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

by Roméo Dallaire

  Two troubling incidents had already occurred between the French and the RPF. The RPF had ambushed a section of at least ten Turquoise soldiers who had moved too far into the Butare prefecture. No one was actually hurt in that ambush, but French pride suffered a blow—special forces had to negotiate the troops’ release. The other incident happened on the road from Kibuye to Gikongoro. Shots were fired and two French soldiers were saved only by their flak jackets. Both patrols had been outwitted by the RPF and shamed in the process. This did nothing to dissuade the French from wanting to support their former colleagues and put the RPF in their place.

  The mission medals finally arrived, and on June 26 we held a mission medals parade in the courtyard near the Force HQ’s main entrance, surrounded by a pile of shot-up, broken-down and cannibalized UN four-by-fours. I had sent word home asking that either the Canadian chief of defence staff or the minister of national defence present Brent’s medal to him in person.6 Henry, Tiko and I proceeded to pin the mission medals on sixty HQ staff, UNMOs and the Tunisian contingent, who lined up in three rows, as spit and polished as they could manage while dressed in flak jackets. We had to keep the ceremony short in case of stray fire, but as we worked our way along the rows, looking in the eyes of every man and shaking his hand, I think all of us were reliving the darkest parts of the mission. I pinned medals on Henry and Tiko, and then they both pinned mine to my jacket.

  The next day, I met Henry at the airport for the Ghanaian battalion’s medals parade. Before we got started, he passed on the disturbing follow-up to his session with Bizimungu. Headquarters staff had made inquiries at the Kigali prefecture about resuming the transfers of displaced persons and orphans. A meeting had been held with the sous-prefect, who very matter of factly stated that the interim government did not see any value in carrying on with the transfers: the French forces would be in the capital soon and they would be able to provide proper protection for all. The sous-prefect also said he thought that when the French arrived and saw people in the camps, it would prove to them that the Kigali authorities had seen to their welfare. Clearly the interim government and its underlings believed the French were actually making their way toward Kigali. As Henry said to me in a very low voice, these were “a very sick-in-the-head group of people.”

  We proceeded along the ranks, pinning medals on the Ghanaian officers, NCOs and troops. The battalion sergeant major found recorded music to play, but I missed the sounds of the Ghanaian regimental band, whose members had been evacuated to Nairobi. Lieutenant Colonel Joe Adinkra promised me they would be on one of the first flights back in.

  That day I spent time with the operations team and Henry, as well as the two Rwandan liaison officers, to come up with the most accurate demarcation line between Turquoise and the RPF. We had sent a few UNMO teams to scout the main routes and bring us news of the RPF front line. It was evident that Kagame was finally moving with speed—but not recklessly—into the western part of the country along two principal axes, one running to Butare and the border with Burundi, and the other aiming directly at Ruhengeri, to link with his forces there (soldiers who had kept many RGF battalions tied up in the heart of the extremist country). The fighting was getting stiffer by the day in Kigali; as Kagame had indicated to me, he aimed to take the city before any possible intervention from the French. We were losing the battle to keep displaced people inside Rwanda in the north; they were fleeing in front of Kagame’s advance. The potential Turquoise area was becoming quite limited in that part of the country.

  Overall I felt as though we were finally moving, or at least staggering, ahead. The same phrase kept running through my head: we aren’t alone anymore.

  The morning of June 28 was filled with finalizing the last-minute details on Turquoise and the front line of the RPF. There was a lot of action in the city and, whenever I could find the time, I went to the roof to check out our surroundings through my binoculars. All I was able to spot were plumes of smoke and a few RPF troops moving in the open. I left Kigali around 1300, heading under escort for the Merama border and crossing into Uganda. I then flew by UNOMUR helicopter to Entebbe and caught a Hercules flight to Nairobi, arriving after supper. My aide-de-camp and four members of the media came with me, and on the trip to Goma we would be joined by the four-person UNMO liaison team who were to be our eyes and ears on the French force.

