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

by Roméo Dallaire

  My failure to persuade New York to act on Jean-Pierre’s information still haunts me. If only I had been able to get Maurice onside, to have him as my friend in court to persuade Annan and Riza that I wasn’t some gun-happy cowboy. I know now that the DPKO was still reeling in the wake of the American debacle in Somalia, in which eighteen American soldiers were killed while attempting to arrest a warlord in the streets of Mogadishu. But I was presenting a reasonable, carefully laid-out plan that was consistent with the approach I had adopted from the very beginning: to maximize our rules of engagement in order to ensure the atmosphere of security demanded by the peace agreement. The tone of the DPKO’s code cable suggested a total disconnect between me and New York; they no longer trusted my judgment to conduct an operation that, while risky, was nowhere near as dangerous as Operation Clean Corridor, which we had pulled off without a hitch. In my view the inside information offered us by Jean-Pierre represented a real chance to pull Rwanda out of the fire. The DPKO’s response whipped the ground out from under me.

  The deaths and injuries suffered by the Pakistani Blue Berets and then the American Rangers in Somalia must have had a huge impact not only on the triumvirate in the DPKO but on many member nations. At the time there was simply no appetite for any operation that might lead to “friendly” casualties—the whole atmosphere within the DPKO and surrounding it was risk-averse. In my code cable I had pushed for a potentially high-risk offensive, diametrically opposed to the reigning climate at the UN. No wonder the reaction had been so rapid, deliberate and unequivocally negative. Still, as understandable as the UN decision was, it was unacceptable to me in the field. If we did not react to the reality of the arms caches, the weapons could eventually be turned against us and against many innocent Rwandans.

  When I briefed the SRSG and Dr. Kabia on the situation on the morning of January 11, Dr. Kabia supported me fully and Booh-Booh was noncommittal. I hoped the SRSG might help me make a last appeal to New York, but I was mistaken. He had authority to go directly to Boutros-Ghali to argue that the DPKO’s decision be overturned, but he brushed aside any such idea and suggested we follow New York’s instructions to the letter. Just before going to see Habyarimana on the morning of January 12, the SRSG, Dr. Kabia and I fully briefed the ambassadors of Belgium and the United States and the chargé d’affaires of France. All of them acknowledged the information we provided and stated they would inform their respective governments. None of them appeared to be surprised, which led me to conclude that our informant was merely confirming what they already knew. I pleaded with them to help us find sanctuary for Jean-Pierre and his family, but the Americans, the Belgians and the French refused to assist. We had been able to verify most of the information he had offered us at considerable risk to himself and his family; I knew the diplomatic community had helped other valued informants in tricky circumstances, and I could not and still cannot understand their refusal.

  Usually when someone from UNAMIR requested a meeting with the president, Habyarimana would let us cool our heels for a couple of days before granting us an audience. Both the SRSG and I were rather taken aback when he agreed to meet with us immediately. He greeted us on his sunny patio, flanked by Enoch Ruhigira; Bizimana, the minister of defence; Major General Déogratias Nsabimana, the chief of staff of the army; and Major General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, the chief of staff of the Gendarmerie.2 Of the five men present, four were hard-liners and Ndindiliyimana was an uncertainty. I trusted none of them, and we were about to hand over the best inside information we had received to date. Booh-Booh led off, giving the president a detailed summary of our knowledge of his party’s activities, including the distribution of illegal arms inside the Kigali Weapons Secure Area as well as the MRND involvement with the Interahamwe and its attempts to subvert the Arusha accords. It was with some satisfaction that I watched the presidential countenance shift from weary indifference to outright incredulity—Habyarimana denied any knowledge of such caches. It was impossible to fathom whether he was actually surprised at the information or at the fact that UNAMIR had acquired it. The SRSG told Habyarimana that New York was expecting a complete investigation to be conducted within forty-eight hours and then went on to warn him that any subsequent violence in Kigali would be brought immediately to the attention of the Security Council. The president promised to take immediate action, and Booh-Booh was certain that Habyarimana had gotten the message. But I wasn’t sure what message he had received. Had this come as a complete surprise to him? Was he part of it or was he losing control of his cronies? If he was losing his grip, who was actually in charge? Rumour had it that his wife and her brothers were at the heart of Hutu Power; they were called the “clan de Madame.” The one thing I was certain about was that this information would be transmitted to the extremists, and the arms caches would be moved immediately or, worse, distributed.

