Publisher's Synopsis
On January 11, 1994, the infamous "Genocide fax" from UNAMIR Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire in Rwanda to UN Headquarters in New York has been claimed to have been a warning of the impending genocide that Koffi Annan's Department of Peace Keeping Operations ignored. Dallaire actually never spoke with the informant; "Jean Pierre" was interviewed by Capt. Amadou Deme. Capt.Deme saw the "weapons cache" and delivered Jean Pierre's request to know when Dallaire would carry out a raid so he could bring more weapons to be found. Dallaire admitted this was true in his testimony in the Military -I trial. Capt. Deme was the first UN official to reach the crash site of the plane of the Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, and provided Gen. Dallaire with the information received about events on events in Kigali as Intelligence Officer during the entire time Dallaire was in Rwanda. At the "Milles Collines" Hotel (The Hotel Rwanda, in the film), when Dallaire was out of the country, Capt. Deme was in command of UN troops escorting refugees from the hotel to the airport depicted in the film. The convoy was stopped by armed civilians and self proclaimed militiamen who threatened the lives of all. A national leader of the "Interahmwe" stepped forward to help Deme avert disaster. Later, when Deme was an investigator for the UN Prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda [ICTR], that same man arrived at the Tribunal in chains. Deme was a member of the ICTR Prosecution team that recommended, in 1997, the prosecution of Paul Kagamé for the assassination of Présidents Habyarimana of Rwanda and Ntaryamira of Burundi on April 6, 1994, the act of aggressive war that triggered the Rwanda genocide. The memoir of Capt. Amadou Deme tells the story of the Rwandan Genocide like no other.
