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

by Roméo Dallaire

  The next day I received from Dr. Kabia a copy of the analysis done by one of the politicos who had attended my meeting with the SRSG. Instead of getting the point that one of the major powers in the MRND was saying the president was no longer in control, this adviser concentrated his comments on the fact that it was inappropriate procedure for me to have met with Ntagerura: “According to UN practice and guidelines, staff members are warned that in conflict situations as we do have in Rwanda, they should not have any close ties with individuals, organizations, parties or factions, so as not to raise any doubts as to their ability to remain impartial and objective in discharging their duties.”

  Rwanda was adrift, and no one either wanted to or seemed to be able to do anything about it.

  I was receiving reports from UNOMUR in Uganda of increased movements of food, fuel and young men into the RPF zone in northern Rwanda. Ben Matizawa and the others were certain that the RPF was gearing up for action. The government forces were equally busy. My MILOB teams were reporting troop movements from the southern sector to the area north of the KWSA, close to the RPF and the demilitarized zone. The army chief of staff had requested permission to reinforce Kigali with elite commando troops, at a meeting he called in the office of the minister of defence, using the lame excuse that the RGF had resupply problems and needed to concentrate their troops closer to their depots in Kigali. The minister of defence then intervened with a request to deploy the military police battalion of over four hundred troops inside the KWSA in static guard duties, to relieve the Gendarmerie of those tasks. The minister argued that the Gendarmerie was burning out and needed reinforcement. I categorically refused both requests, as the Gendarmerie, although stretched, was still able to deploy its two rapid reaction companies, and the balance of troops inside the KWSA was already overwhelmingly in their favour. Even after we lost contact with Jean-Pierre, we continued to receive reliable reports that the armed militias aligned with the MRND and CDR parties were continuing to stockpile weapons and distribute them to their supporters. Both sides were hedging their bets. If the political process failed, they wanted to be ready to fight it out.

  The RPF battalion sequestered inside the CND complex was beginning to display a siege mentality. Recently they had broken out of the compound on a couple of occasions, firing their weapons and forcing their way through UNAMIR roadblocks. Both the troops and the political leadership showed an increasing tendency to vent their frustrations on UNAMIR, threatening my MILOBs if they turned up late for escort duty or flagrantly disobeying the rules of the KWSA agreement by showing up armed at the Amahoro headquarters. The battalion had been penned up in the CND compound for almost six weeks, often with hostile demonstrators on its doorstep, and I thought nothing good would happen if the political stalemate continued. During this time, Colonel Marchal visited my headquarters to inform me that, because the RPF had stepped up their meetings around Kigali in order to prepare for the BBTG, UNAMIR was being swamped by unreasonable requests by the RPF for escort parties. In his opinion, this was a ploy on the RPF’s part to pressure UNAMIR to act more vigorously to break the political impasse.

  For a while, Justin Mugenzi had seemed open to a political compromise on the makeup of the PL’s representatives in the BBTG, but then his car was ambushed on the way home from a meeting on January 19, and one of his bodyguards was killed. He reverted to his hardline stance. We never found out who had tried to kill Mugenzi. When I confronted Paul Kagame about the attempt, he said that the RPF was not involved because if it had been, Mugenzi would be dead.

  Even with our best efforts to enforce the KWSA rules, Rwanda was still awash in guns; grenades were readily available in the local market for about three U.S. dollars. In early January, you’d hear grenade explosions in Kigali every couple of nights. By mid-month it was every night, and by the end of January there were several a night. Attacks against our mission or against people closely associated with UNAMIR had now begun. On January 29, persons unknown had tried to assassinate Major Frank Kamenzi, the new RPF liaison officer to UNAMIR, with a grenade; the next day someone had thrown a grenade into the Kigali Sector headquarters. Luckily there were no casualties. All these factors were piling up like dry kindling waiting for a match.

