We continued along lanes and paths that often took us through the middle of villages that did not appear on any map. In one village, we stopped to wait for all the vehicles to catch up to us. The path we were on had been one of the exit trails used by people fleeing Kigali. There were remnants of a barrier here, and many people had been killed and thrown in the ditches and on the sides of the road. As I got out to wait, I looked at the bodies, which seemed relatively fresh. Just as I glimpsed the body of a child, it moved. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but I saw the twitching of the child and wanted to help. I leaned down to pick the child up, and suddenly I was holding a little body that was both tingling and mushy in my hands. In a second I realized that the movement was not the child but the action of maggots. I was frozen, not wanting to fling the child away from me but also not wanting to hold it for a second longer. I managed to set the body down and then stood there, shaky, not wanting to think about what was on my hands.
We carried on with the reconnaissance of the road. In the early afternoon we crested a hill and before us stretched a huge encampment of the internally displaced, people who had managed to pass through all the roadblocks out of Kigali. The sky was lowering with dark rain clouds, and a blue wave of refugee tarps rose up to greet it; it was as if we were looking out at an ocean of the displaced. We drove very slowly down the hill and up through the camp, heading for the aid station that was set up near the top of the next rise. There were so many people jammed together on these hills that every little motion caused ripples of movement in every direction. The masses were so great it was hard to perceive the individuality of the people—there were so many faces, so many eyes. Clothing that had once been bright was drained of colour and smeared with dirt so that everything was a uniform brown.
The Red Cross workers here were locals, and they were overwhelmed by the demands on them. I told them how courageous they were and how impressed I was that the Red Cross was able to deliver some assistance in all parts of Rwanda. One of the elders in the crowd surrounding us began to speak. He told me that many of them had had to leave in such haste that they had left behind essentials. Since they’d arrived here, he said, they had received aid in the form of maize, and he held out a bit to show me. It was cattle corn, recognizable by its large, hard, jagged kernels. He said that they did not have the tools they needed to grind the kernels. They did not have the pots to cook the corn in to make it softer. They didn’t have the water to put into the pot or the wood to build a fire to heat it. The uncooked maize was not edible, yet some of the children were so hungry they ate it. The jagged kernels ripped their digestive tracts and caused internal bleeding. The children were dying of it, bleeding through their bowels. With an ineffably sad face, this man asked me what I could do. I couldn’t find an answer. In shame, I went back to my vehicle and we drove back to Kigali.
The road back was just as difficult and circuitous as the road in, but it did provide me with time to think with bitterness about how slow the humanitarian response had been. Rome, Paris, Geneva and New York were still demanding assessment upon assessment. Instead of coming to the aid of roughly two million people, the international community and aid groups were still conducting analyses of what was really needed. That night at evening prayers, I received Yaache’s report on the situation, along with one from the new UNREO representative, Charles Petrie. Petrie was in despair about the continuous demands for assessments. I turned to him and said that in his next assessment, he could quote me: “Tell them to send me food, fuel, medical supplies and water for two million people, and we will work out the details of distributing it, but for God’s sake tell them to start sending it!”
A couple of years later I met some of those decision-makers and assessment-demanders, who took the opportunity to tell me that I had been looking at the situation in a “simplistic fashion.”
June 1 was also the day that the number two man in the Canadian Defence department, Bob Fowler, and the number three man in the Canadian Forces, Admiral Larry Murray, arrived for a twenty-four-hour visit. Fowler had taught English at the University of Butare in the 1960s and had a warm spot for this small, tortured country, huddled amongst the big boys of Africa. As chief of operations, Admiral Murray wanted to check out the situation in person before making recommendations to his boss in Ottawa regarding Canadian military participation. As time was short, we ran them through a series of briefings at Force HQ, and then I sent them out to see the protected sites, the Red Cross hospital and as much of the city as possible, and also to meet for a brief session with Bizimungu at the Diplomates. In order to make the whole affair complete, several rounds landed near the hotel while Fowler and Murray were there.
