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

by Roméo Dallaire

  The meeting was being held in the spacious hotel dining room, flanked by two walls of windows. When we walked in, the curtains were wide open, and my first move was to get help pulling the drapes. With the curtains closed and the doors shut, it made for a hot, uncomfortable afternoon. Mamadou Kane was there and took charge of the formalities, but the RPF was late, as was Booh-Booh. Gatsinzi’s face fell when he saw that the RPF delegation was indeed very low-level, just Commander Charles from the CND and Frank Kamenzi, the RPF’s liaison to UNAMIR. When Booh-Booh arrived, flanked by his personal security detail and accompanied by Dr. Kabia, it was clear he was also disappointed in the RPF showing.

  Booh-Booh turned to Gatsinzi first, and Gatsinzi did his best to make an impassioned plea for the immediate cessation of hostilities and of the massacres. The soldiers who were killing civilians had received no orders from him or his headquarters; they were rogue elements that must be stopped. And he closed by saying he regretted the terrible loss of UNAMIR personnel and thanked us for staying on in Rwanda.

  In response, Commander Charles did not budge an inch but simply restated the RPF’s preconditions for the ceasefire, that inexorable chicken-and-egg scenario of having to stop the killing before they could stop the killing. I quote: “All these conditions are not negotiable and must be executed immediately.” He even handed out copies.

  Booh-Booh in his capacity as chair summed up. Both positions reflected a desire for peace, he said. Well, yes, but the RPF was the intransigent party. It had the RGF on the run and had just essentially demanded that the moderates conduct a coup d’état of their own. We’d then have a three-way civil war on our hands in addition to the massacres. I felt pity for Gatsinzi, and something close to disdain for the smug Commander Charles, who was clearly willing to countenance all the killing while his side remained cloaked in bogus superiority. At that moment, as if on cue, gunshots sounded behind the hotel. A glass door behind the drapes opened with a crash, and all our hearts skipped a beat. Then a Belgian officer fought his way through the curtains to report that the shots had been fired by a single trigger-happy RPF soldier. We resumed our negotiations in an even tenser state and got absolutely nowhere. After the meeting ended, I drove a morose Gatsinzi back to army headquarters. He was a man fighting a losing battle with the extremists, and after sticking his neck out to attend this meeting and being rebuffed so firmly, he had become more vulnerable. The lack of progress at this first formal ceasefire negotiation would only give weight to the option of total withdrawal at the Security Council.

  When I got back to the Amahoro, I found out that the Security Council deliberations had ended that day with a split between those supporting option one (the non-aligned nations, as well as China, France and Argentina) and those supporting option two (the United Kingdom, Russia, and the United States under duress). Colin Keating had concluded the discussions by saying that it wasn’t necessary to reach a final decision that day. Seeing as it was Friday, we would have to wait until at least Monday for word on our future. We were in limbo. There would be no cavalry coming over the hill. How many thousands of Rwandans would die that weekend?

  Each new day there were new rounds of ceasefire negotiations and discussions aimed at an agreement to bring the airport under UNAMIR control. The killings were accelerating. More and more Rwandans were coming to us for protection. There were continuous ambushes, firefights and shelling that resulted in casualties in most of our protection sites. Lost or forgotten expatriates called every day asking to be rescued from impossible and dangerous circumstances. Every day we scrambled for food and water and tried to get simple items like paper from a support base a thousand miles away, in Nairobi, Kenya. My people were edgy and exhausted, and nothing was more wearing on them than the endless bickering of diplomats.

  On April 16, I received a letter from the manager of the Mille Collines saying there were now over four hundred people, mostly Tutsis, taking sanctuary in his hotel. The Tunisians and some MOLOBs had done an excellent job in bluffing the militia and keeping the hotel safe, but the manager thought it only a matter of time before the militia assaulted the hotel and asked that the people be moved. I ordered Bangladeshi troops to reinforce the hotel but received a formal letter of protest from their commanding officer, stating the mission was too dangerous and informing me he had passed his protest of the order on to Dhaka. I retracted the order. What was the use? If they’d obeyed the order there was a good chance they would have fallen apart in any confrontation. For the time being there was nothing we could do. Moving four hundred people would be more dangerous for them than maintaining the uneasy détente with the militia.

