Shake Hands With the Devil

by Roméo Dallaire

  By this time the pressure of my absence and the nature of my mission were weighing far too heavily on my family and they hoped to see me before the end of summer, at least on leave. Boutros-Ghali did not want to change force commanders at this critical juncture, and wanted me to stay on until my scheduled end date in October. I proposed to go on leave near the end of August, so that I could have time with my kids before they went back to school, and then return to Rwanda until late September, when I’d hand over my job. I wanted Henry Anyidoho to replace me, and the DPKO was unanimous in its support of his candidacy. In the meantime, I proposed that a new deputy force commander and chief of staff be recruited in order to understudy Henry just before I went on leave.

  Three days after I made my request, having first run it by Maurice, General de Chastelain approved my proposal, and supported my recommendation that Henry take over from me. I passed on the news to Khan, who was aware of my request to leave Kigali a few weeks early. He regretted my departure, but certainly understood the reasons, and thought that Henry would make a fine replacement.

  Word arrived from our liaison team in Goma that the situation was very tense and the flow of refugees was increasing. The Zairean army had moved a parachute battalion to Goma to increase security. The French reported that the RPF were shooting into their advance positions east of Gisenyi with heavy weapons including artillery, and that the French had responded with a show of force using their close-attack fighter jets. The Zaireans were finally disarming the RGF at the border, stripping some of them of items such as machetes and rifles, but large weapon systems—artillery, heavy mortars, anti-aircraft guns and anti-tank systems—were being waved through and escorted north of the city. Neither the Zaireans nor the French were taking any measures to separate the militia, gendarmes or soldiers from the civilians as they crossed the border. Yaache spent the day in Goma with the HAC team, UNREO and the Turquoise humanitarian cell, attempting to coordinate efforts. UNREO formally passed the task of caring for the refugees outside Rwanda to the UNHCR, which bothered me. As media cameras were being drawn to the massive movement across the border, even less attention would be paid to the survivors of the genocide inside Rwanda.

  The worsening picture finally seemed to prod the U.S. administration into making some public noise. On the morning of July 16 I got a cable from the DPKO to which was attached a “White House Press Statement Concerning Rwanda.” The statement announced that “the Clinton Administration has closed the Embassy of Rwanda and ordered all personnel to leave the country. Representatives of the so-called interim government of Rwanda must depart within five working days.” The Clinton administration announced that the U.S. government would “begin consultations with other UN Security Council members to remove representatives of the interim government from Rwanda’s seat on the council . . . [and that the U.S. has] denied access to any Rwandan government financial holdings in the United States. The United States cannot allow representatives of a regime that supports genocidal massacre to remain on our soil, President Clinton said.” The last set of surprises: the U.S. “has taken a leading role in efforts to protect the Rwandan people and ensure humanitarian assistance. . . . [It has] provided $9 million in relief, flown about 100 Defense Department missions . . . strongly supported an expanded UNAMIR, air-lifting 50 armoured personnel carriers to Kampala . . . [and is] equipping the UN’s Ghanaian peacekeeping battalion.”

  Clinton’s fibbing dumbfounded me. The DPKO was still fighting with the Pentagon for military cargo planes to move matériel. The Pentagon had actually refused to equip the Ghanaians as they felt the bill was too high and that Ghana was trying to gouge them. And who exactly got the $9 million?

  Luc Racine and his small team were back from their reconnaissance of the HPZ, where they had been looking for suitable sites for our battalions and firming up handover procedures with the local Turquoise commanders and civilian authorities. They had got around in French vehicles with armed Turquoise escorts, and had kept signs of their UN affiliation to a minimum. Most of the people in the area were either hostile to UNAMIR or fearful we wouldn’t have the will to do the job of protecting them after the French left. Luc recommended that all UNMOs going into the HPZ travel with French units for protection; he judged that it was crucial that they be French-speakers in order to help build trust in the people. There was little aid coming in, so Luc also recommended that we couple our deployments with major food distributions, which would prove we had something we could offer. Lastly, he said the RPF had to stop their advance and quit probing the HPZ line so that people inside the zone would feel safer.

  Luc confirmed that, in all areas inside the HPZ, the RGF were still moving about with their weapons. In only one of the three sub-zones of the HPZ were the militia unarmed. In another, they wore special bandanas and were assisting the French to maintain order. There were still roadblocks all over the place, generally manned by the Gendarmerie. The best estimate was that there were over two million people in the zone, two thirds of them internally displaced persons; of those, about 800,000 were already on the west side of the forest, though still a good distance away from Cyangugu. Tutsis were being held in large numbers in at least three sites. The French had three light battalions in the zone and were patrolling vigorously day and night.

  I was to meet with General Bizimungu in Goma at 1100 on the morning of July 16. I also wanted to touch base with the provincial governors of Goma and Bukavu districts to find out for myself what they planned to do about the refugees, and especially with the Rwandan military and militia in their midst. I was met at the airport by Lafourcade, who asked me to be discreet about how the meeting with Bizimungu had been arranged—it might not look so good that the RGF chief was inside the French military camp.

