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

by Roméo Dallaire

  We got back to the Amahoro that afternoon just in time for Canada Day celebrations: frivolity in the middle of hell. My Canadian contingent had determined that since everyone in the world knew we produced the best hockey players, a field hockey game was the right way to mark the holiday. For a field we would use the HQ parking lot, and Henry had agreed to assemble a Ghanaian team to play against us. My overconfident Canadians gloated about how they would trounce the Africans. Due to the possibility of shelling, the game would be played in flak jackets.

  We adhere to a tough brand of hockey back home. As play started, the Canadians dominated for about a minute—until one of the Ghanaians floored Major John McComber. John was a solid, firmly planted infantry officer who took to competition like it was combat. His fall was a sign of things to come. I joined in for the first few minutes, but after being bodychecked onto my stick, which broke immediately, and landing on the unforgiving asphalt, I surrendered my place and limped off. When Henry, who is over six feet tall and weighs in at close to three hundred pounds, stepped onto the lot, the Canadian team revised its tactics and played a more European style of hockey. As the game progressed and the score went up, not in our favour, we realized that we had been had. The Ghanaians play field hockey as a national sport, and Henry had assembled a high-calibre team of fit, talented young men to counter the older and somewhat less fit Canadians.

  Even so, it felt to us as if we had managed to put aside the troubles of the mission for an hour or two. Later, Colonel Hanrahan, who was in Kigali leading the Canadian Signals Regiment team recce party, wrote, “On the evening of 1 July 1994, the reconnaissance team asked MGen Dallaire and six Canadian UNMOs for a beer, which was carried in by us from Uganda to celebrate Canada Day. It was a surreal celebration. MGen Dallaire and his team were ‘zombies.’ They were in the same room as us, but their minds were elsewhere. Hollow eyes lost in thoughts of what they were experiencing. The stress was taking a huge toll.”

  That same day in New York, the Security Council passed Resolution 935, which requested that the secretary-general establish a committee of experts to investigate “possible” acts of genocide in Rwanda. The world could still not bring itself to call this slaughter by its proper name. RTLM wasted no time in denouncing the resolution. In its view, the Rwandan Supreme Court was both competent and impartial enough to handle the task. The station relentlessly pumped out lies to all Hutus able to find batteries for their radios. Even a month later, amid the horrors of the refugee and displaced persons camps that I would visit in Zaire, I saw people with small portable radios at their ears, listening to this vile propaganda. The radio remained the voice of authority, and many could not detach themselves from it. Because of its accusations against Hutu extremists, Médecins Sans Frontières joined white men with moustaches and Canadians in general on RTLM’s hate list, having been pronounced pro-Tutsi; as a result I ordered more security around the King Faisal Hospital where James Orbinski (the head of the Médecins San Frontières team and a Canadian) and his team were working.

  As predicted, the creation of the HPZ lured masses of displaced people out of central Rwanda and into the French zone. This was the terrible downside to Opération Turquoise. Having made public pronouncements about their desire to protect Rwandans from genocide, the French were caught by their own rhetoric and the glare of an active international media presence, and now had to organize the feeding and care of them. Realizing the news potential in the HPZ, many of the journalists who had been with me for weeks moved on to Goma or Cyangugu.

  Still, we were guardedly optimistic in Kigali because the arrival of some more UNAMIR 2 troops was finally imminent. My staff officers were busy coordinating flight schedules, visiting donor nations for briefings on the mission, organizing troop reception and the thousands of other things that have to happen if a military deployment is going to work. My plan was to send troops out soon after they got to Rwanda to the most likely points of contact between the French and RPF. I tried not to think too much about the irony of having to devote forces intended to serve the cause of peace in Rwanda to preventing confrontation between one of the belligerents and another UN-mandated force. This stands as one of the crueller twists of cosmic irony foisted on the long-suffering Rwandans.

