Posted on 09/24/2003 9:31:37 PM PDT by Stultis
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 started to follow up on it," Donovan said in an interview Tuesday.
"What I found out was that he was the hero of Rwanda. It was a story that Canadians didn't know about, that one of our own had acted very nobly and bravely in the face of horror and tragedy. But as a consequence, he suffered a great deal personally - both he and his family."
Dallaire was the Canadian peacekeeper who drew the world's attention to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
His pleas for reinforcements were ignored by his superiors, now-retired Canadian general Maurice Baril and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
- See Dallaire / A2
*** ADDED THE FOLLOWING COPY ***
It was as a soldier obeying orders that Dallaire stood by and watched as 800,000 Hutu and Tutsi civilians, along with 10 Belgian peacekeepers, were tortured and killed.
Donovan says he met with Dallaire about 2 1/2 years ago and found out he was writing a book about the mission.
The book will be released next month through Random House in Canada.
"In my opinion, the book is earth-shattering, over 500 pages," Donovan said.
"He's a quiet, restrained soldierly witness to this horror. I don't think that anyone who has any kind of feeling would read that book and not come away shaken and changed."
When Donovan met with Dallaire, he said he was struck both by "the raw courage and the sense of higher purpose that he exudes, and with a sense of vulnerability."
For the first time since 1993, Donovan will work with his brother, Paul, on the film project. Paul Donovan is adapting the story for the screen.
Their last project together was Life With Billy, the story of an abused Nova Scotia housewife, Jane Stafford.
The Dallaire film project is only in the script stage.
"One of the plans is a CBC mini-series and the other is a feature film - we have to find out which is the optimum," he said.
After their meeting, Donovan said Dallaire was keen to have his story become a movie, because as a soldier he believes in the concept of a mission.
"He deeply believed in that, and at a certain point his mission was to lead the UN forces in Rwanda," Donovan said.
"And then that mission changed, so when he was there he became a witness to a genocide. But now the mission is to tell the world about this chapter we'd rather forget. That's his mission as a soldier."
Donovan said there's a second mission to the story - to generate understanding of post-traumatic stress syndrome as a consequence of war.
"When I got a sense of the sincerity of these two missions, I couldn't help but say, 'Where do I sign up?' "
Donovan said the Dallaire affair is the type of challenging story he likes to tell.
"The purpose of making movies is not only to use the skills that I've built up over 25 years, but in this case, it is to bring them to this particular mission," he said.
Since Dallaire's Rwanda mission, Donovan said, there has been insufficient recognition of him as the great Canadian hero that he is.
"I personally think that in 50 years, we would look back and say, 'He was the greatest Canadian hero,' " he said.
Since winning an Academy Award in March as co-producer of Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, Donovan said he has become more determined than ever to make challenging film projects.
"That's an opportunity, and I feel the pressure that I must strive toward. There are no excuses.
"I don't want to be confronting St. Peter and for St. Peter to say, 'Now, we arranged for you to get that Oscar. What exactly good did you do with it? Anything? Play a lot of golf?'
"So I have to be able to say, 'I did this movie or that movie, or at least I tried.' "
The U.N. refused to expand the role of Dallaire's mission from "peace keeping" to "peace making," which would have allowed him to go after the arms catches. Instead he was ordered not to do anything provocative that might undermine the "peace agreement".
Shackled at every turn by the U.N. (aided and abetted by France, Belgium and Clinton) he repeatedly tried to warn the World of what was going to happen, and then of what was happening. This man did everthing humanly possible to mitigate the tragedy in Rwanda, pressing his authority to the limit and often beyond. He led his dangerously small forces in patrols time and again to save who he could. But mostly he could only watch the horror unfold -- the bodies (and machetied body parts) piling up day after day, then week after week, for a hundred days -- forbidden to act (though he did, tirelessly, desperate and illequiped) by the world's guarantors of "collective security".
It's a nightmare even to imagine. He left that place a shattered ghost of a man. The Rwandans he commanded gave him a hero's parade as he left, but in the jeep sat a figure of stone with a thousand mile stare, a man whose soul was frozen. There were no parades when the hero returned home. There was a courts marshall instead. (IIRC. There either was one, or it was threatened.) The guarantors of "collective security" had tried to suppress the warnings they had received from Dallaire, to cover up their own perfidy or fecklessness and make him the scapegoat. In any case there was no conviction at the courts marshall, if it actually occured, and the truth eventually came out. But too few have heard that truth, and it was almost too late for a broken man who had been broken again.
Buy this man's book. His story deserves to be heard.
