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

by Roméo Dallaire

  I believe Kagame tried his best to control his new recruits who were lusting for revenge and the returnees who were scrabbling for what they could find, recognizing correctly that word of their excesses would leak out of Rwanda, draw unwanted media and political attention, foil his attempts to acquire loans and aid to rebuild his country and most importantly fuel RGF propaganda and Hutu fears about returning to an RPF-controlled Rwanda. The myth of the “double genocide” was now in full swing—some people actually bought the line that the racial war had cut both ways. The last thing Kagame wanted was to legitimize these claims in any way. Unfortunately, we could not ignore the reports we received of revenge murders, looting and rape, as undisciplined rear elements of the RPF and returnees sought their own retribution. Rumours of secret interrogations at checkpoints for returnees were making people nervous. We investigated and publicly denounced these atrocities just as we had condemned the genocide. The only chance for reconciliation in Rwanda was for everyone to drop their machetes and focus on true justice against the planners and perpetrators of genocide.

  The country also had to focus on rebuilding. Water, that most essential life-sustaining requirement, was not potable, as the waterworks had long since been sabotaged. Wells were dry or tainted and the only other sources were the creeks and rivers that flowed through Kigali, and they didn’t bear thinking about. Food was scarce. All over Rwanda, crops had rotted in the fields because no one was left to harvest them and bring them to market. The city’s sewage system, not even close to acceptable before the war, now presented a significant health hazard. There was no fuel, no electricity, no telephone or other communications—the list of nothings increased by the day. The infrastructure of government, which should step in at such times, did not yet exist, even if the ministers had been sworn in. Kagame used all the resources he had to guard the border with Zaire in the northwest and to build up against the French in the southwest, and who could blame him? We continued to offer what little we had to try to get the government running. But the UN would not authorize us to loan or give any of our resources to the Rwandan civilian administration. Even as millions in humanitarian aid flowed into Goma we could not get a few thousand dollars to help in Kigali. We often ignored the bureaucrats and helped anyway, digging into our own pockets when we could, embarrassed that we couldn’t do more.

  Life for Rwandans trying to survive inside Rwanda seemed impossible in those days of late July and early August. However, the people demonstrated a lack of self-pity and admirable resilience. Slowly, small markets began to appear on street corners, people could be seen working the land and harvesting the rare late crop, small businesses reopened and occasionally even some laughter could be heard in the streets if you listened hard enough. Immense problems remained but with a little help we hoped the survivors would endure to rebuild their nation.

  But I had to wonder about the kind of help on offer from the outside world. As it became safe to venture into the country, the tourists inevitably arrived. On a daily basis, delegations of politicians, bureaucrats, NGO staffers, celebrities, actors, singers and any Tom, Dick or Harry who could manage it (if my tone seems harsh, I have to say that’s what it felt like to us) came to Rwanda requesting that we coordinate their visit, their accommodations, their transportation and their itineraries. They tied up our staff, our time and many of our precious resources. While I recognized that the visitors were absolutely essential in the political fight to obtain aid for Rwanda and to get the troops of UNAMIR 2 deployed, I wasted more hours than I care to remember explaining the unspeakable situation over and over and over again. Every word began to rip at my soul. The one humorous aspect of these visits was that Khan and I would make a point of inviting our distinguished guests to a supper of expired German rations. Maybe it was adolescent of us, but we truly enjoyed the amazed looks on people’s faces at the sight of these “state” dinners, along with their pained gulps as they attempted to eat the hideous fare that had been our staple for months. As time went on I begged out of these endless briefings and visits, and Henry filled in for me.

  In Goma, on July 21, the United States began a massive and magnificent airlift of humanitarian aid that amazed any who saw it. Within three days of the presidential order authorizing the aid, the first U.S. planes were landing. In order to hasten food distribution, the Americans even tried bombarding areas with large loads of aid using low-flying transport aircraft, though they called a quick halt to this initiative as too many people on the ground were wounded by these enormous bundles of food. Such a practice had worked in Somalia, but here, between the jagged and unforgiving terrain and the swarming masses, there was no spot where such drops could be made safely.

