madness of genocide and a world largely indifferent to it. It was and is the peacekeeper’s nightmare.

(VO) It begins, as it usually does, with the dream of something better. When the United Nations peacekeepers started arriving at Rwanda’s main airport in the fall of 1993, it was for a routine mission to monitor a cease-fire between two warring sides, the Hutu-led government and Tutsi opposition. It didn’t last.

SOLDIER (From file footage) Hit the deck!

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) Within months, UN soldiers were being ambushed and killed. Western governments panicked, ordering their soldiers to abandon the mission.

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE (From file footage) It’s simply going to get messier, I suspect, until we get a cease-fire.

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) At the UN peacekeeping compound in Rwanda’s capital, Romeo D’Allaire tried to regain control.

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE My force was withering. I had no capability to defend any onslaught. I mean, we couldn’t defend the airport. We couldn’t even defend the headquarters with enough troops because every minute passing, nations were—capitals were calling their troops and giving them orders.

1ST MAN (Foreign language spoken)

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) With the attacks continuing, D’Allaire heard reports that Hutu authorities were registering all Tutsis in the country for the purpose, he faxed UN headquarters in New York, ‘of their extermination.’ It was a warning of the genocide that would begin three months later. Hutu extremists butchered Tutsis and Hutu moderates by the hundreds of thousands. The roads were blood soaked and littered with bodies. Bloated corpses floated in rivers. Terrified refugees ran to camps so vast there were people as far as the eye could see. The killers entered the camps and murdered some more. The United Nations and its peacekeeping force of now barely 400 were helpless.

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE Now when you look at those people as they are dying of hunger and thirst, women having chil—children and dying right there, when you go to the sites where massacres had already been and the people are still, you know, injured and a bit alive, and you look at them, you know what you see in their eyes, what I saw in their eyes? Bewilderment. They saw me. They saw what was happening, and they were saying, ‘What happened? What happened?’

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) What happened is that Romeo D’Allaire’s warning was ignored. His desperate appeal to intervene before the killing started was rejected by UN peacekeeping headquarters, led at the time by the current secretary-general Kofi Annan, who did not believe that there was support among the members for more involvement. As a peacekeeper, D’Allaire was told he could not take sides. He had to remain impartial. He was ordered by UN headquarters to meet with the very same authorities who were sanctioning the killings.

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE How can I negotiate with a person who’s just finished slashing and hacking people? How do I make a joke with him? How do I plead with him? How come I didn’t take my pistol out and blow a hole right in the middle of his forehead? And do that day in and day out. What stops you from doing that? And is it moral to do that?

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) Journalist Carol Off, who has just published a book on UN peacekeeping, says institutionalized impartiality is its greatest failing.

CAROL OFF, AUTHOR The worst that the United Nations has done is create something that they call ‘moral equivalency,’ where the easiest way to keep a peacekeeping force operating in a country is to pretend that both sides are equal, to look at them as moral equivalents, to not see them as good guys and bad guys. And that’s where we failed in Rwanda. That’s where we failed in Bosnia.

UNDER-SECRETARY GENERAL UN PEACEKEEPING JEAN-MARIE asdf GUEHENNO I prefer to speak about impert—impartiality than—than neutrality.

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) The head of UN peacekeeping today says many hard lessons have been learned from the failures, but the guiding principle of involvement remains the same.

JEAN-MARIE GUEHENNO You can’t say that one side is right and the other side is—is wrong. You have to come to a—an arrangement—a political arrangement where the peacekeeping operation then can—can deploy.

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) For the soldiers involved, being impartial can be personally devastating. In Bosnia, the blue-helmeted UN stood by for years while violence engulfed the lives of thousands. The final horror was when Dutch peacekeepers stood passively as Serbs separated women and children from the men of Srebrenica. The men were then exterminated. Just as in Rwanda, UN peacekeepers were forbidden to act.

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE An individual sergeant or corporal who witnesses such actions who cannot use force goes through a mental crash. His moral values, his ethical values, his religious beliefs are all brought together and they’re all crashing against the rules of engagement and against the use of force, which he considers the natural means to solve it. And so that enormity, it—it’s your whole being.

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) All soldiers witness horror. Peacekeepers have the added burden of following orders to stand by and simply watch.

