A Life Half Lived

by Andrew MacLeod

  My job was to ensure that the role of the Red Cross, as well as the ‘rich white guys in their big white land cruisers,’ as many local people perceive foreign aid workers, were accepted by the general community, that we would somehow create Law of Armed Conflict-training programs in the military, and create programs to ‘re-instil humanitarian values’ in a post-genocidal country. Kagame had refused to meet with all but the most senior of ICRC representatives for some time, due to the perceived (rightly in my view) racial arrogance of some Swiss delegates. It was my job to try and fix that. My French was poor, the Head of Delegation hated Anglophones, so delegation meetings were conducted in French.

  My predecessor, Glenn O’Neil, had done a very good job before me in difficult circumstances, but still the contact list with the Rwandan Patriotic Army and government was small. I was introduced to a man described to me as our key contact: the military Prosecutor General Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Rwigamba. He was to be my main contact point, and through him I had to try and re-establish relations with Kagame.

  Like many in Rwanda, Andrew Rwigamba was a softly spoken man. He seems quite gentle and reasonable, although at the rank of colonel in a guerrilla army he certainly had the ability to be firm when necessary. Rwigamba was a refugee child of 1959 and like many of that generation, was schooled all his life in the need to return to Rwanda and ‘rescue’ the country. He was patient and highly intellectual, with a Masters Degree in Law from the London School of Economics. A good and intelligent man, he was initially a ‘stonewall’. He was the interlocutor designated to block deeper access into the army. His clear instructions had been to be diplomatic, but to keep the ICRC at arm’s length as far as possible. While the ICRC was allowed into civilian prisons to visit the genocide suspects, and to pay for the food to feed them, it was not allowed into military prisons or to have too much interaction with the RPA – the ICRC was simply not trusted.

  Diplomatically, the Rwandans controlled how much access they allowed to key people. They would provide enough access to rebut potential diplomatic criticism, but not enough to provide a full understanding of how Rwanda worked. Full understanding would require trust – a trust that was hard to build with a government who in part blamed the West for allowing the genocide to take place. They were shrewd and smart enough to get that balance right.

  The more I came to know the Rwandans, the more I realised that, unlike preconceptions, they were far from naïve. In fact, they were intensely intelligent. This was to become strikingly apparent many years later when Rwanda re-established diplomatic ties with the French, and joined the British-derived Commonwealth as a non-former colony – on the same day. The clear diplomatic message from Rwanda was, and remains, “We are in charge of our country”.

  Rwigamba wanted to write the first Rwandan Army Discipline code, instil Law of Armed Conflict programs around the rules of the Geneva Conventions, and re-create a police force for Rwanda. As two British-trained lawyers (me and Rwigamba) with passions around International Humanitarian Law, we should have been able to make progress, but for three months we didn’t move beyond the situation that I’d inherited. I am not a patient person by nature. I wanted to implement the instructions given by Yves, but it would have been possible to spend the entire 12–18 month mission going nowhere unless the status-quo changed. In sheer frustration I entered Rwigamba’s office one day and opened the meeting with my feelings.

  “Sir, can I be frank?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “If you have been given the instructions to be diplomatically nice, but

  to block us from doing things, then just let me know and let’s stop wasting each other’s time. Let’s can the meetings, I’ll stop coming, I’ll write the nice reports saying we met, but instead, let me go off and play tennis and no one need know the truth. But if you want to actually do something, you know my skills, you know which ones you can use, just tell me which ones you want, which ones you don’t, and let’s get on with it. Your call.”

  He laughed, looked at me and said, “I have been waiting three months for you to say something like that. Now let’s get to work.”

  Australians, coming from a nation free from a colonist’s legacy that insists one’s culture can and should dominate the world, bring a different approach to that of others. Australians come to a country to learn, whereas many Europeans come to a country to teach.

