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

by Roméo Dallaire

  Kagame was bringing about three more battalions of troops into the north of Kigali. There was a lot of movement to the east of the demilitarized zone, toward the Kagera National Park and the main north-south road along the Tanzanian border. Butare was tense because some Presidential Guards were in the area. Cyangugu, Kibuye and Gikongoro were scenes of ethnic killings by suspected CDR supporters and RGF soldiers. MILOB teams had established contact with an International Red Cross vehicle convoy of humanitarian aid coming from Burundi. The French had nearly completed their evacuation operation and were beginning to withdraw, with Luc’s troops taking up the French positions at the airport. France’s ambassador had closed the country’s embassy and flown out.

  That evening, Brent brought me a copy of a communiqué commandement des forces armées Rwandaises. It pleaded for a face-to-face meeting between Gatsinzi and Kagame under UNAMIR auspices, and it was signed by Rusatira, Gatsinzi, five colonels and three lieutenant colonels of the RGF, including our liaison officer, Ephrem Rwabalinda. They stated that there had been too much killing, and they were submitting to an unconditional surrender as of 1200 tomorrow, April 13. They wanted to establish the BBTG. I wondered why Ndindiliyimana’s signature was not on the communiqué, but I found out from him the next day that he had been stuck in Butare helping some Tutsis escape from the country and hadn’t been able to get back in time to sign. Of course the offer was next to useless, as the moderate politicians had been killed and there was no political structure to build on. How could the officers even guarantee that anyone would surrender? As naive as the offer seemed, I applauded the courage it took to make it, and their desire to stop the war and the killings. And if Kagame would give them the recognition and the support they needed to create a moderate countermovement within the RGF, they might ultimately emasculate the extremists.

  It turned out that the communiqué was the last whisper of hope. Just as it was sent, Gatsinzi was demoted, and the minister of defence announced that Lieutenant-Colonel Augustin Bizimungu, from the Ruhengeri garrison, would be promoted to major general and confirmed as the permanent chief of staff of the army. Bizimungu was a brutal, hard-drinking tyrant who commanded through fear. He had successfully fought the RPF in earlier conflicts and hated them with a passion; his appointment was definitely a sign that any noises the interim government made about wanting to put an end to the killing were just noises. It was clear he was meant to kick-start the lethargic government army in the field. From that point on, when I attempted to negotiate with the government side, I faced three known extremist leaders—Bizimana, Bizimungu and Bagosora—and Ndindiliyimana, who was somehow hanging on to his job and was no match for the hard-liners. Within days, all the officers who had signed the communiqué were transferred to symbolic positions and replaced by known extremists. The last chance of the moderates to gain control of the government side had been lost.

  Later that night I received a telephone call from Europe, a Mr. Gharekhan on the line, who was a special assistant to Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He told me that the Belgian government had just decided to withdraw its peacekeepers from Rwanda. Between his curt questions on the status of UNAMIR and the country, and my equally curt answers, he conferred with someone in the background—I believe it was the secretary-general himself. I had never met with or spoken to Boutros-Ghali, and clearly he wasn’t about to talk to me that night, though his assistant was obviously moving me toward the thought of withdrawing UNAMIR completely. He asked me to consider future options and terminated the call.

  Within the hour, Luc called me, his voice distraught. He had just finished arguing with General Charlier against the withdrawal of the Belgian contingent from Rwanda. Luc hoped that he had persuaded his chief of staff that a withdrawal would be a grave error, but he knew that Charlier was only a conduit of information to and from the Belgian government. I told him that we needed to meet with all contingent commanders the next morning to discuss the position of their governments. Though the last I’d heard was that Willy Claes was urging that the mission be reinforced, the Belgians had obviously shifted their position. They had no doubt communicated this intent to Boutros-Ghali, who in turn had directed Gharekhan to sound me out.

