Shake Hands With the Devil

by Roméo Dallaire

  In the same cable he officially informed me of France’s desire to send troops into western Rwanda, and told me to sort out what my role would be in relation to the intervention. Riza confirmed that the French were mounting a separate operation that would not fall under my command, and said it would resemble the U.S.-led Operation Restore Hope in Somalia. Riza advised me that the new mission could be on the ground even before the Security Council authorized it. “You should ensure that only the cooperation absolutely necessary is provided by UNAMIR and that cordial relations are established,” he wrote. In UN-ese this was a circumlocution designed to let me know that I should cover for the DPKO and the secretary-general by not being too co-operative with the French before their mandate was approved. The trouble was that this meant I should not be in touch with the French force until they actually landed. The humanitarian disaster was huge and growing, the need was urgent, and I was the one with the most current information on the ground, yet I was to observe the niceties and not try to enlighten the French.

  Much as I resented the mission that the French would dub “Opération Turquoise,” I thought that not sharing the picture on the ground was a mistake. I later realized that a number of officers who became part of Turquoise had been French military advisers to the RGF until the start of the war. How would their presence strike the RPF, who had to suspect that the French were not on a purely humanitarian mission? And how much encouragement would the presence of their former advisers bring the RGF and the extremists of the Presidential Guard, who were already ecstatic in the streets of Kigali? The appearance of UN-sanctioned French soldiers was going to make it even tougher for UNAMIR to deal with the RPF. Riza wrote, “RPF perceptions of the operation itself will determine their attitude and we hope that this will not strain relations with UNAMIR.” If I hadn’t felt so grim, I would have laughed. Of course, all my remaining Franco-Africans would be at even greater risk.

  I passed the cable on to Dr. Kabia and to Henry, asking them both to study our options under this Orwellian scenario, in which a UN force under chapter seven and a UN force under chapter six would have to function in the face of a determined belligerent. The French troops were reputed to be aggressive, and the RPF was pushing to conquer the whole country. Would we by default become a peacekeeping force between the French and the RPF?

  The follow-up phone calls between me and the triumvirate were somewhat reassuring. Annan, Riza and Maurice also thought the scenario beyond belief, and they were not keen on the French initiative. But I should make no mistake: it was going to happen.

  How would we carry on? Yesterday’s ambush hit me very hard—it was a blatant overreaction of the RPF toward my mission, even before the French took the field. It was as if the RPF were sending me a blatant message to stay out of the way. Tiko, who had lost a man from his close-knit group of observers, approached me that morning to tell me that although the UNMOs were still willing to serve, the situation had finally become too dangerous for them to carry on with reconnaissance and information-gathering. Tiko was the bravest of the brave, with years of experience in some of the world’s worst war zones, and he always got the job done. That such a soldier had decided to pass on the feelings of his men lent them even greater weight. They had had enough. They had been living in the midst of a raging battle for months; there had been fatalities; they had been taken hostage, caught in the middle of firefights, shot at, menaced by drunken or drugged Interahamwe, asked to share their accommodations and rations with thousands of displaced people, and generally abused by the fortunes of war. It was hardly surprising they felt as they did.

  As far as I was concerned, the ambush had also been a result of my judgment. Until yesterday, every time one of our patrols was sent through the lines, we had warned the belligerents in advance through our liaison officers. But the night I’d got back to Kigali, neither Kamenzi nor his assistant was anywhere to be found and we needed to send out patrols for airfield reconnaissance and contact with the interim government. Though I ordered that the UNMOs were to stop and turn back at any point where they judged there was too much risk, I had agreed that the patrol needed to go. The UNMOs suffered the consequences of my poor operational decision.

  That afternoon I met with a group of senior officers. I told them that, yes, I had been asking them to take extraordinary risks because we needed the vital links they could provide with the belligerents and the information only they could find out. I told them that from here on in, they would not be asked to perform any operation that hadn’t received the consent of both sides. I don’t know where they found the strength to recommit to the mission, but I left that meeting having been told that they had the confidence to continue to serve with me.

  I met separately with the officers of the Uruguayan contingent. I shared in their grief and offered the solace of a brother officer. I told them that they had served bravely and that the mission still needed them to stay dedicated to it in the aftermath of their loss. I also told them that if they wished to return home they could count on my full support—no stigma would be attached to their decision to pull out. The next day three of the officers requested to go back to Uruguay. I was encouraged that the number was so small.1

  Before I met with Tiko and the UNMOs, I had gone to see Kagame. Setting off with my usual escort, we took a route north from the city and then circled around to the east before heading south and finally turning west on obscure dirt roads toward the Nyabarongo River. We drove through village after deserted village, some still smouldering. Garbage, rags and bodies intermingled at places where either an ambush or a massacre had occurred. We drove by abandoned checkpoints ringed with corpses, sometimes beheaded and dumped like rubbish, sometimes stacked meticulously beside neat piles of heads. Many corpses rapidly decayed into blinding white skeletons in the hot sun.

