Shake hands with the Devil

This is the powerful closing statements made by the Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaires’in his award-winning book Shake hands with the devil. This Brave man led the UN peace keeping mission during the Genocide in Rwanda. His statement explains what drives brutal slayings and terrorism and how world peace is a dream that will never occur on our planet if we don’t pull together and make some major changes in this world.

At the Canadian Forces Peace Support Training Centre, teachers use a slide to explain to Canadian Soldiers the nature of our world. If the entire population of the planet is represented by one hundred people, fifty-seven live in Asia, twenty-one in Europe, fourteen in North and South America, and eight in Africa. The numbers of Asians and Africans are increasing every year while the number of Europeans and North Americans is decreasing. Seventy people are unable to read or write. Fifty suffer from malnutrition due to insufficient nutrition. Thirty five do not have access to safe drinking water. Eighty live in sub-standard housing. Only one has a university or college education. Fifty percent of the wealth of the world is in the hands of six people, all of whom are American. Most of the population of the globe live in substantially different circumstances than those we in the First World take for granted.

Many signs point to the fact that the youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in the demobilization camps in Sierra Leone to the suicide bombers of Palestine and Chechnya, to the young terrorists who fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can no longer afford to ignore them. We have to take concrete steps to remove the causes of their rage, or we have to be prepared to suffer the consequences.

The global village is deteriorating at a rapid pace, and in the children of the world the result is rage. It is the rage I saw in the eyes of the teenage Interhamwe militiamen in Rwanda, it is the rage I sensed in the hearts of the children of Sierra Leone, it is the rage I felt in the crowds of ordinary civilians in Rwanda, and it is the rage that resulted in September 11th. Human beings who have no rights, no security, no future, no hope and no means to survive are a desperate group who will do desperate things to take what they believe they need and deserve.



If September 11 taught us that we have to fight to win the “war on terrorism,” it should also have taught us that if we do not immediately address the underlying (even if misguided) causes of those young terrorists’ rage, we will not win the war. For every al-Qaeda bomber that we kill there will be a thousand more volunteers from all over the earth to take his place. In the next decade, terrorists will acquire weapons of mass destruction. It is only a matter of time until a brilliant young chemist or smuggler obtains a nuclear, biological or chemical weapon and uses it to satisfy his personal rage against us.

Where does this rage come from? This book has demonstrated some of the causes. A heightened tribalism, the absence of human rights, economic collapses, brutal and corrupt military dictatorships, the AIDS pandemic, the effect of debt on nations, environmental degradation, overpopulation, poverty, hunger: the list goes on and on. Each of these and so many other reasons can lead directly to people having no hope for the future and being forced in their poverty and despair to resort to violence just to survive. This lack of hope in the future is the root cause of rage. If we cannot provide hope for the untold masses of the world, then the future will be nothing but a repeat of Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Congo and September 11.

Several times in this book I have asked the question, “Are we all human, or are some more human than others?” Certainly we in the developed world act in a way that suggests we believe that our lives are worth more than the lives of other citizens of the planet. An American officer felt no shame as he informed me that the lives of 800,000 Rwandans were only worth the risking the lives of ten American troops; the Belgians, after losing ten soldiers, insisted that the lives of Rwandans were not worth risking another single Belgian soldier. The only conclusion I can reach is that we are in a desperate need of a transfusion of humanity. If we believe that all humans are human, then how are we going to prove it? It can only be proven through our actions. Through the dollars we are prepared to spend to improve conditions in the Third World, though the time and energy we devote to solving devastating problems like AIDS, through the lives of our soldiers, which we are prepared to sacrifice for the sake of humanity.

As soldiers we have been used to moving mountains to protect our own sovereignty or risks to our way of life. In the future, we must be prepared to move beyond national self interest to spend our resources and spill our blood for humanity. We have lived through centuries of enlightenment, reason, revolution, industrialization, and globalization. No matter how idealistic the aim sounds, this new century must become the Century of Humanity, when we as human beings rise above race, creed, color, religion and national self-interest and put the good of humanity above the good of our own tribe. For the sake of the children and of our future, we must make this priority and save our world.