However, I was stunned to find out that Canada was only willing to supply me, and not a single soldier more, to the mission. I protested to the defence department, which remained adamant about the decision until I noticed a tiny loophole in the arrangement. I was being hired by the UN under a civilian contract—in essence being seconded by the government of Canada to UN service—and so the defence department was still on the hook to supply the one Canadian officer it had approved for UNOMUR. The director of Canadian peacekeeping operations at National Defence Headquarters gave me a list of ten names from which to choose the officer who would become my military assistant. Since the mission was so tiny, picking the right MA was crucial: he would take care of a large portion of the paperwork and the administrative burden so that I could concentrate on operations, training and political matters.
I didn’t recognize any of the names on the list of ten, and truth be told I was miffed that none of the officers from my brigade was on it. The people of Rwanda spoke French as well as Kinyarwanda; the RPF spoke English. I wanted my MA to be bilingual, but none of the officers on the list met that requirement—short notice and a lack of volunteers was the department’s lame excuse. I finally stopped at one name: Major Brent Beardsley of the Royal Canadian Regiment, the senior infantry regiment in the army. At thirty-nine, he was older than most of the others on the list and he was currently involved in drafting the Canadian Forces peacekeeping manual. On paper he seemed to have the background to balance off my limited experience with UN headquarters and with peacekeeping. Luckily, his boss was my old colleague, Howie Marsh, and I knew he’d give me the straight goods. When I phoned, he told me that Brent was a solid soldier with a tremendous work ethic, but more important, he was perspicace—he had that magic combination of insight and foresight.
On July 1, 1993, I handed over my command to my successor, Brigadier General Alain Forand, in front of a surprised audience at the anniversary celebrations of the 5ième. Since my family would have to move from the commander’s official residence, Beth launched a search for a new place, hoping to find one in the same area so that the children wouldn’t have to switch schools. With my future uncertain, we didn’t want to buy a home, so we decided to move into military married quarters next to the old Garrison Club.
As for me, I was already in the Rwandan mission body and soul. I set aside as my temporary headquarters the Artillery Room in the Garrison Club, which had been built in the 1820s by British engineers as their headquaters for the massive defensive works of the old capital. The windows look out toward the lush green of the Plains of Abraham, where generations of French, English and Canadian military leaders plotted campaigns, and beyond the plains to the St. Lawrence River. This room, with its heavy, old oak furniture and yellowing nineteenth-century prints depicting training and fighting scenes in the garrison, always sent a thrill through me. I could almost feel the presence of the military and political leaders who came before me, pacing in front of the fireplace as they pondered strategies and worked through knotty tactical problems.
My mission was hardly on the level of their campaigns, but still I was carried away by the romance of it, by the idea of adventure that Africa represented to me. Growing up Catholic in Quebec in the fifties, I had been captivated by missionary tales from “the dark continent.” As a result, my notions of Africa were outdated and Eurocentric. I combed the library for anything I could find on Rwanda and the Great Lakes region of central Africa. There wasn’t much. But serious work was afoot, and time was of the essence.
I had spoken to Major Beardsley only once on the phone and had asked him to bring to Quebec City the most up-to-date technical peacekeeping data, after-actions reports and doctrine, along with the results of the DPKO’s two brief reconnaissance missions to Rwanda, and any general information he could obtain on the country. I hoped we would receive a very detailed intelligence briefing later on at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa. As soon as I laid eyes on Brent, I knew I had chosen well. He is the quintessential quiet Canadian, thoughtful, modest to a fault, but with a sparkle in his calm hazel eyes that signals the presence of plenty of fire, determination and humour. With a few faxes from New York on the mission’s concept of operations, which had been presented to the UN Security Council only a few days earlier, we set to work. By the end of our first afternoon together, we had become a team of two. Brent had an appetite for work and an ability to anticipate upcoming objectives that was awe-inspiring. But I think the quality that impressed me most about him was his unassuming confidence.
For the next three weeks. Brent produced staff work and gathered material for us in Ottawa. I travelled to New York and Ottawa a couple of times, but I received very limited briefings in both places. I worked with the DPKO desk officer, Major Miguel Martin, an Argentinian who was also the desk officer for missions in Angola, Mozambique, Central America, Liberia and any number of other places, and Isel Rivero, an ex–Cuban freedom fighter who served as the political desk officer for central Africa. The four of us were the entire staff effort devoted to UNOMUR by the UN, and Martin and Rivero were only with us part-time. It was clear that this small mission would not sway anyone, either at the UN or at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa, away from the many other missions, crises, problems and budget cuts that were overwhelming them on a daily basis.
We tried to cram in as much knowledge about the Great Lakes region of central Africa as we could. Tiny, landlocked Rwanda was tucked between Zaire on the west and Tanzania on the east, with Uganda to the north and Burundi to the south. Rwanda had never been considered important enough by scholars in the West to warrant extensive study. Brent and I managed to piece together a rough history from newspaper accounts and a few scholarly articles, which reduced a highly complex social and political situation to a simple inter-tribal conflict. With a confidence born of ignorance, we soldiered on.
