Two vs. the devil

Peter Howell

Lt.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire bared his soul and gave his nametag and medals to actor and fellow Quebecer Roy Dupuis for his role in portraying the former UN forces chief in the Rwandan genocide film, Shake Hands With the Devil   The man and the actor: Lt.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire is shadowed by Roy Dupuis, who plays the former UN security chief in the film Shake Hands with the Devil.

When the time came for the military man and the movie star to bid each other adieu, they gave each other a spontaneous hug. Neither of them expected it or necessarily even wanted it. But that's how emotional their meeting had been. The embrace was between Rwandan genocide hero Lt.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire and Roy Dupuis, the actor and fellow Quebecer who plays him in Shake Hands With the Devil, the biographical drama that premiered yesterday at the Toronto International Film Festival. The hug came after an intense five-hour discussion between Dallaire and Dupuis in summer 2006, a final debriefing as Dupuis was heading off to Kigali to seek dramatic truth in recounting the events there of the spring of 1994, when upwards of one million Rwandans died in a genocidal eruption of ethnic hostilities.

"I'm not the hugging sort, and yet it was very spontaneous," Dallaire, 61, said yesterday, as he and Dupuis spoke to the Star hours before their film's premiere. "It was a mangy day like today, it was rainy, and it was a spontaneous communion between us that left me so serene."

Dupuis was equally moved. In playing Dallaire, who is now retired from the military and sits in Parliament as a Liberal senator, he wanted to do justice to a figure whose humanitarian bravery had already been recounted in several films, but whose personal ordeal remained untold on screen.

"He was pretty much the last person I hugged before leaving for Rwanda," said Dupuis, whose leather jacket and lumberjack shirt yesterday played sartorial counterpoint to Dallaire's suit and tie. "And that was a very, very important meeting for me. He was very generous and opened up to who he is."

For added authenticity, Dallaire gave Dupuis the military nametag and medals he wore during his time in Rwanda from 1993-94, when he was the Force Commander of UNAMIR, the United Nations peacekeeping force that tried to stop a genocidal tribal war by Hutu extremists against rival Tutsis and Hutu moderates.

Dallaire and his men were hopelessly outnumbered by hordes of murderous Hutus, and also hampered by foot-dragging UN bureaucrats and a world more interested in O.J. Simpson than African suffering. Still, Dallaire's peacekeepers did all they could to curb the bloodshed, an atrocity that weighed so heavily upon Dallaire, it left him suicidal and with a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder. He recounted his experiences in an award-winning book, also titled Shake Hands With the Devil.

Dallaire knew that Dupuis would do a better job playing him than American actor Nick Nolte did in Hotel Rwanda, in a role so small it was almost a cameo. Dallaire and Dupuis both come from small Quebec towns, and he's an admirer of how well Dupuis played another Canadian icon, hockey great Maurice Richard, in the movie The Rocket. Dallaire also felt the dramatic version of Shake Hands With the Devil, directed by British helmer Roger Spottiswoode (Tomorrow Never Dies), would be more revealing than Peter Raymont's 2004 documentary of the same name. The doc opened at that year's TIFF along with Hotel Rwanda, a drama starring Don Cheadle that Dallaire didn't much like.

Dallaire said he was astonished to learn from the makers of Hotel Rwanda that they hadn't read his book for research. "I told them, `Well, you're producing fiction, because you've exploited only one component.' It had no depth and in fact it played with history." He feels this new dramatic recreation of the events of spring 1994 in Rwanda comes closest to telling the full story. He's not worried that people might think the story has already been told.

"This film is fact ... and if there are other movies on Rwanda, hey, how many movies have they made on the Holocaust?"

Spottiswoode's Shake Hands With the Devil firmly puts the blame on red tape and global indifference for exacerbating and extending the Rwandan genocide. Dupuis and Dallaire both said it's time the message really got out, and they hope people will take the film to heart.
"It was pretty much all the fault of the UN and all those big countries that are in it. I never felt that we were exploiting the suffering of the Rwandans to make a movie out of it, but we were really telling a story about what we did wrong. I think it's the first time that it's so clearly explained."

Dallaire didn't visit the Kigali set of Shake Hands With the Devil, as he had for the 2004 documentary. He didn't want to intimidate Dupuis, or put added pressure on him.
"He had to live the experience by doing it, and he didn't need another general looking over his shoulder."

But Dallaire let it be known he was just a phone call away, if Dupuis had any questions.
"I never called him," Dupuis said, "but I knew he was always there. He was the one keeping me going, because it was tough. But having it tough was food for the character.

Dallaire's only real regret about the new movie is that it took so long to make. Still, he and Dupuis are both hopeful that the film will find an audience at theatres, and then become a DVD that schools can use as a teaching tool.
"Whatever you see is always something that lasts," Dallaire said.

If only ...

The Internet was in its infancy and unknown to most people in the spring of 1994, when Lt.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire was struggling to alert the world to the Rwandan genocide. But if the Net had been going full steam, Dallaire would have used it become a real thorn in the side to the United Nations wheel-spinners who refused to act.
"I could have blogged everyday. I could have talked to people right there. The only weapon I had was to get the information out to the world, and to hell with all the other structures because they were not responding."

Dallaire was frustrated not only by the UN bureaucrats who pretended to see and hear no evil, fearful of inflaming the situation, but also by media editors worldwide who were more interested in things like the O.J. Simpson murder drama, big news at the time.
"We had guys being ambushed getting stories out to Kigali through my headquarters in Uganda to Nairobi and back to Canada. People didn't see much of the gore, because when it hit Toronto, New York, Atlanta, London and elsewhere, the editors were chopping the shit out of it. "Why? Because they had O.J. Simpson, Tonya Harding kneecapping her opposition, they had Nelson Mandela winning his election coming in … the main editors were deciding and a lot of the (genocide) stories were dying."