  At the end of the session, Habyarimana spontaneously asked if the SRSG and I would personally brief the president of the MRND at party headquarters. This unusual request from the titular head of the MRND suggested that a fracture may have been in the making between the hardline MRND and the extremist MRND, as the rumour mill had been hinting. When we went to see Mathieu Ngirumpatse (whom Jean-Pierre had said was his boss) and the party’s secretary-general, Joseph Nzirorera, we confronted them with the information about the training of the Interahamwe and the illegal weapons caches within the KWSA. Both tried to bluff, but when we protested that we had seen members of the Interahamwe participating in the violent demonstrations that had taken place on the previous Saturday, they conceded that some of their members had been in attendance. But they blamed the violence on infiltrators and bandits wearing MRND party insignia.

  That night Jean-Pierre showed up late to a rendezvous with Claeys, delayed, he said, by an urgent meeting with Ngirumpatse. He said his boss had appeared rattled by our visit, demanded that the arms distribution be stepped up immediately. Jean-Pierre then drove with Captain Claeys and Captain Deme, the other member of our intelligence team, to show them one of the arms caches, as he had promised. Deme was Senegalese, fluent in French and dressed in civvies. There were two guards on the cache, so Claeys stayed in the car, and Deme went in with Jean-Pierre, who told the guards that he was an African friend. The cache was in the basement of the headquarters of the MRND, the same building I had visited earlier that day with Booh-Booh. The cache consisted of at least fifty assault rifles, boxes of ammunition, clips and grenades. The building was owned by Ndindiliyimana, the chief of staff of the Gendarmerie, who had portrayed himself as a moderate. However, he was seen in the company of extremists, his gendarmes had been implicated in extremist actions, and now it turned out that the building he rented to the MRND had an arms cache in its basement. Where did his loyalties really lie?

  I was concerned that once Jean-Pierre learned we had relayed his information to Habyarimana and Ngirumpatse, he would stop talking to us, but he continued to feed us valuable and verifiable information. I wanted to secure him safe passage out of the country, but New York said it could not become involved in “covert” activities, such as providing him with travel documents.

  Before Jean-Pierre finally gave up on us and broke off communication altogether, he passed on vital information that enabled me to more clearly assess internal threats to the mission. He told us that operatives were working under civilian contracts inside the mission headquarters at the Amahoro and that one of them had been my driver before being replaced by Troute. He told us that on at least four occasions he had been summoned to listen to tapes of interviews between an MRND party official and a non-Rwandan French-speaking African who was providing political and administrative information about UNAMIR. He also gave us the road map to the structure and planning process of the extremists. By mid-January, thanks to Jean-Pierre, we had all the information we needed to confirm that there was a well-organized conspiracy inside the country, dedicated to destroying the Arusha Peace Agreement by any means necessary. Jean-Pierre disappe
ared near the end of January. Whether he had engineered an escape on his own or was uncovered and executed, I have never been able to find out. The more troubling possibility is that he simply melted back into the Interahamwe, angry and disillusioned at our vacillation and ineffectiveness, and became a génocidaire.

  The security situation continued to deteriorate in Kigali, with incidents along the border of the demilitarized zone and in the refugee camps in the south. Having been told by New York not to move on the arms caches, on January 18 I ordered all the sector headquarters and garrisons to improve their defensive postures and submit their requests for the necessary defensive stores within the week. We then consolidated these requests and passed them on to the FOD in New York, but they were not acted upon. As a result, we never received the stores with which to construct protective shelters in our camps, which would have devastating consequences in April. We had also expected to see the rest of the Bangladeshi troops and the Ghanaian battalion arrive in theatre in early to mid-January. But none of them had yet deployed (and in fact they would not arrive until early February). My current force was burning out as we attempted to stretch to deal with the increase in operational tempo.

