Shake hands with the devil

Just finished reading this book written by Romeo Dallaire who was the U.N. commander in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994. In just 3 months, from April through June, 800,000 people were killed. Dallaire relates on an almost day by day basis the events as he saw them and his actions in attempting to stop the killing.

That may sound like a real bummer of a book but it's not, this guy can write. Despite the heartache and losses there are small victories and human touches that kept the U.N. force going. Faced with an impossible bureaucracy (the U.N.) and international indifference, Dallaire and his small force soldiered on in an impossible situation.

There's plenty of blame to go around for these events and Dallaire dishes some out. He's also defensive of his own actions but who can blame him. The message is that these are human beings here, not just more dead Africans.

This crisis still lives on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). At the end of the Rwanda civil war about 2 million refugees had flooded into the DRC, many near the city of Goma. Today the slaughter still continues in that area and now excacerbated by the struggle to control the DRC's mineral wealth.