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

by Roméo Dallaire

  The media was the weapon I used to strike the conscience of the world and try to prod the international community into action. I would even risk the lives of my UNMOs to ensure that the stories got out every day.

  As far as I have been able to determine, on April 24 the NGO Oxfam became the first organization to use the term “genocide” to describe what was happening in Rwanda. Calling it “ethnic cleansing” just did not seem to be hitting the mark. After numerous telephone conversations with Oxfam personnel in London, we queried New York if what we were seeing in Rwanda could be labelled genocide. As far as I am aware, we never received a response, but we started to use the term sometime after April 24 in all of our communications. Little did I realize the storm of controversy this term would invoke in New York and in the capitals of the world. To me it seemed an accurate label at last.

  April 25. Tiko briefed me with a big smile on his face. He had made contact with and regained control of all the valorous UNMOs forced to escape to Tanzania, Uganda, Zaire and Burundi. He had chosen the officers he wanted to keep in Rwanda and concentrated the rest in Nairobi until further orders. That was the one good piece of news I was able to pass on in my assessment cable to New York that day.

  The rest of the report: Bizimungu had made it quite clear that he would take no action except under instruction from the interim government, which I was having a hard time keeping track of, since it had refused my liaison officers (which I ultimately sent anyway). He also did not want to ask the militias at the roadblocks to open the gates for the transfers of RPF supporters. He and the prefect of Kigali demonstrated real uneasiness when speaking of the militias, as if they had to defer to a body more powerful than either the RGF or the interim government.

  I had a report from Gatsinzi that Ndindiliyimana was in the south actually helping people escape, and that there existed a number of RGF officers who were disgusted with the way things were going and felt that Bizimungu did not have control of the military. I recommended to New York that, if required, we should provide these moderates with protection as they could prove to be useful in the post-crisis period. The humanitarian side continued to be bleak, bleaker in fact after a huge massacre in Butare. Both Médecins Sans Frontières and the International Committee of the Red Cross had had people severely threatened, and local Red Cross staff had been killed. Médecins Sans Frontières had decided to get out of the country to regroup, and, I wrote, “Due to the Butare massacre, the withdrawal of Médecins Sans Frontières, the pillaging of the Red Cross refugee supplies by the militias, the security situation and the lack of guarantees from both sides, the ICRC shut down operations in Rwanda for today and is only staying put for now at their hospital.”

  With the airport drawing fire from both sides, planes had stopped coming in, and Canada was going to repatriate its Hercules in five days. Add to that the fact that the Amahoro complex was being fired upon by both sides with mortars, and this was neither a good start to my new mandate nor an encouragement to my troops to carry on.

  Lastly, it looked very much like we were heading for a scenario resembling the Cyprus green line. The capital could even end up split in two. The RPF was deliberately slowing down its advance from the east, and with Bizimungu in Kigali overseeing the battlefield personally, the RGF were putting up a better fight. The crux of the problem remained the militias and self-defence forces behind the RGF lines and figuring out who was pulling their strings. But with the RPF ceasefire proposal and some help from the moderates, or by putting the fear of death into the interim government in some way, we could offer up the idea of a temporary stop to the fighting along a well-defined line. If we could get that agreed to, I wrote, it just might develop into something more stable. I went to sleep to the sound of Brent at the computer typing up a cleaner version of the assessment.

  The next day was frittered away with more meetings about a potential ceasefire, and more accusations from both sides as to who was the recalcitrant party. That night at about 2200, I was standing on the balcony of my office with Brent, taking brief advantage of the night breeze, when we heard the sound of a small cowbell on the street in front of the HQ. Straining our eyes in the direction from where the bell had jangled, we saw the most surreal scene. Earlier in the day the RPF had warned our humanitarian cell that they intended to move their people from the Amahoro and the Meridien to safety behind their lines. What Brent and I were witnessing was the movement of over twelve thousand people of all ages in the dark in order not to draw RGF fire. We barely heard a shuffling as they went by. The RPF guards gestured their directions and people obeyed without a word. It was like a parade of ghosts, heads bowed, burdened with their few possessions, moving in the dark of night to an unknown destination where at least they would be safe. I watched with an undermining feeling of helplessness but with such deep respect for these people. They had been without food and water for the best part of two weeks yet were able to move with discipline and order. Not even a baby cried as they went by.

