听 Rom茅o Dallaire is a troubled man. As commander of the UN forces in Rwanda in 1994, he saw the horror of genocide descend upon the country. Unforgettable documentary Shake Hands With The Devil follows him as he returns with his wife for the tenth anniversary commemorations of the massacre and he makes a pilgrimage to scenes of some of the worst atrocities. It's part public relations exercise, but also part therapy as Dallaire struggles to resolve his own personal traumas.
A million miles from the sanitised Africa of Hotel Rwanda, this is grim and, at times, gruesome stuff. Given only 450 troops (compared to the thousands sent to Yugoslavia at the same time), Dallaire was faced with the impossible task of trying to avert the genocide which was, as various interviewees attest, recognised by Western governments several months beforehand as inevitable. The West's complicity in the nightmare is driven home throughout but Dallaire's own sense of failure is palpable, reinforced by scenes of mounds of limp corpses or rivers choked with bodies which are brief but stain the memory long after they鈥檝e faded from view.
"A TRAGIC REMINDER"
However, all but one of the talking heads are white and the virtual dearth of Rwandan voices is a significant failure - a savage irony given the film's anti-Western stance. But then the film never sells itself as anything other than a very personal account. Despite Dallaire's stoical resilience to public criticism of his actions, when he's accused at a press conference of being directly responsible for the slaughter of eight Belgian soldiers, the impossibility of the situation he faced is all too apparent. It's also a tragic reminder of how that overused epithet, 'Never again', makes hypocrites of us all.
