Yellowknife (Oct 13/06) - I would wake in a cold sweat, still running from the unknown in that place between sleep and awareness.

For years, I've had the dreams, that something is wrong with the world, that I was in danger. That nothing would ever be right again.

Mother and child stand in Ntarama church in Rwanda, the site where nearly 5,000 were rounded up and killed during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Partial remains still litter the floor between the pews. - photo courtesy of Peter Bregg/Maclean's

Shake Hands with the Devil, a film following senator and retired Lt. General Romeo Dallaire's return to Rwanda in 2004, 10 years after the Rwandan genocide, brought it all back. It was the film scheduled to close the second-annual World Community Film Festival in Yellowknife.

The film follows the genocide's timeline and repercussions, but more than that, it is a glimpse into the heart and mind of Dallaire, the Canadian UN commander who could do little but stand by and watch - underarmed and underfunded by UN bureaucracy - while Kigali became a bloodbath.

In the film, Dallaire is frank about what the experience did to him, as he was when a packed crowd heard him speak at Northern United Place in 2003.

"You see no other option than plowing your car into the bridge that's coming," he said in the film.

A press report then describes Dallaire being hospitalized after passing out drunk under a park bench in Hull, Que. in 2000, the event that sparked his road to recovery.

As he walked the streets and countryside of Rwanda, he spoke of the huge pits of depression he feared could swallow him up at any time.

I spent years studying war crimes and genocide in university, but it was Rwanda, always Rwanda that struck me. It shouldn't have happened. Not after the Holocaust, not in a country without the technological means, but it did. 800,000 Tutsi men women and children died at the hands of the Hutus in 100 days, slaughtered with machetes, masus (spiked bats), guns and grenades, while the world stood and watched.

The dreams came soon enough. I was running and hiding from the Interahamwe, the Hutu militias that cut their way through the countryside. And I wasn't even there. I was just a third-hand witness, reading books, watching movies and writing. I had to stop. I had to move on to another area of study.

In the film, author and Rwanda genocide expert Gerald Caplan is indignant about the role the world community played (didn't play) in Rwanda. "If you're so irresolute after 10 years, maybe it could happen again," Caplan said.

What I have always wondered is this: what do the world leaders, who stood by and did nothing, who have not acknowledged their inaction, and who continue to fail in Darfur, where tens of thousands (some estimate hundreds of thousands) have been killed - what do they dream of?

When the lights came up around me, there were quite a few watery eyes in the audience. Don't let your response go to waste. Get involved. Amnesty International is a good place to start. We can't let it happen again.