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

  When we got back to the city, I saw very little of Beth as I was rushed from meeting to meeting, though I never did meet the French ambassador, who did not follow through on his request to talk about orphans. Before Beth left, Ambassador Edwards had us over for a quiet dinner on June 14 with her husband and some of the diplomatic staff. I was in total culture shock: I found normal human interactions—pleasant chat, good food, the world outside Rwanda—surreal. Plagued with the raw experiences of genocide, I rolled with the evening as best I could. Beth was lovely and did a superb job of hiding her concern about what might still happen to me, what had already happened to me. Later she told me that she could tell that serious trouble was brewing inside me—I did not seem to be really there with her and the others. The one light note I remember about the evening was Edwards suggesting a cure for my relentless insomnia. She offered up a recent book written by her husband on the history of the Canadian forestry industry as a perfect soporific. He looked on good-naturedly as I accepted the book from his wife. And she was right—I cracked it open on several desperate occasions and never got past the introduction.

  As I said goodbye to Beth and the bustling city of Nairobi, I was caught in an emotional mental battle that pitted what I now considered the “real” world—genocide in Rwanda—and the “artificial” world—the detachment and obtuseness of the rich and powerful. I asked myself again and again, “Why stay? Why ask my troops to stay? Why ask for reinforcements?” But every time I answered in the same way: it was a moral duty to stay and help, even if the impact of our actions was small. On the way back, I took more time at Entebbe to do a more thorough reconnaisance. I walked the old airfield, past the wreckage of the hijacked airliner, visualizing the heroism of the Israeli assault and thinking of the selflessness of the people I’d left in Kigali.

  While I was away, Henry juggled demands on all fronts. The special rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights, René Degni-Segui, arrived to begin his formal investigation of the genocide. We did everything we could to help him in his work, facilitating meetings with witnesses and all the political and military players. He and his team stayed with us at the Amahoro, the safest place for him we could find, which on some days was not saying much. One of the first documents he asked us to pass on to the belligerents was an absolute blast from him regarding the killings of the churchmen at Kabgayi. Media all around the world picked up the story, which was embarrassing for the RPF. And Degni-Segui warned Kagame off the top that he was going to be conducting that investigation as a priority. At the ceasefire negotiations, which Henry kept trying to push along, all the parties were clearly worried about what the special rapporteur would find, and with good reason the Interahamwe and the RGF were really tense about the scrutiny.

  On June 13, Henry and the humanitarian cell transferred 550 people from the Sainte Famille church, the King Faisal, the Mille Collines, and the Amahoro Stadium to their respective safe zones. The transfers were becoming more and more crisis-prone. People tried to board the vehicles without going through due process, though due process was hard to achieve when refugees were flooding into our sites and we weren’t able to keep the lists up to date and complete. Then once people were properly boarded, some got scared for the simple reason that the Interahamwe set up roadblocks within view of the gates of our sites. They didn’t stop any convoys, but the militiamen were a clear threat. RTLM was continuing to claim that UNAMIR was only rescuing Tutsis, even though witnesses knew that the Hutu transfers were just as large, and that there were even some Hutus who were refusing to leave the security—however inadequate—of our sites. And then, on June 14, the Interahamwe entered the St. Paul church site, collected about forty children, took them out into the street and killed them, just to show they could. Our UNMOs who had been stationed there were outnumbered and, of course, unarmed, and had to watch as the kids were hauled away. Maybe the massacre was a response to the large and successful transfer we had pulled off the day before, or maybe it was an act of defiance directed at René Degni-Segui.

  Whatever the explanation for this latest atrocity, by the time I got back to Kigali late on June 16, Henry was glad to see me. Catching up that night on not only what had been happening locally but what was going on at the international level, I discovered that Booh-Booh had tendered his resignation on June 14 and that the UN had taken him up on his offer the very next day. And once again the interim government of Rwanda was trying to get me fired, protesting to the secretary-general that my “deficiencies and overt partiality [to the RPF] have largely contributed to the failure of UNAMIR.” It was perhaps a symptom of how far gone I was that I was glad to be back.

