[R-G] Rwanda, "Shake Hands with the Devil". General Dallaire's film fails "Reality Check"

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7400

Rwanda, "Shake Hands with the Devil". General Dallaire's film fails  
"Reality Check"
by Robin Philpot
Global Research, November 22, 2007

During elections, the media like to do “fact checks” or “reality  
checks”. The exercise should be applied to all historical films.  
Especially when the people concerned proclaim it “the film of record”.
That is how Canadian Liberal Party Senator Romeo Dallaire appointed  
for life described his recent film Shake Hands with the Devil based  
on his book with the same title. His film sorely fails any serious  
fact check.

Let’s begin with the end. If you waited until all the credits scroll  
by, you will see it is copyrighted ©Dallaireproductions. It means two  
things: 1) Senator Dallaire incorporated a film company so as to get  
a cut of the profits; 2) he approved every single comma in the script.

That means that he also approved another line in credits. As with  
other historical films, Shake Hands with the Devil has a “everybody  
lived happily ever after” in the credits. In Dallaire’s film, you  
read: “Since July 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Front has governed  
Rwanda in a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation.”

Nothing could be further from the truth! And everybody knows it.

When Rwandan prisons have been overflowing with some 80,000 prisoners  
for more than a decade without trial and without clear charges, you  
cannot talk about “forgiveness and reconciliation”. You cannot talk  
of “forgiveness and reconciliation” when you know about the murderous  
war that the Kagame regime inflicted and continues to inflict on the  
neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo since 1996. Nor when you  
think of the many massacres and selected assassinations carried out  
by the Rwandan army and its agents in Rwanda, in other African  
countries and elsewhere in the world. Nor can you talk about  
“forgiveness and reconciliation” when you think of the cold-blooded  
assassination of Quebec priests Claude Simard and Guy Pinard by RPF  
agents. Fathers Simard and Pinard were eliminated respectively in  
October 1994 and February 1997 – Pinard while he was celebrating mass  
just as Archbishop was assassinate[d] – because they dared to  
denounce crimes committed by Paul Kagame and the Rwandan army.

That sentence in the credits shows the current bias of Senator  
Dallaire in favour of the Kigali regime. In that he is acting  
coherently with his behaviour during his stay in Rwanda in 1993 and  
1994. Shake Hands with the Devil is thus a film of propaganda in  
favour of a regime that is highly contested in central Africa and  
elsewhere in the world. Now to the film.

It abounds with factual errors. Dallaire offers three cases that  
supposedly prove that there was a planned genocide in Rwanda: 1)  
killings to the south of the demilitarized zone that are carefully  
attributed to militias close to the former government; 2) the famous  
Jean-Pierre who is supposed to have been the source of the fax Philip  
Gourevitch of the New Yorker dubbed the “genocide fax” (January 11,  
1994); 3) a sentence put in the mouth of Belgian Colonel Luc Marchal  
who says that Theoneste Bagosora, deputy Defence Minister, had  
declared that all the Tutsis had to be eliminated.

Three stories about real events, and three stories that are  
completely false.

Killings to the south of the demilitarized zone. In the film Dallaire  
and his assistant and villagers are seen investigating bodies found  
in November 1993. It is let on that the people were killed by agents  
of pro-government parties and not by the RPF. In fact, Senator  
Dallaire and his assistant Beardsley are the only people who defend  
this point. It has never been brought or defended in court anywhere  
in the world. What’s more, Abdul Ruzibiza, a former comrade in arms  
of Paul Kagame and lieutenant in the Rwandan Patriotic Army who  
defected, contradicts Dallaire on this point. In his book published  
in French in 2005, he explains that the RPF committed these  
massacres, he names the people who did it and why the RPF did it. On  
page 208 of his book Rwanda L’histoire secrete he explains that these  
incursions by the Rwandan Patriotic Front were aimed at getting  
people excited, destabilizing the country to show how weak the  
government was, and to give the RPF justification to take power by  
force.

The film devotes a good 15 minutes to “Jean-Pierre” whose real name  
is Abubakar Turatzinze. The scene shows a man telling a UN official  
of lists to eliminate people and the arms hidden that would make it  
possible to eliminate them in no time. This story has been around the  
world but it [h]as proven to be totally false. This has come out  
clearly through sworn testimony and evidence produced at the  
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha. The man  
operated like a double agent, having contacts with RPF intelligence  
services and with government and pro-government people. The story  
became important because of Philip Gourevitch of the New Yorker, who  
in turn was being fed by his brother-in-law, Jamie Rubin, Secretary  
of State Albright’s main mover and shaker. The people who know what  
happened then, the people who actually met Abubakar Turatzinze (Jean- 
Pierre), say that there was no truth behind it. Despite these proven  
facts, Dallaire persists in repeating the story.

The third so-called proof of planning is a statement given to Luc  
Marchal. Colonel Luc Marchal reported to Dallaire and headed the  
Belgian troops in Kigali in 1994. Whereas the film has that Luc  
Marchal telling Dallaire him that Bagosora claimed that the only  
solution was to eliminate all the Tutsis. Marchal has never witnessed  
to this effect, neither in Arusha, nor in Belgium, nor in the book he  
published in 2000. On this point, Mr. Marchal says the event took  
place, but that Bagosora had said to both Marchal and Dallaire, who  
was also there, that Rwandans would not be able to get along as long  
as the RPF and its army continued to exist. That is completely  
different from what Dallaire tells us in the film. What is more, Luc  
Marchal has publicly asked Dallaire since 2004 to join him in  
demanding an international neutral inquiry into the April 6 shooting  
down the plane that was bringing former President Habyarimana back to  
Kigali. Dallaire never answered that call.
Three events supposedly proving that a genocide was planned, and all  
three are false. It is also useful is good to pit Dallaire’s film  
against his own statements. On September 14, 1994, he took part in an  
important French-language television program in Montréal. Dallaire  
was just back from Rwanda. When asked a question about a plan to  
exterminate Tutsis, here’s how he answered.