  I learned this in the 1992–93 Christmas-New Year period when travelling with Amanda de Luca, a Brazilian girl, on a trip around Europe. We were arguing on a train to Rome about my claim that one could just ‘pick’ Australians out of a crowd. Given Australia is a multi-ethnic nation, Amanda didn’t believe me. On arrival in Rome railway station, we sat and I started to nominate people as Australian. She then went and verified. I was right every time. We sat for a while, people watching, and trying to figure out what made the Australians different. We finally observed two factors that, if both existed, were likely to indicate an Australian. Firstly, Australian tourists dress badly, Europeans don’t. Secondly, in railway stations most people look for the exit, head straight for it, and get out of there as fast as they can. Australians, on first arrival, gaze around, meander, absorb and learn.

  Later, on the isle of Capri, we ignored a ‘do not enter’ sign to climb down a very dodgy set of stairs to a secluded beach only to find eight other Australians there.

  Amanda said to me, “You know, I have finally figured out you Australians.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “You are always on the other side of a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign asking, Why not?”

  I laughed, but she was spot on.

  Rwigamba and I became good friends. He had an extremely ambitious set of goals for his country.

  Rwigamba would say the RPA were a guerrilla army in the process of becoming professional. So we set to work on one part of the professionalisation: drafting the Defence Force Discipline Code for the RPA, unapologetically using the Australian Defence Force Discipline Act as a basis for our work. This was the starting point, but we had bigger fish to fry – compliance with the law.

  I asked Rwigamba about an Army-wide program for International Humanitarian Law. “This would take the permission of Colonel Patrick Nyamvumba and General Kagame,” he said. Colonel Patrick Nyamvumba was the Chief of Operations, Plans and Training for the Rwandan Patriotic Army, and in the years since has risen to the rank of Lieutenant-general and commanded UN Peace Operations in Darfur. In almost any other army in the world, both Patrick Nyamvumba and Andrew Rwigamba would have been generals with the roles they were filling.

  To visit Nyamvumba at army headquarters, ICRC delegates had to park across the street, go through security and request an appointment. Rwigamba changed that for me. After we started work, and after we made the personal breakthrough, he announced one day “Andrew, you are a former Army Officer, maybe we should allow you to drink in the Officers’ Mess. Join me tonight. The guards will know you are coming and you will be allowed in the car park.” The invitation to the Mess was not only the cementing of a friendship, it was a professional breakthrough. To be allowed into an Army Officers’ Mess, where men relax and let their guard down is an honour, and symptomatic of trust for either you or your institution. ICRC had not been allowed there before. It later led to a breakthrough with Kagame.

  A Church Where God Does Not Exist At Ntarama church, about 45 km south of Kigali, from April to May 1994, killers brutally massacred an estimated 5000 ethnic Tutsis. The compound is no bigger than a convenience store, yet body after body was piled in. To this day the government of Rwanda has left around 3500 rotting bodies in place as a reminder. My team insisted that we visit this small church so that I could begin to learn what genocide really means.

  Genocide is a misused word today, and its misuse degrades the force and revolution of the crime. Having been in the former Yugoslavia, I knew the horrors of ethnic cleansing and mass murder, but they are not the same as genocide. Genocide is a tool used
to forcibly move a population. Ethnic cleansing is killing a few of an ethnic group to encourage the others to move to areas where the perpetrators of the crime wish them to live. Ethnic cleansing is like saying, ‘You can’t live here – but you can live way over there, and we will kill as many of you as we need to in order to convince the rest to leave’. It’s a despicable crime, but genocide is worse. Genocide is defined as killing with the intent to destroy an ethnic group. In other words it is like saying, ‘You, and everyone like you, cannot live here, cannot live there, indeed cannot live anywhere. We are going to find you, everyone like you, and kill all of you. No exceptions.’

