Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

  To add salt to the wound, once the Belgians finally found accommodation that suited them, in buildings scattered all over Kigali, they then wanted the UN to pay the rent. Luc was the one to deliver this message. He was caught between me and the operational requirements of UNAMIR—he knew it was potentially dangerous to have the Belgians scattered all over the city, which was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt after April 6—and the loyalty he owed his superiors, army policy and his government. We tried hard not to let the skirmishing over lodgings come between us and the mutual respect we soon developed.

  My small force was operating at maximum capability. I still had no effective reserve with which to respond to unexpected violent clashes, and we were beginning to pick up the scent of a mysterious third force that seemed to be behind all the killings and assassinations. On December 3, I received a letter signed by a group of senior RGF and Gendarmerie officers, which informed me that there were elements close to the president who were out to sabotage the peace process, with potentially devastating consequences. The conspiracy’s opening act would be a massacre of Tutsis.

  Over the next few months I had several private meetings with Colonel Léonidas Rusatira, the head of the military school and senior member of this group. I wanted to determine the size and clout of this moderate group inside the military and keep a line open to them. I also ensured that the existence of these officers was passed on to Kagame so the RPF would realize there were moderates they could potentially work with inside the present security forces. To flush out who or what this force was, I set up a two-man intelligence unit, led by Captain Frank Claeys of Belgium, with the help of a Senegalese captain named Amadou Deme. Claeys was young, smart and self-assured without being arrogant. Born in Africa, he was an experienced para-commando and special forces officer and he was devoted to the mission, as was his equally efficient and multilingual teammate. According to my chapter-six mandate, I was supposed to rely on the goodwill of the ex-belligerent groups for all my information, but as mysterious deaths began to take on more political overtones, relying strictly on the warring parties for intelligence would have been foolish in the extreme. Because the team was not supposed to exist, I had to cover its expenses from my own pocket, and often Deme and Claeys themselves chipped in with funds.

  Soon they were picking up information that suggested that the killings that had taken place on November 17 and 18 had been carried out by para-commandos from Camp Bagogwe, which was a big commando training base for the RGF in the northwest. This bit of news, together with information they uncovered about weapons caches in the president’s hometown, caused me a number of sleepless nights. Something malicious was definitely afoot. I decided to approach Booh-Booh with my findings and suggest we search and seize the weapons caches. He was alarmed by the idea, saying that to launch such an operation might further jeopardize the political process—since the only targets I was offering were on the government side. I reluctantly obeyed his direction.

  On December 7, Dr. James Jonah, the under-secretary general of the department of political affairs, visited Rwanda and held a series of meetings with President Habyarimana. I was not invited but noticed the sudden flurry of activity in Booh-Booh’s office. The next day, I got a message from the SRSG, saying that he was going to hold a major gathering in Kinihira on December 10 to try to break the political impasse. The meeting was so hastily cobbled together I didn’t have time to set up proper escorts or take adequate weapons control measures. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, when I got to Kinihira Dr. Kabia told me that there hadn’t been time to put together a team to do translation work, and Booh-Booh was hoping he could count on me personally to pitch in and help. Because I had to translate for everyone, I was tied up with the meeting for five hours straight and was unable to keep an eye out for trouble. All of us on the military side were sweating buckets: the number of high-profile people on hand made the meeting an attractive target.

  Even though there had been little advance notice, there was a large turnout, especially of the international press. But things did not go well. The room was set up for confrontation, not resolution, with the RPF and moderate political leaders seated on one side and the government representatives on the other. Instead of trying to overcome their mutual distrust, Booh-Booh instead acted as a neutral moderator. What everybody in that room needed to hear was that the moderate parties were strictly non-aligned and had not affiliated with either the RPF or the regime. Someone had to say that all parties needed to put Rwanda first.