“The plan was more political. The aim was to eliminate the coalition  
of moderates….. I think that the excesses that we saw were beyond  
people’s ability to plan and organize. There was a process to destroy  
the political elements in the moderate camp. There was a breakdown  
and hysteria absolutely…. But nobody could have foreseen or planned  
the magnitude of the destruction we saw.” (Note: people who  
understand French can listen to these excerpts on the Montreal CIBL  
community radio web site http://cibl1015.com/node/52742 ).

That is how Dallaire spoke when he just got back. “Nobody could have  
planned it all”. Who to believe, General Dallaire two weeks after he  
gets back, or Liberal Senator Dallaire in a Hollywood-style feature  
film made 13 years later.

During the same program, he explained his understanding of genocide  
in response to a young Rwandan student who had details and wanted to  
know if Dallaire believed that there were a lot of Hutus as well as  
Tutsis who were killed.

Dallaire: “I would say there was a genocide, but a genocide of a  
national political nature, and it was not purely ethnic in nature,  
which resulted in the death of many many Hutus and as well as many  
Tutsis.”

So a “genocide” that was political in nature, not only ethnic. Many  
Hutus and many Tutsis. If you say that today you get accused of  
revisionism and negationism. But they are Senator Dallaire’s own words.

A principle in the study of history maintains that you should always  
trust sources closest to the events. They are less likely to have  
been bended, warped and distorted by the pressure of foreign policy  
and official history. That principle should be respected regarding  
Dallaire.

In another scene right out of a John Wayne film, Dallaire talks on  
the phone to UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He decides  
to hold the line, refusing to leave even though, back in those cushy  
New York offices, people are calling for withdrawal.

Most likely, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who I interviewed twice, never  
spoke to Dallaire. The film makes him look as though he is the  
“International Community” deciding to leave Dallaire the hero to fend  
for himself. The fact is that Boutros-Ghali made it very clear who  
that nameless “International Community” really was. In his book and  
in interviews he made it very clear.

Boutros-Ghali: “The Rwandan genocide is 100% US responsibility…. The  
United States, with the energetic support of Great Britain, did  
everything they could to prevent the UN from sending troops to Rwanda  
to stop the fighting. And they suceeeded”.

Dallaire uses an old trick. He talks about some vague nameless  
international committee, blaming everybody, which is the equivalent  
of blaming nobody. In that, he is lying and deceiving us because  
according to Boutros-Ghali who had to deal with US and UK  
representatives in the Security Council, we know who the culprits were.

Dallaire also gives himself the great role in that story. However, in  
September 1994, he sang a totally different song. In that program,  
Dallaire boasted about having recommended the withdrawal of the  
troops. “I took part in the decision to withdraw the troops… I  
recommended that they leave”.

The same goes for his attacks on France who led a UN backed  
humanitarian intervention in Rwanda called Opération Turquoise,  
deployed on June 22, 1994. Attacks on France run well in English  
Canada, in England and in the United States. But here is what  
Dallaire wrote to his superiors about the French operation Turquoise  
in a letter dated July 4, 1994.

“I wish to commend the states for the swift action they have taken in  
response to the Security Council resolution 929 to put in place the  
operation code name “Operation-Turquoise”, designed to achieve the  
humanitarian objectives of the UN in Rwanda. … It is beginning to  
emerge that even at this rather early stage of its deployment, this  
operation has started to generate a positive impact by responding  
effectively to the humanitarian needs of civilians at risk inside  
Rwanda where the operation has deployed and begun to work.”

He can shout and scream now about iniquitous France, but at the time  
he did nothing but commend France. On this point, people should start  
asking the French what they think happened instead of saying that our  
appointed Liberal Senator speaks the gospel only. At a recent forum  
in France, the French General Jean-Claude Lafourcade who headed the  
Operation Turquoise in Rwanda and Congo in 1994 was asked about his  
relations with the UN troops and the commander Romeo Dallaire. He  
answered in a straightforward manner. He said, “Romeo Dallaire was a  
“général de salon” which could be translated as an operetta general.  
He added: “I quickly realized how partial he was in favour of the  
RPF.” He later insisted that “Dallaire was incompetent” and that for  
“efficiency and safety reasons” he would never have put the troops  
under Dallaire.

Shake Hands with the Devil is a factually inaccurate hagiographic  
autobiography. A hagiography is the life of a saint. But in this case  
it is the life of a saint, but written by the saint himself.

It makes Romeo Dallaire into a international hero, but only in  
Canada. It is time for serious reporters to realize that they have  
allowed the wool to be pulled over their eyes, and in turn have  
pulled the wool over our eyes.

Robin Philpot is a Montréal writer. His most recent book in French is  
entitled “Rwanda: crimes, mensonges et étouffement de la  
vérité” (Rwanda: crimes, lies and cover-ups), Les Intouchables, 2007.  
He can be reached at rphilpot at sympatico.ca. His 2004 book Rwanda  
1994: Colonialism dies hard is posted in English and in German at  
www.taylor-report.com.


  Global Research Articles by Robin Philpot