  I can’t say enough about the bravery of the Tunisians. They never shirked their duty and always displayed the highest standards of courage and discipline in the face of difficult and dangerous tasks. That morning at the King Faisal Hospital, for instance, Tunisian troops were confronted by a platoon of RPF soldiers desperately low on medical supplies, who argued that whatever was in the hospital was theirs as spoils of war, and then broke in with two sections of infantry. The head of the Tunisian contingent, Commandant Belgacem, stopped them in their tracks with his small reserve force. He had his men in a solid position to defend the medical supply section of the hospital and made it clear to the RPF that he would open fire—the few supplies they held had been flown in for the over seven thousand wounded Rwandans in the hospital compound. The Bangladeshi field hospital commander then came forward and worked out a deal with the RPF, and the troops retreated with not a shot fired.

  A couple of hours later, I stopped to congratulate the soldiers and toured the facility. Every room and corridor was filled with sick, injured and dying Rwandans. Families were huddled with children, who were crying, hungry and dehydrated. The operating area was dispensing what care and bandages they had amid the smell of unwashed bodies, congealed blood, and death. With no water supply for washing, they risked a cholera epidemic. In the back of the building, a large fenced area held thousands of people of all ages and a collection of small tents, clothes, latrines and garbage. It was like a concentration camp. Here the elderly suffered a slow death, and newborns brought anguish to their mothers, who couldn’t feed them.

  There was no water and very little food, with nothing to cook it in and next to no wood to heat it. As I walked among the sick they were begging on their knees, pulling at my clothes, holding their babies up to me. I had nothing to ease their plight. I was guided by a few of the leaders to the site where a large mortar bomb had exploded the day before. The ground had been only lightly disturbed because the impact fuse most likely hit some humans first and exploded instantaneously, spreading a maximum of shrapnel at surface level. There were traces of flesh, brain and blood in the immediate area. Dozens of shredded bodies had been moved and buried. There were over a hundred people still alive who had horrific gashes from the shrapnel. There had been a panic to get inside the hospital itself, and children had been trampled to death. Fights had broken out for space, but in the end everyone had settled down again because they had nowhere else to go—if they went beyond the compound fence they would be killed. Death was all around them, and now death had started to invade from the sky. I wanted to scream, to vomit, to hit something, to break free of my body, to end this terrible scene. Instead I struggled to compose myself, knowing composure was critical with so many despairing eyes upon me. I thanked the medical teams for their efforts and promised them all supplies as soon as I could get them.

  Before he left, Colonel Roman, the Belgian para-commando commander, gave me a phone number in Tanzania where he was deploying his brigade for the next couple of weeks. He told me he and his soldiers would remain in Tanzania just in case we needed help extricating ourselves once we were ordered to withdraw. He phoned twice over the next ten days, asking me if I was withdrawing and if I could use any help, and both times I said no. I suspected that the Belgians didn’t want UNAMIR to take any casualties that could be directly associated with the Belgians’
abandonment of the mission.

  The first three Canadian officers arrived that day from Somalia, and I barely let them unpack before I put them to work. I asked Major Michel Bussières to take over the personnel branch in the Force HQ. Though I’d been told that all our people had been accounted for, the branch had not been able to provide me with even a nominal roll. Within twenty-four hours, Major Bussières had it sorted, and he went on to provide sterling service as we downsized the mission. I gave Major Jean-Guy Plante the job of media officer, escorting and coordinating all journalists in and out of theatre. I told him I wanted at least one report a day to appear on international news networks, and with BBC reporter Mark Doyle, that is what Major Plante accomplished, trying to spark the world’s conscience. The naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Robert Read, I tasked with building from scratch a logistics base at the airport to unload, sort, store and disperse the supplies that were now starting to flow in on the two Canadian Forces Hercules shuttling back and forth from Nairobi. Read did have to ask Brent, “What’s a logistics base?” But once he knew, he settled to his task and within days had created it. That first day, Brent was overwhelmed with rescue missions and tasked Plante and Read to go with a Bangladeshi APC to rescue a Rwandan-Canadian hiding at the Mille Collines. He and his family had been vacationing in Rwanda on April 7 and had fled their relatives’ home. His wife and daughter had been caught and killed by a mob, but he had saved his two sons and hidden them away. Plante and Read sneaked him out of the hotel and back to the Force HQ, where he revealed the location of his sons. Plante and Read then went back out again and rescued his boys. What remained of the family was evacuated to Nairobi and then home to Canada the next day.