  The only way I saw to avoid a total slide into absurdity was to effect a relief-in-place of French forces by UNAMIR 2 as my troops became available. The trap the French had rushed into would inevitably begin to close. Either they would pull out as soon as they could—even before the sixty-day limit to their mandate—or they would be cast in the role of protectors of the perpetrators of one of the most severe genocides in history. Given the large numbers of terrified displaced people who were moving into the HPZ, and the difficulties the RPF would almost certainly have in controlling victorious troops who knew all too well the dimensions and horrors of the genocide, it had become absolutely critical to get UNAMIR 2 troops onto the ground in the HPZ well before the French forces left. I emphasized to my staff that a relief-in-place of the French could not be delayed. But it would be a delicate and dangerous task: the Rwandans who had fled to the French zone, mostly Hutu, did not have as much faith in our ability to hold off the RPF as they had in that of the Turquoise forces. Their minds had been filled with lies about UNAMIR’s collaboration with their enemy, and they themselves knew the level of their own complicity in the deaths of their neighbours.

  The fighting was still intense in the city. Despite our warnings to stay inside, a reporter went out on his balcony at the Meridien hotel to watch the explosions and the arc of tracer bullets in the night and got shot in the leg (our second, and last, media casualty). He had been foolish, but even being cautious was inadequate protection at times.

  Around this time I had a final, memorable encounter with Théoneste Bagosora. I had gone to the Diplomates to see Bizimungu, and was waiting for him at the front desk, when Bagosora opened his office door and spotted me there. From almost ten metres away, he started to shout, accusing me at the top of his lungs of being an RPF sympathizer. I was undermining the very important transfers from the Mille Collines and Meridien, he yelled, and he continued to berate me and UNAMIR for having failed the Arusha peace process as he passed me and started to climb the long stairway that swept in a curve up to the second floor of the lobby. When I mildly responded that it was his side that had been failing to keep truces for the transfers, he ratcheted up to an even more intense level of rage, and paused to lean over the metal railing in order to look me in the eye. With menace in every line of his face, he promised that if he ever saw me again he would kill me. Then he resumed climbing the stairs and carried on ranting even as he moved out of sight. Everyone in the hotel lobby had stopped to listen, and for several minutes after Bagosora’s voice faded from hearing, all of us, civilians and soldiers alike, stood speechless and rooted to the spot. That was the last time I was to see Bagosora, who is now about to stand trial in Arusha as the chief architect of the genocide. When I see him again, it will be in the courtroom as I testify against him.

  During those long nights in early July while the RPF fought to control the city, I sometimes let myself think about the evil that men such as Bagosora wrought—how the Hutu extremists, the young men of the Interahamwe, even ordinary mothers with babies on their backs, had become so drunk with the sight and smell of blood and the hysteria that they could murder their neighbours. What did they think as they were fleeing the RPF and stepping through blood-soaked killing fields and over corpses rotting into heaps of rags and bone? I rejected the picture of the génocidaires as ordinary human beings who had performed evil acts. To my mind, their crimes had made them inhuman, turned them into machines made of flesh that imitated the motions of being human. The perpetrators on both sides had their “justifications.” For the Hutus, insecurity and racism had been artfully engineered into hate and violent reaction. In the RPF’s case, it was willing to fight to win a homeland at all costs, and its soldiers’ rage against the genocide transformed
them into machines. And what of the witnesses—what drove us? Had the scenes we’d waded through frayed our humanity, turned us into numbed-out machines too? Where did we find our motivation to keep going on? Keep on going is what we had to do.

  We were solving problems from dawn to dusk and long into each night. When Hanrahan went back to Canada, he left two members of his recce team behind so they could help establish an APC driving school for the Ghanaian contingent, which was supposed to be deployed by mid-July. The Ethiopian and Zambian battalions were due by the end of the month—we had to locate some English-Ethiopian translators. The Canadians under Hanrahan would arrive in the next three weeks. We were supposed to reach a troop strength of about 2,800 by late July, just in time to implement my aggressive plan to relieve the French forces in the HPZ and subsequently open the zone to the RPF in phases.

