Institute History
Description
Roméo Dallaire is a hero guided by compassion, and a man of tortured conscience. A career Canadian military man, Dallaire was the commander of the shamefully undermanned and undersupported United Nations peacekeeping mission stationed in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. Battling the world's indifference—and hoping in vain to stop Hutu from slaughtering Tutsi—Dallaire was forced in the end to stand by, without water, as an entire country set itself on fire.
Director Peter Raymont accompanies Dallaire as the general revisits the site of a failure not his own, but which clearly haunts him. With support, with men, with the authorization of the U.N., Dallaire might have stopped, stalled, or at least ameliorated the senseless slaughter that took place. That he could not do so has left him with a set of scars as deep as machete wounds.
Raymont gives us historical background on the tribal hatreds that ravished Rwanda, and an accounting of what has happened there during a decade's worth of healing. But what he gives us most richly is Dallaire himself, a man whose soul has been left tattered by the horrors he saw and might have prevented, and whose road to self-redemption is the most torturous journey he has ever undertaken.