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

by Roméo Dallaire

  On November 19, the first Belgian transport aircraft began landing and unloading their human cargo—about seventy-five members of the 2nd Paratroop Battalion, who we were putting up temporarily at the Amahoro Stadium. I can’t say that the Belgians and I hit it off at the welcoming parade the next day. I gave my speech in French, not realizing that they were the advance party of the last remaining bilingual unit—Flemish and Walloon—in the Belgian army. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel LeRoy, a self-confident, rather long-in-the-tooth parachutist, did not project any particular excitement about the mission.

  The UN had requested an 800-man motorized infantry battalion, with one company (125 men) mounted in wheeled armoured personnel carriers, but it was not to be. Instead we had been told back in September that Belgium could send 450 para-commandos, with light weapons, few vehicles, only a handful of APCs, and a small logistical sub-unit, medical-surgical platoon and headquarters. (We ended up having to make up the difference in force strength with a 400-man half-battalion from Bangladesh; the two half-battalions never equated the strength and cohesion of a whole.) Many of the Belgian soldiers had completed a tour in Somalia, which was a chapter-seven mission, and they came to UNAMIR with a very aggressive attitude. My staff soon caught some of them bragging at the local bars that their troops had killed over two hundred Somalis and that they knew how to kick “nigger” ass in Africa. I was compelled to call a commander’s hour when the bulk of the half-battalion arrived, in order to walk them through our rules of engagement and impress upon them that they needed to change their personal attitudes toward the locals and operate in accordance with a chapter-six mandate. I left them with no doubt that I would not tolerate racist statements, colonial attitudes, unnecessary aggression or other abuses of power.

  Much of the Belgian equipment had been shipped directly from Somalia without being cleaned or serviced and was much the worse for wear. Even so, the Belgians would still be my best combat troops. Since in Rwanda, all roads lead to Kigali, and whoever controls Kigali controls the country, I planned to deploy them in the city. Standard UN practice is to name units for their countries of origin; the Belgians in this case would have been called BELBAT. I decided to pass on this custom, as I thought the best chance for melding my motley force was to keep them all focused on their mutual tasks, so the Belgians became KIBAT, for Kigali Battalion.

  Our information gathering in southern Rwanda during this period was restricted to informal reports from Amadou Ly’s field teams, moderate politicians, NGO personnel and the odd journalist. They all suggested tension was building in the region as a result of the coup in Burundi. An estimated 300,000 refugees had crossed the border into Rwanda, and massacres inside Burundi had left the streams and rivers full of bloated bodies. The refugees were occupying makeshift camps and ravaging the small forests that decades of labour had re-established on the mountainsides to prevent soil erosion. The region was into a second year of drought and had suffered extensive crop failures, forcing many of the Rwandans in the area to depend on food aid. The UNHCR rapidly moved in to provide the essentials to the Burundian refugees, but since it is only mandated to look after refugees who cross borders, it couldn’t provide for the displaced or hungry Rwandans. This meant that local people watched refugees eating while they and their children starved.

  We were getting reports from NGOs that arms were going into the refugee camps in the south. There was an alarming increase in assaults and thefts in and near the camps, and also a report of arms smuggling. In order to put a lid on the violence, the Rwandan government decided to move the Burundian refugees into camps divided along ethnic lines. While this diminished the chance of ethnic violence, it provided fertile ground for radicals to move into the camps and stir up trouble. We could do little except maintain a thin presence in the area—hoping that it would help to cool tempers—diverting some of our precious MILOB teams south to conduct sporadic inspections of the camps.

  On November 23, the SRSG arrived. I put together an honour guard of my Tunisians, who were becoming quite expert on the parade square, but I got the feeling that Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh had expected something more elaborate.

  At our first meeting, my head of mission seemed impressive. A tall, heavy-set man with an assured walk, Booh-Booh was clean-shaven and dressed in a light blue suit. His grey hair was cropped close to his head, and he looked every inch the diplomat or man of business. And in fact, since his retirement from the diplomatic corps, he had become very successful in the world of banana production and sales (he once showed me a few pictures of his vast holdings in Cameroon and expressed regret about not being there to take care of things). Booh-Booh said that only a direct appeal from his friend Boutros Boutros-Ghali had brought him out of retirement to take up this post. With his background in politics, diplomacy, business and UN affairs, and his relationship with the secretary-general, he seemed like the right man for the job and certainly someone I thought I could work with. His presence meant that I was no longer the head of mission. I hoped he would be able to do an end run around the party infighting that was obstructing any movement toward installing the BBTG.

  Dr. Kabia and I briefed him to the best of our ability. In September, two of the major moderate parties, the MDR and the PL, had fractured into moderate and extremist “Hutu Power” wings. Each wing had then laid claim to the ministerial positions and representative seats that had been allocated by party in the Arusha Peace Agreement. The RPF, of course, preferred the moderate candidates in each of these parties; the president’s party and an increasingly visible Hutu extremist party, the CDR, preferred the Power candidates. These intrigues were only now coming to the surface and needed astute political handling. I knew I wasn’t up to the task and could now hand it over to Booh-Booh and concentrate on the military and security sides.

