With Hélène it was easy to see how well French-Canadian culture—the language, music, literature and appetite for intense social and political discussion—translated to Rwanda. As the mission continued, I became more and more at ease in this francophone nation. Perhaps I was a willing victim of Rwanda’s charms, but the struggles of this little African country began to stir a passionately sympathetic response in me. My eyes were being opened to realities far from my usual military sphere, and I was attempting to absorb every nuance of the culture, every distortion of the double-talk of its political leaders.
“While Boutros Boutros-Ghali had not assigned a new political head of the mission after Pédanou dropped out, the DPKO had sent along Rivero as well as Martin to accompany me on all my diplomatic and political meetings. And the DPA had sent a junior political officer to assist me. She was an assistant to Under-Secretary-General James Jonah and was soignée and haughty, a fixer and arranger who thrived in the diplomatic social milieu, filling my diary with a constant stream of meetings and attempts at cocktail parties. We saw the Germans, the Belgians, the Americans, the Chinese, the Russians, the papal nuncio, the Burundian ambassador and, of course, the French—twice, at their insistence. None of them offered me any in-depth political analysis. All of them seemed to be singing from the same song sheet: the UN had to get on the ground as soon as possible. None of them put any troops on the table, however, and most permitted themselves to quibble about the potential size and cost of such a mission.
Our junior political officer, who happened to be French, booked me the two appointments with the French ambassador, one at the beginning of the trip and one on the day before I left. The French had a relationship with the Habyarimana regime that stretched back to the mid-seventies. Over the years, the French government had made a significant investment in French-speaking Rwanda, supplying it with arms and military expertise, support that had escalated to outright intervention against the RPF insurgent force in October 1990 and again in February 1993. But the RPF proved to be a stubborn and persistent foe, and the French finally joined the United States in a diplomatic effort that led to a series of ceasefires and, eventually, the Arusha accords. The French still had a half a para-battalion in Kigali, supposedly to protect the European expatriate community, and they also provided military advisers, both in and out of uniform, to the major units of the RGF. France was the only member on the UN Security Council that had demonstrated a clear interest in Rwanda. Keeping the French ambassador informed was important—the possibility of a UN deployment hung in the balance.
To my delight, during our first meeting at his residence, Ambassador Jean-Phillippe Marlaud was open and friendly, showing none of the usual arrogance that I had encountered with French officials on other occasions. He had only been in Rwanda since March 1993, and he seemed determined to further the objectives of the Arusha accords. He listened to me carefully, expressed genuine enthusiasm for my nascent ideas and even looked over my reconnaissance plan. He was the only person in Rwanda other than Ly to demonstrate more than a superficial interest in my work and its details. He believed that it was imperative to find some means of reassuring the Rwandan people on September 10. Even a simple gesture might allay their fears.
As I survived the rounds of political meetings, Brent and Tiko were busy assessing the military situation. The huge Fijian, who had served in Kashmir, Sinai, Lebanon and Somalia, among other places, had a seemingly inexhaustible stock of war stories and equally inexhaustible good humour. A few days into the trip, we travelled together to meet with the senior leadership of the RPF north of the demilitarized zone in Mulindi, sixty kilometres north of Kigali. As we drove through the blue-green countryside, my thoughts turned to Major Paul Kagame, the military leader of the RPF. I was curious to meet the man who had turned a ragtag group of guerrilla fighters into a force capable of holding its own against French soldiers in the field, not once but twice.
We passed a constant stream of pedestrians, women in brightly coloured dresses, swaying gracefully under the large parcels balanced on their heads, often with small children tucked into shawls slung across their backs. Men pedalled handmade bicycles, fashioned from scrap wood and draped with all manner of vegetables. Gaggles of smiling boys in baggy cotton shorts drove cattle. The route was dotted with neat villages of terracotta, mud-brick cottages, the beauty of the landscape masking what I knew was desperate poverty.
And then, in the middle of this rural idyll, we came across a hellish reminder of the long civil war.
We smelled the camp before we saw it, a toxic mixture of feces, urine, vomit and death. A forest of blue plastic tarps covered an entire hillside where 60,000 displaced persons from the demilitarized zone and the RPF sector were tightly packed into a few square kilometres. When we stopped and got out of our vehicles, we were swarmed by a thick cloud of flies, which stuck to our eyes and mouths and crawled into our ears and noses. It was hard not to gag with the smell, but breathing through the mouth was difficult with the flies. A young Belgian Red Cross worker spotted us and interrupted her rounds to guide us through the camp. The refugees huddled around small open fires, a silent, ghostlike throng that followed us listlessly with their eyes as we picked our way gingerly through the filth of the camp. I was deeply impressed by the young Belgian woman’s calm compassion as she gently administered what aid she could to these desperate souls. It was obvious that she could see through the dirt and despair to their humanity.