TED KOPPEL As the weeks went on, the horrors in Rwanda worsened, and General D’Allaire’s pleas for help grew more desperate. That in part two of Kevin Newman’s report when we come back.

ANNOUNCER This is ABCNEWS: Nightline, brought to you by...

(Commercial break)

TED KOPPEL General D’Allaire’s warning that Hutus were preparing to slaughter Tutsis by the thousands had gone unanswered by the United Nations and its members, and soon his warning was a reality, as Kevin Newman explains in part two of his report.

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) It went on for three months. The killers had nothing to fear. No one was stopping them even though news reports were revealing to the world the horror and magnitude of the genocide. General Romeo D’Allaire was now openly pleading for help.

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE I need food, medicine, and material for two million people, and I got to stockpile it now. Because, ladies and gentlemen, if I may say in conclusion, we’re all late. We’re already weeks and weeks late.

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) D’Allaire was saddled with peacekeepers from countries that sent no weapons with them or ways to house or feed them. There was only one country that could help. Only one country has the capability of moving troops and material fast enough and imposing order on chaos quickly, the United States. And it was refusing to get involved.

(OC) So by being involved, could the United States have prevented more of the killing in Rwanda?

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE Oh, absolutely. I only asked. I was down to barely 2,000 by then. And I asked only for 3,000 more combat troops. We could have nipped it.

KEVIN NEWMAN Why didn’t we act?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE You have to ask the people who were there. I’m—I don’t know. I find it inconceivable that the United States blocked action in the Security Council.

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) Richard Holbrooke was the Clinton administration’s last UN ambassador. Its first, Madeleine Albright, said during the months of killing, it was impossible to confirm that an organized campaign of genocide was under way. The State Department acknowledged it only as it was ending and 800,000 were already dead.

1ST WOMAN (From June 10 1994 file footage) We have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred.

2ND MAN (From June 10 1994 file footage) How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?

KEVIN NEWMAN The United States isn’t merely one member of the United Nations. It is arguably the most influential. So in the judgment of many, it is inconceivable that the United States didn’t know the magnitude of the Rwandan genocide since reports of it had been circulating in this building for months. The reasonable conclusion then is that the US chose not to help the peacekeepers. And the consequences of that were horrific.

(VO) America was still traumatized by another peacekeeping mission in another African country a year earlier, Mogadishu, Somalia, where 18 US rangers were killed and some brutalized.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE Mogadishu was a powerful driving force in American foreign policy ever since it occurred in October of 1993. It has deeply affected the shape of the American political debate over our involvement in peacekeeping.

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) From that point forward, the Clinton administration declared US troops would only be involved in peacekeeping missions that were in America’s national interest. The Bush administration is looking to tighten the definition further. Not getting involved, in the opinion of at least one peacekeeper, ensures the nightmare of Rwanda will be repeated.

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE That cost is the cost of being a world power. Abdicating that is turning into a self-centered power in itself. And it is going to shrink the superpower.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE We have two choices, abandon the UN and watch it get worse, or make the UN effective through high efforts to reform it.

CAROL OFF Other countries have come to terms with this and realized that we can’t only be interested in our own country, our own national security. We must intervening to—in the interest of humanity.

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) Almost five years after one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century, President Clinton went to Rwanda to apologize for not responding sooner.

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON (From file footage) We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name, genocide.

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) But Romeo D’Allaire is alone among the players in this tragedy in accepting responsibility for what happened. Tranquilizers and antidepressants, nine pills a day, which settle his mind, but not his conscience.

(OC) When people tell you you did all you could, what does that mean to you?

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE Nothing. In fact, I find it very negative. I am a field commander who had knowledge of the situation on the ground and I was not able to convince my superiors in—in—in taking the proper action to prevent this genocide. You live always with the dimension that you don’t have long to live. For me, it’s like, go to Carnegie Hall, huge, black curtains are coming. You know how they come to the middle and then they they swing around all around and, you know, envelope someone. And so they’re coming. You just don’t have much time. And so...

KEVIN NEWMAN Before you lose control again or what? I don’t understand. Before what?

ROMEO D’ALLAIRE To—To—to be either lucid or to kill yourself.

KEVIN NEWMAN (VO) This is Kevin Newman for Nightline in Ottawa.

TED KOPPEL When we come back, an American politician who tried but failed to gain support for General D’Allaire and the peacekeepers in Rwanda.