  Lafourcade soon sent me a memo confirming his (and his government’s) interpretation of our discussions. He wrote that he had no mandate to disarm the RGF, though he would prevent it from taking action in the humanitarian zone. His memo stated that Turquoise was not going to disarm the militias and the RGF in the HPZ unless they posed a threat to the people his force was protecting. As a result, the extremists would be able to move about freely in the zone, safe from any interference from the French, and also safe from retribution from or clashes with the RPF. Before we took over, I would have to persuade Lafourcade to disarm the whole bunch or our task would be risky to say the least. While the RGF and the militias were unlikely to shoot at the French, they might be tempted to shoot at us.

  Lafourcade’s description of the demarcation line between him and the RPF was still slightly to the east of the one I’d presented to him in Goma, but was far less ambitious than the one France had originally proposed to the Security Council. When Kagame received his copy, he made it clear that he already had troops to the west of Lafourcade’s line and certainly wasn’t rolling them back. I had to intervene, and what a day that was. I lost track of the number of meetings and faxes and phone calls, but by the end of it, we had an agreed-upon zone that didn’t include Ruhengeri or Butare or Gitarama or even a whisper about Kigali. We also had a working plan with Turquoise.

  That night the mood in Force HQ was almost festive. Beth and the Canadian wives had sent another huge air transport carton of goodies from home, and we divided up the spoils. There was a small nook with a counter in the hall outside my office, left over from the building’s incarnation as a hotel. While I stood there chatting with Henry, someone—possibly Tiko—produced a bottle of Scotch and set it on the counter. I went to my office and found a bottle of wine donated by a grateful NGO, and a few beers appeared from somewhere else. I supplied my small yellow radio and tape player and I blasted out our limited repertoire of Frankie Lane and Stompin’ Tom Connors. We smoked cigars and kept everyone in the building, maybe even the compound, awake until past midnight. We were celebrating our success with the demarcation line, but even more than that, I think we were celebrating the fact that we had survived. Henry, Tiko, Phil, Moen, Racine, McComber, Austdal, the complete humanitarian cell and the rest of my ragged band—we had lived to see the cavalry. The night was shot through with jolts of pure sorrow, but it was also full of laughter and an intensity and joy I’ve rarely experienced since.

  Of course, both Kagame and the French had to test the line, and two major incidents nearly blew into open combat between the new belligerents, as I took to calling them.

  First, the RPF ambushed a French convoy that was returning from Butare with a couple of expatriates and a large number of orphans. The transfer had been approved, but a local RPF commander let the convoy through a couple of barriers and then fired on them. The French fired back. Luckily no one was injured, and that mess was sorted out within hours.

  The second event was far more damaging to Turquoise’s semblance of neutrality. A French officer named Colonel Thibault, who had been a long-time military adviser to the RGF, was in charge of the southwest region of the HPZ. Thibault publicly announced that he was not in Rwanda to disarm the RGF or the militias and that if the RPF made any attempt to come near the HPZ line, he would use all the means at his disposal to fight and defeat them. This kind of talk was exactly what the extremists wanted to hear from the French. It also made superb copy for the voracious media. RTLM put the colonel’s posturing to immediate use. Lafourcade had to rein Thibault in and, to his credit, he did, publicly rebuking his subordinate commander. He clarified Turquoise’s position in an unequivocal media statement: “We will not permit any exactations in the HPZ against anybody and we will refuse the intrusion of any armed elements.” He sent a letter to Kagame through me explaining the situation, and Kagame received it with his usual skepticism. The question did remain: Which man best expressed Turquoise’s underlying sympathies, Lafourcade or Thibault?

  This was a political question that the new SRSG, Shaharyar Khan, would have to deal with; he was due to arrive in Kigali on July 4. Khan had a reputation as a well-respected crisis manager; Maurice assured me he was competent and well-briefed, a hard worker who had put in serious time in such complicated places as Afghanistan. I looked forward to handing over the political and administrative functioning of the mission to him.

  By first light on July 4, reports started to come in that the RGF had withdrawn from Kigali and made a clean break toward the west. (From the evidence we later found in and around their defensive positions, it looked like they had run out of ammunition.) By morning prayers, the battle for Kigali was over and the city was unusually quiet.