  In the meantime, Brigadier (Retired) Paddy Blagdon, the head of the UN de-mining program, completed his assessment of the mine threat in Rwanda and finalized his proposed de-mining plan. I was somewhat shocked when Paddy told me that Rwanda’s mine threat of “only an estimated 30,000 land mines, most of which were anti-personnel” was a minor one. Since each mine had the potential to kill or maim a man, woman or child, I was shocked that thirty thousand of them was considered a minor problem; but when he explained the scope of the mine assessments in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Bosnia and other hot spots around the world, I understood his terms of reference. He said he would attempt to obtain funding and arrange the contracting of the de-mining program, but that it would take time. Four months later, when the war resumed, we still had not seen one dollar or one de-miner in Rwanda, and soldiers and civilians continued to lose their lives or limbs on a daily basis.3

  On the evening of January 18, I convened a rare social dinner at the Meridien hotel for my senior officers in honour of Colonel Figoli, who was departing the mission. Figoli had been with me since October and, more than anyone, had maintained the peace in the demilitarized zone, with just over a hundred MILOBs and soldiers and every conceivable logistics and equipment deficiency. He would be sorely missed. The SRSG attended and I also invited Per Hallqvist.

  That day I had also said goodbye to half the Tunisian company, who had served under Figoli’s command and who were now being relieved and rotated home. The Tunisians were all conscripts who had volunteered to extend their military service in order to serve in Rwanda, and they were the very definition of professional soldiers, led by an exemplary officer, Commandant Mohammed Belgacem. This small cohesive unit was (and remained) my fire brigade. Whenever I had a problem, whether in the demilitarized zone, at the CND in Kigali or later on during the war, I turned to the Tunisians, who never once let me down. As I said goodbye to thirty of these men on the tarmac at the airport, I praised them for their service and the sacrifices they had made during the very risky days of late 1993 in the demilitarized zone. With an entire force of such soldiers, we could have met any challenge in the Great Lakes Region. Within days of their arrival, Commandant Belgacen had integrated the new soldiers into the unit, maintaining its high standard of operational effectiveness. The Tunisians remained my ace in the hole.

  At this time I was beginning to be pressured by Paul Kagame over the snail’s pace of the peace process. He told me he was running out of money to feed and fuel his force. As a result, his soldiers were making dangerous incursions into the demilitarized zone, looking for food and water. If he was already facing serious shortfalls, how were his troops going to survive until the time demobilization began, three months after the BBTG was sworn in? Kagame also told me that the fact that his army had been in the field for nearly four years was taking a toll on the unmarried soldiers in their twenties, who were becoming impatient to settle down. The common wisdom was that if they were not married by thirty, they would not live to see their grandchildren or reap the benefits of being elders in their society. It was an added and very real social pressure on his force.

  I had to wonder how the demobilization process was going to begin when no one had stepped forward to fund it. Because everyone had been concentrating on the political impasse, no one outside of the military division had spent time planning for this very important phase. There weren’t even any meagre UN monies allotted, and the only person still trying to drum up funding from the international community was Amadou Ly.4 I went to Booh-Booh to present these urgent requirements, and as usual he heard me out, but he never seemed to realize that, as the SRSG, he needed to take responsibility for advancing this dossier.

  Unomur’s Ben Matiwaza had reported that refugees were making their way from Uganda into the RPF-controlled area of northern Rwanda. We also had unconfirmed reports that Radio Muhaburu, a station operated by the RPF, was encouraging the Rwandan diaspora to take advantage of the right of return granted by the Arusha accords. It seemed to me that Kagame was using the return of the refugees and the incursions into the demilitarized zone by his troops to put the squeeze on UNAMIR to bring about the installation of the BBTG. On January 20, Kagame and I met in Mulindi at his request to discuss these and other matters.