(Commercial break)

TED KOPPEL Until his retirement in 1997, Paul Simon served his home state of Illinois in the US Senate for 12 years. He is now a professor at Southern Illinois University and joins us from our Chicago bureau.

You tried to get in touch with the White House?

PAUL SIMON, DEMOCRAT, FORMER SENATOR ILLINOIS I did. I called—I chaired the Subcommittee on Africa. The ranking Republican was Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont. When we heard what was starting to happen in Rwanda, we got on the phone to General D’Allaire, who is—who is one of the few heroes in this whole tragic, tragic story. And he told us, he said, ‘If I can get 5,000 to 8,000 troops quickly,’ he said, ‘We can put a stop to this thing.’

TED KOPPEL Now, you called—you called the White House. Whom did you try to reach?

PAUL SIMON Well, I—what I did was, Jim Jeffords and I signed a letter. We had it hand delivered to the White House that afternoon urging immediate action, leadership in the Security Council.

TED KOPPEL And wher—where and when did you hear back?

PAUL SIMON And I didn’t hear anything for a week or 10 days. And then I called the White House and talked to someone. I remember I tried to reach Tony Lake, who was the only high level person in the White House who knew anything about Africa.

TED KOPPEL He was the national security adviser to the president at that point.

PAUL SIMON That is correct. And...

TED KOPPEL But—but he wouldn’t talk to you.

PAUL SIMON Well, he wasn’t there at that point.

TED KOPPEL Well, I mean, presumably they could have reached him, right?

PAUL SIMON Well, I don’t know what happened. Anyway, I talked to someone else. And the—the basic message was there isn’t a base of public support for doing anything in Africa. It was a tragically anemic response.

TED KOPPEL And you’re saying that—that the general was asking for somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 troops, I mean, in the—in the taped report that we just saw he said 3,000 would have made a difference. Why do you believe that that request was denied not just by the United States, I mean, you know, this would have been an international force presumably. We wouldn’t have had to supply all those soldiers or even the majority of them, would we?

PAUL SIMON Or maybe even none of them. If we had just asked the Security Council to act and we could have transported troops. But I would certainly have favored having some of those troops be American troops. I think the—the lesson of Somalia that you’ve heard about before, you know, we learned the wrong lesson. Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved in Somalia. It’s one of the finest things that former President Bush did.

TED KOPPEL In point of fact, later on, the United States did become involved in the Balkans and—and sent the US Air Force, together with other NATO air forces, to bomb over Kosovo and Serbia. I have to ask the question, and it is probably going to be the last question I can ask you on this, is—is there racism involved here? I mean, it sure seems as though there is.

PAUL SIMON I...

TED KOPPEL It’s easier to let Africans die than to let Europeans die?

PAUL SIMON It should be added that we moved much too late in the Balkans also. But, there is racism. There is another political factor and that is because of slavery, the roots of African Americans were severed from their countries in Africa. So when as a senator I visited in a Greek community in Chicago, people ask me what I’m doing to help Greece or visit a Jewish community, they ask what I’m doing to help Israel, Polish community, Poland. When I visit an African-American community, hardly anyone asks about Africa because there isn’t a sense of identity with Rwanda or Senegal or any other country.

TED KOPPEL Do you think we’ve learned anything at all?

PAUL SIMON I don’t know. And when I—when I hear that we’re only going to respond when there’s a strategic interest involved, humanity is our strategic interest. If we can—if we’re going to see massive slaughters of people and we’re not going to do anything, but we will move if there’s oil or something like that involved, then we haven’t learned much of a lesson.

TED KOPPEL Senator Simon, I thank you for taking the time to talk with us. Good of you to..

PAUL SIMON Thank you.

TED KOPPEL Good of you to come in.

I’ll be back in a moment.

(Commercial break)

TED KOPPEL Tomorrow on “World News Tonight,” a giant tobacco company spending more money publicizing its good works than it spends on the good works themselves. The money trail, tomorrow on “World News Tonight.”

And that’s our report for tonight. I’m Ted Koppel in Washington. For all of us here at ABCNEWS, good night.
- - -

Note to self to get the book Shake Hands with the Devil : The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda and explore similar items.