  I awoke that morning to the now familiar sounds of hammers, saws and shovels as the advance party of the 1st Canadian Headquarters and Signals Regiment were on the job repairing and setting up the place for the main force. Riza had sent a code cable to Khan asking for UNAMIR’s sense of “broader anticipated tasks” in the “emerging situation.” We had already produced operational directives to cover the HPZ mission and the exercise we were calling “Homeward Bound,” to bring people back safely from the camps in Zaire. I was glad the SRSG was now the one to lay out the mission’s broad political strokes, and the one who would have to travel to Dar es Salaam and to Kampala to try to engage the neighbouring countries in the political and diplomatic efforts to shore up Rwanda and the region. Khan agreed to provide an aircraft so that President Bizimungu could visit Zaire and Tanzania on his own to test the waters and also to discuss with his fellow African leaders the presence and effect of extremists in the camps.

  My own operational priorities were clear. One, we had to move the UNMOs under Luc Racine into the HPZ to prepare the way for our takeover; two, we needed to get our MamaPapas into Gisenyi and the Gikongoro area to help the displaced persons still on this side of the border and to link up with the French, Zairean and RPF forces to calm the situation there; three, we needed to carry on monitoring the HPZ line and to discourage the RPF from probing the zone; four, staff had to work flat out to coordinate the arrival, training and deployment of new contingents with equipment and vehicles. Our chief of plans, Mike Austdal, was not only working feverishly on all these fronts, he also took on the job of head of training. Instead of conducting paper exercises, he took the new officers and NCOs as they arrived out to role-play situations that would test their comprehension of our rules of engagement. I cannot praise enough the way my tiny headquarters staff kept rising with great invention to meet the urgency of the situation.

  The international community was hedging its bets on the legitimacy of the new government. The Human Rights Rapporteur not only harshly criticized those countries who were harbouring the génocidaires, but also condemned the looting, revenge killings and summary executions inside Rwanda, which not even Kagame could prevent. This did not help the new government’s image and, as Kagame and Pasteur Bizimungu had feared, kept a number of nations on the fence about offering help. The cholera epidemic now raging in Goma continued to be a bigger draw on the world’s compassion than the starving displaced persons in the HPZ or the survivors trying to stitch back together a civil society in Kigali. I found myself in the disgusting position of mentally comparing magnitudes of horror: how could the world allow 3,000 deaths a day in Goma to overshadow the effects of the genocide inside Rwanda and let the toll on the 1.7 million people inside the HPZ go on unnoticed? (In the end, as I suspected, the cholera epidemic, which would kill about 40,000, did pale in comparison.) Yet the men who witnessed cholera at its height were beyond such calculations. On July 25, Major St-Denis took a trip to Goma where he was to liaise with the French. Years later, he wrote me a description of what he had seen. “As I was moving through the streets I could not take my eyes off the hundreds of bodies that were littering the roads. All of them . . . had succumbed to cholera. The air reeked of putrefaction, and all I wanted to do was to throw up. For a while we followed a dumptruck filled with bo
dies that had been picked up by French soldiers. . . . I remember the soldiers’ eyes; they were lifeless and full of sadness. . . .

  “On the return trip, I drove in front of a hospital and saw one of the most gruesome scenes. . . . A pile of bodies at least twenty feet high stood in front of that hospital. . . . Some of the people still had their eyes open and I felt that they were looking at me with an intensity I could not bear. I had to turn my head away.” Nearby, St-Denis saw a mother tending to her young son in a group of exhausted women and children. That day happened to be his own mother’s seventy-fifth birthday, and the scene struck him with incredible force. “I wanted to stop and see if I could provide them with assistance, but I had been forewarned that the UN was not overly welcome here and that I should not stop anywhere until I crossed back into Rwanda. I left the scene wondering what would happen to this family, would they survive?” When he got back to the Force HQ, he was able to get a line out to call his mother, but “I could not shake this image of the young boy and his mother. I did not talk for long. [When] I hung up, I drank from a bottle of scotch, something I had never done before, but I had to do something to remove the stench of death from my mouth.”

