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

by Roméo Dallaire

  He had heard I was leaving soon and said he was sorry and hoped to see me before I left. Though he and I both remembered our sessions at Mulindi, talking as friends into the night, we ended our last session formally, as there were staffers all around.

  Lieutenant General Gord Reay, the commander of the Canadian Army, came to Rwanda from August 6 to 8 to visit the troops, bringing with him an old friend of mine, Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Coleman, the army’s public affairs officer. In private conversation General Reay confirmed that my replacement would be Guy Tousignant. I knew Guy as a bilingual logistician whose skill set and experience would certainly help Rwanda and UNAMIR 2, but I told Reay that I still supported Henry for commander. Reay informed me that when I got back, my posting would be that of Deputy Commander of the Army and Commander of the 1” Canadian Division. I was pleased, as this would mean that I would stay in a command appointment. However, the former Deputy Commander had retired in late June, and the post had been vacant since, with the Chief of Staff doing both jobs. Reay wanted me back at work in Canada as soon as possible. He then spelled out a host of problems I’d have to deal with, including the need to handle the Somalia fallout, army reorganization driven by severe budget and personnel cuts, and an ever-increasing tempo of operations. I admit I wasn’t as pleased at the end of the conversation as I had been at the beginning. I was physically and mentally exhausted and I needed a break. I asked for leave before I assumed my new duties and he readily agreed, but he gave me a look that implied “just not too much.”

  Tousignant would arrive in Rwanda August 12 for a week’s handover. I would relinquish the command of UNAMIR to him on August 19.

  Until then, I stayed immersed in our non-stop work. By August 8, we had grown from 600 to about 1000, but we still had only a half-battalion and a company of line troops, the rest being UNMOs, staff and support. Every now and again I would break out in a cold sweat over the looming deadline of August 22, when my bluff might be called. Games at the Security Council continued apace. We had filed a three-month report the week before, and Madeleine Albright was leading the strong resistance to the wording of a new mandate that would include our “ensuring” stability and security in the provinces of Rwanda. “In her view, it would be more practical to describe the task as the ‘promotion’ of stability,” the code cable read. How far does one go up the scale in the use of force to achieve “promotion” without getting into “ensuring”? How would a junior officer understand the resultant new ROE in the field? Once again, we could end up with soldiers injured and dying, and more innocent people sacrificed, because of nuances in mandate that the politicos did not even fully comprehend. I had terribly mixed feelings about my departure but all it took was a code cable such as this or another frustrating session with the administration gang to reaffirm my total incapacity to accept any more excuses, delays or budget limitations.

  I went to see Lafourcade to bring him up to speed and assure him we were still on net with the handovers and withdrawals of his forces. He was feeling the squeeze of getting all his people and equipment out in time, and still hearing some noises that his government might ask him to stay a bit longer. I told him that staying was out of the question—if he did, the RPF would break through the zone and confront him. I told him I would be back next week to personally introduce my replacement, and we parted amicably.

  Lafourcade provided transport and escorts for me to go and meet Augustin Bizimungu, who had asked to see me. The former RGF chief of staff was now living in a comfortable bungalow on a hill overlooking Lake Kivu, and seemed totally at home. He was surrounded by a few senior Zairean officers, a couple of French officers and, to my surprise, the same huge RGF lieutenant-colonel who had come into Bagosora’s office on the afternoon of April 7 (his G-2, or intelligence officer, a man said to have been deeply involved in the genocide).

  Bizimungu met me at the top of the long staircase up to the house. Both he and the lieutenant-colonel were in impeccable RGF uniforms down to their shiny boots, and Bizimungu looked relaxed, even ebullient, as we sat down to talk. Soon he had launched into his usual tirade against the RPF, accusing them of genocide and of targeting RGF officers and their families for execution. He did not ask me how things were inside Rwanda but gave me an earful about his desire to go back and sort out the RPF once and for all. Before he had worked himself up to a complete lather—and perhaps before he could reveal anything more of their future operational plans—the lieutenant-colonel stepped in and effectively ended the meeting. We stood up to make our farewells. With a wry smile, Bizimungu told me that things were fine for him and he didn’t need to meet anyone from UNAMIR anymore. Neither of us offered to shake hands.

  When I got back to UNAMIR headquarters, after a brief stop in Entebbe and a visit with President Museveni (who gazed at me kindly and said, “Well, General, you have certainly aged during this last year”), I saw that a copy of a letter sent by the Secretary-General to the President of the Security Council was on my desk. My eye went to the crucial sentence: “ . . . his government has decided to reassign [Dallaire] to national duties . . . [Guy Tousignant] will assume his duties on 15 august 1994.” There it was, now official.