  The best person to have done that would have been Faustin Twagiramungu, the prime minister designate, but for some reason, he chose not to. The only person to make this argument was Lando Ndasingwa of the Parti libéral, but nobody supported his bold stand. As the meeting dragged on and on, the representatives fell back on their old stories of oppression and marginalization. Booh-Booh, seeing the clock running down and the growing restlessness of the press, decided to take a few of the leaders into a back room, where they managed to hammer out a weak statement reaffirming their commitment to Arusha. I left the meeting very depressed. Once again, instead of grappling with the fundamental problems, the parties had chosen to paper over their differences for the public eye while stubbornly hanging on to their grievances.

  The impasse continued through December as the political parties attempted to put together lists of the members they intended to put forward for the BBTG. Booh-Booh did not invite my counsel on this or any other political issue, though I made a point of seeking that information directly from him, in particular asking for his future plans. I stayed abreast of the political wrangling through Dr. Kabia and sought information from friends within Kigali’s diplomatic circles. It was evident to me and others that hardline voices, pushing ethnic arguments and fears, were beginning to dominate the discussions, and there was an increasingly violent tone to political discourse, fed by the broadcasts of RTLM. The atmosphere in Kigali was becoming tense.

  I had known the Bangladeshis would have little to no equipment or support, but I had hoped they would be well-led and well-trained. I was keen to get them on the ground so that the French paratroop battalion in Kigali could leave, as spelled out in the Arusha accords. The French maintained that their soldiers were in Kigali to protect the expatriate community, but with both the Belgian and Bangladeshi battalions deployed in the city, this excuse would evaporate and they could go home.

  But when the Bangladeshis got off the planes at Kigali airport in mid-December, they had nothing but their personal weapons and their kit, and expected the UN to supply everything else they needed—from their first meal in the field to the canvas over their heads. The added logistical burden of caring for this force was a plague on the mission.

  In order to accommodate them in the Amahoro Stadium, we had to move the last of KIBAT out. We commenced a rigorous training plan, half-heartedly implemented on the Bangladeshis’ part. They harried me and their immediate superiors in the sector HQ on a daily basis with requests for everything from soap to ammunition, vehicles to sandbags. The Bangladeshis had agreed to first deploy their infantry battalion and then send the other units they had promised (an engineer company, a logistics company, a hospital, a military police section and a movement-control platoon) in phase two. This is what I had planned for and what I needed from them. But these four hundred soldiers were a mixed bag of each element, and officer-heavy to boot. A four-hundred-man unit would usually be commanded by a lieutenant colonel, if not a major. The Bangladeshis were commanded by a full colonel, with no fewer than six lieutenant colonels, dozens of majors and an unaccountable number of captains and lieutenants under him. I needed riflemen on the ground, not officers in the mess or headquarters.

  After the French flew home in mid-December, the coast was clear to finalize the Kigali Weapons Secure Area (KWSA) agreement, yet another milestone on the road to installing the BBTG. The KWSA was an innovation I had come up with to deal with the unique problem of having an armed battalion
of RPF soldiers located in the heart of the city, surrounded by thousands of their former enemies. Under the agreement, each party in the Kigali area would secure its weapons and only move them and armed troops with our permission and under our escort. When these conditions had been met, then and only then would the RPF send their political and bureaucratic appointments to the BBTG in Kigali, along with a security battalion. Once they were installed, the new government could be sworn in and that act would signal the end of phase one of our military objectives.

  In the weeks before Christmas, I was totally engaged with preparations for securing the signing of the KWSA agreement and then moving the RPF delegation and battalion into Kigali. On December 23, I held an intense session that ended up running long into the night: I was determined that none of us would leave until all parties had agreed to the terms of the agreement. We held the meeting at a place we dubbed Kilometre 64, on the road from Kigali to Kabale, Uganda, exactly sixty-four kilometres from the capital. It was a perfect spot for a meeting: a couple of old shacks off the roadside in the demilitarized zone, surrounded by hills where I could deploy soldiers to keep an eye out for trouble. There was no electricity, so we had to bring in a portable generator. I had a table and chairs made cheaply by a local carpenter; I wanted the furniture to be rudimentary so that no one could get too comfortable. I wanted all parties to get down to the business of serious negotiations as rapidly as possible.

  Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and Lieutenant Colonel Ephrem Rwabalinda, the RGF’s liaison officer to UNAMIR, were there for the government side. The RPF had sent a delegation of senior officers who introduced themselves by first names only—Commander Charles, Commander Andrew and so on. The major stumbling point was that the RPF wanted all “private security firms” registered and included in the agreement. Bagosora refused, saying that these security firms were not part of the military. We all knew we weren’t talking about private security firms but the growing militias and so-called self-defence groups at work in the country. I wanted them inside the agreement, where they’d be under our control. I pushed the meeting from three in the afternoon until three in the morning, until finally Bagosora relented.

  We were all half asleep by the time we climbed into our vehicles for the long drive home. Luckily, Willem noticed that during the night somebody had covered the road with land mines. He was able to warn me and most of the others, but Colonel Bagosora had been in a greater hurry than the rest of us to leave, and he and Rwabalinda were already in their limousine and out on the road. We honked our horns to get their driver to stop, which he did just in time to realize the car was stuck in the middle of a minefield. I couldn’t resist a chuckle at Bagosora’s expense. The RGF had a bad habit of planting mines on their side of the demilitarized zone even though we had repeatedly warned them not to do so. We knew Bagosora’s troops were bound to be nearby, and honked our horns and yelled to alert them, but it took more than an hour before a RGF soldier showed up on the scene and looked horrified to see Bagosora’s car stranded among the mines. It would be dawn before we could get the mess straightened out. With the lights from my Jeep, I could see that he was stiff with fear and probably fuming over having been trapped by one of his own cat-and-mouse games.

  Even after the KWSA agreement was signed, we ran into major problems with enforcement, and I can’t say I was surprised. My troops reported that the RGF were moving heavy weapons just beyond the area covered by the agreement, and I was also hearing of militia training going on inside the KWSA. I got no satisfactory responses to my queries from the RGF chief of staff or the minister of defence, just shrugs and evasive answers. All I could do was to continue to monitor the situation with my MILOBs and report back to New York.

  By far the most significant military task we had to accomplish in phase one was the operation we called “Clean Corridor”—preparing a secure route for the RPF battalion and politicians to travel into Kigali, and then a safe spot for them to stay once they got there. I had been after the minister of defence to help select a site for the RPF in Kigali since shortly after I arrived in Rwanda, but he had evaded my repeated requests, leaving this crucial decision to the very last minute. Though I had suggested four suitable options, both sides finally agreed to a site I considered the worst possible choice: the Conseil national pour le développement (CND), or the National Council for Development, which was actually the National Assembly building combined with a hotel complex and conference centre. He who controls parliament controls the nation: my fear was that extremists would say that UNAMIR was handing over the soul of the nation to the RPF. Imagine a rebel organization being given control of the East and West blocks on Parliament Hill, or a portion of the Capitol complex in Washington. The appearance was all wrong.

  The CND buildings were located on a small hill in the heart of the city, overlooking the two major arteries leading in and out of Kigali and surrounded by a metal fence. On one side was the Rwandan National Assembly and government offices, a portion of which the Bangladeshis had taken over and were using for their quarters. The other side, the hotel complex of about two hundred rooms, had its own separate entrance and would be the new home of the RPF. Nearby on a low plateau was the Presidential Guard’s headquarters; the two groups could keep a watchful eye on each other. From their hill, the RPF could cover and control major and essential arteries through the city. From the RGF perspective, lodging the RPF in the CND meant they were confined to a hill that was easy to fire upon; the RGF could surround, isolate and lay siege to their enemy if it came to that. Once the decision was made, I deployed my troops around the complex as a thin blue line between the former belligerents.

