I then explained the concept of the new UNAMIR. He listened attentively even though he probably had already been briefed in detail by his representatives at the UN. His reply stunned me. “No objection,” he said. “I suggest however that it be strong enough and ready to fight.” He promptly rose, shook hands and departed.
The sun was going down fast, and we sped off, hoping to get to the HQ before darkness fell completely. Although we arrived way past sunset, the trip back was without a wrong turn or a close shave. I finally sat down that night at a table in the operations room in the rotunda with a cup of tea from somewhere. My job was to study a draft of a “non-paper” being prepared for the secretary-general on the way forward for UNAMIR. A non-paper is essentially a means by which the UN considers a subject without treating the process as official business that has to lead to an official resolution. Here I was up to my armpits in bodies, and the DPKO was reduced to presenting a non-paper in order to garner possible support for a mandate debate. How in hell did they find themselves in such a position? They’d had my sitreps and assessments and military estimates and more staff analyses than they could shake a stick at. But still they wanted my input on the non-paper by early tomorrow.
Call me a wide-eyed optimist, but the draft of the non-paper looked good. It looked, in fact, very much like what I had been recommending (so much so that one of my staff had sarcastically noted on the draft, “This is excellent so let’s get at it”). In my response, I approved the fact that they were proposing my “minimum viable” option of 5,500 troops, yet describing its function with the action verbs I’d attached to the 8,000-troop model. I congratulated them on essentially taking as a package my concept of operations, my plan and my layout of tasks and reported that both belligerents accepted the idea of the reinforced UNAMIR. I insisted that the non-paper stress the sense of urgency—there were still a lot of people at risk and we had to save as many as possible. It already went part of the way by recommending that the normal process of getting troops should be put aside and that nations should provide troops in operational brigade formations. There was no room for untrained and ill-equipped units from developing nations, even if some were ready to send them. The non-paper also endorsed reinforcing the mission even without a signed ceasefire or airport neutrality agreement: music to my ears.
I insisted that the first task of the new UNAMIR would be to address the humanitarian crisis. Their non-paper spoke of a mandate to provide safe conditions for people and safe delivery of humanitarian support, based on self-defence against persons or groups who threatened the safe corridors and areas we would establish, as well as our already protected sites. This read very much as if they would endorse an active defence by strong, highly mobile forces. I pushed for levels of clarity on the risks these troops were prepared to take. I’d asked not for a chapter-seven mandate but for my chapter six and a half, which would allow us to take aggressive action to prevent crimes against humanity as well as in self-defence. I wanted the term “safety assured” attached to our safe sites in Kigali and the churches, stadiums and schools around the country where people were sheltering. I would be able to provide “significantly enhanced security” to the two million internally displaced. I grew elated as I worked. Yes, it was a non-paper, but it finally looked as if the DPKO wanted to give me the right mandate and tools. I signed the code cable the next morning after passing a copy through Dr. Kabia to Booh-Booh for comment.
My spirits had risen and stayed that way even after writing a detailed tactical analysis of what would happen if the RPF attacked the airfield in the next few days. But I could not shake my fears of waking up in the morning to be told that everyone at the Mille Collines had been slaughtered during the night. I called Moigny, who had proven his worth several times already, fending off RGF soldiers, gendarmes and Interahamwe. The militias had only breached the building once, kicking down doors in search of Tutsis. But Moigny and his unarmed officers, supported by some very determined Tunisian soldiers, were able to persuade them to leave before any harm was done—aided by the hotel manager’s deft and generous gift of many bottles from the hotel wine cellar.
Drafts of the UNAMIR 2 mandate were flying between NewYork and us. On May 9, I had to cancel the Hercules flights, one of which was supposed to bring in Ayala Lasso and the investigation team, because heavy artillery and machine-gun fire in and around the airfield were simply too intense. The RPF shelled several parts of the city that day, including my protected sites. At the Amahoro Stadium, a Ghanaian private was about to enter his room when a mortar shell exploded inside the stadium. Fragments flew through the window and hit him under the armpit where there was no protection from his UN flak jacket, and one struck his heart. He was dead before he hit the ground. Several civilians were injured as well. Henry was on the phone to his bosses in Accra right away, defending the need to keep the contingent in place and to augment it as soon as possible.
