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CURRENTLY IN CULTURE
Shaking hands with the devil

Lloyd Mackey

Lieutenant-general Romeo Dallaire has suggested, in a number of interviews, that he has come to know God because he has shaken hands with the devil. For that reason, he is probably a good choice as speaker at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast, set for May 10.

A Feb. 9 Ottawa Citizen article by Michael Petrou movingly described Dallaire’s quest to have the international community “shame and chastise” nations that permit the use of child soldiers. “When you see a 15-year-old girl with a child on her back slashing to death a young woman, also with a child on her back, and killing that child. How do you stop that? How do we pull them out of that?” Dallaire commanded the peacekeeping forces in Rwanda in 1994, at the time of a civil war that resulted in the slaughter of 800,000. Because he was a “peacekeeper”, he was denied permission to intervene in the killing. Yet, in the wake of the genocide, he was blamed for not doing enough to stop the massacre. He has lived with his memories and a sense of guilt, and it has left its mark. He hints that he had sometimes considered suicide. And one summer day he was found drunk and unconscious beneath a park bench in Hull. Petrou’s story ends with Dallaire wondering how people can be concerned about nuclear war but turn a blind eye to children whose lives are destroyed by conflict – just before concluding his speech and walking “off the podium dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief”.

I talked with John McKay, the Liberal MP for Scarborough East, who is chair of this year’s Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast group, about the choice of speaker. He referred to Dallaire’s oft-quoted reference to “shaking hands with the devil”, noting that it was the general’s strong Christian faith that likely kept him from being swept away by depression in the years since his Rwanda experience.

The breakfast will be the third in a row featuring a speaker who has been personally impacted by violence. Two years ago, it was Kim Phuc, the woman who, as a young girl, was napalmed by American forces in the Vietnam war and was made famous by a photo showing her fleeing naked from her burning village. Last year, it was Dale Lang, the Taber, Alta. Anglican minister whose son Jason had been gunned down in a high school shooting. McKay says it wasn’t planned that way. but he believes the trauma of these experience provides the opportunity to explore the causes of and antidotes to violence.

This is a “Doing Politics Christianly” column distributed by Christian Info Canada, which also publishes a monthly tabloid newspaper, Christian News Ottawa, distributed in 400 churches. Lloyd Mackey is the editor and publisher. To receive the column by e-mail, write to: lmackey@attglobal.net.

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Last modified April 26, 2001.

© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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