  I had to find some way of gaining an edge. As far as I could see, the only way to do this was to appeal to the DPKO again to allow me to launch deterrent operations aimed at recovering illegal weapons. This time I would propose that we share such operations with the Gendarmerie, or even with the RPF where appropriate. We needed to demonstrate that we were helping to create an atmosphere of security and abandoning our reactive, defensive posture.

  On January 31, I sat down with Brent to draft a detailed security analysis of the situation for Booh-Booh’s action. This was to be my third formal and comprehensive military and political analysis that month. The first was sent to the DPKO with Booh-Booh’s endorsement on January 5; the second, on January 21, barely got a hearing from the SRSG and was sent on to the DPKO with only a cryptic covering note from Dr. Kabia, bringing it to the attention of the New York staff. I never received any direction from New York on either document. I concluded that either the DPKO was not receiving the documents or had no capacity left to deal with the information. I decided to implement any measures I could in Kigali, keeping Dr. Kabia and Maurice Baril in the loop.

  In my third report I showed how we would conduct the weapons search and seizure operations in a transparent manner using a coordinated public relations campaign to inform the local population of our purpose. I requested that we set up a UNAMIR-run radio station with UN equipment that Brent had tracked down, which had been mothballed in Italy. We needed to circumvent the misinformation dished out by the local media. I supported my argument by referring to the Arusha Peace Agreement, specifically article 54, which tasked the neutral international force to “assist in the tracking of arms caches and neutralization of armed gangs throughout the country” and to “assist in the recovery of all weapons distributed to, or illegally acquired by, the civilians.” Booh-Booh responded quite positively to my proposal and sent it off to the triumvirate in New York.

  The response I got back on February 3, signed by Annan himself, was yet another body blow. Once again, he reinforced the passive posture of the mission. He wrote, “ . . . we are prepared to authorize UNAMIR to respond positively, on a case by case basis, to requests by the Government and the RPF for assistance in illegal arms recovery operations. It should be clearly understood, however, that while UNAMIR may provide advice/guidance for the planning of such operations, it cannot, repeat, cannot take an active role in their execution. UNAMIR’s role . . . should be limited to a monitoring function.” They were tying my hands.

  * * *

  1. For the duration of the mission I continued to communicate information and intentions directly to, and to seek direction and advice from, the DPKO without reference to the SRSG or the authority of his office. Having been head of mission as well as the conceiver of the mission, I simply continued to use the channels that had been open to me before the SRSG arrived in Kigali. At no time did the SRSG or the DPKO advise me to stop this practice, although on occasion a response to a code cable of mine would go directly to the SRSG for action.

  2. On January 1, 1994, according to the Arusha Peace Agreement, the military leaders of the RPF, the RGF and the Gendarmerie were all promoted to the rank of major general, and other officers’ ranks adjusted so that the three faces shared equivalent ranks for the coming demobilization and creation of a new force for Rwanda.

  3. I asked for de-mining equipment to be provided to my Bangladeshi engineers, as they had deployed without any. We were sent some old, ineffective equipment, and some new equipment that the UN wanted us to try out, which the Bangladeshi engineers did not have the skill to use and with which they showed no interest in training. When we asked for usable equipment, I was told yet again that there was no money in the budget to purchase it. My Belgian contingent had a limited d
e-mining capability, but it was under strict national orders not to engage in de-mining operations except in emergency situations where the lives of UNAMIR personnel were directly in danger or if mines were discovered in the immediate vicinity of Belgian quarters. As a result of the bureaucratic and financial limitations of the UN, and the restrictive national policies of the troop-contributing nations, we were never able to address the mine threat in the country.

  4. On January 26, Ly convened a round table in Kigali of representatives from humanitarian agencies, the World Bank, the IMF, concerned UN agencies, the RPF, the Rwandan government, donor countries and UNAMIR to discuss the funding strategy for the demobilization and reintegration of surplus troops. This meeting became the basis of the donor-country round table in Europe in March.

