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

by Roméo Dallaire

  I can’t bear to think of how many Rwandans were told that help was forthcoming that day and were then slaughtered. In just a few hours the Presidential Guard had conducted an obviously well-organized and well-executed plan—by noon on April 7 the moderate political leadership of Rwanda was dead or in hiding, the potential for a future moderate government utterly lost.

  The senior leadership of the RGF and Gendarmerie were meeting that morning but I didn’t know where. I needed to find them, and I asked for Major Peter Maggen, the senior duty officer, to come with Robert and me to take notes since he was the only other officer available at Force HQ at that time who was fluent in French. A slight, reserved air-defence artillery officer, Maggen was steeped in the mores of the NATO Central Front in Europe. When he’d heard what was going on, he’d made his own way to the headquarters through Kigali’s dangerous streets. My thought was that if it was only the units close to the president that had gone rogue, why shouldn’t my force intervene with the Gendarmerie and help nip this thing in the bud? If it was a Bagosoraled coup by the hard-liners, aimed at derailing the Arusha accords, I had no more mandate. Civil war would surely break out.

  Booh-Booh called to complain that the APC had not yet arrived to take him to his meeting at the American ambassador’s residence. I told him I would see to the missing APC myself and sent out the request over our shaky radio net. Booh-Booh called back about ten minutes later. The APC still had not arrived, he was going to miss the meeting and he was furious.

  Before I left, I phoned Riza in New York. We now knew that moderates were being targeted, that people under the protection of UNAMIR had been attacked—and God knew what was happening to our guards. It was difficult to get through roadblocks. Soon we might have no choice but to use force. Once again Riza instructed me that UNAMIR was not to fire until fired upon. (From the sitrep sent to New York later that day, I quote, “The Force Commander discussed Rules of Engagement with Mr. Riza and the Rules of Engagement were confirmed that UNAMIR was not to fire until fired upon.”)

  At about 0930 the SRSG called to say the diplomatic meeting had been cancelled because the ambassadors couldn’t be safely escorted there. It was a lost opportunity to try to sway Bagosora. I had to get to the RGF military meeting as quickly as possible.

  At 1000, I met with the few officers who had made it to Force HQ. The standoff at the crash site hadn’t changed; a platoon of Belgian troops at the main terminal of the airport was still being held prisoner, but they still had their weapons. It was hard to move around the city; we had neither the authority nor the firepower to force our way through roadblocks. There was little our patrols could do other than try to find an alternate route, which inevitably led to another roadblock. The situation outside Kigali was relatively quiet.

  I asked Henry to round up the remaining staff any way he could and to bring order to the chaotic situation in the operations centre. I broke the news of Riza’s new limit on our ROE, emphasizing the need to avoid any incident the extremists could exploit to turn the army, the Gendarmerie, the militias and possibly the population against us. I directed that the change of rules be passed to all sectors down the chain of command. I sent Ballis to the CND and asked him to remain with the RPF, who for the present were holding up their side of the KWSA agreement. He was to assure them that I was in contact with the Crisis Committee and intended to stay with Bagosora for as long as it took to get control of the situation. What I really didn’t need now was for the RPF to break out of the CND. The ceasefire and the whole peace process were hanging by a thread. Brent was to finish the written report to New York but hold off on sending it until I got back. He was also to answer my phone and maintain the link with the DPKO, relaying messages to myself or Henry as required.

  Robert, Major Maggen and I left to try to find the meeting. We had a hand-held Motorola radio in addition to the one in the vehicle. Robert had the only weapon, a pistol. There was the sound of sporadic gunfire around the city, but the main streets were still empty except for the occasional Presidential Guard vehicle. Maggen was at the wheel, Robert was in the back seat, and I was in the front with my ear close to the radio. We had to make a long detour to the southwest of the city in order to avoid the firing that had broken out again between the RPF and the Presidential Guard around the CND. I hoped Ballis had made it through. As we approached the city centre, there were people in the streets and in doorways, and groups were gathering around the roadblocks. Interahamwe, in their distinctive baggy, clown-like suits, some soldiers and ordinary civilians were manning the roadblocks, armed with machetes. Some of them had guns. Youths half-dressed in army uniforms swore at us before reluctantly letting us through.