  * * *

  1. Christine de Liso, our acting CAO, had been relieved of her duties in early May. A fine human being, she had done everything humanly possible to aid UNAMIR despite the enormous restraints placed on her by the FOD.

  2. St-Denis received a Chief of Defence Staff commendation.

  14

  THE TURQUOISE INVASION

  THE BATTLE FOR Kigali raged through the month of June with no respite. Kagame was a master of psychological warfare and used it to overcome the imbalance in weapons and numbers between his forces and those of the RGF. After the initial lightning attack to link up with the RPF battalion already based in Kigali, he had begun a more deliberate operation of encirclement and reduction of the defending forces. He was not the least bit intimidated by the elite Presidential Guard, artillery and armoured units, civil defence forces and militia who were determined to defend the capital. He believed they did not have the discipline needed to fight a clever and determined foe and that they were wasting their resources on killing civilians instead of concentrating their efforts on defence. From the first, he focused on what he saw as the main task: defeating the RGF in the field.

  The story of the Sainte Famille raid illustrates the level of competency and daring of the RPF troops. Thousands of Tutsis had taken refuge in the Sainte Famille church, on the eastern side of central Kigali. One night in mid-June, the RPF sent a company two kilometres inside what was enemy territory, recovered six hundred Tutsis from Sainte Famille, and pulled them out to safety through RGF lines. The mission began as a clandestine operation and ended as a fully supported running battle with carefully planned artillery support—and, by the standards of any military force, ranks as a first-class rescue.

  As the June battles chewed off ever-larger bites of RGF territory, the defenders’ morale dropped. And once again, RTLM stepped up its personal campaign against me, airing more accusations from the interim government about me being the architect of Hutu misfortunes. But the extremist forces were about to receive a boost from an unexpected source.

  On the afternoon of June 17, the day after I got back from Nairobi, I was in my office attacking paperwork with a vengeance, when Phil appeared at my door. Behind him were Bernard Kouchner and another Frenchman, introduced by Kouchner as a representative of President Mitterrand’s crisis committee on Rwanda. I thought that they were not especially smart to be here, with the RPF in Kigali and not fond of the French. Still I was in some ways pleased to see Kouchner, a man of great energy and presence, even if I never knew when or if his humanitarianism masked the purposes of the French government.

  Unlike the first time we had met, when he had just barged in, Kouchner asked politely if I could spare him an hour or so, explaining that he was acting as an interlocutor for his government in the field and had been sent specifically to see me. At least this time his role was clear. Kouchner opened the conversation by recapping the horrendous situation and deploring the lack of action by the international community—it was easy for me to agree with that. But then he floored me. The French government, he said, had decided that in the interests of humanity, it was prepared to lead a French and Franco-African coalition force into Rwanda to stop the genocide and deliver humanitarian aid. They would come in under a chapter-seven UN mandate and set up a safe haven in the west of the country where people fleeing the co
nflict could find refuge. He asked me for my support. Without a pause, I said, “Non!”—and I began to swear at the great humanitarian using every French-Canadian oath in my vocabulary. He tried to calm me with reasons that probably sounded high-minded to him but, considering the track record of the French in Rwanda, struck me as deeply hypocritical: surely the French knew that it was their allies who were the architects of the slaughter. Just then Phil Lancaster opened the door, cutting Kouchner off. Phil needed me outside right away. I excused myself and went to see what the crisis was. It wasn’t one crisis, but two.

  An UNMO patrol had either hit a mine or been ambushed on the outskirts of Kigali—the picture wasn’t yet clear. Phil had received a report that one of our officers was probably dead and another injured. The ambulance that had been sent to retrieve them—”ambulance” in this case a fancy word for a van with a stripped interior, a rudimentary first-aid kit and one stretcher—had run into trouble.