  That night the fate of the Rwandan refugees at the Mille Collines kept me awake. I knew that an attack could occur any minute. I wanted to use force to defend all the sites under our shaky protection, but I knew I didn’t have the military capability—I could only hope the militia did not call our bluff. I called Moigny (the Congolese MILOB who commanded the site) and asked him to call me directly to check in every night, especially if an attack started. For many nights to come I talked to him over the radio, offering encouragement if nothing substantive. Over the next weeks he would prove himself to be a magnificent leader of men, fending off with his Tunisians three large force attacks against the hotel, as well as a couple of bombardments.

  There were more requests for assistance as the rogue elements of the RGF and Gendarmerie overtly allied with the Interahamwe and other militias. This alliance was fuelled by a call over RTLM from the interim government for all ordinary citizens to take up arms nationwide and mount barricades or roadblocks to protect themselves against what RTLM billed as a rebel army bent on infiltrating and killing Hutus. It was a sort of mass mobilization of the population, and the result was that there were now three belligerents in the fight, one fanatically dedicated to exterminating an entire ethnic group.

  Our blue-beret neutrality was under fire. It was only a matter of time before my troops would be engaged in battle with the murderous hordes of militia, or even with one or both of the warring parties. We were entering a new phase of the conflict, where our bluffs would be called.

  At the roadblocks throughout Kigali, there were more youths with machetes and spears. Ten days into the genocide (a word I had yet to start using to describe what was going on around me, for reasons that still elude me: maybe simple denial that anything like the Holocaust could be happening again), most streets were vacant except for the patrols of prisoners from the Kigali jails who were loading corpses into dump trucks for disposal in mass graves outside the city.

  The memory of those trucks is indelible. Blood, dark, half-coagulated, oozed like thick paint from the back of them. One day I saw a young Hutu girl in a light dress, wearing sandals, lose her balance as she slipped on the blood beside the truck. She landed hard, and though she got up immediately, it was as if someone had painted her body and her dress with a dark red oil. She became hysterical looking at it, and the more she screamed, the more attention she drew. Soon we were surrounded by hundreds of people, many carrying weapons. In seconds, such a crowd could lash out at any target. I rolled down my window and greeted them in Kinyarwanda. Some of them started to hammer on the vehicle. I kept my open palms quite visible in the traditional expression of friendship. People in the crowd recognized me and called my name, even smiled, and I was able to ease the vehicle forward until we were clear of the mob. The scene took only fifteen minutes but felt like an eternity.

  For the last four days we had been forwarding our radio logs to the UN at the end of the day, as requested by the DPKO, a practice we carried on until the end. I thought that if the UN knew what we were dealing with day to day, someone might still come to our aid. Instead, the log was used to inform troop-contributing nations of the state of risk to their national contingents, effectively scaring off the timid. We finished the newest military assessment late that night and sent it on: by now one would have had to have been blind or illiterate not to know what was going on in Rwanda. In this report, I informed my superiors that, with all of these hard-liners now in positions of authority in the RGF and the Gendarmerie, we were witnessing the death of any desire on the RGF side for a ceasefire. Over the last few days while the Security Council considered, the extremist movement had been emboldened. Was it possible, I asked, that the interim government had concluded that there would be no international intervention and that they had carte blanche to exterminate the Tutsis?

