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

by Roméo Dallaire

  I finally rose and, with some regret, explained that my helicopter had no night-vision capability and I had to be on my way. It had been amazing to see Kagame with his guard down for a couple of hours, to glimpse the passion that drove this extraordinary man.

  The next day, Friday, January 21, I went to the airport in Kigali to welcome my deputy force commander and chief of staff, Brigadier General Henry Anyidoho of Ghana, who had finally been appointed. Anyidoho is an imposing man, well over six feet tall and weighing over 120 kilos. His impressive physical presence was matched by his voracious appetite for work. He was a born commander. Like myself, he was a graduate of the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Virginia, and he had a tremendous amount of experience from being on many operations, from the Congo in the sixties to Lebanon and Cambodia, not to mention his own country. Henry was confident, aggressive, capable and committed to the mission from the start. We liked each other at first sight.

  Later that day, one of the MILOB teams at the airport searched an unscheduled flight of a DC8 cargo plane into Kigali and found the aircraft to be loaded with tons of artillery and mortar ammunition. The paperwork on the plane—registration, ownership, insurance, manifest—mentioned companies in France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Egypt and Ghana. Most of the nations on the list had troops in UNAMIR. Brent asked a Belgian officer what it felt like to be risking his life in Rwanda while his nation dealt arms that could be used to kill him. The officer replied that peacekeeping was peacekeeping, and business was business, and the business of Belgium was arms. I cursed the double standard of the supposedly ex-colonial powers. I ordered the munitions impounded and demand an explanation from the minister of defence. I sent Brent to deliver the message to impound the weapons at the airport to Colonel Marchal at his quarters at the Meridien hotel. Luc asked whether we were authorized to seize these arms. Brent confirmed that I believed it was part of the mandate and the KWSA agreement, and Luc issued orders accordingly.

  On the way back to the Force Headquarters, Brent and Troute came across a mob outside the CND. Since the RPF had moved into Kigali, the RGF and the minister of defence complained regularly over the number of visitors to the CND, charging that the RPF was sneaking in reinforcements and ammunition along with them. The RGF, the Presidential Guard and the Interahamwe usually stationed people nearby to monitor the comings and goings, often stopping and harassing visitors, so it wasn’t unusual to see an angry crowd gathered there. But as Brent and Troute drove past they could see that this mob was armed with machetes and was yelling at the RPF guards stationed inside the complex. Brent ordered Troute to stop so they could figure out what was going on. It quickly became apparent that members of the mob had attacked a couple who had been visiting the CND, and were now taunting the RPF guards to try to save them.

  Brent, realizing how rapidly this situation could escalate, intervened, ordering the RPF to stay inside the compound and not respond to the provocation. Brent and Troute then plunged into the crowd, certain that they would be backed up by the eight-man Bangladeshi guard unit that was stationed at the entrance to the CND. As they got to the centre of the mob, they discovered a man sprawled on the ground with blood splattered everywhere. His face had been sliced almost in two, exposing the blue-white glint of bone. Close by lay a heavily pregnant woman, her arm sliced through the bone and broken. Brent lifted the man onto his shoulder and made directly for the vehicle. As he moved forward with his bloody burden, a man with a machete separated himself from the crowd and stood squarely in Brent’s way. Without a second’s thought. Brent drove his fist into the man’s solar plexus, knocking him to the ground. Troute raised his assault rifle, and the crowd backed off, giving him room to pick up the woman and carry her to safety. It wasn’t until Brent and Troute were both back at the vehicle that they realized the Bangladeshi guards were nowhere in sight. They were hiding in their bunker adjacent to the main gate.

  Brent and Troute drove straight to the King Faisal Hospital, a magnificent medical facility that the Saudis had built in the early nineties as a gift to Rwanda. The trouble was the country had neither enough qualified medical staff nor the money to run the hospital, so the Rwandans basically padlocked the place and left it to gather dust. Given that I was stuck with no field hospital, I had come up with the idea of locating my medical staff in the King Faisal, and the government had leapt at the idea. The Bangladeshi medical platoon that I’d stationed there was headed by a lieutenant colonel who was known as a superb surgeon, grateful for the facilities of a first-class hospital.