  I don’t know when I began to clearly see the evidence of another crime besides murder among the bodies in the ditches and the mass graves. I know that for a long time I sealed away from my mind all the signs of this crime, instructing myself not to recognize what was there in front of me. The crime was rape, on a scale that deeply affected me.

  We saw many faces of death during the genocide, from the innocence of babies to the bewilderment of the elderly, from the defiance of fighters to the resigned stares of nuns. I saw so many faces and try now to remember each one. Early on I seemed to develop a screen between me and the sights and sounds to allow me to stay focused on the work to be done. For a long time I completely wiped the death masks of raped and sexually mutilated girls and women from my mind as if what had been done to them was the last thing that would send me over the edge.

  But if you looked, you could see the evidence, even in the whitened skeletons. The legs bent and apart. A broken bottle, a rough branch, even a knife between them. Where the bodies were fresh, we saw what must have been semen pooled on and near the dead women and girls. There was always a lot of blood. Some male corpses had their genitals cut off, but many women and young girls had their breasts chopped off and their genitals crudely cut apart. They died in a position of total vulnerability, flat on their backs, with their legs bent and knees wide apart. It was the expressions on their dead faces that assaulted me the most, a frieze of shock, pain and humiliation. For many years after I came home, I banished the memories of those faces from my mind, but they have come back, all too clearly.

  We were in newly conquered RPF territory, which was deserted except for the corpses and rebel soldiers. The RPF guide who was taking us to Kagame moved along at a fair clip, seemingly oblivious to the impact on his vehicle of the cratered and scarred dirt trail. The RPF had mechanics and spare parts, but I had neither. My four-by-four had to see me through the war and I deliberately slowed the pace.

  When we reached the river, across which Kagame had made yet another temporary headquarters in his advance, the opaque earth-coloured water was high and fast. The RPF engineers had constructed a pontoon-type bridge that light pickup trucks could cross ging
erly. Getting out of my vehicle, I noticed a number of soldiers with long poles upstream, pulling bloated bodies up on the bank. To me this was now such a commonplace sight it did not penetrate my protective screen.

  I did not want to risk our vehicles on the bridge. As we made our way across on foot, I noticed that clothes were caught between the struts of the floating base and I stopped to look over the side. Staring up at me were the faces of half-nude corpses, stuck under the bridge. There were a lot of them. In some places they had accumulated to the point that we were actually walking on a bridge of dead bodies. On the far bank, soldiers were trying to pry them loose for fear that their weight would pull the bridge apart. The screen shattered, my stomach heaved and I struggled for composure. I couldn’t bear the movement of the bridge, up and down on the slaughtered hundreds.

  The first thing I raised with Kagame when I reached his small command bungalow was the ambush on my UNMO team—it was out of my mouth even before the news of Turquoise. He expressed sincere condolences. His only excuse for firing on my men was that too many of our vehicles had been abandoned after breaking down and were being used by the RGF; he said his soldiers did not trust any unannounced travellers in UNAMIR vehicles. In that case, I countered, he should make efforts to return the UN vehicles his own troops had commandeered, since the RGF surely felt the same way. I insisted that from now on, his liaison officer and his assistant had to remain at my headquarters and not disappear at night, as they had both done on June 16. If they hadn’t gone missing, the clearances would have been dealt with. Kagame said that going forward he would guarantee a response from the RPF the night before we launched any mission.

  We moved on to the French. I asked him about meeting with Kouchner; Kagame was inscrutable on the subject. I told him I was becoming concerned that I, and my mission, were being used as a kind of public relations front to distract the world from others’ hidden agendas. He denied this wholeheartedly. I said I was definitely not looking for a fight. Though I expected the RPF to react to the French and to be confrontational, the triumvirate had told me over the secure phone that the United States was putting considerable pressure on the RPF to co-operate. I told Kagame that I would handle the French proposals to firm up their area of operations and that I’d be a conduit between him and Turquoise. I would insist that the French not deploy in Kigali; ultimately the capital should be under my control to prevent the French getting anywhere near his forces. For a moment Kagame just looked at me. Then in a very confident fashion, he told me that I shouldn’t worry about that. The French would not be entering Kigali. As to the reason why, his assessment was blunt: “Tell France that Kigali can handle more body bags than Paris.”

  I dreaded the return trip over that bridge of death. As I picked my way back across, I was careful not to look over the sides or down through the slats, but I could not get out of my mind the fact that I was walking on bodies.

  I had little to add to the sitrep that night except for my concerns about the bigger game going on to which I was not privy. That evening at prayers, I asked Henry to assess the risk of conflict in and around Kigali and to once again draw up plans for a possible withdrawal. The capital could soon become a major battle zone.