  A French staff officer led me and my aide-de-camp, Babacar Faye Ndiaye, through the labyrinth of the Turquoise tent city and then left us alone to see the general. Bizimungu had just crossed the border that morning and he looked terrible. He was haggard, his left arm was injured, his uniform was dirty. He was incensed with the RPF for not stopping before Ruhengeri and proclaiming the ceasefire, which would have prevented the exodus. He had nothing with him—no kit, no money, no food—and he asked whether UNAMIR might assist him. I told him to stay in touch with my liaison team in Goma and to produce a list of what he needed. As we were leaving, he asked my ADC to send him cigarettes and soap.

  We headed into Goma proper under French escort, driving past ash-covered squalor, dead bodies abandoned in the street, and suffocating crowds. We waited at least twenty minutes outside the governor’s office before he was free to see me. The governor was a gracious man with a no-nonsense air about him. I asked him what he thought of this onslaught of refugees, militia and Rwandan army personnel. He said that he needed massive support from the NGOs and the UN; the influx had taxed the local infrastructure beyond its capacity and there was suffering among his own people. Food and water were already scarce. Starvation and disease wouldn’t be far behind.

  Regarding the RGF, he said that their small arms and major weapons were being moved to secure compounds several kilometres north of the camps and the city, and that Zairean troops would provide protection for the refugees and the NGOs in Goma. I informed him that UNAMIR might find itself obliged to assist in the return of the refugees as well as escorting convoys of aid. He was not favourable to my forces entering his country.

  As we made our way back to the helicopter, the sky seemed to darken though it was only early afternoon. The nearest volcano was spewing more ash, which was blocking out the sun. I suddenly felt claustrophobic, as if this scene were about to swallow me up. We escaped the airport without having to pay a landing fee.

  In Bukavu, the governor had similar concerns about UN troops crossing the border. He said he could handle the 300,000 refugees so far who had fled into his province, but he hoped the French could hold the others across the river. I was surprised at the lack of NGO or UN agency presence in town, but I already knew th
at Turquoise did not have a solid humanitarian plan. There had been major looting in Cyangugu under the noses of the French. This was not looking good at all.

  After Gisenyi fell on July 17, RPF artillery rounds began to land on the outskirts of Goma, principally along the escape routes among the foothills of the volcanos. Both Lafourcade and the Zairean authorities were outraged. A few rounds landed at the airport where the runway area was chockablock with a steady stream of incoming and outgoing aircraft. Panicked, some of the refugees started to move farther away from the border. What was the RPF trying to prove? I ordered Frank Kamenzi to inform his headquarters that they had to stop the shelling. A day or two later it did stop, but the psychological effect on the refugees was debilitating.

  Ironically, the unilateral ceasefire—another name for total RPF victory—was announced the next day, though there were no crowds cheering the peace in the streets of Kigali. I don’t think any of us except the humanitarian gang felt much relief, but Yaache and the MamaPapas were happy that at last they would be able to deal with only one overall authority to coordinate emergency relief, and that the rebuilding of the nation’s judicial, financial, medical, policing and government infrastructures could begin in earnest. And the atmosphere in the HQ eased a little. The fighting and the killing were officially over, but the exact nature of the horrors that were soon to afflict the Goma camps and the displaced people in the HPZ were waiting just around the corner.

  On July 19, Khan and I set off to attend the official swearing-in of the new Broad-Based Government of National Unity at the CND. Having seen so many failed attempts in the months leading up to April 6, I felt a little strange sitting at the end of the front row of dignitaries on the lawn by the main entrance to the CND, under a canopy in the sun, with no responsibility except to be a witness. The RPF was taking care of security; the well-armed soldiers who stood between the hundreds of spectators and the dignitaries under the canopy, as well as all around the perimeter of the CND, detracted from the serenity or hope the swearing-in of a new government might have inspired. As a general rule, I thought, the larger and more overt the security precautions, the less safe one should feel.

  So I watched as the ceremonial necessities were undertaken with solemn decorum. Rwanda’s new president, Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu who had been tortured by the Habyarimana regime, was sworn in, followed by the rest of the eighteen-member cabinet. Khan and I didn’t understand a word, as all the speeches were in Kinyarwanda, but Bizimungu looked almost regal. Then Paul Kagame took his oath as vice-president and minister of defence, followed by two more Hutus: Faustin as prime minister and Colonel Alexis Kanyarengwe as vice–prime minister.

