Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

by Roméo Dallaire

  We had produced the bulk of the necessary paperwork for the mission, including operational documents that still had to be confirmed on the ground; we had pushed all the possible buttons. We hadn’t been able to persuade the desk officers from the relevant departments to have a final coordination session on our mission; such a meeting was nearly impossible to organize because the culture of the UN was one of jealously guarded stovepipe fiefdoms where information was power (not the best way to run a complex, multi-national, multidisciplined and international organization that was always in the poorhouse).

  Cooling our heels while waiting for the SOMA to be signed was wasting precious time. I had left my family high and dry to serve what I thought was a greater good. At very short notice, they had been forced to vacate the beautiful and spacious garrison commander’s home and move into married quarters in a historic building that had been built in 1804 and was not in the best of shape. Brent’s wife, Marge, was pregnant with their third child and was going through some difficult days. Finally, I requested leave, which was immediately approved by Maurice.

  On the way back home, I stopped in Ottawa for an administrative and intelligence update: the update was, there was no intelligence. Canada’s defence department was unconvinced that the Great Lakes region of central Africa was a priority.

  In Quebec City I found it hard to gear down and act as if the long separation facing me and my family was just another posting. On the surface we were the perfect military family: three happy kids and a loving wife and mother who, after twelve years of teaching, had chosen to pack up her chalk and her workbooks and devote her time to raising our children and making a home for us all. Underneath there was trouble. Willem, my eldest, was fourteen and having difficulty at school; he was constantly being baited by his pro-sovereignist teachers about his staunchly federalist father. I could see that he was angry, isolated and confused, but I didn’t have the time or the patience to connect with him. I had had all kinds of time for the young officers I had guided, mentored and nurtured over the years, but I was unable to offer the same love and support to my own son. Instead, I dealt with the surface details of trying to get my family settled in our new home.

  I should have seen that Beth, too, was struggling. She had gone from leading a high-profile, very involved life as the wife of the garrison commander to being brutally shoved aside as the military community hurried to embrace my replacement. What comfort could I offer her when it was my desire and duty to go to Africa that had put her in this position?

  On the weekend of August 8, I received an urgent call from Brent. The Rwandans had just signed the Arusha Peace Agreement—which called for, among other things, a speedy deployment of an international peacekeeping force to guarantee the shaky ceasefire on which the peace accords rested. All hell was breaking loose at DPKO as they rushed to cobble together a response, and I was needed back in New York. I threw some clothes into a bag and was off.

  Back at the UN, we immediately immersed ourselves in the text of the Arusha accords, provided to us by a Fijian colonel named Isoa Tikoka, who had been the UN military observer throughout the last months of negotiations at Arusha. The existence of Tikoka was a surprise: no one had thought to tell us that there was a UN military man on the ground in Africa whom we might have tapped for information during my weeks in New York. Tiko, as we soon came to call him, was a veteran peacekeeper, a literal giant of a man, good-hearted and full of life. He had been pulled from the Somalia mission to observe the Arusha peace talks. In Somalia he had had several vehicles shot out from under him, had been frequently robbed at gunpoint and had lost all of his personal kit. In the months ahead, he would become a most valued adviser to me.

  The peace agreement was a complex document that was the result of painstaking refereeing by Tanzania’s president, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, at Arusha during nearly two years of fractious negotiations. What was not evident to us sitting in New York was that the accords papered over, rather than resolved, the major problems of how to share power between the formerly warring parties and how to resettle refugees in Rwanda, some of whom had left the country forty years earlier and now had children and grandchildren with a claim on Rwandan citizenship. We also did not appreciate the state of human rights in the country after so much fighting. (Such information was available in New York, but because of the lack of sharing between the departments in the UN, the UN agencies and the non-governmental organizations [NGOS], no one filled us in until we actually hit the ground in October 1993.)

  Basically the accords set a brisk, twenty-two-month timetable in which the various political parties, including the RPF and the former ruling party, the Mouvement républicain national pour la démocratie et le développement (MRND), would first form a broad-based transitional government (BBTG). Then the country would proceed through several stages to free, democratic, multi-ethnic elections. Along the way, the BBTG would somehow reintegrate the refugees and the RPF, demobilize both armies and create a new national force, redraft the constitution, revitalize the civil police and rebuild the shattered economy, drawing on the world financial and aid communities, which would be needed to throw money at all the country’s complicated problems. All of this depended on a neutral international force deploying immediately to assist in the implementation of the stages of the accords. The deadline that Arusha set for the presence of such a force was September 10, a mere five weeks away.

  The DPKO decided to launch a third reconnaissance of Rwanda. Usually each department sent its own team on its own schedule. This time we were trying to achieve a faster turnaround, and representatives from all concerned departments would go at the same time.

  Brent and I set to work immediately to produce a plan of attack that focused on military concerns but also took into account the humanitarian side of the mission. The political side remained the purview of the DPA. We worked without an office or support staff or even proper military maps of the area—we were two guys pulling all-nighters on borrowed laptops. We planned our reconnaissance using a tourist map of Rwanda.