  Tensions and confusion were building regarding UNAMIR’s authority to coordinate humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts throughout Rwanda. Yaache and MacNeil had complete faith, as did I, in Charles Petrie, who was now working in the Nairobi office of UNREO, and they recommended I bring him with me to Goma because of his extensive experience and his ability to swiftly analyze a situation. Humanitarian support was still at a minimum in the RGF zones, where most of the people in need were trying to survive amid constant moves west. June 29 in Nairobi was an arduous exercise in patience, posturing and repeating myself to deaf ears. I had already alienated the French defence minister, François Léotard, who was on an inspection visit to his troops and had asked to meet me the same day in Cyangugu. I hadn’t been able to go because I was supposed to be in Nairobi, and he was quite put out. I, however, was just as glad. He was travelling with an entourage of media, and any sign that I had rushed to his side would have given the RPF cause to question my neutrality.

  My meetings in Nairobi were with the diplomatic community, the UN civilian administration support staff, the media and the NGOs. As usual, the diplomats promised support without making specific commitments. The media was focused on Turquoise and wanted me to threaten the French again so they could grab a punchy news clip (which I declined to do). The administration staff offered excuses instead of results, and the NGOs renewed their demands for independence and non-involvement with the military for reasons of neutrality, at the same time as they called for an “atmosphere of security” to allow them to do their work. UNREO was making headway in getting the NGOs and agencies to agree to hold daily information sessions not only in Nairobi, but also in Entebbe, Kabale, Goma, Bujumbura and Kigali. And Petrie promised to set up shop again in Kigali over the next weeks in order to shift the aid groups away from Nairobi and into the heart of the action.

  Before I left for Goma, I held a medals parade for the mission’s eighty or so Franco-African and other UNMOs and military staff who had been evacuated to Nairobi. We performed the ceremony on the front lawn of the expansive UN regional headquarters. This time, with no worries about mortar attacks or stray fire, and with the media in attendance along with some diplomats, UN senior staff, and NGO personnel, I spoke my mind and my heart. I stressed that the medals were well-deserved but that the job was certainly not finished; I took my listeners through the heroism and the horror, and the world’s indifference. Even as I spoke, the carnage was continuing in Rwanda. I did my best to leave an impression that would survive for at least a few hours, maybe until the next news deadline, and then tried to enjoy the post-parade gathering.

  The city of Goma looked as though it had been painted in blacks and greys. At about 1000 on June 30, I was sitting up front with the crew as we made our final approach to the single airstrip. We had stopped to pick up our liaison teams and their vehicles in Entebbe and then had flown on over the Volcano National Park, which was the home of the endangered mountain gorillas. Dian Fossey was buried down there among her great apes, having given up her life to a butcher with a machete in that thick bamboo mountain forest. One of the seven volcanoes we flew over was in a state of instability, spewing out steam and ash.

  Goma was depressing. Before the genocide, Gisenyi, across the border in Rwanda, had been a beautiful tourist town, but Goma struck me as a dreadful, dark backwater, even though it was the capital of Kivu province.

  I could see the sprawling Turquoise main base spread out before me. As we came down, I noticed hundreds of children playing chicken with the large cargo aircraft as they took off and landed. A misstep or a stumble and the children would be under the wheels of those m
onsters. No one had thought to put up fencing to keep the children out of danger. It was an inauspicious start to the first of my many visits to Turquoise.