  We would devote most of the day to receiving the new SRSG. Khan flew to Entebbe and then on to the Rwandan border by helicopter. Dressed in a blue UN bullet-proof vest and surrounded by an impressive number of UNMOs and UN vehicles, he carried on to Kigali by road. He arrived around 1800 and was greeted by a Ghanaian honour guard at the stadium, while the roughly ten thousand displaced persons still behind protective razor wire looked on with curious eyes. From our first handshake, he struck me as a leader to be relied upon. He did not blanch at the sight of his office-cum-bedroom in the Force HQ, and he greeted everyone he met with warmth and sincerity. Over the coming weeks he dined with us on the usual terrible German rations, and experienced our ongoing privations and rationing. Khan was a man of ideas and initiative who rapidly put his imprint on the political team. For the first time in a long while, Dr. Kabia looked happy.

  * * *

  1. Little did I know the impact that the death of Major Sosa would have on the political situation in Uruguay. When elections were held, the incumbent president almost lost power. Voters could not understand why the government would send its officers to such a far-off place to die.

  2. UNAMIR 2 did not complete its deployment until December 1994, fully six months after the genocide and the civil war were over and when it was no longer required.

  3. At a conference in 1997, the RPF ambassador to the United States, Théogène Rudasingwa, confirmed to me that he and the RPF representative in Europe, Jacques Bihozagara, had been invited to Paris and had been fully briefed on Opération Turquoise before I had even heard of it.

  4. Médicins Sans Frontières returned to Rwanda in late May, led by the Canadian doctor, James Orbinski. By mid-June, James and his team had the King Faisal Hospital operational.

  5. The MamaPapa moniker was the creation of Marek Pazik. As the first Humanitarian Assistance Cell (HAC) officer, he was tasked with checking on the aid agencies still in Kigali and providing them with Motorola radios. Not familiar with the phonetic alphabet used by Western military forces, he translated his initials MP into MamaPapa (it should have been MikePapa) as the radio call sign for the aid agencies to reach him. Radio traffic during the failed evacuation attempt from the Hotel des Mile Collines on May 3 was heard by all UNAMIR personnel who had tuned in on the frequency to monitor the situation, and everyone heard the MamaPapa call sign—the Ghanaian troops in particular thought it was great. Attempts were made to change the call sign
to standard military form, but the Ghanaian troops wouldn’t hear of it and continued to call all members of the humanitarian cell MamaPapas, to the particular consternation of Colonel Yaache. The name stuck throughout UNAMIR and UNAMIR 2, with many aid workers throughout the world using their assigned MamaPapa call sign to check in with UNAMIR.

  6. That didn’t happen. Brent’s mission medal was first handed to him by his commanding officer. Later I arranged for Louise Frechette to present Brent’s medal to him at a small reception in the DPKO conference room at the United Nations in New York.

  15

  TOO MUCH, TOO LATE

  JULY 5 WAS the start of a new phase in the civil war and genocide. Kagame wanted to meet me as soon as possible, but I spent a good part of the morning briefing the SRSG and then taking him on an orientation tour of our sites in Kigali. Shaharyar Khan described his first encounters with the genocide in his book The Shallow Graves of Rwanda: “As General Dallaire drove me past places where massacres had taken place, there were corpses and skeletons lying about picked bare by dogs and vultures. The scene was macabre, surrealistic and utterly gruesome. Worse was to follow. We went to the ICRC hospital where hundreds of bodies lay piled up in the garden. Everywhere there were corpses, mutilated children, dying women. There was blood all over the floors and the terrible stench of rotting flesh. Every inch of space was taken up by these patients. The day before, as government forces (the RGF) left, they had fired mortars indiscriminately and one had hit the casualty ward in the ICRC hospital, killing seven patients.” (In fact, when we got there, the staff were still cleaning up body parts.) Khan continued: “I have never witnessed such horror, such vacant fear in the eyes of patients, such putrid stench. I did not throw up, I did not even cry: I was too shocked. I was silent. My colleagues who had lived through the massacres were hardened: they had seen worse, much worse.”