"I missed the Rwandan genocide, I'm embarrassed to say," filmmaker Peter Raymont readily admits. "Like many people in journalism and filmmaking. I remember vague reports of tribal warfare in some obscure African country."
The tribal warfare was actually one of the modern era's worst genocides: In an organized campaign of mass extermination, with neighbor killing neighbor, an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 1994 as the international community stood by and did nothing.
But one man tried.
Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian who was commander of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Rwanda at the time of the massacre, sent cable after cable, warning after warning of the impending genocide to the United Nations and the international community, to no avail.
He was in fact forbidden from intervening militarily to stop the genocide, although he did set up protective zones in various places -- a football field, a hotel -- and saved thousands of people. He returned to Canada later that year, and over the next several years suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress; on at least one occasion, he attempted suicide.
Dallaire returned to Rwanda in 2004 to mark the 10th anniversary of the genocide, a journey captured by Raymont in his new movie, "Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire." Opening Friday in Los Angeles, it is both a profile of Dallaire -- featuring interviews with people who worked with and knew him in Rwanda -- and a chronicle of his two-week journey back to the land he once called "paradise on Earth."
Raymont, who is also Canadian, was living in Ireland at the time of the genocide. He and his wife, Lindalee Tracey, had recently completed a documentary about neo-Nazi groups recruiting Canadian high school kids. "We got some nasty phone calls when the film came out, including death threats and people saying, 'We know where your kid goes to day care.' " Moving to County Cork allowed them to "get out of the rat race for a while."
On the subject of Rwanda, he added, "I was reading newspapers and watching a bit of television, but mostly trying to get away from the madness of the world. But that's no excuse. I missed what was happening, and I feel kind of horrible. I really do believe that we are our brother's keeper."
Rwanda, however, stayed with Raymont, after the genocide, after he and his family returned to Canada. "I realized that the film to make as a Canadian would be a film on Gen. Dallaire."