The scene was deeply disturbing, and it was the first time I had witnessed such suffering unmediated by the artifice of TV news. Most shocking of all was the sight of an old woman lying alone, quietly waiting to die. She couldn’t have weighed more than a dozen kilos. Pain and despair etched every line of her face as she lay amid the ruins of her shelter, which had already been stripped of its tarp and picked clean of its possessions. In the grim reality of the camp, she had been given up for dead and her meagre belongings redistributed among her healthier neighbours. The aid worker whispered that the old woman likely would not last the night. Tears stung my eyes at the thought of her dying alone with no one to love or comfort her.
As I stood struggling to regain my composure, I was surrounded by a group of the camp children, who were either laughing outright or smiling shyly at this strange white man in their midst. They had been playing soccer with a ball made out of dried twigs and vines, and they tugged at my pants, eager to have me join their game. I was awed by their resilience. It was too late for the old woman, but these children had a right to a future. I am not being melodramatic when I say that this was the moment when I personally dedicated myself to bringing a UN peacekeeping mission to Rwanda. Until that point, the exercise had been an interesting challenge and a potential route to a field command. As I climbed back into my vehicle, I knew that my primary mission now was to do my best to ensure Rwanda’s peace for the sake of these children, and ease this suffering.
We soon passed the RGF checkpoint, eased our way through a marked minefield that delineated the front lines, and entered the demilitarized zone, which was an eerie place, dotted with villages that had been deserted by the displaced persons we had seen in the camp. They had been driven out by fighting in 1990, and their fields and farms were beginning to be reclaimed by the luxuriant native plants and wildflowers. The air was filled with the raucous yet lonely cries of flycatchers and warblers. I would have loved to have gotten out of the vehicle and gone exploring, but we had been warned that this area was heavily mined. So we stuck to the road until we crossed the zone to RPF territory.
The RPF greeted us with an honour guard of about thirty Intore, or warrior dancers. Each of them wore a short underskirt of scarlet cotton draped with a piece of leopard-patterned cloth, and huge flowing headdresses made to resemble lions’ manes. Their bare chests were ornamented with beads, around their ankles were clusters of tiny bells, and in their hands, they carried ceremonial shields and spears. Tossing their heads and twisting their bodies, they leapt effortlessly int
o the air like a flock of giant birds, their sweat-streaked torsos gleaming in the sunlight. They danced, drummed and sang for about twenty minutes and ended with a flourish, presenting their weapons to us. Their display wove the discipline and precision of a well-trained modern army with an ancient warrior tradition, setting the tone for what was to follow.
The RPF was using the large complex of buildings belonging to a deserted tea plantation as its headquarters. We drove up a hill lush with unharvested tea and halted in front of a graceful old house with a huge veranda overlooking a formal garden slowly going to ruin. The air was laden with the fragrance of flowers. Inside, we were given a warm welcome by the RPF political and military leadership, including its chairman, Alexis Kanyarengwe, who was plump and bright-eyed and wore a difficult smile; its senior political officer, Pasteur Bizimungu, who was both impatient and eloquent; and Paul Kagame, who seemed more like a stern college professor than a rebel army commander. They led us to a large living room that had been stripped of its domestic furnishings and now functioned as a meeting place.
The trio of Kanyarengwe, Bizimungu and Kagame presented an interesting study in contrasts, and each was very effective in his own way. Kanyarengwe, the RPF’s titular head, was a Hutu and seemed a little uneasy with his leadership role, constantly checking for the reactions of the others after making a remark. Still, he proved to be solid, serious and well-organized. Bizimungu was the RPF’s public political face. He had been a senior civil servant during Habyarimana’s regime and as such had been jailed and tortured when he sought to expose its worst excesses. He, too, was a Hutu, passionate, argumentative and inflexible, devoid of real charisma. Then there was Kagame, easily the most interesting of the three, although he was the most self-contained. Almost stereotypically Tutsi, he was incredibly thin and well over six feet tall; he towered over the gathering with a studious air that didn’t quite disguise his hawk-like intensity. Behind his spectacles, his glistening charcoal eyes were penetrating, projecting his mastery of the situation.
Most of the group, senior officers included, behaved with quiet confidence and dignity. When we took breaks, they were never idle but talked over points among themselves. The atmosphere was Spartan: there were no flags, pictures or decorations of any kind and no indulgences like alcohol or cigars. We sat at a long table in the centre of the room; three rows of benches were filled with staff officers and civilian leaders observing the meeting.
The RPF was unanimous in its support for Arusha. The chairman stressed that we had to act rapidly to avoid the “gangrene,” or wasting away, of the agreement. He also conveyed his concern over the growth and activities of paramilitary groups within Rwanda. He said that if the UN was to form the neutral peacekeeping force mandated by Arusha, the UN had to guarantee the security of the RPF leaders when they came to Kigali to join the transitional government. He also insisted that the UN should pressure France to remove its soldiers from the country as soon as possible. He politely did not mention that the RPF, proudly African, actually preferred the notion of a peacekeeping force run by the OAU to one from the UN.