Review - courtesy Amazon.com:

Lt. General Roméo Dallaire is revered by Canadians everywhere. When I finished the book, I could understand why. Here was a man who screamed into the void. No one listened, no one cared, no one heard. But he never stopped screaming. He valued every human life. He wept for every human loss. He never gave up.
Stephen Lewis in The Walrus

Using the detailed daily notes that were taken by his assistant in the field, Gen. Dallaire painstakingly recreated the events leading up to the genocide and provides a minute-by-minute account of the eruption of bloodshed in April, 1994, as his pleas for reinforcements to UN headquarters in New York were ignored.
Stephanie Nolen, The Globe and Mail

Almost certainly the most important book published in Canada this year.
The Globe and Mail

Shake Hands with the Devil is both an exorcism and a scathing indictment. With all the powerful immediacy of an open wound, Shake Hands with the Devil is the most important non-fiction book of the year.
The Vancouver Sun

It [is] a story of international indifference and political failure, but it [is] also one of the most profoundly disturbing tales of the century.
The Ottawa Citizen

With considerable effort, pain and sacrifice, retired Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire has provided us with an insider?s account of how he struggled with one of the most horrific events in the 20th century while an indifferent world and an incompetent United Nations looked on. Hopefully, this well written and comprehensive book represents the last chapter in Dallaire's painful Rwandan journey.
The National Post

Shake Hands with the Devil [is] one of the year's, if not the decade?s, most important events in Canadian publishing.... Dallaire gives us something to believe in. That he has done so with his eyes and heart wide open to the worst our species has to offer is a monumental achievement. Shake Hands with the Devil delivers this remarkable man and his story to us.
Vancouver Sun; Times-Colonist (Victoria)

[O]n the enormously important issue of Third World development and the moral obligation of the Western world to assist the dispossessed, [Shake Hands With The Devil] is a powerful cri de coeur for the powerless, and a gut-wrenching description of what really happened during those awful months 10 years ago.
The Toronto Star

Dallaire, the proud, dedicated Canadian in charge of that mission, a man of deep humanitarian conviction.
The Ottawa Citizen

The very spareness of the prose reflects a supreme effort at self-mastery and heightens the anguish described....He manages to convey the full horror of the genocide in relatively few passages of extraordinary, wrenching lyric power....This is a book to read to understand what genocide means, to relect on the failure of *humanity,* and to be inspired by the courage of the few in the face of genocidal horror and international indifference.
The Gazette

With the best intentions in the world, we asked Romeo Dallaire to inhabit an unspeakable world for us, to witness horrors beyond imagining, to carry a moral burden that no one person should ever have had to shoulder. He has now done us the immeasurable service of setting out in print what price that burden exacted on his mind and his soul.
The Gazette

Anyone wondering whether the United Nations still has a role to play ought to be reading Romeo Dallaire's long-awaited account of the Rwandan massacre. Shake Hands with the Devil is a harsh, uncompromising account of a great catastrophe - one the great powers saw coming and chose not to prevent. This is an important book.
Edmonton Sun

As painful as Shake Hands with the Devil is to read, it is impossible to imagine the agony it author had to go through to write it. What he witnessed, what he was incapable of stopping, would have broken anyone. Dallaire?s condemnation of the free world is stark and uncompromising. It is impossible to read this memoir, written in meticulous detail, without feeling sick and without feeling rage.
Calgary Herald

[A] powerful story of leadership and sacrifice, of moral and physical courage, and a deep love of humanity. In short, a story of a fine soldier and a hero.
The Edmonton Journal

This is an important book because it is a factual record of the genocide of recent times?. So we encounter with him the misery and chaos and the sheer unadulterated terror of living through an unnecessary and avoidable atrocity?. Read this book and rediscover if you have lost it, your capacity for moral outrage.
Winnipeg Free Press

Shake Hands with the Devil, Dallaire?s powerfully eloquent reconstruction of genocide, [is] a haunting story of evil?.That he has survived and found a way to write about those events is a triumph. Not a book for the faint of heart, perhaps. But Shake Hands with the Devil should be mandatory reading for Western leaders and citizens of every country that pays lip service to the peacekeeping ideals and the sanctity of human life.?
The Chronicle-Herald (Halifax)

[A]n almost day-by-day chronology of the horror?. Dallaire has written an emotional, often bitter book, moving and tragic.
The Telegram (St. John's)