We traced the roots of the current hostilities back to the early twentieth century and Belgian colonial rule. When the Belgians chased the Germans out of the territory in 1916, they discovered that two groups of people shared the land. The Tutsis, who were tall and quite light-skinned, herded cattle; the shorter, darker Hutus farmed vegetable plots. The Belgians viewed the minority Tutsis as closer in kind to Europeans and elevated them to positions of power over the majority Hutu, which exacerbated the feudal state of peasant Hutus and overlord Tutsis. Enlisting the Tutsis allowed the Belgians to develop and exploit a vast network of coffee and tea plantations without the inconvenience of war or the expense of deploying a large colonial service.
Rwanda achieved independence in 1962, after a popular uprising slaughtered or drove out the Tutsi elite, and installed a Hutu-dominated government led by the charismatic Gregoire Kayibanda. Over the next decade, a series of violent pogroms further targeted the Tutsi population of Rwanda and many more fled to the neighbouring states of Uganda, Burundi and Zaire, where they led a precarious existence as stateless refugees.
In 1973, Major General Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, toppled Kayibanda in a coup d’état and began a twenty-year dictatorship. It led to a degree of stability in Rwanda that was envied in the volatile Great Lakes region. But the expulsion and persecution of the country’s Tutsis sowed permanent seeds of discord. Slowly, the Tutsi diaspora became a force to be reckoned with. Fuelled by the continued oppression in Rwanda and harsh treatment at the hands of their reluctant host countries, the diaspora finally coalesced into the Rwandese Patriotic Front. A small but highly effective military and political movement, the RPF proved capable of engaging and defeating the French-backed Rwandese Government Forces (RGF). By 1991, the Rwandan government was caught between an increasingly formidable rebel army and international pressure for democratic reform. President Habyarimana began the on-again, off-again negotiations that formed the basis for the peace talks then taking place in Arusha, Tanzania.
A few short weeks of snatching at whatever material that came our way was not about to make Africanists of either one of us.
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Downtown Manhattan in mid-July was hot, and the streets were littered with tourists. It was not the best time of the year to be in New York, but the shimmering glass tower of the United Nations headquarters beckoned, and sometimes I had to pinch myself to realize I wasn’t dreaming.
Like many first-timers at the UN, I was impressed by the grandeur of the chambers of the General Assembly and the Security Council. But I soon learned that the real work went on in a rabbit warren of offices that lay just out of sight of the general public. The drabbest and most cramped offices seemed to belong to the DPKO. Staff were working in dreadful conditions: desks squeezed together, phones jangling constantly, outdated computers crashing (in some cases, employees were still using typewriters), people often short of the most basic office supplies. Not to put too fine a point on it, the DPKO was essentially a thirty-sixth-floor sweatshop. Its sorely under-equipped state was possibly part of the image game that the UN plays in order to avoid the wrath of irresponsible media and the international political vultures who use any excuse to accuse it of “wasting” money. But I soon noticed that other UN agencies, such as the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), were not only better quartered but enjoyed a better quality of life all around.
Maurice Baril was a member of a triumvirate that led the DPKO. The other members were Kofi Annan, the under-secretary-general of peacekeeping, and Iqbal Riza, who was Annan’s number two and essentially the chief of staff for the department. The appointment of Baril in June 1992 had been celebrated as a coup for Canada. But the task he had set himself—building the office into an effective military-strategic, as well as operational, headquarters—was a huge challenge. Critics charged that the DPKO was staffed by a bunch of incompetent boobs who kept bankers’ hours and disappeared when situations in the field came to a head. Canada’s Major General Lewis MacKenzie, who had led the UN peacekeeping contingent in Sarajevo, had heaped scorn on the DPKO for its generally negative attitude toward those in the field, its lack of response to immediate needs, and the way its staff and leadership seemed to be consistently unavailable when urgent decisions had to be made. His criticisms had made headlines in Canada and most of the capitals in the world and had sunk morale in the DPKO.
Maurice set up an operations room that was now staffed around the clock by talented and dedicated young officers. He’d begged and borrowed most of them directly from the permanent missions and managed to get their home nations to cover their costs as well. He would pose his request simply: “Don’t you think it would be an irresistible training opportunity to have one or two of your better qualified officers loaned to me during my buildup of DPKO headquarters?” Many nations responded immediately and positively out of a kind of enlightened self-interest. He also began “borrowing” officers from the field missions in order to bring their expertise back to New York, where he gave them responsibility for sorting out problems that missions were facing on the ground.
Among his enormously diverse staff, he had created an atmosphere of good humour, hard work and co-operation that was quite remarkable under the circumstances. The number of UN missions had nearly tripled in just a few years to seventeen. They now involved more than 80,000 personnel from over 60 contributing nations, with unimaginable logistics, training, ethical and equipment problems, and were all being commanded from an ad hoc, under-staffed and under-funded headquarters in New York. I remember waiting in Maurice’s office one time while he was on the phone trying to link up some ancient M-48 tanks from one army with a battalion from another army that was sitting on the border of Croatia, in need not only of tanks but tank training and maintenance. On a second phone, he was keeping U.S. officials in Germany on the line to provide ammunition and spare parts for the tanks, and he still needed to figure out where the mechanic instructors would come from.