  On August 13, Khan got a call from the DPKO asking him to go to the new government and ask to delay the departure of Turquoise by up to two weeks. I had argued against it, but New York was getting very nervous that my bluff was only a bluff and we would be too thin on the ground to safely conduct our mission. Kagame had at first agreed in principle, but Pasteur Bizimungu was adamant—no delay would be tolerated.

  Guy Tousignant had arrived on schedule and we did the rounds and the prayer sessions and the decision meetings together. Another Canadian came with him; Colonel Jan Arp, a fellow gunner who made a real difference to the mission as its first dedicated chief of staff. At prayers a couple of days before I was to leave, a problem with lack of water came to the table again. I was about to be very nasty to the administration staff but Guy jumped in and said he would like to look into it. I realized then that I was truly out of a job.

  When I took Guy to meet Lafourcade, the French commander broached the subject of keeping a small logistics component in Goma in order to ensure support for the Franco-African battalion. I emphatically replied that the UN would allow no remnants of Turquoise to remain in the area. He was a bit taken aback by my forceful manner but Guy backed me up.

  I was invited to have lunch with Kagame on August 18 in his new home in Kigali where he was living with his wife and children. It was a bit more formal than we had been used to, the conversation was light, and the menu actually included meat. All in all, it was a pleasant two hours. Kagame wished me well and thanked me very kindly. He said that he hoped I would return to Rwanda someday.

  I do hope to return to Rwanda very soon, after I have finished my duties as the UNAMIR force commander by testifying for the prosecution at the International Tribunal on the Rwandan Genocide in Arusha, Tanzania, in the spring of 2004. The place where the Arsuha Peace Agreement was signed—the very same building in fact—is now the place where the tribunal meets to deliver justice to the extremists who destroyed that agreement.

  How do you say goodbye to people who have bravely travelled through the inferno with you? On the night of August 18, all of the old gang, including Henry, Tikoka, my brave civilian secretary Suzanne, Yaache, Khan, Golo and the rest of the staff organized a farewell party for me in the damaged restaurant at Chez Lando. I won’t think of what they had to do to clean it up given that the place had been closed since Hélène, Lando and the children had been killed. They plugged a large hole in the roof with some blue refugee tarps, and the CO of the Canadian logistics base had found a caterer just setting up shop in town who produced a meal the likes of which none of us had seen in Kigali in a number of months. Some of Lando’s surviving relatives had come back, and the party was also designed to help them relaunch the business.

  We drank a lot that night. We sang songs and even brought out the Stompin�
� Tom Conners tape for a while. Some of us quietly cried our hearts out. It was a rare celebration, and the emotions it unleashed ranged from deep hurt and anger to exaggerated laughter and even love. It is not too strong a word.

  The next morning, I said a formal goodbye to my staff, and then in a slight rainfall we conducted a change-of-command parade in front of the main entrance to the HQ building, as Henry insisted was proper. A proud contingent of Ghanaians was waiting for me, joined by many of the staff officers. While Guy, Khan and I inspected the ranks and pinned UNAMIR medals on everyone, my favourite band from the Ghanaian battalion played for us. I cannot remember my speech, though I know I was grateful that the rain shortened it. Following Ghanaian military tradition, Guy and I exchanged a white baton of command.

  Then I was escorted off the dais into an open four-by-four. Two long ropes were stretched before the vehicle and all the officers took up positions along them. They pulled me out of the compound to the music of “Auld lang syne.” I called to Tiko, hauling on the rope, to come and join me, because I would need his support one last time when I reached the end of this ride. He climbed in with me and propped me up like a brother. We laughed and yelled to the men on the ropes and waved to the crowd who’d gathered to see me off. When we came to a halt, Tiko helped me out of the four-by-four for the ride to the airport. After a flurry of fraternal hugs all around I was gone.

  Phil had flown ahead to Nairobi to sort out the terrible mess the UN staff had made of my tickets. I was to travel to Amsterdam before going home for some leave with my family, walking the old battlefields where my father and Beth’s dad had fought.

  The next morning Phil took me to the airport. It wasn’t necessary for me to say much to Phil. He understood how guilty I felt abandoning my troops before the mission was over, how guilty I felt that I had failed so many people and that Rwandans were still dying because of it. Phil would have none of it. I had to accept that I had become a casualty, he said. Just like other casualties, I needed to be evacuated. There was no guilt in that.

