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

by Roméo Dallaire

  Meanwhile, inside the CND, Habyarimana was sworn in with much pomp and circumstance. Then the proceedings ground to a sudden halt when the list of ministers and delegates was distributed. The RPF delegation realized that someone had changed the document at the last minute. Members of the Hutu Power wings of the MDR and PL were now on the list and the names of the moderates had been omitted. The RPF delegation stormed out and the ceremony ended in failure. Nevertheless, the newly sworn-in president came out of the building and beamed for the waiting TV cameras; quickly surrounded by a cordon of Presidential Guards, Habyarimana climbed into his black Mercedes and was driven off at breakneck speed. Booh-Booh and his political staff melted away, leaving me alone to explain to the RPF and to the media what had happened.

  In interviews and meetings the day after the botched swearing-in ceremony, the SRSG characterized it instead as a major step forward. The delay in installing the actual cabinet of the BBTG, he said, was a minor political problem that would soon be ironed out, especially since Habyarimana had shown his commitment to Arusha by agreeing to the swearing-in. Booh-Booh and the rest of the political types seemed persuaded that Habyarimana would be able to broker a deal to break the impasse. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Of even greater concern to me was the speed and skill with which the mob had been provoked by the Presidential Guard. This was the first time I’d seen just how well the extremists and the Presidential Guard were organized and how easily they could coordinate major operations—a new security challenge we had to overcome. That afternoon I held a meeting with Luc, Tiko and principal Force Headquarters staff officers, in which we drew up a security strategy for future installation ceremonies. We’d block the Presidential Guard in its camp, control the major routes to the CND and the entrance to the compound, escort the moderates to the CND and take down any barriers that might spontaneously appear in the way of the moderate politicians. The rest of the week was spent trying to hammer out an agreement on the representatives. At one point I stepped into the fray, telling the SRSG that after the meeting I had had with Enoch Ruhigira I had begun to believe that if the RPF and the moderates could agree to make some concessions around the issue of amnesty or even on the selection of the justice portfolio, there might be a way around this mess.

  One night that week I got a phone call from Lando asking me to come to his house to discuss the situation. I headed over to his place with Brent and Philippe Troute. Lando and Hélène and a few other PL members were having an impromptu meeting in the living room; a couple of the deputies were pushing Lando hard to reach some sort of compromise with Justin Mugenzi, who had split the PL and now headed the extremist, or Power, wing. Mugenzi was quite an operator, smooth and charming, and up to his eyeballs in the dirt and corruption of the regime. He did, however, control many of the hard-liners inside the PL, so getting him onside was crucial if the impasse was to be resolved. Neither Lando nor myself were blind to the risks that such an alliance implied, but Mugenzi and his wing presented a much greater danger to Rwanda if they remained outside the process and continued to flirt with volatile elements such as the Interahamwe.

  It was a difficult meeting, but I kept emphasizing that the installation of the BBTG was just a stage on the road toward free and fair elections and that stalling the implementation would send a negative signal to the international community, which Rwanda was depending upon. I think my argument made sense to Lando that night. In previous meetings, he had been extremely voluble, rarely giving way or really listening to what others had to say, but now there was a definite shift. He knew how serious the situation had become and how high the stakes were. We agreed among us to invite Mugenzi to the meeting, and I sent Brent and Troute to fetch him. Mugenzi’s home was surrounded by militiamen who were either protecting the politician or preventing him from leaving home. When Brent argued his way into the compound, Mugenzi’s wife told him that her husband was not at home. Brent suspected she was not telling the truth; he had heard male voices inside.

  Even without Mugenzi, I still thought that we might get somewhere and suggested we call in the SRSG and get his input. This idea was not met with a great deal of enthusiasm, but I was uncomfortable mediating what was potentially an important political meeting without him and sent Brent to retrieve him from his suite at the Mille Collines. It was very late and Booh-Booh did not appreciate being disturbed, but he came anyway, and we went at it for another hour or so. Though nothing tangible was agreed to, I saw a crack in Lando’s armour and I left feeling more optimistic than I had in days.

  The political players—the president, the two prime ministers and the RPF—with the concurrence of the SRSG, decided to try again to swear in the representatives for the BBTG, on Saturday, January 8. We moved into high gear to ensure that the ceremony happened under the tightest possible security. But on that Saturday morning we were surprised by a series of violent demonstrations throughout Kigali. Many of the demonstrators were armed with machetes, and the focus of their anger appeared to be the moderate or non-aligned members of the PL, the MDR and the PSD parties. Angry crowds prevented the politicians from getting through to the CND where the ceremony was to be held. The mobs materialized rapidly, and again, a number of Presidential Guards in civilian clothes, men we recognized, were inciting them.

  This swearing-in was also foiled by backstage manipulations of the lists of ministerial and assembly appointments, and the behind-the-scenes tug-of-war between the president and Faustin. At the last moment, the president decided not to attend, and when the politicians, the diplomatic community and the representatives of the RPF caught wind of the fact that he wasn’t coming, the ceremony degenerated into a shouting match.