  8

  ASSASSINATION AND AMBUSH

  FEBRUARY MARKED THE tail end of the dry season. The freshness was gone from the air, and the landscape was coated with a film of fine, red dust, which sudden wind squalls would pick up and swirl into dust devils. The political atmosphere was heavy with anticipation. On February 1, the minister of defence invited me to a meeting at his office. Augustin Bizimana had always struck me as a man who was carrying around a pocketful of secrets. Though he tried to project an air of detached calm, he seemed propelled by internal forces that pushed his mobile features into absurdly dramatic scowls. No meeting I ever had with him was dull, because at any moment it seemed like he might let something slip.

  But on that Tuesday morning, Bizimana decided to be uncharacteristically forthcoming. He raised issue after issue, as if he had gone through my list of security concerns for the Kigali Weapons Secure Area and was ticking off each one. He actually suggested that we work together on the problems: the banditry, the grenade attacks, the illegal demonstrations, the occasional riots. He said we needed to get the Gendarmerie to pull its weight in order to get things under control. He’d just come from a meeting with the MRND leadership, concerning the armed militias and how to get a grip on them, and he was planning similar sessions with the other political parties. He also offered to set up a meeting between UNAMIR and the leadership of the Interahamwe so that we could begin a dialogue with them and perhaps direct them to play a more constructive role in this very delicate transition period. I listened to him intently, sure my ears were deceiving me.

  The door to his office was ajar, and both Colonel Ntwiragaba, the head of military intelligence, and Théoneste Bagosora, were lurking within earshot. I was very uneasy about Bizimana’s sudden change of heart—just a few days earlier he had been slandering UNAMIR to the local media. However, I used the opportunity to press for an invitation for Luc Marchal and myself to attend a big security and public safety meeting we had heard about, a gathering of all the burgomasters and sous-prefects in the area, under the auspices of the prefect of Kigali. The minister seemed a little taken aback but agreed to arrange it.

  On the drive back to headquarters, I puzzled over what could have precipitated Bizimana’s dramatic change of attitude. The only recent event of any significance was the visit by Doug Bennett, the assistant U.S. secretary of state for international organizations. (It was customary for the state department official to visit the capitals of nations after they had taken up one of the rotating seats on the Security Council in order to brief their senior political and diplomatic leadership on U.S. policy and try to bring them onside with American interests.) Bennett had met the president, the interim prime minister, the prime minister designate, the foreign minister, the defence minister and others and, at each meeting, had stressed the importance of the Rwandans ending the political impasse and getting the transitional institutions into place.

  On the following day, February 2, I had the opportunity to brief Bennett myself, in the Amahoro conference room, along with Booh-Booh and representatives from several NGOs. I was very frank about the problems plaguing Rwanda, but I wanted to get the message through to Bennett that UNAMIR still stood a good chance of succeeding if we received the resources that had been promised and the authority to act. He was a pleasant fellow who listened patiently to what I had to say and asked a few insightful questions. But then he was gone, and if he actually did communicate my message when he got back to the United States, nothing happened as a result. However, his visit and the message he delivered may have caused reverberations through the hardline community, to which Bizimana was reacting.

  Later that day, I travelled up to Kilometre 64 for a meeting of the Joint Military Commission.1 The one positive thing to come out of the political impasse was that it left me more time to work out the complicated process of demobilization. One of the first steps, and a critical one, was redrawing the demilitarized zone so that the two forces would be far enough apart that their longest-range guns no longer posed a threat to each other. As it stood now, at some points the parties were almost twenty kilometres apart, and in other places, within a few hundred metres of each other. The Arusha Peace Agreement gave the neutral international force the task of redefining the demilitarized zone and persuading the former belligerents to move their forces in order to comply with it; the area in between was to be controlled by UNAMIR troops. It was yet another example of the accords leaving a contentious issue deliberately vague, and UNAMIR had to sort it out.