  Radio Rwanda, now in the hands of the new government, was broadcasting to the refugees in Goma, telling them to come back. Its announcers quoted a letter, dated July 19, from Boutros Boutros-Ghali that promised that the big UN agencies would assist the homeless and the have-nots. Boutros-Ghali also announced that he was calling for a UN inter-agency appeal for victims of the crisis in Rwanda, and that the head of the DHA, Peter Hansen, would chair a conference on August 2 in Geneva to bring about a coordinated response from all donors. But first Hansen would have to head to Rwanda to do his personal assessment on the ground.

  Hansen was an old hand at humanitarian crises and his visit was a professional piece of work. He had at least twenty people with him, including senior representatives from the other UN agencies. At a meeting with Khan and myself, he acknowledged the wisdom of immediate repatriation and even accepted the idea of aid coming from within Rwanda. He and Khan visited the president and other members of the new government, and then toured the camps in Goma and Bukavu (but not the displaced persons camps inside the HPZ). By this point Lafourcade’s support troops, stationed principally at the Goma airport, were totally overwhelmed, even paralyzed by scenes such as St-Denis described. Lafourcade had come into the country heavy with combat assets and light on the tools of humanitarian relief. Frozen in its tracks by the spread of cholera and by the knowledge of the health risks its troops would be exposed to due to the high infection rate of HIV/AIDs among Rwandans, Turquoise remained limited.

  UNAMIR 2 was still engaged in a scramble for resources and equipment. Belgium had at last agreed to equip a Malawi company once they got to Kigali; the old colonial powers were fearful that equipment might be hijacked en route and used for coups or to outfit palace guards to reinforce the new government. The site at Entebbe was still all too basic and I redirected more UNOMUR personnel and assets there to assist in improving it (UNOMUR was to close down and I’d soon lose their valuable assistance). Our facilities were too limited to hold troops for any length of time before deploying them. But the reinforcements were still not coming. By the last week of July, I had at best six hundred personnel of all ranks in the mission.

  My Kigali staff, still living in terrible conditions, were visibly tiring, now partly from the stress of dealing with all the parties who wanted to come in and help us. I nearly had a second mutiny over food when another batch of German rations was opened and it smelled to high heaven. These rations, so generously provided to us when we had nothing left to eat, were now well beyond their best-before date. (The crisis was resolved when the Canadian contingent arrived, bringing with it a hefty supply of hard rations that we all could share.)

  I had a mission headquarters staff of fewer than thirty officers, with varying levels of skills and knowledge, trying to keep a multitude of operational tasks moving: I had made a vow that UNAMIR would never be the stumbling block to peace and stability in Rwanda, and the staff worked themselves ragged to fulfill that promise. I had not allowed my principal staff any leave time, with only a few exceptions, since the start of the war. A couple of people had become zombies, blank and unresponsive, and we’d had to send them home. Others were over-irritable and would become very emotional over conditions that we had been living with for some time. It was as if a line had been crossed and they began to interpret everything as if they were Rwandan, wholly identifying with the victims. Once they started inhabiting the horror they could not handle any serious new work. We started to send them off to Nairobi on the Hercules for a couple of days’ rest. Their fatigue was a recognized medical state. After seeing a doctor in Nairobi, they would move to a hotel room and then wash, sleep, eat and somehow attempt to relax. Since there was no budget to handle the walking wounded, such bouts of rest and recuperation were at the expense of the injured person.

  What really began to wear us down was the constant raising and then dashing of hopes. Watching the world support Turquoise, with all the ambivalence that engendered in us, was one thing. But believing that we were finally to be aided by the Americans—and then being utterly let down—was another.