  Late in the afternoon of January 10, Faustin came to my office and insisted on a private meeting. He was shaking with excitement and fear. I took him out onto the balcony where we could talk without being overheard. Almost breathlessly, he told me that he was in contact with someone inside the Interahamwe who had information he wanted to pass on to UNAMIR. I had a moment of wild exhilaration as I realized we might finally have a window on the mysterious third force, the shadowy collection of extremists that had been growing in strength ever since I had arrived in Rwanda.

  After Faustin left, I immediately called Luc Marchal and asked him to meet me in my office. I briefed him on Faustin’s news and suggested he try to arrange a rendezvous that night. Though I was as excited as he was, I cautioned Luc that the person who had come to Faustin might not be telling the truth and this might possibly be a set-up, and suggested that he take my intelligence officer along with him. I worked as long as I could and then headed home to the bungalow. Brent and I were both tense with anticipation and said little to each other. I made a pot of tea, sat down to watch some TV and tried to relax, but I just couldn’t settle. Luc finally got to the bungalow with Claeys and Major Henry Kesteloot, the operations officer of Kigali Sector, at about 2200.

  Drawing from the copious notes he had taken, Luc described his encounter with the informant we code-named Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre told Luc that he had been an officer in the commandos and the Presidential Guard. He said that he had left the army to become the chief trainer for the Interahamwe, and in 1993, he had begun drilling cells of young men in the communes (villages) of Rwanda, initially under the guise of preparing a civil-guard-style militia to fight the RPF if it resumed the offensive. Jean-Pierre said that his direct superior was Mathieu Ngirumpatse, the president of the MRND party. He reported to and received his orders from Ngirumpatse, along with a salary of 150,000 Rwandan francs a month (at the time, about $1,500 U.S.). He told Luc that in the past few months, the real plan behind the training of the Interahamwe had begun to be articulated.

  He and others like him were ordered to have the cells under their command make lists of the Tutsis in their various communes. Jean-Pierre suspected that these lists were being made so that, when the time came, the Tutsis, or the Inyenzi as Rwandan hate radio called them—the word means “coc
kroaches” in Kinyarwanda—could easily be rounded up and exterminated. Jean-Pierre said he hated the RPF and saw them as the enemy of Rwanda, but he was horrified that he had been drawn into a plan to create a series of highly efficient death squads that, when turned loose on the population, could kill a thousand Tutsis in Kigali within twenty minutes of receiving the order. He described in detail how the Interahamwe were being trained at army bases and by army instructors in several locations around the country, and that on a weekly basis a number of young men would be collected and transported for a three-week weapons and paramilitary training course that placed special emphasis on killing techniques. Then the young men were returned to their communes and ordered to make lists of Tutsis and await the call to arms.

  I was silent, hit by the depth and reality of this information. It was as if the informant, Jean-Pierre, had opened the floodgates on the hidden world of the extremist third force, which until this point had been a presence we could sense but couldn’t grasp.

  Luc told us that until now the only weapons the Interahamwe possessed were traditional spears, clubs and machetes, but Jean-Pierre had claimed that the army had recently transferred four large shipments of AK-47s, ammunition and grenades to the militia. These weapons were stored in four separate arms caches in Kigali. He offered to show us one of the caches to confirm the information he was giving us. For revealing all four arms caches and everything else he knew about the Interahamwe, including its leaders, financing, links to the MRND party, the civil service, army and the Gendarmerie, he wanted all his Rwandan francs exchanged for U.S. dollars and to be given passports for himself and his family to a friendly Western nation. He also warned us to be careful about who we told about him: not only was the local civilian staff of UNAMIR infiltrated, but the extremists had also recruited a civilian Franco-African on Booh-Booh’s staff. Jean-Pierre said a stream of information about mission decisions at the highest level was being passed directly to Mathieu Ngirumpatse.

  To demonstrate his authenticity, Jean-Pierre said that he had helped organize and control the demonstrations that had occurred the previous Saturday morning. He said the aim of these violent demonstrations had been to provoke UNAMIR’s Belgian troops. At each location, selected individuals were to threaten the Belgians with clubs and machetes in order to push them into firing warning shots. Had this plan worked, as soon as shots rang out, members of the Presidential Guard, the Gendarmerie and the RGF para-commando regiment, already mingling with the crowd, would uncover hidden firearms. The roundabout near the Presidential Guards’ compound had been littered with hidden weapons and radios. The ambush would be sprung for one purpose only: to kill Belgian soldiers.

  Jean-Pierre told Luc that the trap was intended to kill some ten Belgians. The leadership of the Hutu Power movement had determined that Belgium had no stomach for taking casualties in their old colony, and if Belgian soldiers were killed, the nation would withdraw from UNAMIR. He said that the extremists knew the Belgians had the best contingent in UNAMIR and were the backbone of the mission, and they assumed that if the Belgians left, the mission would collapse. Jean-Pierre warned that the leadership was about to make a decision to distribute the arms caches to every Interahamwe cell in Kigali. If that happened, he said, there would be no way to stop the slaughter.