  Near the Hôtel des Mille Collines in the centre of Kigali, we met two Bangladeshi APCs held up at a roadblock manned by Presidential Guards. A French-made armoured reconnaissance vehicle had its seventy-six-millimetre-cannon aimed at them. When I got out, the Bangladeshi lieutenant pushed his head out of the turret. He and his men were very uneasy, he told me. They hadn’t been able to get to the UNDP compound to extricate the Rwandans stranded there. I told him to stay put until I could get the APCs through. I walked up to the corporal who was running the roadblock and told him to let my vehicle and the APCs by. He refused. His orders were that no one, especially UNAMIR, was permitted into the city centre and that if we tried to cross his roadblock he would open fire. I wanted to drive right over his roadblock, but I remembered Riza’s directive. I turned in place, absorbing the situation around me, and noticed that the cannon on the turret and its coaxial medium machine gun were now aimed at me. I walked back to my vehicle and told the Bangladeshi lieutenant to keep the APCs in place until I ordered them to move forward. This did little to allay the fear so explicit on his face. The five working APCs were our last line of resort and if they couldn’t get through a roadblock, nothing we had could. I had to get Bagosora or Ndindiliyimana to open the roadblocks.

  I decided to proceed on foot. I told Robert to back up and find a road to the west; he might be able to negotiate his way through a roadblock there and link up with us. I told Maggen to join me as I walked toward the roadblock. The corporal watched as we went by him, then yelled at me and gave orders in Kinyarwanda, which were followed by the sound of weapons being cocked. I told Maggen that we would keep walking. Other orders were yelled but no shots rang out.

  We now had to walk about half a kilometre through the deserted government and business district. There were a few bursts of small arms fire coming from northwest of the city, but there was no sign of life here, as if all the people had fled or were in hiding. The Presidential Guard was doing a fine job of containing the relatively small city centre, but who was issuing the orders? Why was the rest of the city starting to resemble anarchy while the Gendarmerie was apparently sitting on its hands?

  We stopped at the gates of the UNDP office compound. It was deserted. The important person, whoever it might have been, was not here now—there were no signs that anyone had been here all morning. We returned to the Boulevard de la Révolution and kept walking. Our pace was brisk. The only sounds we heard were birdsong, the echo of our footsteps on the pavement, and the pounding of our hearts. Maggen kept his own counsel as I was deep in thought. Should I use force regardless of the direct order from Riza? Given our resources, I couldn’t magically transform us into an intervention force, but how far could I go? I still had a mandate—the RPF was still following the rules and we were only facing rogue RGF units. The key to re-establishing a secure situation was Bagosora. He was in charge. He and Ndindiliyimana had to demonstrate to me that this was not a coup.

  The Ministry of Defence was only about a hundred metres from the UNDP office compound and was guarded by a platoon of about forty personnel, mostly army troops wearing no regimental insignia, along with a few gendarmes. I asked the lieutenant in charge—who had made it clear that he was not disposed to let me inside—where Colonel Bagosora was. He responded that he wasn’t there. I turned around and c
arried on walking with Maggen, heading west to the main gate of army headquarters at Camp Kigali, about four hundred metres farther down the avenue. As we walked along the edge of the Ministry of Defence compound, a major called out from the wall. He yelled that he did not think it wise for us to proceed on foot—he would drive us the rest of the way. I told him not to bother, but he came running to join us, trailed by a small military car. At his insistence, we climbed in. I told him I had to find Bagosora and Ndindiliyimana.

  The army headquarters was just inside the main gates of Camp Kigali. When we arrived, the place was still in full combat readiness. All the bunkers were manned and medium machine guns covered the entrance. Several rows of spiked barriers were set up to deter wheeled vehicles. There was a large bunker about twenty metres inside the gates with a direct line of fire down the long, straight boulevard. An armoured car was parked outside the entrance in a semi-hull-down position, partially hidden, its gun aimed down the street. Several troops and some Presidential Guards were manning the gates. The major leapt out of the car and approached the guards. After a few minutes he came back and told us that the meeting was being held at the École Supérieure Militaire.