Letter From Rwanda (justice, reconciliation & non-ethnic politics loathed by France, U.N., NGOs)
Well, I think there's some Victoria Cross winners at Dieppe and in Normandy that might dispute that, but still...this man's story needs to be told. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans needlessly died because Kofi and his fourth-rate dictator buddies at the UN refused to let Dallaire and his forces do what had to be done. They would rather a million innocents die than allow "the white colonial man" take up arms against an African nation, no matter how corrupt the leaders or how desperate the situation.
Rwanda is the classic example of why UN "peacekeeping" only breeds war. Peacekeeping doesn't work. The truest peace is the peace of the victor, not the peace of the referee.
}:-)4
Disturbing article about Rwanda, France, UN, Belgium, Annan, and Clinton (Read this one)
The behaviour of the French was worse than that of the Belgians. Eager to become the pivotal power in the Great Lakes region, they aided and abetted the massacres at every turn. The Akazu death squads had received military training from the French; Hutu extremists were always assured of a warm welcome in Paris and the flow of French arms to the Hutus continued throughout the genocide. Whenever the Tutsis regrouped sufficiently to threaten Hutu power, France mounted a discreet military intervention to save its friends. The French troops who arrived towards the end of the 1994 massacres were thoroughly confused by the reality of the million Tutsi dead: they had been told they were coming in to prevent a massacre of Hutus by the Tutsi minority.
Agreed. And I suspect this man's moral clarity may have been damaged along with his spirit. I expect I might not agree entirely with his perspective, but I'm gonna read his book anyway. There is also a documentary I saw about him and the events in Rwanda awhile back that was quite good, but I can't remember the name of it.
ACK! I missed that! Too bad.
Well then he'll probably blame it all on America. And there is plenty of blame due, for Clinton. His admin had an explicit policy of keeping American, or even non-American U.N. forces, out of Rwanda. The U.S. was key in shaving the U.N. force down from 1,500 (IIRC) to 500, and blocking any upgrade from "peace keeping" to "peace making" status (which would have allowed intervention against the genocidaires).
But of course the role of THE FRENCH (and the Belgians) will be minimized or ignored. THE FRENCH had intelligence and extensive contacts in Rwanda that we (Americans) did not. Those F*&^#ers knew this was going to happen. Indeed the militant faction that planned the genocide were clients of THE FRENCH, and continued to recieve assistance, and arms, from THE FRENCH even as the genocide proceeded.
The leftleaning NGO (Toyota Taliban) types also play up the blame-America-and-leave-French-culpability-in-the-small-print aspect. See this webpage on Rwanda, for example (although it does have some good links).
And the libs, of course, dependably and consistently draw exactly the wrong message from the whole Rwanda affair: that preemption was called for. That early and determined action could have been taken at very low cost.
Dallaire has said, I think, that the events in Rwanda diminished in him the simple certitudes of the Cold Warrior. But in fact those certitudes, and the instincts that followed from them, were exactly correct. He wanted to openly expose the fact that the Rwandan government's commitment to the peace agreement was a sham and a deadly ruse. True, that might have ended the peace, but at least the rebels could have fought instead of being butchered, along with noncombatants, in the hundreds of thousands.
Coffee and Klintoon, however, thought that the peace must be "preserved" even if it meant ignoring the truth. (See also: Palestine, Oslo, Arafat.)
Au contraire! Turning a blind eye to African brutality, and even ooh-ing and ahh-ing over jack-booted and blood-smeared African dictators, is fully in the tradition of (actual) African-American "civil rights" leaders. And Pat Robertson.
| April 7 at 9pm |
| The Last Just Man (DOCday U.S. Premiere) – Directed by Steven Silver. This Canadian documentary offers a forthright, lucid and heartbreaking account of Rwanda’s spiral into genocide in the early 1990s. The story is seen largely through the eyes of Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the UN peacekeeping mission charged with maintaining the fragile truce between Rwanda’s Hutu majority and its Tutsi minority. In the fall of 1993, Dallaire warned the UN that Hutu extremists were stockpiling guns and machetes. But in the wake of the notorious murder of American soldiers in Somalia, the UN and its member nations – particularly the U.S. and Great Britain – were wary of intervention, and Dallaire was forbidden to act. Though Dallaire ultimately defied UN orders to evacuate Rwanda, he could not halt the Hutu armies and militias that massacred some 800,000 people in a mere 100 days. The Last Just Man will also air on the 17th at noon, the 20th at 7:45am and 3:00pm, and the 25th at 11:00am. |
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