That evening, we had a supper of canned sausages and beans, with water to wash it down. We sat on mismatched chairs in a small conference room off the main hall, crowding around tables that were too large for the room, so that there was barely space to move, though we had plenty of fresh air and bugs thanks to the previous artillery bombardments and a lack of plastic or plywood to cover the holes.
The conversation was lively and the atmosphere warm. One point raised several times was our regard for the exceptional work being done by the Canadian aircraft and crews. I explained to Fowler and Murray that it had gotten to the point where the mere sound of the aircraft engines gave a tremendous boost to our morale. The sense of both isolation and vulnerability that we all suffered from every now and again was totally alleviated when we heard those planes. I almost didn’t care if the planes came in empty, as long as they came in, and I thanked Fowler and Murray for leaving me these aircraft and their crews, who risked their lives on a regular basis and had the bullet holes in the frames of those old Hercs to prove it.
We made speeches to each other. At the end of Admiral Murray’s remarks, he asked me to stand up, and then and there he awarded me the Meritorious Service Cross. He pinned it on my uniform in front of my closest brothers in war, and I could barely stay upright and composed. I was proud to be honoured in this way, yet ashamed that I was being decorated ahead of so many of my troops. I had had soldiers and officers die in theatre, and had several others evacuated because of injuries sustained in the line of duty, or because of sickness due to lack of medical supplies, and yet they had not been recognized in such a fashion. One more bittersweet memory of Rwanda.
That night our guests slept in the discomfort of our HQ. We had planned a visit to the RPF for the next day, but in the morning we couldn’t secure the clearances, and the route was under considerable fire. So we went up to the roof and I pointed out a number of sites in and around Kigali. They got to see an assault by the RPF in a quarter of the city less than two kilometres away.
On June 2, I received a message from Kofi Annan, asking me to provide extra protection at a place called Kabgayi. It was a huge Catholic mission not far from Gitarama. The Red Cross had reported that there were about thirty thousand people there, as well as a large number of prelates and priests. The RPF had surrounded the place, and Annan told me that the Pope himself had requested extra security for the people there. I responded, “I will continue to send UNMOs to visit Kabgayi as often as I can spare them, but I can do no more until I get more troops.”
At the ceasefire meetings, which Henry had been chairing, both sides agreed again to respect a truce for the continued evacuation or transfers of refugees. On June 3, we decided to try another one. I thought it would be wise for Henry to go along with the RGF convoy and to be conspicuous in the area of Kadafi Crossroads to see if the RPF was still going to fire. Even with Henry and a UNAMIR APC planted there, mortar fire still came from the RPF zone.
I decided that I would wait for the returning convoy in plain view at the crossroads, with Phil, my escort, and a couple of APCs. As I was standing there, out in the open, chatting with a few of my men, an RGF soldier appeared from the ditch behind us. He was a sergeant, clearly in rough shape, tattered but armed to the teeth; he was the RGF guard in this no man’s land. He talk
ed with us a little and then pointed up the hill to show us where the RGF was positioned. I reached for the binoculars around my neck to check it out—I’d brought them so I could spot from the smoke where the mortars were situated if the RPF fired. The soldier was intrigued by the binoculars. I took them off and let him look through them, and it was clear that this was a first for him. With my binoculars in hand, he eyed my flak jacket and asked what it did and how it felt to wear it. I took it off and helped put it on him, and I wrapped the binoculars around his neck. For a brief moment he was in heaven.
I asked for my flak jacket back, and just as he was handing it to me, a mortar round fell and hit the hard asphalt about ten metres from where we were standing. It sprayed chunks of the road and hot metal in all directions. Instinctively everybody dropped to the ground, including the RGF soldier. I didn’t move. I had my flak jacket in one hand, and everybody else was on the ground. As soon as they realized they weren’t hit, they all scrambled for the protection of the APCs. I noticed a piece of hot metal stuck in my trouser leg, but I stayed put and calmly put my flak jacket back on. I then turned toward the RGF soldier to get my binoculars back, but he was nowhere to be seen. And I thought, “That’s okay, he liked the binoculars so much, he can have them.”