  With our reduced force, we had to do a lot of toing and froing to fit personnel to tasks. Henry became the enforcer of good order and all matters of staff and military discipline. I spent my time with the humanitarian buildup and negotiations, and meeting with both sides to come to grips with the massacres and the ceasefire. We were often only one-deep on any task. Fatigue, poor eating, traumatic experiences, long hours and no time off required us to keep a close watch on our people. I started to send some of them by air on three-day leaves in Nairobi (my request to Admiral Murray, the Canadian deputy chief of defence staff, that the Hercules not be withdrawn had made its way up the chain of command and to the prime minister, who okayed it, so we still had our flights). Good food, clean sheets, a few beers, no stress and a taste of normalcy would bring them around fairly quickly. Some would feel guilty about having some time off outside Rwanda and would want to return faster: that was a no-no. My office would regularly get calls from the CAO asking that my troops stop harassing the staff about poor support. By the time the last Canadian officers arrived in a week’s time, the force would be 463-strong with a dozen civilians, including my mission secretary Suzanne Pescheira, who had escaped Nairobi to be with us. She demonstrated considerable spunk in coming back to join us and worked to all hours, even under fire.

  By the end of April, twenty-three days into the slaughter, the situation continued to grow nastier in the rural areas as well as in the cities. Neither side was putting any serious effort into the unilateral ceasefires, and the airport was now a major battleground. The Ghanaian battalion there had become quite vulnerable and we had taken minor casualties. The lone battalion doctor was swamped. The interim government and the RGF were constantly complaining that I must be a reconnaissance party for the RPF since the war seemed to follow me. I explained to Bizimungu himself that his troops were continuously withdrawing, providing little or no fight to stop the RPF. As I shuttled between the sides, I could be considered either a spy for one side or an advance party for the other.

  As the RPF advanced, it all too frequently captured killing fields of corpses. The eastern rivers were packed with bodies that flowed into Uganda and Lake Victoria. So far, an estimated forty thousand bodies had been recovered from the lake. The crocodiles had had a feast. And in a matter of days, 500,000 refugees spilled across the lone bridge at Rusumo into Tanzania, creating the largest dislocation of a population ever witnessed by the UNHCR as well as one of the largest refugee camps in the world. In those camps, a pattern that would later reappear in Goma and Bukavu was established. The refugees were organized by village, commune and prefecture and placed under the same génocidaire leaders who had led the killings in Rwanda. Remy Gatete, the prefect of Kibungo, established control of the whole camp, threatening and, if required, killing anyone who testified to journalists or human rights activists about what the génocidaires had done in Rwanda. He also executed anyone who tried to go home. In addition, he began siphoning off humanitarian aid to support his thugs in the camp. The Tanz
anian government was reluctant to use force to dismantle this network of terror, and with no alternative, the aid agencies reluctantly reinforced the abuse.

  The UN Rwanda Emergency Office (UNREO) personnel left behind by Hansen were doing stellar work, however, under the direction of Lance Clark. He and Yaache integrated their efforts with little problem and made good headway with the RPF to get the aid effort moving. Clark himself had been hit with insurance hassles—no insurer wanted to gamble on the scene of a genocide—but stayed in the field anyway, serving as the critical link with the bigger UNREO office in Nairobi. We were pushing hard to get the same things from the RGF, but it was so splintered by now it was difficult to figure out what information was getting to the authorities and who the authorities even were. Bizimungu seemed to be letting the militia and its leaders run the show, though he still had somewhat of a grip on the army and the Gendarmerie.

  Late in April I received a message from Gatsinzi. He said that the Kigali garrison had become demoralized and vicious in the wake of strong RPF advances, and some young officers were planning to conduct killing sprees at our protection sites. I deployed more MILOBs and troops to reinforce our presence, but there was little else I could do.