  When Brent arrived with his casualties, he was greeted with the usual emergency-room pandemonium. The pregnant woman, who had been talking incessantly in Kinyarwanda on the ride to the hospital, suddenly began to weep inconsolably. A young Rwandan boy, whom the Bangladeshis had hired because he spoke English, translated her anguished cries. It turned out that she had been carrying a baby in her arms when she was attacked and she had no idea where her child was or if it had been harmed. Brent turned around and, taking Troute with him, headed back to the CND.

  By the time they got there, a few gendarmes had arrived and dispersed the crowd. The assailants were long gone, but crouched against a wall across the street was a woman cradling a baby. Brent asked her in halting French if the child perhaps belonged to the woman wounded by the mob, and she nodded. Brent and Troute immediately took the baby to the hospital to be reunited with its parents. When Brent visited the parents later in the week, he found them alive and well. The surgeon, famous at home for having saved the life of one of Bangladesh’s prime ministers who had been shot during a coup attempt, had done a remarkable job of sewing the man’s face back together and had also managed to save both the woman’s arm and her pregnancy.

  The attack at the CND was not the first time UNAMIR had witnessed the targeting of innocent civilians by machete-wielding mobs intent on killing Tutsis. But in the days that followed, these incidents accelerated at an alarming rate as the failure to install the BBTG led to frustration with Arusha and UNAMIR, and the militias grew openly aggressive. It was as if a signal had been given to them to start a cycle of civil unrest, injury and death.

  Manfred Bleim, the head of the UN Civilian Police Division, had arrived in late December. I had hoped that he would work quickly to invigorate the existing civilian police in Kigali and persuade them to work more co-operatively with UNAMIR. I also hoped he would be able to root out elements within the Gendarmerie and the local police who were tacitly supporting, if not actively participating in, the growing ethnic violence. My technical mission report had called for the civilian police division to function under my command, seeing as how the parallel body in Rwanda, the Gendarmerie, was paramilitary in structure. However, instead of working with us, Bleim created a totally separate bureaucracy, which jeopardized the force’s communication with the Gendarmerie. Bleim and his officers made little progress on the investigations into the November killings, which remained an example that the extremists liked to use to claim that UNAMIR was not only ineffective but pro-RPF. He and his people never developed a good working relationship with the Gendarmerie and the communal police, and they never managed to gather information on or to influence the moderates or extremists within Rwanda’s police ranks. Bleim’s aim instead was to build an independent UN Civilian Police unit, and to help him achieve that objective he nurtured a close professional relationship with the SRSG.

  The morning after the couple was attacked outside the CND, we rose and drove to work at the Amahoro only to find all of the major intersections on our way blocked by machete- and club-wielding youths. At the roundabout by the Meridien hotel, we ran into a particularly hostile mob, which had surrounded a vehicle carrying some of our civilian employees. I immediately got out of our car, followed by Brent and de Kant. Leaving Troute standing by the vehicle with his rifle cocked, we waded into the crowd. I ordered the mob to let the vehicle through, which it did, now that its attention was focused on me. I harangued them about the vio
lation of the KWSA agreement and told them that the Gendarmerie would deal with them shortly. We headed back to our vehicle amid a torrent of verbal abuse and physical posturing.

  When we arrived at the Amahoro, reports were coming in from all over the city that all the major intersections were blocked. Brent took a UN bus and a local driver to collect some of our civilian staff who had agreed to work that Saturday morning. At one location he found a man with a severe machete wound and took him to the hospital. But no amount of negotiation could secure safe passage for the bus carrying our civilian staff through the mobs. Brent decided to drop the staff off at the Meridien, and then took a circuitous route back to the Amahoro, only to come upon a man and a woman being hauled from a vehicle by another mob. Captain Claeys also happened to be driving by, and he stopped too. Brent, Claeys and Troute rushed the mob and everyone ran, leaving the couple behind. They turned out to be a Tutsi doctor and his wife, a nurse, who had been trying to get to the Kigali hospital, as the radio was alleging that there were large numbers of casualties throughout the city.