Phil urged me, in not very tactful language, to take cover in an APC. Instead I walked to where the crater was, and he followed me, and we undertook a crater analysis. It had been a light mortar round and it had come from the RPF lines. The crews moved the APCs away from the crossroads, but for the five minutes or so before the convoy got there, I stood my ground, naked to incoming fire. The empty convoy finally moved by me, and there was no more shooting. Over the course of the mission, we rescued ten thousand people in this fashion, never knowing whether we would be fired upon.
That night, Yaache sent me a formal letter, drafted by Don MacNeil, informing me that the Ghanaian soldiers as well as the UNMOs considered these high-risk missions unessential and thought they were being exposed to danger unnecessarily. I understood their complaint, but I didn’t agree. Not only were the transfers one of the few positive acts we could perform, they were also helping to reduce the numbers of people we had to shelter and feed. Still, coming on top of the events at the crossroads, I welcomed the letter because it helped me to decide to put an end to the transfers until the RPF came to its senses. I was also troubled as to what the RGF was doing with its people once they were dumped on the road; their zones were totally chaotic. And there was another complication we had to contend with before we could proceed with more transfers: not everybody sheltering with us wanted to leave. Some did want to seek the safety of their own sides. Some wanted to get out of the country altogether, though in order to accomplish that, we had to ensure they had the right documentation, or Nairobi would send them back. But a surprising number wanted to stay, and I had to admit there was logic to that. With us they were receiving some assistance and minimal protection, and they were not keen to throw themselves into total uncertainty.
That night I wrote a sharp letter of protest to Kagame over the mortar fire at the crossroads. I made it quite clear that his senior liaison officer to UNAMIR had okayed the whole operation and that we had received confirmation from his side that everything was a go. I reminded him that my ROE permitted retaliatory fire. I closed with, “I must insist on your personal response on this matter. I will, once again, personally deploy to Kadafi Crossroads when and if we resume the displaced persons exchange to monitor the situation.”
Less than twenty-four hours later, I had a contrite written response from the general. He wrote that the local battalion commander had not obeyed his orders and that serious disciplinary action was being taken. Later, we heard two rumours about what may have happened to that battalion commander. One was that he was severely chastised and sent to take up an ignominious command in the rear. The other was that this particular battalion commander was a fanatical Hutu-hater, that he had already been in trouble with Kagame for taking too many losses, and that he was taken away and shot.
Since Bernard Kouchner had left Kigali, he had often been in touch with the humanitarian cell regarding the Rwandan orphans. In his capacity as the president of a French NGO, he asked our permission and aid to evacuate a group of very sick children to Paris. We finally said we would get them out if Kouchner could negotiate an agreement from both sides.
The evacuation of over fifty children went ahead on June 4. The plan was that the Canadian Hercules would arrive in the morning in Kigali with Canadian military nurses on board, and after off-loading, would pick up the children and fly to Nairobi. There, a French military hospital aircraft would be waiting to take them directly to Paris. Our end of the operation went well. Early that morning the children were loaded on board, where the nurses stabilized them for the flight. Some of the children were coping with severe injuries, and many were terrified because they’d never been on an aircraft before.
The flight arrived just past midday in Nairobi. But there was no French aircraft waiting, and the Kenyans didn’t want the kids to get off the plane. It was a sweltering day, exacerbated by the heat from the asphalt runway. The children were stuck in the plane for over nine hours, and their health suffered badly—one of the children was reported to have died. That night the hospital aircraft finally arrived, and the children were loaded and taken to Paris. The flight landed the next morning in France at a time of day that guaranteed the maximum exposure in the press.
