Summary Of Romeo Dallaire's Shake Hands With The Devil

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, a proverb that dates to c.1150, certainly comes to mind when one examines Rwanda’s 1994 civil war as told by Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire in his work Shake Hands with the Devil. Dallaire, the Canadian general that led the United Nations (UN) effort on the ground in Rwanda, leaves that country in the end feeling like he failed the Rwandan people. There are many reasons Dallaire, the UN and Western countries in general failed to prevent genocidal killings in Rwanda. Perhaps Dallaire was not the right leader to send into Rwanda and the UN should have looked for an African to lead the mission and perhaps someone with more political and peacekeeping experience. A fact Dallaire admits himself early in his book. Trained as an artillery officer, Dallaire was unfamiliar with Rwandan politics and was not knowledgeable in UN …show more content…
Demonstrating a clear lack of moral courage, the leaders in the UN failed on several fronts. Maintaining peace and preventing mass killings and genocide is the very reason the UN was created. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Secretary General of the United Nations, and Colin Keating, the head of the Security Council should be ashamed for their inability to garner international support for increased UN involvement. What is worse, once the decision to send a peacekeeping force was made, the UN should have done more to send properly trained and equipped personnel. Lastly, it is unnerving to read Dallaire’s reaction to his “Chapter 6 and half” mandate. What should have been outright rejection by Dallaire of the mandate’s blurred language, he seems quite proud of the middle ground he is given. The fact that UN was unable to provide clear language in the mandate contributed to the mission’s failure, the fault of course lying with that organization’s