  On June 19, the date that UNAMIR 2 should have had 4,600 soldiers in Rwanda, my troop strength stood at 503, and we were still living with all of the problems and shortages that had plagued and undermined us in April. The secretary-general wrote to the president of the Security Council on that date to say that the phase-one deployment was about to go ahead, but that because no nation had provided a fully equipped and trained battalion, UNAMIR 2 would not be operational for at least three more months. In these circumstances—combined with an exponential increase in humanitarian problems and the fact that UNAMIR was taking casualties as it attempted to provide a modicum of support for Rwanda—Boutros-Ghali suggested that the Security Council consider a French-commanded multinational operation under a chapter-seven mandate to assure the security and protection of displaced persons and civilians at risk in Rwanda. He also asked that governments maintain their troops until UNAMIR 2 was up to strength.2

  Since Booh-Booh was officially gone, I had to formally assume his political duties. On June 20, I forwarded a document called “Assessment of the Proposed French-Led Initiative in the Rwandese Crisis.” In the clearest, most objective and rational terms I could muster, I described all of the reasons why the French should not deploy and what I estimated would happen if they did.

  I proposed three options to the UN. The first was to withdraw UNAMIR outright and hand over the entire situation to the French. The second option was to secure the agreement of both parties to the French deployment but to keep UNAMIR as an independent mission and interpose it between the French and the RPF. The third was to redeploy UNAMIR into a country near Rwanda, develop UNAMIR 2 and return once the French had completed their operation. “It is strongly recommended that the French-led initiative be encouraged only if the RPF agrees to French troops on the ground, or if this force comes with personnel and equipment but not with any French troops. Should this option not be possible,” I wrote, “in order to avoid an escalation of the conflict, both inside Rwanda and in the region . . . the French-led initiative should be let to run its course alone and permit UNAMIR to build itself up in a secure environment . . . after which the Mission could redeploy with the effective forces planned for in its mandate.” If French troops were coming in, and we could not secure the belligerents’ approval, I recommended the third option. New York now knew exactly where I stood. The final salutation in UN messages is always “Best regards.” For the only time on this mission, I closed the document with “At this point, FC finds regards very difficult to express.”

  I raised grave concerns about what area the French were in fact going to occupy. Was it their intention to support the RGF right into the capital, or were they looking to avoid confrontation with the RPF? Nobody could tell me. Boutros-Ghali’s letter to the president of the Security Council simply stated that the French wished to help “displaced persons in Rwanda,” which could mean anywhere. For the next six days, my discussions with New York, Paris, Kigali, the RPF and the French force (I don’t remember the RGF being a party to these negotiations) concentrated on drawing a single line in the western part of Rwanda to delineate the French zone.

  On June 21, I sent them all a drawing of the tactical layout of the RPF positions as of that day. After the French announcement, the RPF had accelerated its campaign, and the RGF had also sped up its withdrawal toward the west, with an estimated two and a half million Rwandans moving ahead of them. Even while the French awaited final authorization from the UN, the RGF-held territory was shrinking, mostly in the south. I ended up negotiating the final line that the RPF and the French would accept as the French zone of operations. I subsequently sent UNMOs to liaise with both sides to confirm the line on the ground. And so, as I had predicted, above all the other tasks my small force still had to perform, we were turned into a chapter-six peacekeeping force between a UN chapter seven force and the winning side of the civil war.

  When news of the French intervention was broadcast in Rwanda, the RPF, as I had feared, retaliated against my Franco-African officers from Togo, Senegal, Mali and Congo. They were robbed, insulted and roughed up to the point where I had to confine them to camp. I negotiated their withdrawal from the mission area for their own safety and informed New York of my decision. On June 21, I said farewell to these magnificent Franco-African officers, who had served the mission well since the previous November. Being the only francophones in the mission, they had had to conduct most of the tasks in the RGF sector and had been exposed to more than their fair share of danger. Some of their comrades had been killed and others wounded. Most of them had fallen ill at least once, and they had witnessed scenes that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. But they had all stayed on through the frustrations and dangers, and it was an emotional farewell.

  Because of the ri
sks of altercations with the RPF in the rear areas where the troops were less disciplined than in the front lines, I tasked Henry to personally lead the convoy to Uganda. Tiko, wanting to be with his UNMOs to the last, went as well. About a dozen kilometres outside Kigali, they were turned back by the RPF and brought to the airfield. Under the eyes of Frank Kamenzi, who did not intervene, RPF soldiers proceeded to conduct a complete “customs” inspection of each one of the forty-two men. Their belongings were thrown about, and their electronic equipment—radios, tape recorders and the like—were confiscated. The inspection lasted about an hour. When it was over, they were told to pick their stuff up off the runway and get back on the buses, and then they were sent on their way. This humiliation, which they endured after so many months of putting their lives on the line to help Rwandans, created such anger in them that Henry was concerned they might take matters into their own hands with every delay at the checkpoints. When I protested their treatment to the RPF, I was told that it was entirely normal that the occupying force would search anyone attempting to leave the country since, they claimed, there had been considerable looting in the past.

  The departure of the Franco-Africans stripped me of most of my French-speaking staff officers. For the third time in the short history of this mission, I had to rebuild my headquarters from the bottom up, all the while continuing with operations. The weight and the complexity, the sheer urgency, of demands related to the coming mobilization of UNAMIR 2 hit us right in the face, swamping us in the organizational details of how to secure resources, logistics, infrastructure, training, the Entebbe theatre reception and logistics base, the troop carriers, the rations and the water we would need. I sent a message to the DPKO that I was bringing in forty-eight UNMOs from Nairobi to replace the departed officers.