  At the same time, the ceasefire negotiation meeting being held that day at our headquarters had just erupted into a potential hostage crisis. It turned out that while the meeting was in progress, the RGF had shot at a transfer convoy of Tutsis, preventing the transfer from taking place. When the RPF representatives at the meeting heard the news (via radio) they arrested the whole RGF delegation, including Gatsinzi. My officers intervened but were now caught in a Mexican standoff. Phil asked me to look out the window: in the compound was a melee of yelling officers, ringed by the armed escorts of both sides. I saw Henry down there, and Tiko, but even so it was clear that panic reigned and mayhem was only a split second away. Phil said, “General, you better get down there or you are going to lose this command.”

  I don’t actually remember how I got to the compound, it just seemed that I was suddenly in the thick of it. I ordered my senior officers out of there: they were to meet me in the operations centre immediately. I spotted Frank Kamenzi off to one side talking on his Motorola. Interrupting him, I told him to tell his bosses to call off this absurd action at once: any attempt to remove or harm hostages from my compound would spark a forceful response from my troops, as well as his own arrest. Kamenzi rarely showed emotion, but he stepped back from me with his eyes wide and got back on his radio.

  In the operations centre, I asked Henry and Tiko, who was clearly having a hard time restraining his anger, what was going on with the patrol. I was told that at about fifteen minutes to noon the report had come in that the MILOB team—an Uruguayan major, Manuel Sosa, and Major Ahsan from Bangladesh—had seemingly hit a mine about twenty-one kilometres north of Kigali. Our only doctor, an officer from Ghana, hopped into the van-ambulance with a MILOB team and headed out, accompanied by an APC, to rescue the wounded UNMOs. They successfully negotiated fifteen kilometres of bad roads and roadblocks, then the van got a flat tire. The doctor and crew abandoned the vehicle and continued on in the APC, but the APC was leaking oil and also broke down.

  Meanwhile, the two-man MILOB team that had been travelling just behind Sosa and Ahsan managed to report in that they had picked up both casualties but were now being held up by the RPF.

  The situation was extremely ugly. The RPF soldiers were refusing to believe that the wounded Ahsan was actually an unarmed peacekeeper, despite the fact that he was wearing his Bangladeshi uniform and UN insignia. Furthermore, Ahsan and Sosa had not actually run over a landmine; they had been targeted by a rocket, and when Ahsan had tried to pull Sosa out, they were fired on again. The troops took the money Ahsan was carrying, and then the sergeant leading the party told his soldiers to drag the Bangladeshi officer away and kill him. When Major Saxonov, one of the UNMOs from the second team, rushed forward to plead for Ahsan’s life, he too was placed under guard. What ultimately saved Ahsan was that the RPF soldiers stopped to squabble over how they would split the stolen money. Throughout the confrontation, no one had been allowed to touch Sosa, who was badly wounded but still alive. After almost an hour, the RPF decided to let all of them go.

  Along with their wounded colleagues, Saxonov and his partner. Major Costa, reached the spot where the APC was broken down at about 1310. But it was too late for Sosa, who had died on the way in Saxonov’s arms. When they found the ambulance, they had to spend tense minutes fixing the flat tire. By this time, Tiko had launched a second rescue team, led by Lieutenant Colonel Mustafizur Rahman, but their APC, not to mention the drawn-out haggling to get through every roadblock, slowed them down terribly. North of the Kadafi Crossroads, they were fired on constantly and had a close shave with a mortar bomb. When they finally met up with the ambulance and the UNAMIR four-by-four heading south, Rahman sent part of his team to try to recover the broken-down APC and led the rest of them directly to the Red Cross hospital.

  Upstairs at Force HQ, Phil had gotten in touch with the Hercules detachment in Nairobi to request an immediate medical evacuation. They agreed to come even though the airport was closed, and said they would arrive in about three hours. The hostage standoff was not yet completely resolved, but Phil got the RGF and the RPF liaison officers to call for clearance for the Hercules to land.