Maurice’s overextended desk officers particularly admired the way he stickhandled around the clumsy bureaucratic UN procedures and protected his staff so they could actually do their work. What won him particular glory from them was that he did not seem intimidated by the all-powerful Americans; he could negotiate with them and wasn’t afraid to go one-on-one in the corner if the interests of the DPKO were at stake. Maurice was definitely in his element, using his shy, self-deprecating humour to win over the crustiest UN time-servers. I had been warned by friends back home that working for the UN could be a nightmare, but seeing the genuine esteem that Maurice had won within the institution in just one year made me think that I would be able to handle it.
I was also tremendously impressed by Annan and Riza. Annan was gentle, soft-spoken and decent to the core. I found him to be genuinely, even religiously, dedicated to the founding principles of the UN and tireless in his efforts to save the organization from itself in these exceptionally troubled times, where conflict and humanitarian catastrophes, often linked, were breaking out around the world. We were not facing a new world order, as George Bush had declared two years earlier, but world disorder, with the destruction of human life in “peacetime” at an all-time high.
Riza wasn’t as personable as his boss, but he read his interlocutors rapidly and could set the tone of any encounter. Tall, thin and intense, he did not suffer fools and at times did not hesitate to make you aware of that fact. His occasional intellectual arrogance was offset by his sound common sense and political sophistication.
The relationship between these two men lay at the core of the DPKO as I knew it, Annan very human and concerned, and Riza the cool, calculating master of ceremonies. Articulate, businesslike and direct, Riza made the place dance to their tune. Along with Baril, these two éminences grises seemed determined to force change on their watch and eradicate the stain of recent failures in Somalia and the Balkans.
There was talk of mounting a larger peacekeeping mission inside Rwanda itself but only in passing. Some people in the DPKO thought that a small and quick success story in Rwanda might inspire member nations to place increased confidence in the UN’s peacekeeping efforts and be more generous with military and financial resources. The trouble was, as I was bluntly told on a few occasions, no one but the French and possibly the Belgians had any interest in that part of the world. Where would the political will and resources come from? This, at least, was the party line from Hedi Annabi, the head of the Africa Section in the political division of the DPKO. Still, as far as I knew and as far as Brent could find out, the parties in Arusha were close to putting the final touches on the peace agreement. Once that was in place, either the OAU or the UN would be called upon to help implement it. Maurice doubted that the OAU had the expertise or the resources or even the desire to mount a full-fledged peacekeeping operation in Rwanda, and he was certain the DPKO would be asked to pick up the slack. But at that point, the only people motivated to spend any time on preliminary activity for such a mission to Rwanda were my very small team.
From my conversations with Maurice, I was gradually working out the elaborate power relationships that he had to deal with. The DPKO was definitely further down the UN totem pole than the Department of Political Affairs (DPA), under Dr. James Jonah from Sierra Leone. The DPA was a very political place, indeed, where many officers flaunted their connections, particularly with the secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Maurice told me that one of the most difficult problems he and his colleagues faced was the DPA’s constant interference and manoeuvring without consulting the DPKO political staff who were in direct contact with the mission in the field.
Maurice and I had become close during our battles with the Ottawa mandarins in the late eighties, and I thought I knew him well. However, New York had changed him in an almost indefinable way. His earthy good humour was still there, but he had begun to take on the coloration of his surroundings. He was becoming more cautious and more politically sensitive. For instance, he and his staff always dressed in civilian clothes. He told me that he had instituted this policy because uniforms made the civilian staff
at the UN uncomfortable and created unnecessary friction. The new, more astute Maurice understood that to woo allies he had to become more flexible than his military background generally allowed. He tried to pass this knowledge on to me, and Brent and I also donned civilian clothes, albeit with great reluctance.
Maurice had become masterful at marrying political, diplomatic, humanitarian and military imperatives in an organization full of internecine friction. Had he become more cunning or had he just matured at the grand strategic level? He certainly had become very skilled and attentive to the political dimensions of the use of military force. With so many factors at play when he had to make decisions, how was his fighting edge affected? All I can say is that while he was still a close friend, he had acquired a polished side that field soldiers do not readily understand.
The Security Council of the UN had approved UNOMUR in June, but we couldn’t do anything until the Ugandan government signed the status of mission agreement, or SOMA, which would allow our troops to operate within the country. Mozambique had stalled the signing of the SOMA for the peacekeeping mission currently operating there and, when the UN had sent peacekeepers without the signature, they were hit with a crippling series of taxes on soldiers and equipment as soon as the mission arrived on the ground. At the Security Council, the British were refusing to let my mission deploy before the UN had the signed SOMA in hand. Brent became quite adept at collecting corridor intelligence. Some people speculated that the Ugandans weren’t signing because they were in a mad scramble to find alternate routes to supply the RPF, while others cynically thought it was a ploy to try and extract cash from the UN.