  Bagosora had been avoiding me, even when I showed up while he was in his office at the Hotel des Diplomates. I finally managed to meet, instead, with Bizimungu, around noon on April 28. He was irritated that the U.S. under-secretary of state for Africa, Prudence Bushnell, a woman at that, had called him directly to order him to stop the massacres and sign the ceasefire document. He told me he had informed her that he was not mandated to sign anything and was outraged by what he viewed as her brazen act of calling him to impose her will. He spent some time pointing the finger at Booh-Booh and the diplomats: what was up with the ceasefire and the political efforts in Nairobi? He went on to say that all the problems—airport neutrality, refugees and transfers—had to be resolved within the ceasefire discussions. I agreed but asked what he and his government were offering in order to move the negotiations along. He rhymed his answer off: (1) return to positions before April 6; (2) stop the massacres; (3) arrange the return of the displaced persons and refugees; (4) accelerate the installation of the BBTG; (5) respect a ceasefire under the auspices of UNAMIR.

  I asked him what he thought the RPF was attempting to do with this war. He replied that the RPF wanted to conquer the whole country. Since he and the government would not let that happen, there would be lots and lots of dead. His side, he claimed, had never refused to share power with the RPF; it was the RPF that was now refusing to negotiate with the interim government.

  That night I received a draft copy of a president’s statement to the Security Council calling for an end to the appalling slaughter and massive displacement of people in Rwanda. The non-aligned members of the UN, supported by the OAU and the Red Cross, were now insisting that too much emphasis had been placed so far on the fighting and not enough on the killings. The U.S. representative informed them that the RGF was buying new arms and that an embargo was beside the point. The non-aligned members wanted some strong action-oriented language in the presidential statement and they wanted my comments immediately.

  I brooded over the fact that the United States knew exactly what was happening on the ground in Rwanda. Once in a blue moon, Americans would even share some information. A few days earlier Brent had received a telephone call from Colonel Cam Ross (who had led the first technical mission to Rwanda for the UN), the director of Peacekeeping Operations in Ottawa. He told Brent that a friendly foreign power (we later confirmed it was the United States through the American ambassador in Nairobi) had received information that I was to be assassinated in the next few days and recommended that I bring adequate security with me when I had to leave the force compound. Brent told Henry, who hand-picked two Ghanaian sergeants and a section of troops. One sergeant had taken a special driving course and had driven the president of Ghana for a time and the other was an excellent marksman. The assigned troops were the biggest, baddest, meanest-looking gentlemen I had ever seen, especially when their eyes were hidden by sunglasses, which was more or less all the time. This team latched on to me and was my constant escort until I left the mission. I guess I should have been grateful for the tip, but my larger reaction was that if delicate intelligence like this could be gathered by surveillance, how could the United States not be recording evidence of the genocide occurring in Rwanda?

  As the staff, largely led by Brent, prepared responses for New York, Henry and I finalized the requirements for the technical mission to Burundi, which had been sent to us a few days earlier. The situation there had worsened—that country was experiencing a more subtle type of genocide. The Tutsi-dominated army had commenced operations against Hutu rebels, and many villages were going up in smoke. It was felt in New York that we should go take a look. I did not object, and I placed Henry, Tiko and four members of the HQ and MILOB group on twenty-four-hours’ notice for the trip; Henry had thought a lot about Burundi and would do a good job on the reconnaissance. But I told the triumvirate that no resources that were destined for my mission could be diverted to this possible new venture.

