Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

When one looks back at Rwanda or now at the Congo – still on and still the terrible pestilence and destruction of human life – our enormous concentration on Iraq, we want to ponder that question: are all humans human, or are some more human than others?

In January 1994, General Dallaire sent out the alarm with credible information of an impending catastrophe. The United Nations and the membership of the Security Council failed General Dallaire, it failed the people of Rwanda, and it failed humanity. “Never again” was what we had all said. General Dallaire told us that “never again” was happening again, and the Security Council played word games with the Genocide Treaty. It was one of the darker moments of history.

Amid escalating violence, Dallaire faced a nearly impossible situation. The United Nations repeatedly refused to send him reinforcements, and his force shrunk from 2,600 soldiers to 800 as nations withdrew their troops in the first days of the slaughter. Dallaire and his remaining forces stayed, trying to save as many people as they could while the killing continued, witnessing acts so inhuman that the general later suffered severe post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Almost fifty years to the day that my father and father-in-law helped to liberate Europe -- when the extermination camps were uncovered and when, in one voice, humanity said, ‘Never again,’ -- we once again sat back and permitted this unspeakable horror to occur,” Dallaire writes in the introduction to his recent book Shake Hands With the Devil, in which he chronicles the brutality he witnessed as the world simply stood by.