  Meanwhile, back at headquarters, many of my subordinate commanders and staff officers were recommending we intervene and clear the demonstrations, using force if necessary. But no one from UNAMIR had been directly attacked and we did not yet have confirmed reports that our civilian staff was being assaulted either. I did not want us to be dragged into this and then have a shooting incident that would create severe complications for the mission. I thought that clearing the intersections was a basic law-and-order task for the Gendarmerie, who should be assisted by Bleim and his team. But they were nowhere to be found. For the most part, the UN Civilian Police Division only worked the day shift, Monday to Friday. There was no one manning its headquarters on a Saturday. There was no sign of any gendarmes, either.

  Luc Marchal was already onto this mess. He tracked down Ndindiliyimana and demanded that he intervene to enforce the KWSA agreement. By mid-morning the head of the Gendarmerie had agreed. By lunchtime, his men had deployed, the demonstrations had petered out and the mobs had been dispersed. I was glad that UNAMIR had not been dragged into a firefight with an angry mob of poorly armed civilians, and I was content that we had provoked the Gendarmerie to do its job. Within a week I would find out how lucky I had been in taking this decision. Jean-Pierre told Captain Claeys that the demonstrations had been another attempt by the extremists to entice the Belgian soldiers into using force. Carefully laid ambushes had been in place near many of the demonstrations, and once again our restraint had saved the lives of UNAMIR soldiers.

  Because of the deteriorating security situation, by the last week of January we had mounted UNAMIR guards at the homes of Madame Agathe; Joseph Kavaruganda, the head of the constitutional court; Faustin; Lando; and four other moderate ministers. Kigali Sector put five to eight men at each house, and they guarded these people twenty-four hours a day. Even though I could not afford the troops, the death threats were real and confirmed. Since these persons were so vital to the future of Rwanda, what choice did I have? At that time I had only three companies in Kigali that I could potentially draw from for guard duties: two Belgian and one Bangladeshi. One of them I couldn’t touch because it was committed to protecting the airport. Each company could at most protect nine VIPs. Once I’d okayed these teams of guards, I’d used up a whole company of troops. Requests for UNAMIR guards began to pour in from other moderate politicians, from human rights activists, minor party officials, even branches of the UN civilian administration who had acquired offices away from headquarters but now wanted my soldiers to guard them. I knew that the guards were a credible deterrent except in the case of a deliberate sustained assault, but that providing the guards was undermining my ability to perform all the other essential tasks that UNAMIR needed to carry out. So I refused all further requests, except the one from the SRSG—Booh-Booh’s residence had been fired upon, and he demanded a personal protection section. Once again, I felt like we were losing the initiative as we rushed to protect the targets of the threats, instead of dealing directly with the threats themselves, weakening our ability to achieve other aims. By the end of January, having not yet received the phase-two deployments, I had in effect one company in Kigali doing the work of four.

  In the midst of all this turmoil, I received an unusual invitation. André Ntagerura, the minister of transport and the acknowledged dean of the MRND, wanted to see me. On January 24, I agreed to meet him for supper at the Restaurant Péché Mignon, a stone’s throw from the MRND party headquarters. Perched on a hillside, the restaurant had a reputation for fine cuisine and a lovely courtyard that boasted a garden and fountain. When I arrived (with Willem de Kant, who would provide some discreet security) shortly after 2100, the place was almost empty. I found Ntagerura seated at a secluded table, a small pudgy man with a jovial air about him and an exceptionally round face. His features were unusual, with exaggerated curves, and he could overwhelm you with the power of his expressions, whether of joy or anger. Ntagerura had been involved with the Habyarimana regime for close to thirteen years and had occupied some of the most influential government ministries. He was a member of Habyarimana’s inner circle, and I was curious as to why he wanted to meet with me, though I had worried that accepting his invitation could be misconstrued as a partisan gesture.