  It was late and I went up to the roof to watch the tracer bullets and small explosions in the sky around the city, trying to appreciate for a moment the coolness of the night air. Bagosora and the extremists had expected me to withdraw. Their man was still on the Security Council, privy to all discussions on the status of my mission. Since I hadn’t yet withdrawn, maybe my fantasy of the fence might yet come true, and they might be tempted to come at us in order to capture Faustin and inflict more casualties that might cause us to run home. Our defences were paper thin, but we would not hand over Faustin without a fight.

  That night, Maurice confirmed the scenario I’d guessed at. The secretary-general, after consultations with the Belgian foreign minister, was going to inform the president of the Security Council by letter the next day that the Belgians intended to unilaterally withdraw from Rwanda. Boutros-Ghali thought this withdrawal would put the whole mission in peril. I asked why the turnaround on the part of the Belgians, especially Willy Claes, but Maurice had no reason. I made my stand very clear. I would not leave. We could not abandon the Rwandans in this cataclysm, nor could we desert those thousands of people under our protection. Booh-Booh had been holding separate conversations with Riza and possibly Annan that same evening. I wondered what had been said, for over the following few days Booh-Booh also shifted to support a complete pullout.

  The next morning, I informed my staff of the Belgian about-face. We had to produce a summary of contingency options in the event of the Belgian withdrawal. The contingent commanders needed direct communication with their home nations to determine which countries intended to stay, which intended to leave and who was on the fence. The United States, France and Belgium had proven with their evacuation exercise that this mission could be reinforced. It was certainly not a lack of means that prevented them from reinforcing my mission or even taking my mission under their command to stop the killings.

  Later that day, I went to my first negotiation with the RPF regarding the RGF moderates’ offer of unconditional surrender. As I’d predicted, Seth and the other politicos dismissed it outright. Seth was particularly arrogant during the meeting, his stance reminding me of the inflexible position the RPF took during much of the BBTG negotiations. Once more they were going for the extremists’ jugular. The RGF insisted on a ceasefire so they could redeploy forces to stop the killings. The RPF insisted that the killings had to stop before they would agree to a ceasefire. Round and round we went, day in and day out, both sides defending their positions stubbornly and neither side willing to bend.

  Back at the Force HQ, I sent New York another report, this one on the contingency options after the Belgian withdrawal. You can imagine how bleak they were, but the critical point I made was that in some incarnation we had to stay in place to be a witness to events and to pursue ceasefire negotiations. At 0612 on April 14, I received a new code cable from the DPKO requesting that we examine two new options. The first was to tell both sides that the secretary-general would consider leaving the force in place for three weeks, minus the Belgians but with the benefit of the bulk of their equipment, in order to permit the parties to resume the Arusha process—but only if there was a ceasefire for the whole period and the airport became neutral territory. If no agreement could be reached by April 30, UNAMIR would be completely withdrawn by May 7.

  The other possibility? If no progress was possible, both sides should be informed that UNAMIR could not stay in Rwanda and would leave in concert with the Belgian withdrawal. Booh-Booh and I would stay on, along with a small security force of approximately 200 to 250 troops, to carry on with mediation efforts. The cable specified that the Belgians could be counted on for just four more days. It gave us eight hours to consider this direction, to provide a complete list of the equipment we needed from the Belgians, and
my assessment of the viability of the two options.

  I scanned the attached transcript of the Security Council meeting of the day before to find that Riza had raised an even more disconcerting point. On the issue of protecting the civilians in our care, Riza noted that, “the [Security] Council should consider whether PKOs [peacekeeping operations] should be assigned such tasks.” On humanitarian and moral grounds, I had taken the safeguarding of civilians as a given, and here my superiors were questioning the whole concept. Even though we had absolutely no means to defend them except our own presence, so far the security at the sites had been working fairly well. There had been just one incident at the Amahoro Stadium, when RPF soldiers had forced their way in with no resistance from the Bangladeshis and had taken away about a dozen civilians who had been singled out by other Rwandans in the stadium as having committed atrocities. They were summarily executed outside the stadium.