  The first American officer to arrive in Kigali was Brigadier General Jack Nix, every inch the image of a solid U.S. Army combat one-star general—the only way he didn’t fit the stereotype was that he didn’t smoke cigars. As the field commander of the U.S. Joint Task Force (JTF) to Africa, Nix came to me to discuss the U.S. concept of operations in the region. He said the Americans would first operate out of Entebbe and then transfer all matériel to cargo planes, then onto trucks to move to UNAMIR in Kigali, and then on to Goma and all regions of Rwanda. I told him our most urgent requirement was off-loading equipment and personnel at the airport—he wouldn’t be able to send anything more than a Hercules into Kigali until we had the infrastructure to deal with it. As far as he knew, his mission was to help the UN efforts in Goma and in Rwanda, but before he initiated anything he had to await confirmation from the overall JTF commander, Lieutenant General Daniel Schroeder, who was due in theatre in a couple of days. We parted with me reminding him that Goma had to remain a temporary exercise. For the Americans to be part of the solution, the aid effort had to be from within Rwanda.

  The UN did its bit at the airport. Within twenty-four hours of receiving the call from the DPKO a group of about twenty Canadian Air Force air traffic controllers had been assembled from all the bases back home and were in the air. When they arrived in Kigali they went directly from their Hercules to the air-control tower and complex. They removed the bodies they found (no abandoned building in Kigali was without its dead), washed the place down, set up their old manual-and-visual air control apparatus (which looked like something out of the Battle of Britain), and slapped a large Canadian flag on the tower underneath the Rwandan and UN flags. They were open for business before nightfall.

  A few days later, when the U.S. ground and off-loading crew arrived with media crawling all over them, the Americans unabashedly announced that they had “opened” the Kigali airport. But the picture that made it to newspapers around the world caught a gaggle of our air controllers hanging out of the tower pointing to the large Canadian flag. The Americans had to take a lot of ribbing after that as they worked hand in hand with Canadian and other UN troops to get the airfield functional and the much-needed aid, contingents and logistics on its way.

  I had to drive north toward the border of Uganda in the last week of July to meet with Baroness Chalker, the British minister for Overseas Development, who had just been to Goma and Mulindi but had not had enough time to complete the leg of her trip to Kigali. (She was a “tourist” I immediately warmed to. She did not stand on protocol and travelled with a tin of homemade tea biscuits, which she shared with everyone.) I met up with her at Kilometre 64, and we carried on northward, crossing into Uganda at the Gatuna bridge, while I
pointedly explained why we needed the promised British trucks, engineers, maintenance platoon, field hospital, small headquarters and UNMOs. She sent the colonel who was travelling with her to do a recce in Kigali and told him to forward the list of our needs to the British ministry of defence. In parting, she promised me what I requested, though she reminded me that she had only a six-month commitment from her government to support Rwanda and UNAMIR.

  At Entebbe the American presence was already strong—the Stars and Stripes flag was flying from the roof of the main terminal. I visited my team in their minuscule ground-floor office and then proceeded to my transient camp. The Ghanaian platoon had set up tents and portable latrines, benches and tables, but they had no cots. There was no electricity and no running water, no cooking facilities and no phone lines. The APCs were standing in silent rows by a pile of junked parts. The Brown and Root mechanics were working hard, swearing about the lack of spare parts, and the repainting of the vehicles in UN colours had begun. Even with the exceptional efforts of the UNDP resident representative and our UNOMUR civilian support staff, the camp was going nowhere fast. I went back to the UNMOs in charge of troop movement and told them to alert the mission and New York to the fact that the Entebbe base was not functional and that all incoming troops should fly directly to Kigali, where we’d manage as best we could. They needed to get the word out quickly since the large Canadian contingent under Mike Hanrahan was due the next day.

  I then headed to the top floor of the new terminal, where at least a hundred military personnel were going in all directions putting the American headquarters together before Schroeder arrived. Nix was in Goma doing a reconnaissance. Not wanting to burden the junior staff officers, I headed back to Kigali, wryly smiling about how comfortable the furniture in the American headquarters looked—a demonstration of the priorities and capabilities of an imperial force.