Shake Hands with the Devil is one of the saddest books I have ever read and one of the most heart-breaking eye-witness accounts. A kind of naïve and painfully honest confession of the failure of a man and the total failure of an organisation, a meticulous description of one of the worst betrayals in the history of humanity. In spite of serious omissions, in particular about the massacres in the areas that were theoretically made secure by the UN, in spite of its ponderous and often verbose style, it is unfortunately a book that must be read in order to understand how, with imperturbable coldness and implacable cynicism, the peacekeepers allowed an entire country to commit suicide. As for Dallaire, who is considered a hero in Canada, he explains that he was a powerless victim like the 800,000 dead who continue to haunt him. – Gil Courtemanche, April 2005.

I’m busy reading this shocking account of the Rwanda genocide by Romeo Dallaire, having the usual Primus at The Forest Garden Inn, in Nyamagabe, Rwanda. I start a conversation with the waiter – in his late 20’s. It was somewhere in 2014, and I realised this youngster must have been barely 10 years old when the genocide of 1994 between the Hutu’s and Tutsi’s erupted. Knowing that the genocide subject in Rwanda is a petulant one, and not knowing how to prompt a discussion about it with the young man, I confirmed that he was circa 8 – 10 years old at the time. He lost his parents and a sister.

The young man – understandably so – not keen to take the conversion much further. I persist and asked him: “How do you deal with it, how do you forgive or how do you forget”. His reply is simple and painfully relevant. “……To forgive and to forget is easy, the difficult part is – which one to do first…..”

In our struggle to decide “which one to do first”, we many times do neither. These words explain so many of not only today’s global conflicts, but also our own deep and personal ones.

“……To forgive and to forget is easy, the difficult part is – which one to do first…..”