The RPF portrayed itself as a group of Rwandan refugees who only wanted to go home and live in peace. They claimed that their desire was to build a multi-ethnic, democratic society in Rwanda. While I didn’t doubt their sincerity, I was aware that having been successful in the civil war they had nothing to fear and everything to gain from the successful implementation of the peace accords. We hit only one awkward snag: the chairman expressed his concern that, since the signing of the Arusha agreement in early August, the displaced population of the demilitarized zone—which numbered 600,000—had started to wander back into the area. The RPF was worried that its security could be compromised as a result. Having just witnessed the hell of the displaced persons camp, I ventured that these poor people were desperate to return to their homes and small farms and that it should be one of the first orders of business to de-mine the area to prepare it for resettlement. Bizimungu did not agree. According to the provisions of the Arusha agreement, the neutral international force had to keep the area clear and closed. At the time, I put his concern down to the paranoia of an insurgent rebel force. Later on, the thought crossed my mind that the reason the RPF raised the issue had less to do with security and more to do with the resettlement ambitions of Tutsi refugees then in Uganda.
Our inspection of the RPF army was conducted in closely guarded convoys over terrible tracks. This struck me as a deliberate attempt to waste our time and prevent us from taking a really good look at the RPF headquarters and units. However, without helicopters, which could fly over the heavily forested and mountainous terrain, we were going to be very limited in our observations of the force. The officers were good at giving the impression of full co-operation, but they offered very little information about their force structures and true capabilities. The soldiers we did see were clearly well-led, well-trained and motivated. They wore an idiosyncratic combination of East German summer uniforms and rubber boots, but were always clean and neat. The rank and file tended to be young, sometimes even boys; the officers, too, were young but clearly knew how to work their troops. When not training, soldiers had lectures to attend and equipment to clean and maintain. This was a combat-proven and battle-ready army.
The RPF’s only limitation was in logistical support. They had very few vehicles, and while their troops appeared to be fit, well-fed and reasonably well-equipped, they were a light infantry army that had to fight and resupply by foot or bicycle. Yet they had won all recent contests because of their superior leadership, training, experience, frugality, mobility, discipline and morale. If Kagame was responsible for nurturing this force, he was a truly impressive leader and perhaps deserved the sobriquet that the media had given him: the Napoleon of Africa.
The RGF was a pronounced contrast. The army’s chief of staff, Major General Déogratias Nsabimana, was a big man with facial expressions that betrayed a deceptive nature. He was not an impressive soldier and had proven less than effective in the last campaign against the RPF in the spring of 1993. He hung on to his position after hostilities ended because of his closeness to President Habyarimana. Despite the presence of an interim government, the army and large parts of the Gendarmerie (the Rwandan police) were still controlled by the regime due to the fact that well-placed hard-liners from the president’s party, the MRND, had hung on to power in the ministry of defence.
Among the senior officers of the RGF was a cadre of a few colonels who appeared to be committed to Arusha and who eagerly anticipated the end of a conflict they had lost on the battlefield. But there were many others within the officer corps, particularly from northern Rwanda, who seemed less committed to Arusha and made no secret of their hatred of the RPF. It was clear that there was a group to work with and a group to watch.
I visited the RGF side of the demilitarized zone and the southern part of the country in a light Gazelle gunship helicopter and also flew north to see the training camps of the elite units of the RGF in Ruhengeri, close to Habyarimana’s birthplace. As we approached Ruhengeri, the Virunga Mountains rose up in front of us like blue giants from the sea of verdant hills. This breathtaking vista (made famous by the film Gorillas in the Mist) was the heartland of the former regime.
The elite units in the area were based in a commando camp; a Gendarmerie rapid reaction force and elite military units were based at the Gendarmerie school in Ruhengeri. All were being trained by French and Belgian military advisers.
On the other hand, the front-line units of the army were composed of poorly trained recruits who lacked weapons, food, medical supplies and, above all, leadership and morale. Atrocious living conditions meant desertion rates were high and units had to be frequently rotated due to the high incidence of malaria. There was a double standard in this army: high for the elite units and low for the rest of the army.
The RGF unit that caused me the most concern was the Presidential Guard, which Brent and Tiko had observed closely at its c
amp in Kigali near the Meridien hotel. It was made up of highly trained officers, NCOs and soldiers, and was the best equipped and staffed of the elite units as well as the most aggressive. They were Habyarimana’s praetorian guard, and they acted with arrogant self-assurance. I did not appreciate their standard of discipline. While they were respectful and obedient to their own officers, they treated all others in the RGF, and even myself, with contempt. It was clear they would have to be handled carefully. Reintegrating them into society when they were released from military service or rolling them into the new army planned for Rwanda would be difficult, to say the least. They would be a first priority during the demobilization phase, and I was sure that controlling them would require the personal intervention of the president.
While the RGF’s conscripted troops lived for their two beers a day and well-nigh mutinied when that ration was cut in half, the young officers who commanded them were generally hard-hitting and dynamic. The gulf between officers and enlisted men was explained to me by a senior local commander in the Ruhengeri garrison, who said that the only way for officers to advance was “to make a name for themselves.” He didn’t elaborate, but I understood him to mean “in the field.” This was not a comforting thing for a potential UN peacekeeper to hear, as it meant that the more ambitious young officers with nothing to lose and all to gain might be willing to risk the lives of the men under their command to advance their own careers.