The batch of code cables I was handed on the morning of June 5 informed me that the battalion being considered for the phase-three deployment was from Bangladesh. What could I say?
Henry was away in Nairobi, sitting in on a meeting that Booh-Booh was chairing as a run-up to a summit in Tunis, organized by the OAU, which was determined to broker a ceasefire. That morning at prayers, I asked for a status report on our resources—I particularly wanted to know how many vehicles were functioning and how much food and fuel we had left. It turned out we had about a dozen trucks and forty to fifty working four-by-fours, depending on how ingenious the UNMOs could be. We had a small amount of fuel to keep the generators at the Amahoro, the King Faisal and the Mille Collines running, but we were down to next to nothing for the vehicles. Even if I thought the situation was safe, I couldn’t send out a transfer convoy for fear of running out of gas. (I asked Kagame the next day if he had a bit of fuel I could borrow, but in that crisis, it was the Red Cross who came through, lending us the fuel for one more transfer.)
When it came to my troops, I was constantly worried about how far I could push them and how I could keep them motivated to the point where they would risk their lives, especially in the transfers. Henry’s steadfastness went a long way in propping up the morale of many of the African UNMOs and, of course, his own Ghanaians. He had also forged a strong bond with Tiko, who was considered a saint by the UNMOs. Tiko had never once left an UNMO in a precarious situation. Henry and Tiko together were able to keep the vulnerable and overtaxed UNMOs going flat out.
The surprise of the day was the sudden visit of the Italian foreign minister, who was scheduled to arrive that morning at the airport and was expecting me to greet him. We quickly drew up a schedule for him, and at about 1000, I arrived at the main terminal to wait for the plane. Finally we heard the engines and all moved outside to watch the landing. The Hercules was used to coming in under fire and had developed a routine where it would land, circle in front of the terminal, letting its ramps down and laying pallets in a line as it moved in front of us, like a goose laying eggs. This time the plane had turned and the crew chief had lowered the ramps, when heavy mortars hit just behind the tower. The roar of the plane obscured the sound of the explosion, but when I saw the plume of smoke that billowed up, I gave the sign to the pilot to get out of there. The pilot reacted immediately, turning up the engines and starting to move. But the crew chief was on the ground, connected to the plane by the line from his headset, and as the plane started to move, he was pulled alon
g. The big goose of a plane rolled forward, and he was trying to lift the ramps back into the plane. One of my Canadian UNMOs, Captain Jean-Yves St-Denis, instinctively ran to help. They got one ramp up and then tried for the second—the plane was now moving so fast that the crew chief was running behind, with us cheering him on. Finally they got the ramp up, the crew chief jumped in, and the plane was able to move. Just as the Here made it to the runway, another round fell right where it had been unloading.2
I ordered everyone inside the terminal. In my mind I was certain the plane was going to blow up. I thought our luck had run out, that I would see a massive explosion and that fifty or sixty lives would be lost, including that of the Italian minister. But though another round landed much too close, the Hercules made it safely into the air. There was no doubt that the rounds had been aimed at the plane, because the bombardment stopped as soon as it cleared the field.
Just after the incident, Frank Kamenzi came to me to say that it had been the RGF that had targeted the plane. His people had intercepted the order from the RGF head of operations to shoot on the aircraft. When I confronted Bizimungu that morning, he flatly denied it, though he did admit that the RGF had not been warned of the Italian minister’s arrival and had not been thrilled with the unannounced visit.
I had no choice but to order the airport closed until further notice, leaving us exactly where I had most feared to be: stranded in Kigali with no quick resupply or evacuation route.
That night before I fell asleep, I realized that the next day was the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. The week before the war in Rwanda had started, I had targeted June 6 as our own personal D-Day to be ready for demobilization. I lay sleepless on my mattress, taking stock of where we were instead: out of food, being shot at, the slaughter in full flood, and still no cavalry coming over the hill.