Late that afternoon, I was called to meet with the minister of social welfare at the Kigali hospital. He was absolutely hysterical by the time I got out of my vehicle at the main gate. Before me was a scene of chaos and horror that simply seemed to explode in my face.
The RPF had fired three to four artillery rounds into the hospital compound. Fumes and smoke still hung over the site, filtering the brightness of the sun and turning everything into a dreamlike image of atrocity. One bomb had landed in the middle of a large tent erected as shelter for about thirty injured persons. Staff were cleaning up pieces of charred bodies and trying to put the tents that had surrounded it back up. Inside the nearby walled compound stood the pharmacy and dispensary. It had a wired service counter in a doorway; people would line up along the front wall waiting for their prescriptions to be filled. The yellow-painted, one-storey building was still standing although all the windows were smashed. After a closer look I was aghast. On the wall there were outlines of people, of women, of children, made of blood and earth. It was like a scene out of Hiroshima. There had been over forty people standing against the wall, caught between the shell blasts and the solid building. A medical person said that some people just exploded into the air. None survived.
I could not absorb the carnage. As an artillery officer, I had seen the effects of explosions on all sorts of targets, but never could I have imagined the impact of such hits on human beings. The age of abstract “exercises” was over for me. Hundreds of people of all ages were crying and screaming, and staff ran every which way trying to attend to all the wounded. With tears and crazed gestures, the minister of social welfare screamed at me that UNAMIR and I were accomplices to this savagery and that he hoped I would never be able to erase this scene from my mind. Then my aide-de-camp came up to me with the Motorola. It was Henry. The Force HQ was under heavy artillery attack.
We raced back through town with little patience for the barriers, rage welling so hot in me that the militiamen must have taken one look and decided the risk of stopping me was not worth it. As we approached the HQ, the smoke of explosions was still billowing and a round landed about three hundred metres away as I drove through the gate, a pillar of earth flying up and then in all directions. A few vehicles were destroyed. Many of the windows in the rotunda were shattered. As I walked into the headquarters, two rounds landed on the edge of the compound near the street. All the staff and civilians were huddled in the central lobby. As I was being briefed by Henry, another round exploded in the compound right outside the doors. Later I watched media footage of the attack and was quite surprised to see that when a bomb exploded, everyone around me flinched but I was so focused I remained immobile, impatient in fact for them to get up and back into the briefing. About an hour later I gave the all-clear. There was a huge mess to clear up but luckily this time no one was injured.
I spoke a few words of encouragement to the staff and sent people back to their duties. I then asked Frank Kamenzi, our RPF liaison officer, to come with me outside. Away from prying ears, I lit into him. Threatening an immediate pullout an
d world scandal in between curses, I insisted on seeing Kagame the next day. I was not going to bring more forces into this cesspool unless such scandalous and dishonourable actions stopped right now. And I told Frank not to return to my headquarters unless he successfully set up the meeting
The next day in Byumba, Kagame met my outrage over the assault on UNAMIR and the killings at Kigali hospital with his own horror stories, including the mass extermination of young Tutsi students in Gikongoro. He agreed to apply more discipline to his troops and said he would personally brief the liaison team to my HQ and provide them with the necessary communications to be able to call off misbegotten attacks on us. I left after about an hour, wanting to believe his word but still concerned.
Henry had formally written to me reminding me that Kagame had warned us that he was implementing his tactical plan to take the airport. It seemed to Henry that holding on to our positions at the airport in the face of that threat was of no great benefit to the mission. When we met later that day, I argued that if we withdrew from the airport, the RPF would make it nearly impossible for us to return. Henry agreed with me but let me know that he was under pressure from Accra to get his troops out of there. He spent a good part of the next day with his Ghanaians.