  At prayers, when I announced the imminent withdrawal of the Belgians, the Belgian staff officers felt embarrassed, betrayed and angry. They had been with me since November, and now that things were desperate they would be ordered to abandon Rwanda to its fate. The military ethos of loyalty to the chain of command was sorely tested that morning. I tasked Henry to produce a reorganization plan for staffing Headquarters minus the Belgians and then drove all of us near to despair by outlining the thinking in the code cable about what would happen to UNAMIR when the Belgians were gone. The one bright spot was that the Belgian staff officers could be replaced by Canadians, three of whom would be redeployed from Somalia to UNAMIR over the next couple of days. There was a promise for another eight or nine Canadian Forces officers over the next few weeks. While others were abandoning Rwanda, Canada had taken the unique decision to reinforce the mission.

  That was also the day that a Belgian magistrate arrived to investigate the murder of the ten para-commandos. I gave instructions that he was to receive full support in getting testimony from witnesses and that I and any other member of UNAMIR would be available upon his request. I had already ordered a board of inquiry to be conducted by Lieutenant Colonel Dounkov of Russia and that all material of the board be made available to the Belgian military investigation.3

  I met with the minister of defence that afternoon. Bizimana was overjoyed that the Belgians were pulling out; he claimed it would reduce tensions amongst his colleagues, the Rwandan military and the population as a whole. We took a new route back to the Force HQ after the meeting because of heavy weapons fire around the CND and sporadic fire in different quarters of town. When I got back, there was a call from Katz Kuroda at the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs, offering his expertise for my fledgling humanitarian section. He asked me for a rough assessment (a word I would learn to despise coming from the aid organizations) of the general humanitarian situation to share with his department and the Security Council. He gave us authority to use all material and food in the UN humanitarian warehouses (supplies originally intended for internally displaced Rwandans and Burundian refugees). The trouble was how to take advantage of his offer. We tried on several occasions to get control of the warehouses and were fired upon by both sides, who were engaged in plundering these supplies for themselves. We returned fire on a few occasions. Sometimes we were able to escape with a few truckloads of food. Bravery was called for and was the order of the day. I remember one APC making it back with supplies despite hundreds of bullet hits and a flat tire.

  The hospitals remained operational throughout the genocide, thanks to efforts by Philippe Gaillard and the International Committee of the Red Cross, backed up by Médecins Sans Frontières and the Canadian doctor and Somalia veteran James Orbinski. But at what a cost. Fifty-six Rwandans working for the Red Cross would be killed before the conflict was over, a few white doctors and nurses would be injured and hundreds of Rwandan casualties would be pulled out of ambulances and slaughtered on the spot. On one trip to the city centre, I saw a white Red Cross van, angled on the road, riddled with bullet holes. Smoke was coming out of the engine compartment and all the windows were smashed. The passenger door was open and a Rwandan in a Red Cross vest was hanging down, facing us, with blood oozing from his head in a slow, steady stream. The back doors were open and a body on a stretcher was still inside, with another held up on the bumper. There were three other casualties, their white and bloodied gauze dressings spun around them. One body had no head. Five blood-spattered youths sat on the curb, smoking cigarettes beside the ambulance. Their machetes were stained red. At most they may have been fifteen years old.