  On August 10, Brent and I were called into a hastily scheduled meeting with other reconnaissance mission team members to discuss plans and requirements. Nobody had anything useful to bring to the table and most appeared to be totally out of the loop. Even Macaire Pédanou, a slightly-built African with a pensive manner who had been the UN political observer in Arusha and had been appointed head of the reconnaissance mission, had little to offer in the way of a plan of action. Though Maurice and others talked about Rwanda being a chance to redeem the reputation of UN peacekeeping, it was clear to me that the mission was still considered a sideshow to the main event, which was always going on somewhere else far more important, such as Bosnia or Haiti or Somalia or Mozambique, just about anywhere other than the tiny central African country that most people would be hard-pressed to locate on a map.

  A few days before we were to leave for Rwanda, Maurice called me into his office to brief him. His workspace was functional and rather depressing, without any creature comforts whatsoever. He spent so much of his time in the field or at innumerable meetings all over the UN that he wasn’t in his office much; it lacked the personal trinkets that usually accumulate in a commander’s office. The sixties wood panelling was in need of a serious upgrade and the furniture should have been out on the garbage heap.

  I was feeling very confident about our plan for the reconnaissance or, in UN-speak, the “technical mission.” Maurice listened to me carefully but told me not to come back to him with a request for a brigade-sized mission. His words were roughly, “This thing has to be small and inexpensive, otherwise it will never get approved by the Security Council.” I was taken aback. He was asking me to “situate the estimate,” as we say in the military, to design the mission to fit available resources rather than to respond to the actual demands of the situation we were being sent to assess.

  I struggled with this new information as Brent tackled the UN bureaucracy to get funds released for our techni
cal mission. I rationalized that as a soldier coming from a chronically undermanned and under-equipped army, I was used to making do—that was part of a soldier’s job description. But I was in a serious quandary. From what I had determined, the Arusha accords would require a UN mission to meet their milestones. Yet if my technical mission report asked for more than what nations were willing to pay or contribute, there would be no mission. I had a major ethical dilemma on my hands before we had even left New York.

  Then we received word that an eye condition had sidelined Pédanou. He would not be joining us in Rwanda because he had to have emergency surgery. Not until the plane tickets were in my hand did Maurice tell me that no one from the DPA would be able to replace Pédanou as mission head. By default I was to be in charge. I was still naive enough to be pleased.

  4

  ENEMIES HOLDING HANDS

  WE LANDED IN the Rwandan capital, Kigali, on August 19, 1993. From the first moment I glimpsed its soft, mist-covered mountains, I loved Rwanda. Though it is almost on the equator, its elevation makes it a temperate place, full of fragrant breezes and unbelievable greenness. With its tiny terraced fields against the perpetual backdrop of rolling hills, Rwanda seemed to me then a kind of garden of Eden. Not that there was much time to appreciate its beauties: from the moment the plane touched down, I was caught up in a flurry of diplomatic activity. From the runway, I stepped into my first press conference, which was well-attended by the local and international media.

  The atmosphere was friendly and positive. The official airport welcoming party was led by Anastase Gasana, the coalition government’s foreign minister; Jean-Damascène Bizimana, the Rwandan ambassador to the UN; and the Rwandan ambassador to Uganda. Gasana had been one of the strong peace supporters within the Rwandan government at Arusha, and he had been appointed official liaison with the technical mission. He was an affable, unpretentious chap, a politician from the Mouvement démocratique républicain (MDR), a party that was in opposition to the Habyarimana regime. He believed that the Arusha Peace Agreement marked the beginning of democracy for his country. He wasn’t afraid that Rwanda would fall back into war, but he recognized the dangerous political uncertainty that the transition to a multi-party, power-sharing, democratic system represented for the country. He was unwavering in his insistence that the UN had to form a neutral peace-keeping force and get it on the ground as soon as possible.

  I was buoyed by Gasana’s optimism; it was hard to keep my neutral face and not respond. Bizimana was a different story. He watched and listened intently and said nothing, his sombre silence more than a little disturbing, as he was Rwanda’s man in New York and an important interlocutor on our behalf in front of the media that day. At the time, I didn’t know he was from the hardline side of the house.

  I stuck closely to my script, emphasizing that my team was embarking on a fact-finding mission, and stressing that our presence was no guarantee that the UN would commit to the full-fledged peacekeeping operation mandated by the Arusha accords. The question of September 10, the day that the BBTG was supposed to be in place, was on many of the journalists’ lips. I remember raising my finger to make the point that our presence was only phase one, that a series of decisions had yet to be made by the UN and the troop-contributing nations before anybody would be sent to Rwanda. There would definitely be no UN mission on the ground by September 10. However, I promised, if a mission was approved, we would break every possible record, not to say a few rules, to get there as quickly as possible. My news took a lot of the enthusiasm out of the reception.

  I was surprised that a formal visit to President Habyarimana wasn’t on the immediate agenda, since I thought he might have wanted to make his own appraisal of the person leading the team of UN staff that would sway the decision to send a mission or not. When I mentioned this to Gasana, he assured me that the president did want to see me. He left it at that and so did I for the moment.