  As the ceremony ended I thought, “So now they are the ones in charge, after nearly four years in the bush.” I wondered again about the nature of this less-than-perfect unilateral ceasefire and victory, and of Paul Kagame, so dignified as he accepted his new office. Was he haunted by the human cost of his victory? He and the rest of the RPF leadership had known what was going on behind the RGF lines. He and the movement had been relentlessly inflexible about any concession that might have eased the tension in the country, both before the civil war broke out and later, when they had the RGF on the run. He had been reluctant to support UNAMIR 2, whose specific duty was to stop the killing and the mass displacement of the population. Increasingly we could see the immaculate cars of Burundian returnees or the ox carts of the Ugandan Tutsi refugees in the streets of Kigali, as members of the scattered diaspora took up residence throughout the better parts of the capital, sometimes even throwing out legitimate owners who had survived the war and genocide. Kagame seemed to be doing little about it. Who exactly had been pulling his strings throughout the campaign? I found myself thinking such dire thoughts as whether the campaign and the genocide had been orchestrated to clear the way for Rwanda’s return to the pre-1959 status quo in which Tutsis had called all the shots. Had the Hutu extremists been bigger dupes than I? Ten years later, I still can’t put these troubling questions to rest, especially in light of what has happened to the region since.

  Unsettled by my reflections about the RPF victory, I met with Vice-President Kagame in his walled bungalow at Camp Kanombe the next afternoon to discuss the pressing issues that faced his newly-won country. He agreed to all my UNAMIR 2 deployments and to the force structure I envisioned, though both he and I recognized it would be tricky to achieve my tasks when the pace of UN deployment was still so slow. I also suggested that we move some of our forces into the Gisenyi area in order both to secure transient camps inside Rwanda for returnees and to be ready to go into Goma to help out. On stopping the outflow of displaced persons, Kagame agreed that there should be a major aid effort inside Rwanda, which could act as a magnet to draw people back into the country. He raised the idea of sending some of the new government ministers into the HPZ to start explaining to the populace what was going to happen and to encourage them not to flee to Bukavu.

  He needed our help to repair the airport in order to persuade a commercial airline to start regular flights into Kigali. He wanted normalcy as fast as he could get it. He asked us to make every effort to meet the planned July 31 date for entry of formed units into the HPZ, and was adamant that the French leave by August 22; he wanted us to work with the French to set up the bureaucratic infrastructure in the HPZ before the handover in order to avoid creating a vacuum of civil authority. He wanted Canada to provide a technical mission to help reconstruct his army because of our reputation for being able to accomplish such tasks and the fact that our forces were bilingual. He had yet another delicate job he wanted me to undertake: could I persuade Turquoise and the Zairean government to return all the heavy weapons and vehicles they had let into Zaire? I could hold onto them until things stabilized, he said, but he wanted them back. In the hands of his enemies they were a constant threat to Rwandan security. (That did not happen before I left.)

  In that two-hour meeting over soft drinks in his bungalow, we built a program for the next two to three months at least. All I needed was my troops and the promised resources. I reinforced with Kagame that I was receiving reports that starvation and disease were beginning to cut a swath through the refugee camps. There was not a moment to waste.

  After the installation of the new government, we were in a race against time, which was nothing new to me because UNAMIR had always been running to catch up to the situation on the ground. The French were making noises about seeking the authority to stay past August 22. As the RPF caught wind of those noises, they began to up the pressure on UNAMIR to replace the French and get them out of Rwanda. Our logistics situation was still erratic: we periodically ran out of water or food or fuel, and we never seemed to have enough working vehicles, radios or equipment to do anything the way it should be done. In many areas, we were regressing, not progressing.

  The situation in Goma was truly desperate. As the media converged to cover the refugee influx, world public opinion began to pressure governments to act. The NGOs, broken free from UNREO now that camps were overflowing in Zaire, cast co-operation and coordination aside, followed the cameras to Goma and began what can only be described as an exercise in over-aid. Meanwhile, a hundred kilometres to the south, almost as many people still inside Rwanda were under-aided and there was little to no media coverage of that situation. Nothing we could say was able to shift any of the attention south.

  New York still waffled on providing my minimum requirements. Except for national reconnaissance parties, UNAMIR 2 had still not deployed sixty days after mandate approval and thirty days past the deployment date. I got tired of asking where my troops were.

  Life began to return to Kigali. The Amahoro Stadium and our other protected sites slowly emptied after the government was sworn in as at first one person and then a family and finally all of our companions left us to find out what had happened to their relatives and their homes. Too often the news was bad. Everyone had lost someone in the genocide. With almost ten percent of the pre-wa
r population murdered in a hundred days there were very few families who did not lose at least one member. Most lost more. It has been estimated that ninety percent of the children who survived in Rwanda saw someone they knew die a violent death during that time.

  As far as homes and businesses went, first the RGF, the Interahamwe and ordinary civilians had stripped the city of anything they could lay their hands on. In my pre-war house the only items left were a set of golf clubs I had borrowed from the Belgian military attaché, and a single copy of Maclean’s magazine. Sinks, faucets, windows, light fixtures—everything was gone.

  Some of the more recent recruits to Kagame’s army also engaged in looting. Kagame had promised that they would receive their back pay after they had won, but he did not have the money—no government cash reserves were left in the capital (they had evaporated along with the interim government). His troops began to pay themselves with whatever they could find; genocide survivors and diaspora returnees also scrounged what they could. I am told that for years afterwards you could buy the material goods of Kigali on the street markets of Uganda.