  The first thing that struck me about Ntarama was my guilt about being a voyeur. Yet this guilt was outweighed by the urge to see, learn, accept and to lament. The second thing was the smell. The smell of love and death are so close. The church had a musk-like odour of rotting flesh and death. The smell of death, being very musky, is so close to that sweet smell of love and sex, except it burns your nostrils with an acrid after-smell that never – and I mean never – leaves you. The third thing was the eye sockets in the head of a baby. Not the entire body, just the head. The baby’s head balanced on the pile of bones, staring lifelessly at me, accusing me endlessly: “Why did you let this happen to me?”

  It was then that I realised God failed the ‘logical test’. Theologians tell us that God, from whichever monotheist religion, is an all-powerful and benevolent being. But if God were all-powerful, and let this happen, then he is not benevolent. If he is benevolent and this happened, then he is not all-powerful. While a theologian may then say “God in his wisdom gave man free will”, my response is quite simply this: no one gave that baby any free will or choice, and there is no benevolence in what happened to that small child.

  Walking into Ntarama church is confronting. It is the place that haunts my soul and where I moved from agnostic to atheist with a positive disbelief in God.

  Within our being we know what is right and wrong. We do not need the existence of a great outside power to direct us, or to tell us what happened in Rwanda was wrong. To me, the mere existence of life is enough of a reason for a life, and the desire to do good is enough of a purposeful life for me not to need God. There were times in my life that I did not believe this, but any doubts about the non-existence of God were expunged inside that church in Rwanda.

  While Dallaire said; “I know God exists as in Rwanda I came face to face with the Devil”, I take a different view. The Devil may exist locked inside all of us, but God does not exist. To my mind, the existence of god fails the ‘logical test’.

  Reuniting Families is a Good Thing? One of the very good things that the ICRC does is to reunite families in post-conflict and natural disaster settings. Instinctively, one would feel a family reunion would be an unequivocally good thing. Sadly, this is not the case.

  One of the tragedies I witnessed was a family reunion. In 1998 four years after the Rwandan genocide, many parents had assumed that their children were dead. In most cases they were correct. The ICRC had created a book of orphans, photographing each and listing the orphanage in which they were held. Many of those orphans had lost their parents in the genocide. However, many were merely separated and unable to find each other.

  In today’s mobile-phone age it’s difficult to comprehend that if a child is split from his or her parents, there’s no way to reconnect if that child doesn’t know where he or she lives. It may be the case if a child is 13 or 14 at the time of the conflict he or she would know where they live. But what if the child is two, three or four years old when separated from the parents? In this case, often the child’s photograph would end up in a booklet and some time down the track a parent would claim that child. Or at times perhaps, an extended family member would let the ICRC know where the parent was. Sometimes during a family reunion when the child was brought back to the parents there was nothing but happiness on people’s faces. But sometimes the case was different.

  In some developing countries parents have many children, assuming that a large family size is in effect a superannuation for the parents when they get old. There is an assumption that a family of eight would naturally lose two children in childbirth, two in early years and maybe one or two in the middle years, leaving two or three children to support parents in their old age. In the absence of a national superannuation scheme, the one guarantee of a good old age is to have lots of children. This is the reason why economic development is such an important aspect of bringing global population growth under control.

  But imagine this: you are a poor family stuck in the middle of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. During the fighting you lose one of your children. After a couple of years the child has not been found and you assume that child died during the genocide. There are no national records for births and deaths so you have nowhere to go to check. You therefore have another child.

  That additional child often extended the resources of a family to the limit. Then imagine one day you’re contacted by someone in authority from the village who tells you the ICRC has found your original child and is bringing him or her back to you. Two emotions would cross your mind: firstly, you’re filled with excitement that the child you thought was dead is, in fact, alive. Conversely however, you also recognise that your family does not have the resources to feed the additional mouth that you had assumed was dead. I will never forget the look on a mother’s face when we brought a child back to her, a child who was in his early teens at the time of reunion but who would have been no more than eight years old at the time of the genocide. He had assumed his parents died. They had assumed he died, and had another child. The ICRC was fully aware of the problem of bringing a child back to a family when the family had limited resources and brought with the child support in the form of non-food items such as plates, cups, and other household items that would help the family accept the addition. On a designated point on a red clay road, banana palms on one side and eucalyptus trees on the other, we met up with the mother and reunited her with her child. Clear, conflicting emotions showed on her face – unabashed love for her child, but also concern for the rest of her family. There are few things in life more heart-breaking than a mother who is not sure that she should accept her lost son because she does not know how to choose which mouth to feed.