  Both sides had agreed in August that the light battalion accompanying the RPF politicians would come equipped with machine guns with anti-aircraft mounts as well as light mortars. I had to admire the moxie of Major Paul Kagame, who must have seen the tactical advantage of such a site and seized the opportunity.

  With the KWSA agreement signed on the morning of December 24 and December 28 set as the date on which we would escort the RPF to its garrison in Kigali, we set out to pass what we thought would be the worst Christmas of our lives. De Kant had gone on leave to Kenya to meet his girlfriend and spend the holidays on safari. I could tell that Brent and Philippe were missing their wives and young children—Brent was about to miss his new son’s first Christmas.

  On Christmas Eve, we came home at the end of a normal workday and had a spaghetti supper. Tiso, our cook, had given us a banana tree, and Major Arthur Godson of Ghana had given us a string of lights; Brent married the two gifts to produce the strangest looking Christmas tree I have ever seen. After supper, we exchanged some small presents and opened a number of letters from Canadian schoolchildren, along with Christmas gift packages, which people on the home front have been sending to troops on operations every year since the First World War. The maple syrup, fruitcakes, ham, cheddar cheese and other treats really boosted our morale. Still, we were all in bed by nine.

  When we woke up, the Christmas tree was dead. Apparently banana trees do not like to be strung with electric lights. We spent a good part of Christmas morning trying to revive the poor tree, deeply embarrassed that Tiso would return from his short vacation and discover our carelessness. Philippe and I decided that there was only one thing to do in such a situation: blame Brent.

  That night, Philippe went off to the Belgian contingent’s Christmas service and dinner to pass the evening with his comrades. Brent and I were invited to the home of the Canadian consul, Denis Provost, to have a Canadian Christmas with his family, a number of Canadian expatriates and Rwandans with ties to Canada. At home, Beth and I would have been convening a big family gathering around our own table, and I would have been carving the turkey. I wondered how she and the children were doing without me, then immediately dismissed the thought—I had to make the best of what was in front of me, not long for what wasn’t. I remember speaking at length with Hélène Pinsky, who was certain that the situation
in Rwanda was taking a turn for the better and that there would only be bright days ahead as decency and respect for human rights took hold in the nation. Not one of the Rwandans at that party, linked by marriage or friendship to Canada, would survive the coming genocide.

  We launched Operation Clean Corridor on schedule on December 28. Luc Marchal and his Kigali Sector contingents were to play a key role in this difficult and dangerous task, the biggest test UNAMIR had yet faced.

  We were awake before dawn. I dropped Brent off at the CND to supervise the final preparations for the arrival of the RPF. With Hallqvist and his deputy away for Christmas vacation, the more professional and co-operative members of his staff, under the supervision of Phillip Mitnick, had worked through the holiday, and we were ready. Philippe and I drove to the Ngondore refugee camp, near the demilitarized zone, where we checked communications and supervised the deployment at the camp of UNAMIR troops, RGF soldiers from the military police, and Rwandan gendarmes. Then we waited. The RPF convoy was supposed to depart from Mulindi at dawn, cross the RGF front lines around breakfast time and arrive in Kigali before lunch. Long after dawn, the code words for the movement had not yet been given; Luc called to tell me why there was a delay. The RPF soldiers had been exceedingly slow in loading their vehicles and getting themselves organized but that he expected them to be ready in an hour. An hour passed and he called again to say that they were now refusing to move because a suitable vehicle had not been provided by UNAMIR to carry the chairman of the RPF into Kigali. No one had ever asked us to provide a staff car, but they insisted they would not leave Mulindi until we sent a suitable vehicle. We hurriedly found a Mercedes and driver and sent it north from Kigali with an escort. By the time the car got there, it was almost lunchtime. With some prodding from Luc, the convoy finally started to move. It had to get into the CND before dark, and time was tight, but all went well and the convoy quickly passed through the RGF lines and moved down to Kigali.