The last of my Canadian reinforcements arrived that day, led by Lieutenant Colonel Mike Austdal as contingent commander. Phil Lancaster arrived that day as well, a sight for sore eyes. The other Canadian officers were Major John McComber, Captain Sarto LeBlanc, Captain Jean-Yves St-Denis, Captain André Demers and Captain Nelson Turgeon. Within hours I put them to work in my headquarters where they rendered sterling service for the duration of their tours with UNAMIR. I released two of the three officers who had come from Somalia—Major Plante opted to stay—sending Bussières and Read home with my thanks for a job well done. Major Don MacNeil and Major Luc Racine had arrived from Canada in late April, just before Brent got sick, and both of them would provide excellent service for the next year in Rwanda.
That day the high commissioner for human rights, Ayala Lasso, made it in, and we all briefed him. He did his rounds as best he could on all sides and saw the horrific sites. This was his first trip into a human rights disaster since he had been appointed, and he could not hide his fury nor his disgust. At the end of his fact-finding tour he declared that what he saw in Rwanda was a genocide. The report he eventually made was an accurate account of events as we knew them thus far. He also wanted to send in human rights observers as soon as possible but was well aware of the risks. Kagame encouraged him to do so and said he would provide support. The RGF was less enthusiastic and said it would get back to him on the matter.
As we crept further into May, more extremists in the government, including ministers, were encouraging the arming of the Hutu population and demanding more action at the roadblocks to weed out Tutsis and rebel infiltrators. UNOMUR reported that the RGF was being supplied by boat over Lake Kivu and by land from Goma and Bukavu in Zaire. Reports were coming in of new massacres in towns around the country. Philippe Gaillard called in with news that thousands had been murdered at the great religious centre of Kabgayi, which was next door to Gitarama, where the interim government was set up.
Dr. Kabia came to see me with the news that Booh-Booh had left again for Nairobi and then Paris to meet with Boutros-Ghali. I asked what that was all about, and he said that such consultations were not out of the ordinary. I told him I needed his comments on the most recent version of the non-paper, especially as the United States was working diligently to shoot it all down. Instead of establishing safe sites based on concentrations of displaced persons in Rwanda, as I had called for, they wanted me to set up a Kurdistan-type of large safe zone on the periphery of the country, arguing that troops would be safer that way. But there the concept had worked because the bulk of the Kurds were already in that general safe-zone area, whereas in Rwanda the people at risk would not be able to get to a safe zone on any border since the militias and armed civilians would simply set up a cordon some distance away and massacre anyone foolhardy enough to try. On top of that, the British representative argued that a more formal report was required before any decision could be taken, and the report also needed to include a budget assessment. The DPKO had to write the report and then the Security Council would look at it. Ambassador Keating was insisting that my chapter six-and-a-half wasn’t good enough—we needed a chapter-seven mission. I did not want to intervene in the war or become a third belligerent—I wanted just enough authority and firepower to move the humanitarian agenda safely. In a conversation with the triumvirate, it was clear we had to step up the fight for the new mandate.
For four more days, the Americans put obstacle after obstacle in our way, with the British playing a coy supporting role. The French backed UNAMIR 2 but with conditions; the non-aligned countries were furious at the delays; and the RPF published a statement to the Security Council that looked very much like a manifesto against us, arguing that UNAMIR 2 was too late to stop the killing and could potentially destabilize the RPF’s struggle for power. In fact it was not too late; the massacres would continue for weeks. If I had been a suspicious soul, I could have drawn a link between the obstructive American position and the RPF’s refusal to accept a sizable UNAMIR 2. In the pre-war period, the U.S. military attaché from the American embassy was observed going to Mulindi on a regular basis. In addition, a large Tutsi diaspora in North America backed the RPF.