  Booh-Booh’s arrival coincided with a worsening of the weather and an increased number of reports of shootings and killings around the country. Every afternoon, large purple clouds would darken the sky and we would hear the rumble of thunder; by nightfall, we’d be drenched with torrents of rain, and lightning would rip the sky apart, bathing the city in its eerie momentary glow.

  The day after Booh-Booh landed in Kigali, we received a report that there had been an attack on a village in northwestern Rwanda by persons unknown and that a number of Hutu civilians had been murdered. This was followed rapidly by the news that some children had disappeared while fetching water in the Virunga Mountains. I drove to the area and, with an escort of Tunisian soldiers, confirmed the deaths. Rumours were spreading that the RPF had committed the attack, and I was determined to investigate and identify the perpetrators of these hideous crimes. We questioned local people and military personnel, who condemned the RPF without any proof or witnesses. I then led a patrol through forests of bamboo up a volcano called Mount Karisimbi. We found some abandoned water cans but no sign of the missing children. As dark was coming down, I tasked the Tunisians to extend the search higher up the volcano the next morning and returned to Kigali to try to quiet flying rumours.

  The Tunisians found the children the next day. They had all been murdered except for one young girl, who my soldiers carried to a nearby hospital. I dispatched Brent, another officer and a local translator to the site. After a long drive and foot march, they came to the place where a boy of eight and five girls between six and fourteen had been strangled to death. Deep violet rope burns cut into their necks. All of them had also suffered head wounds and the girls had clearly been gang-raped before they were murdered. Near one of the bodies was a glove in the colour pattern of the RPF uniform. Brent collected the glove, wondering why someone would leave such a distinctive signature.

  A small party of civilians, who claimed to be relatives of the dead children, had also climbed to the site. Once Brent had finished his initial assessment, he turned to the group and, through his translator, asked who they thought had committed the massacre. The translator was from the public affairs office of our missi
on in Kigali and should have been reliable. But Brent noticed that the man repeatedly used the word Inkotanyi when he spoke to the group, which Brent knew was slang for the RPF. (The rough translation is “freedom fighter,” a term the RPF meant seriously but opponents used sarcastically.) The translator turned back to Brent and told him that the villagers believed the RPF was responsible for the murders. Brent was sure the man was coaching the testimony. From that day forward, we did not trust that translator, and it was later strongly suspected that he was an RGF spy who had been ordered to infiltrate our mission. (After the war, the RPF identified six of our local staff as spies for the RGF. My first civilian driver turned out to be a militia member, and it was alleged that a francophone staffer in the SRSG’s office was an informant to the MRND.)

  By that time, it was late afternoon, and Brent wanted to get himself and the rest of his party off the mountain before it got dark. He turned to the relatives and asked for their help to carry the bodies down. Eyes wide with fear, they shook their heads, refusing to touch the dead children. Brent had to leave the bodies behind, assuming that the relatives would not touch them out of a reverence for their spirits or for some other religious reason. He later found out that the families thought the bodies had been booby-trapped, and preferred that someone else touch them first.

  At the base of the mountain, Brent and his party were met by a large government patrol; the RGF soldiers had coloured ropes tied around their waists and carried large fighting knives in addition to other weapons. Brent briefed the commanding officer on what had been found, and said a UNAMIR patrol would return the next day to collect the children’s bodies and return them to their families. Unprompted, the commander repeated the charge that the RPF had perpetrated a massacre. But Brent could still not figure out why the RPF would do such a thing. There was no tactical advantage in crossing forty to sixty kilometres of gruelling terrain into the Hutu heartland to commit such a brutal crime. Brent and his party took their leave and headed to the hospital in Ruhengeri to see the little girl who had survived the raid.

  She couldn’t have been more than six years old and was in a deep coma, shaking from severe brain damage. A few weeks earlier, back in Canada, Brent had been with his wife when she had given birth to their third child; now he was standing by a young Rwandan girl’s bed, saying a prayer for her and puzzling over what he had seen and heard that day. He couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something very odd about the crime scene. Why would the RPF leave behind a telltale glove? They were not known for stupidity. Was it possible that others had committed the crime in order to blame it on the RPF? Brent remembered the ropes dangling from the waists of the RGF soldiers, and their large fighting knives. He wondered if blows from the hilts of those knives could have caused the deep wounds he had seen on the children’s heads. Brent was hoping that the girl would wake up and that she might be able to tell him what really happened; he stationed a guard by her bedside with instructions to inform him of any change in her condition. But the little girl never regained consciousness, and she died the next day. Brent returned to Kigali, troubled by what he had witnessed and frustrated by his inability to take the investigation further.

  I was as stuck as I had been with the earlier killings, but I was determined to get to the bottom of this murder of children. I invited the RGF and the RPF to join UNAMIR in a joint commission of inquiry to determine who had committed the crimes. The RPF immediately named two lawyers to the inquiry. The RGF hesitated, saying they had to study the matter. Despite repeated pressure from me, months passed before the RGF finally appointed their commissioners, which left all of us chasing a cold trail. While the children’s deaths became more fuel for the extremist propaganda machine, even RTLM had to recognize that we had invited both parties to participate equally in the investigation, and did not attack me personally. If we kept our wits about us and acted quickly, we could sometimes gain the initiative and counteract the damage being done.