  I flew up to Mulindi in one of the two fifties-vintage helicopters that the Belgian troops had brought with them. I had arranged to use one of them whenever I had to make a snap visit to Mulindi or another location outside Kigali; there was only room for the pilot and two passengers in the old beasts, and they didn’t have much oomph. Still, the trip to Mulindi was a flight I loved, low-flying (as always, to avoid anyone taking a shot at us) over the undulating emerald hills. We landed on a rough soccer pitch surrounded by a fringe of trees; it looked like it had been scooped out of the side of the mountain. RPF troops scattered every which way; they used the pitch as a drill area, and there were always at least a hundred or so men training there at any given time.

  Escorts met me and walked me up to the RPF compound. Kagame had a modest bungalow set apart from the rest. Birdsong and the gentle sigh of the wind in the trees were the only sounds you could hear. I found him sitting on the little patio attached to the bungalow, and he slowly unfolded his long, angular body from one of the chairs as he stood to greet me. He has incredibly powerful eyes that lock on your own, probing, searching, testing, and he wastes little time on social niceties. When we sat down, he dived right in, addressing the situation of long-time Rwandan refugees in Burundi, which was rendered untenable by the October coup. He told me that many of these refugees had fled to the safe havens of schools and church missions to elude armed mobs seeking revenge for the killing of the Burundian president. Many had no other option than to escape back into Rwanda or face death at the hands of the mobs. He said that the Rwandan refugees inside Uganda were facing similar, although less extreme, pressures from their impatient Ugandan hosts. Recent land reforms had given squatters title to the land that the refugees had occupied for close to thirty years, and the refugees were being forced out. He and the other leaders within the RPF were trying to stem the flow into Rwanda, he said, but it was hard to do. After all, the RPF had fought the war so that the refugees could return to their homeland.

  As he spoke of the plight of the refugees, he lost some of his customary reserve and dug deep into his own experience to emphasize or illustrate his points. At times he would get up and walk around restlessly as he described growing up in a refugee camp in Uganda, always the outsider, the minority, tolerated but never really accepted as an equal. He showed flashes of anger as he relived his struggle to maintain a sense of self-worth and dignity against the crushing defeatism of the refugee camps. In his case, he devoted himself to self-improvement. He told me how he had fought to help rid Uganda of the dictator Milton O
bote by joining the NRA, training in Tanzania, and fighting in Uganda under the current president, Yoweri Museveni. Even though Kagame was a highly regarded officer, he told me he was never able to rise to his full potential in the NRA because no one ever forgot he was Rwandan.

  I knew that the NRA had accepted Tutsi refugees such as Kagame in its ranks. They had fought for Museveni because they believed that when they defeated Obote and installed Museveni, he would treat them fairly. But Museveni had had to form alliances with other tribes and groups at the expense of the large Tutsi refugee population that had put him in power. I was reminded of a tale the RPF liaison officer, Commander Karake Karenzi, had told Brent to describe the Tutsi experience in Uganda. Karenzi had said that when the hunter and the dog are after the prey, they are equals. But once the prey is caught, the hunter gets the meat and the dog gets the bones. And that is how the Tutsis in Uganda, who had served under difficult conditions in combat for the NRA, felt after Museveni came to power. The realization that they would always be the dogs in Uganda had been the impetus behind the formation of the RPF. They wanted to go home and be treated as equals in their own country.

  Kagame told me the only way to resolve the refugee situation was to jump-start the stalled political process. He looked me dead in the eyes and said that otherwise the situation would only deteriorate. Desperate people were willing to take up arms in order to reclaim their birthright. Near the end of the meeting, he leaned toward me and said, with complete conviction, “If things continue as they are, we are going to face the situation where someone is going to have to emerge as a winner.” In other words, if the impasse was not resolved quickly, Arusha would be swept aside and the RPF would resume the war, and battle it out until it achieved victory. It had nearly succeeded twice before, though each time the French had intervened on the side of the RGF.