Roméo Dallaire

Roméo Dallaire

Roméo Dallaire (Roméo Antonius Dallaire) was born on June 25th, 1946 and is currently 79 years old. Roméo Dallaire was born in Denekamp, Netherlands. Dallaire attended the Royal Military College of Canada where he received a Bachelor of Science degree. He also attended the Canadian Land Force Command and Staff College and the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College.

Roméo Dallaire is a retired Canadian military officer and politician that was a senator from Quebec from 2005 until 2014, and a lieutenant-general in the Canadian Armed Forces.

Roméo was notably force commander of UNAMIR, the UN’s peacekeeping mission in Rwanda in 1993-94, during the Rwandan genocide. He was a Senior Fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies and was a co-director of the MIGS Will to Intervene Project.

Roméo was born in the Netherlands to Staff Sergeant Roméo Daillaire (a non-commissioned officer) and Catherine Vermeassen (a Dutch nurse). Roméo arrived in Canada with his mom as a 6 month old baby on the Empire Brent, landing in Halifax on December 13, 1946. Roméo spent his childhood in Montreal.

He’d enrolled in the Canadian Army in 1963, as a cadet at the Royal Military College Saint-Jean. Then in 1970 he graduated from the Royal Military College of Canada with a Bachelor of Science degree and got commissioned into The Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery.

In 1971, he applied for a Canadian passport so that he could travel overseas with his troops and was surprised to learn that his birth in the Netherlands as the son of a Canadian soldier didn’t automatically make him a Canadian citizen.

Roméo has also attended the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College, the British Higher Command and Staff Course, and Canadian Land Force Command and Staff College.

Shake Hands with the Devil is the tragic and profoundly important story about the legendary Canadian general that watched while the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the people’s blood that we were supposed to be protecting.

Romeo was called upon to serve as force commander of UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, he believed his assignment was meant to help out 2 warring parties achieve the peace they both wanted. Instead, he was exposed to the most chaotic and barbarous display of genocide and civil war in the past decade, observing in only 100 days the murders of over 800,000 Rwandans.

With just a few troops, his own ingenuity, and bravery to direct his efforts, he rescued thousands of people, however his call for more support from the world body fell on deaf ears.

In this book, he recreates the awful history the world community attempted to ignore. He also chronicles his own progression from the confident Cold Warrior into the devastated UN commander, and lastly to retired general that struggled painfully (and publicly) to overcome posttraumatic stress disorder, the highest-ranking officer to ever share such experiences with readers.

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Fans of Roméo Dallaire also enjoy these authors:

1. Dan Brown, author of the Robert Langdon Series.
2. Stieg Larsson, author of the Millennium Series.
3. Blake Crouch, author of: Dark Matter.
4. Anthony Doerr, author of: All the Light We Cannot See.
5. Amal El-Mohtar, author of: This Is How You Lose the Time War.

Roméo Dallaire: F.A.Q