  On April 15 I awoke at four-thirty in the morning. A code cable from New York had just arrived; our cables were criss-crossing over the Atlantic and confusing the discussion. This cable informed me that the two proposals about how to withdraw had been approved by Boutros-Ghali and had been presented to the Security Council. The DPKO had added a third option, a finessing exercise: in this plan we’d start with the larger force of 2,000 troops and then slide down to the 250-troop level if no ceasefire was in place at the end of three weeks. Boutros-Ghali was standing by option one: an immediate ceasefire as a precondition of 2,000 troops staying in place for three weeks, and France supported that plan as long as a reassessment of the situation occurred in five to six days. The British essentially took a similar position to that of the French. Nigeria, speaking for the non-aligned members of the Council, said none of the options met their concerns and that the possible withdrawal of UNAMIR would send the wrong message. Nigeria wanted more time to make a proposal. The United States wanted to pull UNAMIR right away: “The Security Council should adopt a resolution providing for the ‘orderly evacuation’ of UNAMIR, since it is unlikely that a cease fire would be established in the near future.”

  Only New Zealand’s Colin Keating, the president of the Security Council, thought they should move to stop this catastrophe. He actually proposed that the UN should “increase the strength of UNAMIR and . . . revise its mandate to enable it to contribute to the restoration of law and order and the establishment of the transitional institutions within the framework of the Arusha Peace Agreement.” In case my heart lifted too high, Riza pointed out in the cable that neither the language nor the resolution had been agreed upon.

  Later that morning I was handed another cable from Riza. I had requested clarification from his office as to the Standing UN Operational Orders in regards to persons under our protection. His answer: it was my call on the priority, feasibility and level of response to these demands. “In the abnormal circumstances prevailing,” he wrote, “these orders may be overridden at the discretion of the SRSG and FC [force commander], for humanitarian reasons.” I felt sickened as I read. On the morning of April 7 Riza ordered me “not to fire unless fired upon.” Now he was saying that all along it had been the Force Commander’s prerogative to take offensive action for humanitarian reasons.

  Ten days into the killing, Captain Deme summed up the state of the war as far as the belligerents went. In an intelligence report to me, he wrote, the “general intention seems that [the RPF] are conducting a deep penetration to control the main RGF supply routes, to surround the main targets and to make assaults only once they are ready. They have no interest in the airport at this time. They are slowly, calmly and coolly gaining terrain. Many important targets like Byumba are surrounded. They are installing Tutsis in areas already under their control.” When pressed on that issue, Seth and the other RPF politicos simply said that they were letting the Tutsi refugees come home—surely there was nothing wrong with that since it was one of the aims of the whole Arusha exercise. But once the Tutsis were in place, the RPF guaranteed some humanitarian NGOs safety behind the front lines, and the NGOs—hotheaded and undisciplined in my view—moved in to feed and aid these supposedly displaced people. Of course, the RPF controlled all the aid distribution points and “recuperated” their share from the people the NGOs were pledged to help. This was a flagrant instance of NGOs providing aid and comfort to a belligerent, and as far as I cou
ld see, there was no way to stop it except by making the issue part of the ceasefire negotiations.

  Deme’s assessment of the RGF was revealing. The troops were receiving very little tactical information or direction at the front; soldiers were deserting, while others looted to feed themselves. Some troops wanted peace and had confidence in UNAMIR (once the Belgians were gone), and a rift was starting between some military units and the Interahamwe. As anticipated, the RGF front-line troops and recruits, undisciplined and disorganized, would not put up much of a fight.

  I went back and forth between the RPF and RGF, trying to arrange a meeting to discuss the terms of a ceasefire. They all finally agreed to meet at the Meridien hotel. On the government side, the delegate was supposed to be Ndindiliyimana, but when I arrived with an APC and some Bangladeshi troops to pick him up, the RGF had decided to send Marcel Gatsinzi instead, telling me that the head of the Gendarmerie would be saved for the next, more senior round of discussions. It was a very nervous Gatsinzi, charged with pleading for an unconditional ceasefire, who joined me in the APC. He would hold his breath each time we hit a roadblock and I would pop my head up through the hatch to help argue us through. Getting out of the RGF and Interahamwe zone was really slow, but in the RPF-held areas we were flagged right along. I got the driver to run the APC right up the stairs at the front of the hotel to get us as close to the doors as possible and got out first to cover Rusatira’s exit from the vehicle.