Last week, alongside TIME and the International Crisis Group, ONE co-hosted a film screening of ‘Shake Hands with the Devil’, directed by Roger Spottiswoode.

The film tells the story of General Roméo Dallaire, a Canadian United Nations commander who was dispatched to Rwanda in 1993 to oversee a fragile ceasefire but ended up witnessing genocide. Dallaire’s peace-keeping troops were forbidden from taking action to stop the killing by their mandate which only allowed them to open fire in self defence. The United States was reluctant to intervene in Africa after the killing of 18 of its soldiers in Somalia the previous year. In spite of individual acts of great courage, Dallaire and his troops were powerless to intervene in the genocide which claimed the lives of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

After the feature, there was an interesting discussion on the issues and questions raised by the film. The panel discussion, chaired by Simon Robertson (senior editor at TIME), included Lord Malloch Brown, Justin Forsythe, Bob Geldof, Donald Steinberg, and Colonel Bob Stewart. They looked at the lack of international response to the genocide and shifting attitudes to international humanitarian intervention.

ONE staff members, including Oliver Buston, European Director, attended the screening. When I caught up with Oliver afterwards, he described the film as “a very revealing and provoking film which spells out the grossly inadequate response of the world to the genocide and demands of us all that the same mistakes are not made today or in the future.”

-Jessica Gomez-Duran