  I had thought out the problems of this process during the reconnaissance in August. Knowing any redrawing of the demilitarized zone would be controversial, I had kept the actual plan confidential until I had been able to build up a strong enough rapport between the RPF and the RGF to present it. I had only released it publicly on February 1, and this would be the first time that any of the men had seen it. The new line of separation that I had worked out required the RGF to pull back 75 per cent of their forces a few kilometres, since I couldn’t push the RPF back any farther without shoving them into Uganda.

  Gathered around the rough wooden table at Kilometre 64 were about twenty people: Major General Nsabimana, Major General Ndindiliyimana, Major General Kagame, and respective staff members—this was the first time these former bitter foes had actually met. Because Kagame spoke no French and Nsabimana spoke no English, once again I provided the simultaneous translation so there would be no room for misinterpretation, and a minimum of wasted time. Again the staffs mingled easily; I was also struck by the politeness and civility that each of the commanders afforded the others. However, as I laid the map out in our makeshift meeting-hut and traced the new line of demarcation, I saw Nsabimana’s face fall. He had absorbed most of the blame for the military defeat of the RGF in February 1993, and he had barely managed to hang on to his job. Sitting across the table from him was the man who had defeated him. Lifting his eyes from the map to confront me, Nsabimana demanded to know why I was asking him to retreat. Kagame kept silent.

  I told Nsabimana that I wasn’t asking him to retreat but requesting him to reposition his force so that both armies would be beyond the range of each others’ guns, and my troops could safely interpose themselves between them. The RGF had to move because Kagame’s forces had nowhere to go. But if this scenario was unacceptable to him, there was another option. If each force consigned their medium- and heavy-weapons systems, including the RGF’s helicopters, into UNAMIR’s care, we would not have to conduct such massive troop redeployments. From the charged silence in the room, it was clear that no one was going to accede to this new plan today. I asked them all to take it home to their headquarters and come back to me within seven days, which they all agreed to do. That seven-day period for deliberation turned into weeks, and the new line of the demilitarized zone was never resolved.

  As I left the meeting, however, I thought that we had achieved a breakthrough. If the highest military authorities on both sides were still willing to meet to discuss demobilization, there was a chance that we could continue to move forward in the peace process. But I had no way to leverage these small military advances into progress on the political level. The fact was that at any of my meetings with Kagame, Ns
abimana or Ndindiliyimana, all three were far better briefed on the political situation than I was. The relationship I had been able to foster with Booh-Booh when he first arrived had been disrupted when he had gathered around him a group of Franco-African advisers who, with few exceptions, such as Dr. Kabia and Beadengar Dessande, were hostile to me. We were not a cohesive team.

  Prime among the group was Mamadou Kane, Booh-Booh’s chief political adviser and the leader of this clique. From the moment he landed in Kigali in mid-December, he manoeuvred constantly to increase his authority, his salary and his rank. In just two months, he managed to get himself promoted twice, until in UN terms he outranked me and just about everybody else in UNAMIR except Booh-Booh. In the end, Booh-Booh and the clique became isolated from the rest of the mission; the right hand never knew, let alone understood, what the left hand was doing.

  The next day, Luc and I attended the town hall meeting on public safety and security in Kigali. It was packed. We were seated at a long table on the podium along with an impressive gathering of politicians, ministers and local officials. The meeting started at about ten in the morning and ran non-stop for six hours, with more people trying to squeeze into the room the whole time. UNAMIR took a lot of questions, some posed by ordinary citizens from the floor, which gave me insight into how the political stagnation was affecting their lives. People complained that the government was no longer really governing: a lot of salaries were not being paid, public schools were closed and government-sponsored medical care had been starved of resources. They were extremely disturbed by the increased banditry and lawlessness. Even so, the local leaders and the ordinary citizens had not given up but wanted to find solutions. They asked good questions and listened attentively when Luc and I explained the mission mandate, making it very clear why we weren’t able to achieve all the objectives spelled out in the Arusha accords. They wanted us to do more to control the violence and hoped that we would take on the security of Kigali with the Gendarmerie working under our direction, and were disappointed in the limits set on our mission.