  In the operations centre, I asked Henry to take over negotiating the RGF’s way out of here, and told Tiko to get his observer headquarters back under control. We had suffered a terrible blow, but losing our heads was not going to help anything. Even so, I could not blame my officers. They were obviously affected by the stress and strain of the impossible situations they faced each day and their living conditions. I announced that I would deal with the RPF. Kamenzi was still on his Motorola in the compound, talking with great passion to whomever was on the other end. When I approached him, he told me that the RPF was backing down.

  Kouchner and his colleague, who were settled uneasily in two springless armchairs, were still waiting for me in my office. I told Kouchner I could not believe the effrontery of the French. As far as I was concerned they were using a humanitarian cloak to intervene in Rwanda, thus enabling the RGF to hold on to a sliver of the country and retain a slice of legitimacy in the face of certain defeat. If France and its allies had actually wanted to stop the genocide, prevent my UNMOs from being killed and support the aims of the UN mission—something France had voted in favour of twice at the Security Council—they could have reinforced UNAMIR instead.

  But Kouchner and his compatriot clearly wanted me to stop arguing. They did not say that my mission should be subordinated to the French one but nonetheless left me with that impression. They said that I should concentrate on getting UNAMIR 2 operational in the RPF zones over the next four months, while they sorted out the RGF-held territories and their supposed safe area. I concluded that they had come to see if I would voluntarily agree to subordinate UNAMIR to the French force. There was no chance of that.

  I ended the meeting abruptly when I heard the sound of the Hercules overhead. Kouchner wanted some support from us when he went to meet with the RPF; I told him we would do our best to help despite my complete disapproval of the French course of action. I thought he was positively nuts to try to argue his position with a rebel army who hated the French. What I did not know at that point was that the French government and military had already held high-level meetings with RPF representatives in Europe about this plan, and that members of the RGF, including Ephrem Rwabalinda, my RGF liaison officer, had been to Paris to discuss the coming French intervention. I had been kept in the dark like a mushroom—and fed plenty of fresh manure.

  At the airport the Hercules kept its engines revving while we loaded the injured officer onto the plane and into the care of a Canadian military nurse. In the airport VIP lounge, we performed a solemn, if short, ceremony of remembrance and respect for Major Sosa. He was the twelfth UN soldier to be killed in Rwanda and to my chagrin he would not be the last. I grieved for him and for his family. Once again one of my officers was being shipped out wrapped in a blue refugee tarp while my small and tattered force tried to absorb the meaning of his loss—and the world’s indifference to the risks we had to
take.

  That night, French media reported France’s plan to deploy troops to Rwanda, news that was soon picked up by RTLM and the other local stations and broadcast to the nation. The defending forces in Kigali went mad with joy at the prospect of imminent rescue by the French. Their renewed hope and confidence had the side effect of reviving their hunt for genocide survivors, which put in further jeopardy those who remained in refuges in the few churches and public buildings that had been left untouched. The génocidaires believed the French were coming to save them and that they now had carte blanche to finish their gruesome work.

  I had not been able to reach the triumvirate in the DPKO by phone before I’d gone to bed, but I’d made sure that full sitreps describing the chaos of the day—including Sosa’s death, Ahsan’s being wounded and Kouchner’s reappearance—were sent to New York. Among the overnight batch of code cables was one from Riza. In short, he told me to keep my head down. “In what appears to be an increasingly dangerous situation, you will take the operational decisions necessary,” he wrote. “Our general advice would be that you adopt a defensive posture in order to [avoid] risks and casualties until a clearer picture emerges.” My mandate for the last month had been to do exactly what I had been doing. Now Riza was advising me to isolate the mission in Kigali and stop trying to maintain contact with the RPF and the interim government. He told me that until the reinforcements arrived, which could take two to three months, I should limit UNAMIR to passive guarding of our sites in and around Kigali.