Shake Hands With The Devil

A true Canadian hero, former General and now Senator, Romeo Dallaire, gets a chance today to bring justice to some of the top villains of the Rwanda massacres of 1994. 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by Hutu extremists. Two of them are now standing trial; Augustine Bizimungu, former Rwandan army chief of staff and Augustine Ndindiliyimana, who headed the country's military police.

This story from The Guardian:

"Both of the accused, who deny the charges including genocide, are well known to Gen Dallaire. He was appointed as the UN's force commander in Rwanda in 1993 and given the job of overseeing a peace accord between the Hutu-led government and Tutsi rebels. Less than a year later, President Juvénal Habyarimana's plane was shot down over Kigali airport and the government and army helped spark the mass killings.

"The UN security council rejected Gen's Dallaire's repeated requests for extra troops. Though his presence during the genocide is now seen as having helped save thousands of lives, Gen Dallaire was initially made a scapegoat for the international community's failure.

"In 1998 he returned to Africa to testify at the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda, a traumatic experience he describes in his book about the genocide, Shake Hands With the Devil. "The memories, the smells and the sense of evil returned with a vengeance," he wrote.

"Within 18 months he was given a medical discharge from the military. He is now a Liberal senator in Canada."