  While listening to Luc’s briefing, I made the decision to go after the weapons caches. I had to catch these guys off guard, send them a signal that I knew who they were and what they were up to, and that I fully intended to shut them down. I knew that such a raid carried a high degree of risk and might incur casualties, but I also knew it was well within my mandate and capabilities. The spectre of the peacekeeping disasters in Somalia did not come to mind. These weapons caches were a violation of the Kigali Weapons Secure Area agreement; the arming of militias violated the Arusha accords and our mandate and presented a great risk to the safety of my force. My rules of engagement allowed the use of unilateral force in self-defence, in the defence of the force overall and the prevention of crimes against humanity. We needed to confirm the existence of the caches before we acted, just in case Jean-Pierre was baiting a trap for us. But if the informer was telling the truth, we had to act.

  When Luc finished his report, there was a moment of absolute silence. I looked over at Brent to find his face flushed with what I can only describe as elation. Finally it looked like we could identify the third force, grab hold of it and wrestle it down. After months of frustration, of being forced to act after the fact, we had a chance to seize the initiative.

  Luc’s debriefing had gone on for nearly two hours, bringing us to midnight. I thanked him for a job well done and instructed Captain Claeys to keep meeting with Jean-Pierre for more information. I then led what amounted to a council of war. I ordered Luc to have his staff begin planning four simultaneous search-and-seizure operations on the arms caches within the next thirty-six hours, and to keep this planning on a strict need-to-know basis within his headquarters. There was to be another attempt at a swearing-in ceremony on Wednesday, January 12, two days from now. Jean-Pierre represented a fork in the road. By acting on his information, we would either galvanize the political process or reveal it as a sham.

  After Luc left, I decided to inform the SRSG first thing in the morning—I was gravely concerned about the security of this information within the SRSG’s staff—and also to put together for General Baril a carefully worded code cable, which I would send as soon as possible. By sending the code cable directly to Baril, I was breaking the usual protocol. The standard operating procedure was to route all communications on matters of substance between a force commander and the DPKO through the civilian political hierarchy—in this case, through Booh-Booh and his office. The only time a force commander was to deal directly with the military adviser or any other concerned department at the UN was in order to discuss purely administrative matters or requirements. My decision on January 11 to send this code cable under my signature directly to the military adviser—Maurice Baril—was unprecedented. I was opening a line of communication in an area where I had no authority to do so. But I believed that these revelations from Jean-Pierre had to be acted upon immediately.1 I ended the cable with my high school and 5ième Brigade motto: “Peux ce que veux. Allons-y!”

  Sending the cable was also a risk on several fronts. While the code cable to New York was secure from intercept, documents often travelled through many hands before they reached the desks of Baril, Riza and Annan. In one of those ironies of life, as of January 1, the Rwandan regime had a seat on the Security Council—the luck of the rotation that saw member nations take up temporary duties on the council alongside the permanent members. As a result, the Rwandans were now privy to many secure documents concerning the mission in their home country.

  I needed New York to realize that, even though I wanted to move quickly, I was not blind to the possibility that this could be a well-laid trap to force UNAMIR onto the offensive and jeopardize our role as keepers of a fragile peace. I also wanted to make it clear in the cable that I was not asking permission to raid the caches but was informing New York of my intentions, as was my responsibility as force commander. I was finally going to be able to wrest the initiative from the hard-liners. Brent and I fiddled around with the wording for over two hours. When we were satisfied with the document, Brent raced to the Amahoro to print it out and send it. I went to bed with the firm belief that we now had a handle on a situation that had been spiralling out of control.

  When I woke up the next morning after a few fitful hours of sleep, I was still in seventh heaven. I was convinced that we were on the verge of regaining the initiative or at least of throwing the extremists off-balance, making them vulnerable to defections, to panic, to making foolish mistakes. Little did I realize as I waved to the local kids on the side of the dirt road on my way to work, that New York was already shooting my plan of action out of the water.

  The code cable from Kofi Annan, signed by Riza, came to me and the SRSG; its co
ntents caught me completely off guard. It took me to task for even thinking about raiding the weapons caches and ordered me to suspend the operation immediately. Annan spelled out in excruciating detail the limits New York was placing upon me as force commander of a chapter-six peacekeeping operation; not only was I not allowed to conduct deterrent operations in support of UNAMIR, but in the interests of transparency, I was to provide the information that Jean-Pierre had given to us to President Habyarimana immediately. I was absolutely beside myself with frustration. The November massacres, the presence of heavily armed militias, a rabid extremist press screaming about Tutsi Inyenzi and demanding that blood be shed, the political impasse and the resultant tension—all were signs that we were no longer in a classic chapter-six peacekeeping situation. Jean-Pierre simply connected the dots, revealing that the mission—and the Arusha Peace Agreement—were at risk. Something had to be done to save us from catastrophe. For the rest of the week, I made phone call after phone call to New York, arguing with Maurice over the necessity of raiding the arms caches. During these exchanges, I got the feeling that New York now saw me as a loose cannon and not as an aggressive but careful force commander.