  Rescue missions continued throughout this period, with us successfully picking up a family here, a few nuns there, a lost expatriate here, a missing person there. For much of the time, Brent was in charge of rescue missions, and each morning he would take the requests that came in from foreign capitals, embassies, the UN and other agencies in Nairobi, and by rumour, and pick which ones could be conducted and which ones could not be given the limited resources we had to spare for these tasks. I particularly detested the way world leaders or foreign government bureaucrats would try to contact me directly and attempt to order, threaten or otherwise intimidate me into rescuing some individual Rwandan whom they knew. Why should an acquaintance of a VIP be more important than any other individual at risk? I left the selection to Brent, who became particularly adept at rescuing nuns, to the everlasting gratitude of many orders around the world. These were extremely stressful and emotional missions. It was never worse for Brent than when he delayed a mission a day or two for lack of resources or because of the particular level of risk in the area, only to mount it and find the persons in question recently killed. As men, we do not play God well, but the situation demanded that in some cases we had to choose who lived and who died.

  Booh-Booh arrived with his political team from Nairobi early on the morning of April 30. Dr. Kabia and I met with him in his office at the HQ, where he briefed us on the regional political events over the last week. He showed us the formal response to the Arusha ceasefire proposal, which was signed by Bizimungu for the interim government. It was the same old rhetorical merry-go-round, with Bizimungu insisting that the ceasefire had to be signed by the interim government, which he knew was a non-starter with the RPF. We had not advanced a step. The RPF, winners on the battlefield so far, would never agree to these RGF points.

  That morning I lost Brent. The day before, I found him lying down on his mattress in the afternoon. Brent never rested during the day. He told me he had a headache, but by suppertime he could no longer move his fingers to type and he was sweating profusely with a fever. My new aide-de-camp, Captain Babacar Faye Ndiaye, said he recognized Brent’s illness as malaria and took him to the airport to see the Ghanaian battalion doctor. Brent and I had both lost our malaria medication when we abandoned our home on April 6. The doctor diagnosed Brent with malaria, gave him an enormous amount of drugs and told him to rest. Brent returned to the HQ and went to bed, watched over by Major Diagne.

  Brent was awoken routinely during the night to take his drugs, but at dawn he looked like death warmed over. I ordered him to go to Nairobi for examination, expecting him to be back in a few days. In Nairobi they figured out that it wasn’t malaria that had made him ill in the first placec, but he then had suffered an allergic reaction to the anti-malaria drugs. He was ordered to rest under observation for a couple of days, and he
opted to stay at a hotel so he could get a good meal and a shower.

  Two days later, his wife called and found him nearly paralyzed with pain and delirious. She contacted the Canadian Forces Operations Centre in Ottawa, which contacted our air force detachment in Nairobi, which picked him up and took him to the hospital. The next day he was evacuated to Canada. He had nearly died and would take almost a year to get healthy again. First from Nairobi and then from Ottawa he called to say he was being replaced. I felt like I had lost my right arm. After all that we had been through together, we were now split without even a proper goodbye. His replacement would be Major Phil Lancaster, an officer I knew very well since Phil and I had been junior officers together early in our careers. He was fluently bilingual, staff-trained, experienced and extremely skilled. Somehow I’d have to get along until he got to Kigali.

  In the afternoon of the day Brent was shipped out, I had a chance to meet with Kagame regarding the ceasefire and the airport. He had promised to keep his guns clear of the airport, but not only had some of his rounds fallen on the runway, but the terminal housing the Ghanaian battalion had suffered deliberate artillery and mortar assaults, and we had established that the firing had come from RPF positions.

  On the way up to Mulindi, taking a new route through the bush and swamps north of the city, the two vehicles of my convoy came under directed mortar fire at a prominent crossroads. Not only did the initial rounds come close enough to spray the vehicles with dirt, a couple more nearly hit us as we hastened to drive through the ambush. In this case, either side could have been the culprit, as fighting had not ended for control of the crossroads.

  Kagame was waiting for me not far from his quarters. Our greetings were curt and we got right down to business. I wanted him to deal with the airport situation. He said he would instruct his troops to be careful of UNAMIR but that the RGF were well dug in en masse at Camp Kanombe, right at the end of the runway, and the airfield was inevitably going to be the focus of a big fight. I reminded him that the airport was the principal source of aid and the humanitarian buildup, and if the airport got thoroughly blown up, I had no engineering capabilities to repair a runway.