TORONTO - Audiences at the Toronto film festival wept for Rwanda genocide victims at the premiere this week of "Shake Hands with the Devil,” a movie about the failure of UN peacekeepers in 1994 to stop the slaughter around them.

Although critics panned the movie, there was not a dry eye in the cinema.

The film is based on the 2004 biography of General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the UN force. Actor Roy Dupuis portrays Dallaire’s frustration at being shackled by an inadequate UN mandate to hold back the violence.

Now a Canadian senator, Dallaire has blamed callous quiescence at the top levels of the United Nations for the massacre.

Filmed on location in Kigali, the film follows Dallaire from his home in Canada to Rwanda, where the civil war is about to boil over.

"The general asked me to talk about his soldiers and the genocide in the film. He didn’t want me to make a hero out of him,” said director Roger Spottiswoode. "But they are my heroes.”

In the film Dallaire appears courageous and sometimes rash, but handcuffed by UN officials that do not allow him to try to quell the riots that eventually led to the deaths of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Peacekeepers from Belgium, Pakistan and Ghana are treated with deference, though governments in Brussels , Paris and Washington however are heavily criticized.

A scene in which the US ambassador in Kigali claims a US military deployment would be impossible because of the loss of 18 American soldiers in Somalia the previous year is especially powerful.

"Although we believe in human rights we still are able to argue that the lives of ours are more significant than the lives of thousands and thousands of others,” Dallaire said at the screening, receiving a standing ovation.

 "This movie is part of a campaign to never let the Rwanda genocide die,” he said.

AFP