The Character Left Behind

The story of the Rwandan genocide casts most UN apparatchiks as heartless bureaucrats. Current UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan—then head of the organization’s peacekeeping department—squashed an operation that would have seized Hutu extremists’ weapons caches. (Although that didn’t stop Harvard from awarding Annan an honorary degree earlier this year.)

In Hotel Rwanda, one heroic figure emerges as an exception to the UN’s heartlessness: Colonel Oliver, the hard-drinking, hard-working Canadian commander of the undermanned international peacekeeping force. The only problem is that Oliver’s character—brilliantly portrayed by Nick Nolte—is in fact a figment of director Terry George’s imagination.

Oliver’s real-life counterpart, Canadian Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, now holds a visiting fellow post at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Dallaire’s journey from the Heart of Darkness to the halls of Harvard is worthy of a film in its own right.

Dallaire fought with UN diplomats who refused to provide adequate support for the peacekeeping mission. After the genocide ended, Dallaire returned to Canada—but the horrors of an African holocaust trailed him home. Dallaire battled a new enemy: post-traumatic stress disorder. In June 2000, Quebec police found Dallaire unconscious on a park bench: he’d consumed a bottle of scotch—which produced a dangerous mixture with his daily dose of prescription psychotropic drugs. By the time police had rushed Dallaire to the hospital, the decorated general had nearly fallen into a coma.

Four years later, Dallaire has published a bestselling memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil, which was re-released in paperback form by Carroll & Graff last week. A documentary of the same title will air at the Sundance Film Festival next month. On occasion, he can be found in an office on JFK Street studying conflict resolution

Dallaire is nonplussed by George’s decision to excise his character from the plot line. “He did not think much of the fact that his character was omitted from the narrative,” says his research assistant, Zahra Boodhwani. (The general himself did not return requests for comment.)

George decided to focus the film on the Hotel Mille Collines—where protagonist Paul Rusesabagina worked, and where he harbored hundreds of Tutsis. “Gen. Dallaire didn’t have the level of interaction with the Mille Collines that I needed,” George says. Moreover, with Dallaire’s own book on the market and his movie headed toward American audiences, George concludes: “It was not for me to impinge on him getting his own story out.”