Shake Hands With the Devil is a must see film for anyone with a conscience. Based on the book of the same name by Canadian Lt. General Roméo Dallaire, it recounts his tour of command in Rwanda in 1993/94 on a United Nations peacekeeping mission and his return visit last year commemorating the 10 year anniversary of devastating genocide.

If the film suffers from anything, it is that both Dallaire and filmmaker Peter Raymont, presumably sensitive moral men, shrink from showing the abomination up close and personal, although it certainly was both for Dallaire. The sense is that it would have been simply unwatchable. Recalling the release of Alain Resnais Night and Fog, and its images of the Jewish Holocaust, it was so powerful, in part, because film images so graphic and soul numbing were a novelty. It is a central point of Raymont’s film that we have now seen so many real life horrors that we can quite smoothly turn off the TV and go eat dinner. This is precisely what the film suggests that the members of the UN did after voting to deny increased support to Rwanda in 1994.

The incidents recounted in the critically acclaimed Hotel Rwanda only begin to describe the magnitude of the wholesale slaughter of neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend. Internal conflicts boiling over after years of neglect or deliberate agitation, 800,000 people were massacred in just 100 days. Men, women, and children were shot, beheaded, clubbed, and macheted, the numbers often reaching 10,000 murders every day. Those interviewed suggest that the Catholic Church could have stopped it, the Belgian imperialist forces could have stopped it, and the UN could have stopped it. To the shame of the developed, wealthy, and powerful nations, they just plain had little interest. The US was more fascinated by a single bloody glove in the O. J. Simpson trial. In Europe the conflict in Yugoslavia was more worthy of international support, and in spite of efforts to get the world’s attention primarily through the BBC, this horrific event went almost unnoticed.

Adding insult to injury, the 10-year memorial held last year in 2004 drew relatively minor attention and no apologies from the nations who turned their backs on the bloodbath. The touch of theatricality by director Raymont when lightning bolts electrify the sky over the ceremony may be forgiven. Held in a stadium that ten years earlier held tens of thousands of Rwandans, with no fresh water, dead and rotting bodies amid the human debris, Dallaire is among the speakers who have not forgotten or forgiven this monumental global failure.

The catalyst for the movie is Dallaire’s book and return to Rwanda to participate in the remembrance. Filmed over a two week trip with his wife, Elizabeth, he revisits the people and places that have haunted him for ten years. The trip and the opportunity to tell his story seem to have been a somewhat purging experience. There is little evidence in the film to refute anything Dallaire has to say, a politically motivated and preposterous attack against him notwithstanding.

Coming from a seasoned and self-possessed military man, the account is all the more powerful. Decidedly from the viewpoint of a westerner, it is not the story from the Rwandan perspective, but rather of the lingering shame and helplessness of a man who, in spite of helping to save thousands of lives, struggles to escape the guilt of an apathetic world.

Through one man’s journey to make sense of the unimaginable, we are compelled to question our own complicity through neglect or apathy as evidenced in this very recent and very black episode in modern history.