Free Republic

Brian Steidle's only weapons against mass killing were his pen, paper, and camera. The former Marine captain catalogs what they caught in Darfur, Sudan, with quick-fire urgency: toddlers with their faces smashed in, men castrated and left to bleed to death, charred bodies of villagers locked in huts later burned down. Charged only with monitoring ceasefire violations in the war-wracked region, he soon grew weary of playing spectator to genocide. So after six months, the 28-year-old Mr. Steidle returned to the United States a month ago and launched his own offensive to stop the killing. In mid-March he criss-crossed Washington,...

John Doe in Hell by F. H. Buckley Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, Carroll & Graf, 562 pages, $30 The saddest story is of the impossibility of necessary things. It is necessary that the United Nations prevent genocide. It is also impossible for it to do so. The proof is Rwanda, where 800,000 people died in 100 days in the spring of 1994, in plain view of a small group of UN peacekeepers. And how did the UN answer the anguished pleas of the peacekeepers? It expressed concern, it expressed...

For seven days in February, Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general who commanded the United Nations peacekeeping forces in Rwanda 10 years ago, sat on a witness stand in a small courtroom in Arusha, Tanzania. Dallaire had served in Rwanda during one of the worst massacres in modern history. In 100 days, some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus viewed as sympathetic to them were murdered, and Dallaire was powerless to stop it. During those months, his waking hours were a living nightmare. The bodies were everywhere, strewn in fields and latrines and stacked in neat rows next to the road as if...

Romeo Dallaire often told people that once, in the cool, misty, green hills of Rwanda, he looked evil in the eye and shook hands with the devil himself. That haunting allegory became the title of his wrenching memoir of the ill-fated 1994 UN mission in Rwanda. According to his publisher, Shake Hands with the Devil, The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda is "a story of betrayal, failure, naivete, indifference, hatred, genocide, war, inhumanity and evil." It is a gripping story of a clash among African politics, old colonial prejudices and big power indifference that left Dallaire and a handful of...

UN dysfunctional, troops cowards, he says in new book Nearly 10 years after returning from a catastrophic tour of duty in Rwanda, Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire has come to realize that he has two sets of eyes. The first set -- he calls them his "outside eyes" -- act like a camera and recorded the horrific acts of the 1994 genocide. The second set -- the "inside eyes" -- look into his soul and won't let him forget what he saw. Lt.-Gen. Dallaire saw a great deal in Rwanda he would like to forget, and which has since led to two...

Salter Street to shoot Dallaire's Rwanda book By Greg Guy / Entertainment Editor Salter Street Films has secured the rights to retired lieutenant-general Romeo Dallaire's upcoming book, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Salter Street's Michael Donovan says he hopes to go to camera next year, and the project will be shot in South Africa. Dallaire's story caught Donovan's attention when a photo of Dallaire, who was found drunk on a park bench in 2000, ended up in newspapers across the country. "I wanted to know what led him to this state of distress and...