  In twelve days, my small eighteen-member team and I had to assess the political, humanitarian, administrative and military aspects of a potential UN peacekeeping mission. Because I was now head of the mission, I had to split my time to cover political and humanitarian aspects as well as the military and meet the leading politicians of the seven parties who would be involved in forming the transitional government. I also had to meet members of the diplomatic community of Kigali, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) resident representative, Amadou Ly of Senegal, who was the senior UN presence in the country.

  As a result, I had to delegate several military reconnaissance tasks to Brent, Tiko, Miguel Martin and Brigadier Paddy Blagdon, a retired U.K. army officer and UN de-mining expert, while I took on only the work with the highest military authorities on all sides. As well, I would have to touch base with the humanitarian and aid organizations that would be key to helping the refugee, internally displaced and famine-ridden populations inside and around the country and reintegrating demobilized soldiers later on. A drought had hit southern Rwanda hard, and no let-up seemed to be in sight.

  Staff from the Field Operations Division (the UN’s field administrative and logistics agency) would examine communications, infrastructure, personnel, local logistics and transportation, and every other aspect of administrative support that the mission would need in this remote, landlocked country.

  Even for the technical mission, we needed vehicles, local staff, telephones and all sorts of equipment. We set up a temporary headquarters in a meeting room in the Hôtel des Mille Collines, but we were plagued with logistical problems, and I fumed about the amount of time we were wasting just getting ourselves set up. We had some tourist maps on the wall, some computers on the desks and a conference table with a few chairs. At the end of this brief trip I would have to submit my recommendations and draft concept of operations to the UN for approval, and already administrative problems and shortages were consuming our limited time and attention.

  Luckily we were blessed with Amadou Ly, who had been in Rwanda for three years and knew the lay of the land. Unlike many others in the UN, he was neither cynical nor jaded, even though he had witnessed his share of bungling and incompetence. His mild demeanour masked a ferocious appetite for work, which inspired his small but dedicated staff to achieve minor miracles with their scant resources. He managed to supply us with everything from paper and pencils to access to overseas lines, and vehicles with drivers, even though it wasn’t his job to do so and his office didn’t have the budget to provide this service to us. On that trip, Ly was one of the few people in Rwanda to alert us to the ominous rumblings of the extremist elements and to the presence of militias, which had inserted themselves into the youth wings of the various political parties, even the moderate ones. He warned me that time was of the essence: the UN needed to get a peacekeeping mission on the ground as soon as possible to prevent such forces from increasing their grip.

  My first official meeting was with the prime minister of the interim government, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, known far and wide simply as Madame Agathe, and Faustin Twagiramungu, the prime minister designate, who had been chosen in Arusha to lead the BBTG. We met in Madame Agathe’s large, airy office. She was a motherly woman, but there was steel in her too. She supported a UN peacekeeping force. Rwanda’s future hung in the balance, she said, and we could not miss this historic opportunity for democracy because of a few hard-liners who did not want to share power.

  Twagiramungu had studied in Quebec from 1968 to about 1976, living through the War Measures Act and René Lévesque’s separatist Parti Québécois taking power democratically. He had participated in the great rally for a McGill University français. He felt that that experience had assisted him greatly in his political life. He was not as inspiring as Madame Agathe, and less prone to be front and centre, but he was very keen on the establishment of the BBTG. Before entering politics, he had been the general manager of a state-run company that had a monopoly on all of Rwanda’s international freight movements. Twagiramungu had at one time
been accused of pocketing bribes and was briefly incarcerated, an episode he attributed to political persecution. Perhaps that accounted for his cool, chip-on-the-shoulder attitude. Although he seconded Madame Agathe’s support of the UN, he did so without her passion.

  I found the circuitous talk of the Rwandan politicians whom I met a little trying at times, but I soon realized that if I stopped asking questions and listened, I was often rewarded with amazing insights into the history and culture of the country and what ailed it. For example, individuals from both sides of the ethnic divide betrayed a fear of the future, all the while expressing their desire for the peace accords to be implemented. Their lingering sense of injustice over their treatment in the past, the chaotic uncertainty and their mistrust of authorities, could be potential impediments to grasping the incredible opportunity that the peace process held out. Overall they were a people suffering from psychological depression because of legitimate or imagined past grievances. They had a pessimistic, though perhaps realistic, view of the future.

  I was surprised at how many of the people I met had either studied in Canada or had had Canadian teachers in Rwanda. People also had very close ties with the Belgians, the old colonial power, and with the French academic and military milieu. The scanty information I’d collected before arriving in Kigali did not quite describe the decades-long relationship between francophone Rwandans, mostly of Hutu extraction, and Quebec, especially its two largest French universities, Laval and the Université de Montréal. The head of the moderate Parti libéral, Landoald Ndasingwa, was married to a Québécoise, Hélène Pinsky. They made an odd but charismatic couple, Lando with his gentle charm and easy laugh, and Hélène, who called to mind a turbocharged Bella Abzug. He was the minister of social affairs in the interim government, and he expected to be a minister in the BBTG. Hélène ran the family business, which was Chez Lando, a hotel, bar and restaurant, popular with European expatriates and Rwandans alike.