  Still, the French had obviously not skimped on their own logistics, billets and military requirements, and had carefully deployed around the airfield and in the town. Witnessing the size and level of the outfitting of the camp vividly put into relief my own lack of support. Money and resources were no problem when the full weight of a world power is put behind the effort. Opération Turquoise included over 2,500 members of elite units such as the French Foreign Legion, paratroopers, marines and special forces. They were equipped with state-of-the-art weapons, command and control communications HQ assets, over one hundred armoured vehicles, batteries of heavy mortars, a squadron of light armed reconnaissance and medium troop-lift helicopters, even a dozen or so ground-attack and reconnaissance jet aircraft. They were being deployed to Goma by an armada of very large cargo aircraft—Boeings, Airbuses, Antonovs, Hercules and Transalls delivering supplies of all sorts. Large bladders of fuel and water were already functional, and a tent city to house troops and equipment was receiving final touches. All that capability was mustered under a command team that had worked together for years and was familiar with African conflicts.

  A small group of tall, fit French senior officers was waiting for us at the edge of the airfield, looking very smart in grey-green field dress. Brigadier General Lafourcade introduced himself and his principal officers. He had a low voice, a generous handshake and an engaging demeanour. I introduced my team, which included Charles Petrie, the liaison officers and the journalists. Lafourcade invited us to climb into jeeps for the ride into the centre of town, where he had established his HQ. We made small talk as we drove along near-impassable streets carved out of lava-covered ground, bouncing in all directions and trying not to hit any of the crowd in the streets. Everything was filthy from falling ash.

  About twenty minutes later, we entered a low-walled compound with an unfinished building at its heart. The communication vehicles, antennas, satellite dishes, and land lines going every which way were the classic signs of a well-equipped HQ, even though doors and windows were missing and the rooms were still unfinished.

  We convened in small, straight, military field chairs in the middle of a Spartan briefing room. Lafourcade’s staff had taped a few area maps on the wall, marked with minimal tactical information about troop deployments. Lafourcade was very interested in my opinion regarding the RPF front line and confirmed that he had sent out troops toward Butare and Ruhengeri. Over the past few days, his force had set up a secondary airhead in Bukavu, across the river from Cyangugu. His mandate, he said, was to protect people at risk but not necessarily to disarm the RGF. He was, however, going to take down the barriers and disarm the self-defence forces and the Interahamwe. He stressed that he was only in the region until UNAMIR 2 was operational—at most for two months. Overall his briefing on his plan of action was rather skimpy, considering all the means he had at his disposal.

  I walked Lafourcade and a couple of his senior staff officers through the mandate, concept, plan and operational status of UNAMIR 2. I then showed them a map marked with the five deployment sectors covering the country and the proposed force structure. I briefed them on the status of the battle for Kigali, and our picture of the massive movement of displaced persons and the major locations of camps. I then went to Lafourcade’s map and drew the line that I saw as the outer limit of the French-protected area inside Rwanda. He was aghast. He could not believe the RPF had moved so fast in the last week. I told him that there would be no room left for him to operate east of Gisenyi if the displaced persons moved any closer to the Zairean border. In the southwest, the RPF was about twenty kilometres from Karama, east of Gikongoro, holding a front straight down to the Burundian border, though I did not know in what strength. The line I had drawn on his map left a narrow margin of no man’s land between his forces and the most forward RPF positions. I made it clear that Butare was in essence in RPF hands. Still mulling what I’d revealed, Lafourcade proposed that we break for a light lunch and come back to the map after we had eaten.

  Over lunch I found him to be much more genuine and level-headed than his officers. While I was talking about stopping the ongoing genocide, his staff were raising points about the loyalty France owed its old friends. (I had been told the Habyarimana family had close ties to President Mitterrand; one of his sons had serious business interests inside Rwanda.) They thought that UNAMIR should help prevent the RPF from defeating the RGF, which was not our job. I tried to alert Lafourcade to be on his guard when it came to the interim government, which I thought would likely do everything in its power to bring about a confrontation between his forces and the RPF to try to bring the French firmly in on its side. I told him that the extremists were very astute and desperate, as well as in shock because so far the French had been taking down some barricades and seemingly doing nothing to help their cause. But my French interlocutors weren’t convinced and continued to express their displeasure with UNAMIR’s poor handling of the military aspects of the civil war. They refused to accept the reality of the genocide and the fact that the extremist leaders, the perpetrators and some of their old colleagues were all the same people. They showed overt signs of wishing to fight the RPF.

