Shake Hands with the Devil

Content Warning: This section contains graphic description of violence, sexual assaults, and human remains. 

American journalist and diplomat Samantha Power begins the Foreword by citing Night, an autobiographical account of the Holocaust by Elie Wiesel. Power compares Roméo Dallaire’s experiences to Wiesel’s story of Moshe the Beadle, a Jewish man from Sighet, Transylvania. Moshe the Beadle was forced into a cattle car along with other Jews and sent out of Transylvania. The Jews were then forced by Nazis to dig their own mass grave while others were shot. Miraculously, Moshe the Beadle survived and returned to Sighet, but his story was not believed. Similarly, Power sees no one believing Dallaire’s own account of the events he witnessed. When Dallaire tried to warn authorities of the horrors that lay ahead and described atrocities as they happened, he was ignored and written off as a “loose cannon” (ix).

In her Foreword, Samantha Power focuses on the issue of Bureaucracy and Political Needs versus Humanitarian Intervention. She argues that Dallaire had foreknowledge of the Rwandan Genocide but was ignored by the United Nations. However, she suggests the UN did not act because of the reluctance of member states to risk the lives of their own citizens following violent incidents involving peacekeepers in Somalia, referred to as the “Mogadishu Line” (x).