[Dallaire's] passionate, disturbing memoir of those awful days is harrowing reading. It is a savage book. But his humanity shines through, unlike so many others tainted by the blood of innocents.
?The Calgary Sun

[Shake Hands with the Devil] is an affidavit for an indictment - an indictment of the murderers, the hamstrung, bureaucratized UN, and the self-absorbed developed world?. If Shake Hands with the Devil serves as an introduction to the Rwandan genocide, even for those only voyeuristically in what happened to a Canadian general, it has surpassed its original intent. For all this, Romeo Dallaire emerges as our post-Cold War hero.
Quill & Quire

To read his soul-searching book is to feel a rush of empathy with its author. It is also to confront uncomfortable truths. Shake Hands with the Devil is an uncommonly courageous work, wrung from the depths of despair and wrought in plain, forthright prose. Abroad in the world, the Canadian humanitarian needs a saint?s compassion, a scholar's knowledge, and a soldier's strength. Bravely and passionately, Romeo Dallaire has shown us where to start.
Literary Review of Canada

In his book, Shake Hands with the Devil, Dallaire has documented the callousness and inertia that precluded military intervention in Rwanda. The book is a scathing indictment of the United Nations and its member countries and a dire warning of the consequences to be expected when we choose to not get involved.
?The Hamilton Spectator

Retired Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire has writeen a book that is sure to mark all those that read it. Shake Hands With the Devil is a book with a message. LGen Dallaire?s *cri du coeur* is a must read.
The Edmonton Sun

There's something about [Shake Hands With the Devil] that is Shakespearean - this sincere soul with a solid heart who tries to do the right thing while the rest of the world cynically covers their butts.
Michael Donovan, interviewed in The Globe and Mail

[a] remarkable book. I hope Canadians will read this book?Dallaire does not spare us any of the details, for which, once again, thank you!...Read this book! Thank you, again, Dallaire ? not just for the book, but also your service to Canada and the world.
The Guelph Mercury

Product Description:
On the tenth anniversary of the date that UN peacekeepers landed in Rwanda, Random House Canada is proud to publish the unforgettable first-hand account of the genocide by the man who led the UN mission. Digging deep into shattering memories, General Dallaire has written a powerful story of betrayal, naïveté, racism and international politics. His message is simple and undeniable: “Never again.”

When Lt-Gen. Roméo Dallaire received the call to serve as force commander of the UN intervention in Rwanda in 1993, he thought he was heading off on a modest and straightforward peacekeeping mission. Thirteen months later he flew home from Africa, broken, disillusioned and suicidal, having witnessed the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in only a hundred days. In Shake Hands with the Devil, he takes the reader with him on a return voyage into the hell of Rwanda, vividly recreating the events the international community turned its back on. This book is an unsparing eyewitness account of the failure by humanity to stop the genocide, despite timely warnings.

Woven through the story of this disastrous mission is Dallaire’s own journey from confident Cold Warrior, to devastated UN commander, to retired general engaged in a painful struggle to find a measure of peace, reconciliation and hope. This book is General Dallaire’s personal account of his conversion from a man certain of his worth and secure in his assumptions to a man conscious of his own weaknesses and failures and critical of the institutions he’d relied on. It might not sit easily with standard ideas of military leadership, but understanding what happened to General Dallaire and his mission to Rwanda is crucial to understanding the moral minefields our peacekeepers are forced to negotiate when we ask them to step into the world’s dirty wars.

Excerpt from Shake Hands with the Devil

My story is not a strictly military account nor a clinical, academic study of the breakdown of Rwanda. It is not a simplistic indictment of the many failures of the UN as a force for peace in the world. It is not a story of heroes and villains, although such a work could easily be written. This book is a cri de coeur for the slaughtered thousands, a tribute to the souls hacked apart by machetes because of their supposed difference from those who sought to hang on to power. . . . This book is the account of a few humans who were entrusted with the role of helping others taste the fruits of peace. Instead, we watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the blood of the people we were supposed to protect.

Product Details:
• Hardcover: 584 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf (October 10, 2004)
• ISBN: 0786714875

Customers who shopped for this item also shopped for these items:
• Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda by Michael Barnett
• Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwanda Genocide and the International Community by Linda Melvern
• When Victims Become Killers : Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda by Mahmood Mamdani
• A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide by Linda Melvern
• We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch
• The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa by Bill Berkeley.