  We backed up and drove south along Avenue de l’Hôpital, past the second gate to Camp Kigali, heading for the military school entrance. Inside the gate, I got a glimpse of what looked like two Belgian soldiers lying on the ground at the far end of the compound. It was a brutal shock. How had they been captured? I ordered the major to stop the car, telling him I thought I had seen some of my own soldiers on the ground. Instead, he sped around the corner and drove directly into the college parking lot. It was only a matter of moments, but those moments seemed to last a lifetime, the small car carrying me farther and farther away from the second gate. The major told me emphatically that I could not go into Camp Kigali. The troops inside the camp were out of control.

  I got out of the car, Maggen behind me. Sizable numbers of fully armed troops and gendarmes, some with bandoliers of bullets across their chests, were sheltering from the noon-day sun in the shade of several mature trees. All talk amongst them abruptly stopped as they stared at me. Suddenly a UNAMIR military observer, Captain Apedo Kodjo of Togo, stepped away from the soldiers who had been holding him and approached me. He was fearful and whispered in my ear, pointing out five Ghanaian soldiers who were being held nearby. They had just been brought here from Camp Kigali, where a group of Belgian soldiers were still detained. These Belgians, he said, were being assaulted—the verb he used was tabasser, which means “beaten” or “roughed up.” I looked over at the Ghanaians, who should have been armed but had no weapons with them. They waved nervously. Murmurs were rising from the RGF soldiers, but none of them changed position.

  I told Captain Kodjo to stay put and await my return. His eyes grew wide at this order but he obeyed. I judged that the Ghanaians and my military observer would be safe for the moment and rapidly headed along a short path to the amphitheatre where I suspected Bagosora was holding court.

  I entered a small anteroom that was in total darkness. Opening the heavy curtains on the other side, I burst out into a well-lit room full of people in uniform. I could see the shock and surprise on Bagosora’s face. I seemed to have caught him in mid-speech, with one arm raised for emphasis. I advanced a few steps toward the small platform where he stood. Ndindiliyimana was sitting at a table to his left. The hall was silent and no one moved. Then Bagosora lowered his arm and came toward me, extending his hand and saying that I was most welcome, and how fortuitous it was that I had arrived when all the army and Gendarmerie senior leadership were in one location.

  A third chair was quickly placed on the podium for me. I looked around the room, spotting some of the moderate senior officers with whom I had had several discussions in the past about the political future of the nation. Overall though, it was a less than sympathetic crowd. Carrying on with his speech in French, Bagosora defended the creation of the Crisis Committee and said that it must put together a communiqué by two o’clock that afternoon to calm the nation and inform the people that the security situation was well in hand. Bagosora received support for this plan, and Colonel Léonidas Rusatira, the senior colonel in the army (a moderate I had met with several times), was made the chair of the subcommittee that was to draft the communiqué. Bagosora emphasized that it was essential that the RPF understand what was happening. He hoped that I would relay this information to them.

  At this point I still did not believe that Arusha was irrevocably lost. However, with the Belgian soldiers being mistreated in Camp Kigali, as well as other troops still not accounted for, we were moving rapidly toward confrontation. How could I protect the unarmed civilian and military personnel? And there were other UN staff in remote locations around the country who would become targets for retaliation if I met violence with force. In addition, there was a diplomatic and expatriate community of about five thousand, scattered all over Rwanda, who were vulnerable.

  Bagosora turned to me and asked if I would address the commanders—I discovered a completely new set of stomach muscles that were attempting to bend me in two as I stood. The hall was silent. “I regret enormously the loss of your president and the chief of staff of the army in the crash last night,” I began. “I realize that some units very close to the president have been overwrought with grief, fear and anger and have conducted over the last twelve hours the gravest of crimes, which must be stopped now by you, the senior and unit commanders. We in UNAMIR are staying put. I will continue to support you in avoiding the destruction of the Arusha accords and will assist you in preventing another civil war with the RPF. It is the duty of the commanders of units in the KWSA to regain control of their units and return immediately to their garrisons to abide by the rules of the KWSA. It is crucial that you, the commanders of sectors and units around the country, maintain a state of calm in your units and in the populations in your areas of responsibility until the political and the security situation is resolved.”