  I also reported that Kagame was obviously achieving his goal, though his campaign was slowing down even further. Three days ago the RPF could have overrun Kigali in a matter of hours, if not days. They didn’t, and that was either Kagame’s intention or perhaps he was slowed because they encountered stiffer resistance than they expected because of the mass mobilization of the population sparked by RTLM, or possibly because they were running out of supplies. If supplies were the problem, the RGF might potentially produce enough defensive capability to stop the RPF and turn this into a protracted war. As it stood, I wrote, the killings were increasing in scale and scope “just ahead of the RPF advance” and under the eyes of the RGF and the Gendarmerie.

  I was pushing the NGO community, the humanitarian agencies and the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs to link up with my nascent humanitarian branch in response to the immense effort needed in Rwanda, but we faced a huge quandary in the risks we were required to run. “Rapidly UNAMIR is being dragged into a peace enforcement scenario for humanitarian reasons,” I reported. “If this mission is to be changed into a peace enforcement scenario to stop the massacres and rescue threatened civilians then a change in mandate will be required and the mission must be reinforced with men, weapons and equipment.” I added, “ . . . the [Bangladeshi] contingent’s junior officers have clearly stated that if they are stopped at a roadblock with local people in the convoy, they will hand over these local people to the inevitable killing rather than use their weapons in an attempt to save them. . . . UNAMIR must be prepared to defend the airport with one battalion as it is our and the humanitarian agencies’ lifeline.”

  In conclusion, I wrote, “The force simply cannot continue to sit on the fence in the face of all these morally legitimate demands for assistance/protection, nor can it simply launch into Chapter 7 type of operations without the proper authority, personnel and equipment. It is thus anticipated that over the next 24 hours or so, the Force Commander will either recommend a thinning out of the force down to a responsible level needed for security of airport, political process, humanitarian support tasks . . . a force of 1,300 personnel, or the FC will recommend . . . the 250 men force.”

  On Sunday I received another of Riza’s cables. He provided some surprisingly direct guidance on the intransigence of the RPF. “It should be impressed upon the RPF that without some quick agreement on a cease-fire—even a limited one—by Wednesday [April 20] at the latest, the Security Council can be expected to decide to
withdraw UNAMIR from Rwanda. At that time the RPF could be blamed for not accepting the cease-fire to allow discussions to begin. Only once a durable cease-fire has been established, [can we move on to] the creation of a framework for the resumption of the Arusha [process] . . . Please stress to them that without a cease-fire, humanitarian assistance operations cannot begin.”

  There was disturbing news in the cable as well: “Your plans to start sharp reduction of UNAMIR personnel is approved. This also will demonstrate imminence of withdrawal of UNAMIR if cease-fire is not achieved.” I had given them an argument for pulling out, and they jumped on it, though that hadn’t been my intention. Henry and I, talking late that night, mulled over how little the massacres and the plight of the Rwandan people seemed to inflect the instructions we were receiving. Maybe they believed a ceasefire would automatically stop the killing, which was naive in the extreme given what was happening behind RGF lines. I felt helpless and frustrated by what I viewed at the time as my inability to make the horror sink into the minds and souls of the people in the DPKO, the security council, the secretary-general’s office, the world at large.

  Before going to sleep, I went downstairs to spend some time with the six civilian communications staff who had insisted on staying with us after the rest of their colleagues had been evacuated. Although they were living in squalor in the back of what had been the Amahoro hotel kitchen, their morale seemed to soar with each passing day. They had scrounged some Primus beer and offered me one, and we sat together in a fug of fatigue and cigarette smoke and a whirl of their loud commentary on where I could stick the Security Council and all its dithering, along with our gang in the “Club Med” in Nairobi. On a serious note, their manager brought to my attention the fact that the main satellite and control system, located near the operations centre, was not sufficiently protected against heavy fire from either party. I made a mental note to cover the communications system in sandbags the next morning and then headed off to try to sleep. Two days later, a bomb exploded no more than five metres from the new sandbag barrier around communications central. The system was damaged and went down for nineteen long, isolated hours, but it wasn’t destroyed. I scrounged a bottle of whisky as a thank-you present to those men for their prescient advice.