  When Ntagerura did not order, or offer me, any alcohol, I realized how important he felt the meeting to be. It turned out that he was another Rwandan politician who had spent many years in Quebec. He could swear better in Québécois than I could and was extremely knowledgeable about the political culture of my home province and Canada. After he spent some time charming me, he got around to the point of the meeting. The president was no longer in charge, he said, and the MRND was operating independently of him. Faustin Twagiramungu’s inflexibility regarding nominations to the BBTG within his own party was the source of much of the political impasse, he said. Leaning toward me, taking care to shut up when a waiter came near, Ntagerura insisted that pursuing Habyarimana for the solution to the impasse was useless. The better road was to persuade Twagiramungu that the nominations from his party to the BBTG should reflect the wishes of the party rather than his own. He went on to address the internal problems of the PL, saying that Lando and Justin Mugenzi should just agree to disagree.

  As he warmed to his subject, his essential mean-spiritedness showed through. He said that the transitional government should reflect the country’s real makeup and not the sudden resurgence of a minority ethnic entity seeking to dominate the majority. He suggested that the RPF was seeking to control the BBTG by wooing the majority of the cabinet over to its side, leaving the MRND isolated. To him, it all smelled like a return to the Tutsi-dominated pre-independence feudal system.

  His eyes grew wild and his voice rose alarmingly as he insisted that the RPF was going to impose a Tutsi hegemony over the Great Lakes region of Africa. He claimed that the number of RPF soldiers inside the CND complex had increased since December to more than a thousand and that RPF agents were trying to influence the local population and distribute arms. I pointed out that under Arusha the RPF had the freedom to operate like any of the other parties, and that included holding political meetings and getting their message out to the local population. He threw me a skeptical look and said UNAMIR was being far too soft on the RPF, particularly the Belgians. Pursing his lips with disapproval, he said the Belgians had been observed running after women and causing fights in local bars and discos. Stabbing the air with his chubby finger, he charged that UNAMIR had not found out who had committed the November killings and seemed to be providing escorts and protection only to Tutsis and their supporters.

  Things were coming to a head, he warned, and UNAMIR would no longer be able to sit on the fence. UNAMIR was not well understood by the local population, and unless we took the initiative, we would continue to be the brunt of misinformation. He hinted that the violence and the negative press would escalate if the situation remained unchanged.

/>   By the time we finished talking, it was close to one in the morning. The fanatic in him disappeared and Ntagerura was all civility and charm. I thanked him for his candour and deliberately gathered up the many notes I had taken. As we stood, he reached, almost affectionately, to shake my hand, patting my upper arm with his other hand in obvious satisfaction at how the meeting had gone. As Willem and I headed home, I replayed the meeting in my mind. I determined that I had to improve security at the CND. Ntagerura’s attitude confirmed what we had learned through Jean-Pierre: the regime felt that the tide was turning against them. I saw that a great chasm was opening up and the only way to bridge it would be through political involvement and diplomacy at a higher plane than the fiddling around that UNAMIR had been doing. We had to find a way of reaching out to the hard-liners while not pandering to their ethnic extremism. Ntagerura, for all intents and purposes, had asserted that the president was no longer in full control of the MRND movement. Who was running the show on the extremist side?

  The following day I briefed Booh-Booh and a few of his staffers on my meeting with Ntagerura and handed him a written analysis and report of the conversation for his action. I told him that we had to start pushing harder, putting more pressure on the parties to solve their disagreements and get the BBTG installed. Booh-Booh responded with alarm. On the contrary, he said, we needed to slow down the process in order to build consensus. He pointed to the correspondence that was going on between Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Habyarimana and said that we should wait and see if the president’s diplomatic efforts bore fruit. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing: hadn’t I just told him that the dean of the MRND had claimed that the president was no longer in control of his own party? I returned to my office furious.