  To my surprise and chagrin, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh turned out to be a proper gentleman who kept diplomatic working hours. He was not involved in helping me deal with the fallout of the massacres and the propaganda wars they were provoking. He was rarely in his office before ten, took a full two-hour lunch and left the office before five. He made it clear that he was not to be tracked down and disturbed on the weekends unless there was a dire emergency. He seemed to bring nothing new to the table in the way of expertise on Rwanda, knowledge of the conflict, familiarity with the Arusha accords, or skill at identifying and dealing with the political intrigues of the nation. He was not inclined to take the lead on the international political effort, even though the enormous power invested in him and his mandate by the UN Security Council made him the logical person to do so. While he met with the President, Prime Minister Agathe and the RPF within a few days of arriving in Kigali, the meetings were more in the nature of courtesy calls than discussions of real significance. Habyarimana unburdened himself to the SRSG, clearly more comfortable in this francophone African’s presence than he had ever been with me. The session under the Cinzano umbrellas on the president’s patio was cordial, with Habyarimana candidly revealing his distrust of the RPF; his perception that the MRND was the target of intrigue and unfair dealing; and his sense of injustice over the fact that the only political party that existed in Rwanda before the Arusha accords did not seem to carry more weight in the proceedings. Booh-Booh asked no questions and made no promises, just told the President that he could be counted upon.

  When it came to the RPF, it didn’t help that Booh-Booh’s English was minimal. At their first encounter with him in Mulindi, the RPF representatives pressed him to outline a program for pushing beyond the political impasses and getting them into their quarters in Kigali. Booh-Booh had no strategy to give them, and the RPF were not impressed.

  I was rarely asked to accompany him or brief him, and he never offered to debrief for me after major political working sessions. He generally kept his own counsel or shared his thoughts with his close political advisers, who were all francophone Africans who also played things close to the vest. His grip on his political staff was unshakeable. After Dr. Kabia was appointed UNAMIR’s chief of staff, he discreetly kept me in the loop as to what my head of mission was—or wasn’t—up to.

  The last of the Belgian forces arrived in the first week of December, bringing with them the final member of my personal staff, my military driver, Master Corporal Philippe Troute, who joined the ménage at my house. Troute had originally been a light-armoured soldier, but with the downsizing of NATO forces at the end of the Cold War, he had been transferred, somewhat reluctantly I think, to the para-commandos. He was an excellent driver, a solid, mature soldier with heavily tattooed arms and a stare that could freeze steam. He was a Walloon who prided himself on speaking only French, never Flemish, and he could not speak any English. He had never been away from home for longer than three weeks and was nervous about how his wife and child would handle the separation.

  Colonel Luc Marchal, who would become the Kigali Sector commander, stepped off the plane on December 4, wearing his blue beret and looking fit and ready for action. He was a senior colonel with extensive African experience, and he had an intimate knowledge of the mission, as he had been the chef de cabinet in the office of the Belgian minister of defence. I was glad to have him in theatre with me, especially since the Belgians were becoming more of a problem than I had bargained for.

  Unlike many of his countrymen, Luc carried no colonial baggage. He came to thrive within my ad hoc, multi-ethnic, multilingual force and had a special knack for working with troops from less sophisticated armies. He took a keen interest in Rwanda, building very positive relationships with the local leaders and the ordinary people. In our first meeting, I emphasized that the mission was there to support the ongoing political process and therefore had to follow a strict chapter-six mandate. As soon as the weapons-secure area was negotiated—and Luc’s major task as Kigali sector commander wou
ld be to maintain it—the RPF was going to send an armed battalion to the capital. I had wanted a rapid reaction force to deal with these kinds of challenges, but because Belgium had forbidden its troops to be used in crowd control of any sort, we had to build this force out of troops from Bangladesh. And he was going to help me.

  Unfortunately, soon after he arrived, Luc became caught up in a nasty fracas over accommodations for the Belgian troops. I told the Belgian commanding officer that I wanted a significant portion of his contingent to occupy the airport as their garrison and their primary defensive location. In a landlocked country, where the only viable and efficient means in and out of the country is by plane, the airport is the vital ground. But I also needed troops to be a presence in the city to provide the atmosphere of security necessary for keeping the peace process on target as well as to allay the fears of the local population about the presence of an armed unit of the RPF in the heart of the city. To do this, I needed the Belgians to be prepared to live out of camp garrisons.

  In the guidelines to the troop-contributing nations, I had directed that contingents bring camp stores (tents, stoves, ablution facilities and so on). But LeRoy informed me that not only had they not brought camp stores, they also had no intention of living under canvas. Belgian soldiers would only be accommodated in hard buildings as per national policy. I asked to see the policy and, over the next several weeks, had many discussions with Luc and the Belgian commanders about the issue. In the end, they did show me a national Belgian army policy directive that stated that in Africa, Belgian soldiers would never live under canvas but only in buildings, not necessarily for the sake of comfort or hygiene but because it was imperative that they maintain a correct presence in front of the Africans.