Meanwhile the smell of death continued to permeate the real world in central Africa. We prepared and sent updates on the situation, clarifications of the concept of operations, lists of acceptable troop-contributing nations, vetted by both the RPF and the RGF, and still it was not enough. I increased my media interviews, and Mark Doyle poured articles into the BBC, but nothing seemed to prod the Security Council into motion. I ordered an attempt to get humanitarian aid into the RGF zone under the protection of UNAMIR in order to respond to the accusation that we were favouring the RPF but also to prove how vulnerable we were. UNREO organized the attempt, under the direction of its brilliant coordinator, Arturo Hein, and brought along four journalists. It headed to Runda and the displaced camps there (there were ninety-one such camps around the country). They ran an ambush on the outskirts of Kigali, were searched at several roadblocks, and the journalists had their film confiscated twice. After they unloaded the trucks at the site, the locals, armed with machetes, clubs, grenades and stones, surrounded the vehicles and threatened the whole team. The mob had started to pull the aid persons off the trucks when the local sous-prefect finally arrived to put a halt to it. The UNMOs had done their best, but the size of the crowd and its state of frenzy had flummoxed them. On the way back to Kigali they barely squeaked through a rocket attack. We sent a detailed report of this foray to the DPKO for promulgation. The bulk of the civilians were behind RGF lines. If we did not get to them, thousands would continue to die by the road and in the displaced persons camps. I hoped this account would prove exactly why the humanitarian effort needed muscle.
There were so many life-and-death decisions swirling in my head that I needed to find a stable reference point so I could get my bearings. I decided one morning to go to Kinihira in the former demilitarized zone. After warning the RPF liaison officer of my intentions, my escort and I drove north on the main route to Gatuna for about eighty kilometres and then veered off onto a dirt track at the edge of a small village where children still waved at us as we bumped by. The trail was broken up due to the heavy rains, and I was doing quite a job of trying to leap from one hole to another in my SUV. We drove for about thirty more kilometres like this. My aide-de-camp, ever polite, and the Ghanaian sniper sitting in the back seat didn’t complain but were rather shaken up by the time we arrived at the commune office at the top of the third long ridge in the paint-by-number series of valleys. I badly needed to stand in the little school on the spine of that ridge, where nearly a hundred children had studied before the killing started.
And the place
did not seem touched by the war, except that there were no children playing in the schoolyard. We noticed only a few very timid adults peering at us from their doorways. As I walked around, under the watchful eyes of my African escort, in my mind’s eye I could see the children wearing their bright blue-and-beige uniforms, the overworked but smiling teachers, the little brothers and sisters dragged to school by the older kids in order to let their mothers work in the fields, the boys racing after a banana-leaf soccer ball at recess. I sat at the end of the schoolyard and looked at the scene below. Tea and coffee fields, once precisely groomed, looked scraggly and in need of tending. The hundreds of small garden plots running up the sides of the hills were now overflowing with weeds. The landscape used to feature spectacular splashes of colour from freshly washed clothes, laid out neatly in the sun on green patches of grass beside brown huts with thatched roofs. They were all gone. I looked out over burnt huts, some still smouldering, carrion birds overhead, black lumps in rags moving ever so slowly downstream as others piled up on a curve in the river. I was filled with a sense of gross ineptness. I had come to paradise in full bloom and now, on my favourite hillside, I saw myself walking these hills and valleys, crossing streams and sitting in the shade of banana trees, talking without anyone being there, ripped apart by failure and remorse. I had come to Kinihira looking for a little peace, but peace had been murdered here, too.
I was brutally brought back to the moment by my aide-de-camp, who handed me the Motorola radio. The DPKO wanted our response ASAP and I was required to review yet another document before it was sent. We drove back in silence.
Back at headquarters, Yaache had news for Henry and me. That day the RPF had held a humanitarian coordination meeting with the UNHCR and sixteen NGOs at Mulindi. I had not been informed, and our military observers with the RPF were also kept in the dark. “The bastards,” I said. With huge problems delivering aid to the RGF zones, efforts in the RPF area had to be absolutely transparent. In no way could aid resources be siphoned off to Kagame’s troops. Thus started a running battle between me and the UNHCR, which lasted right through the over-aid crisis in the Goma camps that was still to come.