  There was scattered applause at the end of my short speech. They’d heard from my lips that UNAMIR was staying; the implementation of Arusha was still my mission. I couldn’t abandon the people who had trusted the international community to help them. I made the decision to stay in the final split second before making the most consequential speech of my life. As a result I had to accept that UNAMIR would be threatened and at risk.

  I have been severely criticized in some quarters for the decisions that I took on April 7, 1994. I accept responsibility for every decision I made that day, on the days previously, on the days after—for my conduct during the entire mission. I will try to tell the story so that you understand that this was a day not of one or two isolated incidents and a few decisions. It was a day that felt like a year, where there were hundreds of incidents and decisions that had to be made in seconds.

  I didn’t raise the issue of the Belgian soldiers in that speech because I wanted to discuss it with Bagosora alone. I needed to assess its impact on the entire mission, and I wanted to talk to the senior army leadership, who I hoped might be able to save the situation. It was that decision, in part, that contributed to the deaths of ten soldiers under my command. I wanted to proceed by negotiation, as I realized I could not use force without the certainty of more casualties. I did not have the offensive force to take on a dug-in garrison of more than a thousand troops. I considered a rescue option irresponsible. If we used force against the RGF compound, we were then a legitimate target and we would become a third belligerent. My aim that morning was to do everything in my power to avoid a confrontation, regain control of the rogue units in Kigali and keep the dialogue and the prospects of the peace accord alive.

  Commanders spend their careers preparing for the moment when they will have to choose between lose-lose propositions in the use of their troops. Regardless of the decision they make, some of their men will most certainly die. My decision took sons from their parents, husbands from their wives, fathers from their children
. I knew the cost of my decision: I was risking the lives of the Belgians in Camp Kigali, men whose names are listed on the dedication page of this book. They were and remain heroes of Rwanda.

  It was clearly the fulfillment of the plot Jean-Pierre had told us about months earlier. The Belgian soldiers were being deliberately targeted by extremists to create fear. The aim was to secure first a Belgian, then a UN withdrawal. The extremists had taken their cue from the grim farces of Bosnia and Somalia. They knew that Western nations do not have the stomach or the will to sustain casualties in peace support operations. When confronted with casualties, as the United States was in Somalia or the Belgians in Rwanda, they will run, regardless of the consequences to the abandoned population.

  I remained standing for a few minutes as Bagosora resumed centre stage. I heard him express his relief that UNAMIR was staying to help them through this terrible crisis. As the meeting ended, he disappeared through the mass of officers who rose from their seats and gathered at the front of the stage to greet me. A group of senior officers endorsed my stand. Among them were my RGF liaison, Ephrem Rwabalinda, and the head of the military college, Colonel Rusatira. Since I couldn’t spot Bagosora, I confronted Ndindiliyimana: What was happening to my men in Camp Kigali? He didn’t know for sure, he said, but RTLM had been broadcasting that the presidential plane had been shot down by Belgians, and soldiers and veterans were rioting inside the camp. He and the others insisted I let them try to secure the release of the Belgians. At the time I didn’t realize that these were the soldiers who had been the escort and guard for Prime Minister Agathe. The officers asked me to attend the sub-committee that was drafting the communiqué to the nation while others intervened on behalf of my men, and we proceeded to a classroom on one side of the amphitheatre. I wondered whether Rusatira was going to make a move to coalesce the moderates. As the meeting began, Ndindiliyimana seemed to sink into a sullen lethargy and didn’t take part in the discussions. The only men who were not morose and uncertain were two RGF lieutenant colonels whom I had never met, who kept urging Rusatira to make haste—obviously hard-liners planted there to keep an eye on things. If the moderates in this room actually had the will to attempt to reverse the manipulations of Bagosora, they would have a difficult time of it.