  Law and a Guerrilla Army: A New Challenge While Rwigamba was becoming more confident of a working relationship, and while his gentle coaching of me on how to behave in the Rwandan Army Officers’ Mess was starting to create trust, Patrick Nyamvumba was still not totally convinced.

  “Andrew”, Rwigamba once said to me, “What else can we do to establish trust? I need you to meet Colonel Kalimba, the head of our medical service. Can you help us in first-aid training in our army, for example?”

  Colonel Kalimba had banned all interaction between troops under his command and the ICRC since early 1994. He had done so as he had felt the approach by ICRC delegates had been neo-colonialist and insulting. He didn’t like foreign people telling him what he ‘must and must not do’, in his own country. This was not an uncommon story. A new bridge of trust had to be built with Kalimba. There was some logic to his concerns. For years the ICRC had concentrated less of its effort on soldiers and more on civilians. This was partly due to how the nature of conflict had changed. At the time of the first Geneva Convention in the mid-1800s, 90 per cent of casualties in conflict were soldiers and 10 per cent civilian. In World War I it was about 50:50. Post World War II, civilian casualties in conflict is close to 90 per cent and combatants 10 per cent. Naturally, as the victims of armed conflict became more civilian, so the work of the Red Cross changed. The root of the organisation though is the provision of service to wounded soldiers. A request for first-aid kits and first-aid training made a lot of sense.

  I ran the idea by Yves Daccord in Geneva before approaching Dominique. Yves got the link right away, but counselled me “not to forget how much this departs from our recent practice. Some people will not
like it and some people will question our neutrality. Remember, neutrality is not the same inaction to everyone, it is the same action to everyone, and stress to the Rwandans that we would offer the same service to the other side.” Yves asked headquarters to identify a suitable trainer and a budget, and not long after Paule Rousseau, an ambitious Frenchwoman in her mid-60s, and a powerhouse of energy, arrived to start a massive military-wide training program in first aid, while I made it clear that we would do the same for the other side of the conflict. We were getting closer to the goal of an army-wide training program.

  Trust was continuing to build, and a critical component of this was the Officers’ Mess. Tradition in the officers’ mess is consistent across different cultures and armies. One tradition dictates that visiting members present their home unit plaque to decorate the walls of the mess they visit. Before I left Rwanda, I had an ICRC plaque made in military style and presented it to the mess. “With this plaque, every ICRC head will be welcome here,” the Mess President said when I presented it. In 1998 only two white guys had permission to drink off-duty in the Mess. One was Lieutenant-colonel Richard (Rick) Orth, who had a ‘liaison’ role with the US Forces. The second was me. Rick and I became good friends over beers in the Mess, as I did with his successor Rick Skow.

  The Officers’ Mess had a small billiard table, and like billiard tables everywhere the winner gets to stay on the table. I enjoyed the odd game here and there, won some and lost some, and in the process slowly gained the trust of more of the officer corps. General Kagame would come in some nights. He was and remains an unusual guy. Tall, but physically slight and softly spoken, sometimes he would quietly sneak in and be unobserved for a short while. Many in his past have misjudged him and not seen the true strength and leadership he commands by using his sharp intellect and a forward vision. Few hold these skills. He would always win at billiards and I guessed he was allowed to. I also guessed he hated it. Brigadier Rowe’s complaint came back to me. Good leaders want people to confront and challenge them – albeit in the right way. Kagame had a track record as a good leader.