  Some of these officers came from the colonial tradition of military intervention in the domestic affairs of former client states; they saw no reason to change their views over what they billed as one more inter-ethnic squabble. Other French citizens, such as Bernard Kouchner, seemed genuinely motivated by humanitarianism. I believe the French never did reconcile which attitude was supreme in Turquoise. To be fair, I do not think that at that point many of the Turquoise troops had a clear idea of the scale of the massacres or the degree of complicity in the genocide by the Habyarimana regime. While I feel no inclination to be generous in interpreting the motives of the French military, I honestly believe that their subsequent face-to-face encounters with the reality of the genocide brought most of them to their senses.

  The French media very soon would start to report interviews with French soldiers who were shocked that it was their allies who were conducting the massacres and not the RPF, as they claimed to have been told by their superiors. Some of them soon came to understand the horrible responsibility of peacekeepers in a genocide. Despite its humanitarian aim, Opération Turquoise had arrived extremely light in trucks, which are essential to relief operations. At Bisesero, hundreds of Tutsis came out of hiding to be saved by a French patrol. The soldiers told them to wait while they went to find transport, and left them out in the open and on their own. When they got back with the trucks, they found the Tutsis massacred by the Interahamwe. As Opération Turquoise continued, more and more French soldiers experienced similar incidents and became disgusted with their role in Rwanda.

  When we returned to the briefing room after lunch, I informed the French officers that the RPF had asked that I be the link between them and Turquoise, and that UNAMIR be the arbiter and monitor of the demarcation line. We confirmed that Lafourcade would disarm all non-combat troops he encountered and also any persons who committed crimes, but he had no mandate to disarm the RGF in Rwanda. The French-led force would actively stop the killing in the Humanitarian Protection Zone (HPZ)—the term we agreed on to describe the Turquoise-secured area of Rwanda. Lafourcade agreed that his forces would never go beyond the demarcation line. He would include UNREO in the planning and execution of humanitarian efforts in the HPZ, which would keep us all in the loop. My mission would pursue its mandate even in the HPZ but in full coordination with his forces on the ground.

  I asked him to concentrate on preventing the 2.5 million displaced persons from running through the western forest from fear of the RPF, pointing out what would happen if they spilled over the border into Zaire. Lastly, I asked that his public affairs people get the message across in the HPZ that Turquoise was not there to reinforce the RGF.

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sp; The meeting ended on a friendly note, but I was certain that Lafourcade would have to confirm many of my points with Paris. And even though he struck me as a competent and decent commander, I did not leave his headquarters with the warm and fuzzy feeling that we were totally on net.

  My team and I took off at about 1500 for Entebbe, where we overnighted beside Lake Victoria, not far from the presidential palace that used to belong to the British governor general. The next morning, Canada Day back home, I inspected the movement control and liaison teams at the airport. Our transition camp for the contingents coming into Rwanda was still only a dream, even though in less than seven days the rest of the Ghanaian battalion was expected to be coming through and would need training on how to operate the APCs. So much for the power of my motivational speeches in Nairobi.

  We then proceeded by helicopter to Kabale and stopped there for a session with Azrul Haque and UNOMUR, a meeting with the NGOs that were setting up advance transition points in the town, and not least, the final mission medals parade at the White Horse Inn. I warned the troops in my speech of praise and thanks that things would get more difficult before they got better, and I asked them to continue their effective cat-and-mouse games with the NRA. Then we flew by helicopter to the Mirama hills and crossed into Rwanda to link up with my escort.

  The road trip through the Kagera National Park was beautiful despite the fact that at this time of year bush fires were burning, and in some places enormous clouds of smoke filled the sky. It was ghost country—though the RPF had the area firmly under control, there were still no civilians in the desolate and garbage-strewn villages.