  I left Africa on August 20, 1994, nearly a year to the day from when I had first arrived in Rwanda, full of hopes for a mission that would secure lasting peace for a country that once had been a tiny paradise on earth.

  * * *

  1. Kouchner had shown up with his own usual lack of warning, leading an E.U. delegation that had come to Rwanda to offer us a hundred human rights observers to start conducting the investigations that had been called for by the International Human Rights Commissioner. A special investigation had already begun under the auspices of the UN, and I wondered why the E.U. wanted to launch this effort, and told them I thought their efforts would be misguided. I told Kouchner that what Rwanda needed at this delicate point was not another hundred human rights investigators (who would not easily be able to get to the perpetrators inside the Goma camps) going through the entrails of the RPF, but rather a hundred qualified policemen to come and help train the nascent Gendarmerie and bring law and order to the capital.

  CONCLUSION

  In the introduction to this book I told the story of meeting a three-year-old orphan on a road lined with huts filled with the Rwandan dead. I still think of that little boy, who if he lived would be a teenager as I write. What has happened to him, and the tens of thousands of other orphans of the genocide? Did he survive? Was he reunited with any members of his family, or was he raised in one of Rwanda’s overcrowded orphanages? Did anyone care for him and love him for himself, or was he raised with hate and anger defining his young life? Did he find it in himself to forgive the perpetrators of the genocide? Or did he fall prey to ethnic hate propaganda and the desire for retribution and take his part in perpetuating the cycle of violence? Did he become yet another child soldier in the region’s wars?

  When I think about the consequences of the Rwandan genocide, I think first of all of those who died an agonizing death from machete wounds inside the hundreds of sweltering churches, chapels and missions where they’d gone to seek God’s protection and ended instead in the arms of Lucifer. I think of the more than 300,000 children who were killed, and of those children who became killers in a perversion of any culture’s idea of childhood. Then I think of the children who survived, orphaned by the genocide and the ongoing conflict in the region—since 1994, they have been effectively abandoned by us as we abandoned their parents in the killing fields of Rwanda.

  When we remember the Rwandan genocide, we also have to recognize the living hell these children inherited. My work after the genocide has intimately acquainted me with the circumstances in which the children of genocide and civil war are forced to survive. In December 2001, as part of my duties as special adviser on war-affected children to the minister responsible for CIDA, I conducted a field visit to Sierra Leone to get first-hand information on the demobilization and reintegration of child soldiers and bush wives—children who had been abducted from their families and had then fought for several years as part of the once powerful rebel force, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). I travelled deep into the heart of rebel territory, near the towns of Kailahun and Daru in the far eastern sector of the country. I remember a visit that my small team, which included retired Major Phil Lancaster, made to the local demobilization centre. Sitting down with a group of the boys, all around thirteen years of age, we were soon discussing tactics, bush life and the brutality of civil war. They were only a few days into the retraining process, and they fervently hoped—now that they were permitted to hope—that they had a promising future in a country that could sustain peace. But, talking with them, it was clear that if things did not work out in the camp, they would return to the free and violent life of terrorism in the bush, where they would carry on taking what they wanted by force. The rehabilitation and reintegration period was scheduled to last at best three months, and they wanted to know what would happen next. Who would pick up the ball? Certainly not their families or communities, who had yet to accept them back, nor their devastated country in which teachers and other educated persons and potential leaders had been a favourite assassination target. Abducted at nine or even younger, a number of these boys had become RUF platoon commanders, and in terms of experience they were thirteen going on twenty-five; if laying down their weapons meant they had no future except to join thousands of others in displaced and refugee camps that dotted the countryside, they would not countenance it. Some of them were running camps within the camps for the younger children; if these combat-tested leaders were not specifically targeted for advanced education and social development programs, they would surely lead the children back into the bush. Simple, well-intentioned Dick-and-Jane schooling was not going to be enough to meet their needs.

  Even worse off were the girls, who were much shyer about coming forward for help. Many of them had serious medical problems caused by rape, early child-bearing and unassisted births. Their state of health was appalling. A high proportion had been infected with HIV/AIDs by the male adults in the rebel army, and were so emotionally scarred and so inexperienced with “normal” life that it was difficult for them to care properly for their children. Where would they find the necessary love to give their babies when they could not remember ever having received it themselves? In time, the boys were generally accepted back into the community, but the girls were often shunned and abandoned, since in this male-dominated culture they were considered to have been permanently sullied by the uses to which the soldiers had put them. If they tried to go home, they and their children became outcasts in their communities; if they went to the displaced and refugee camps, they again became the prey of adult males. Some of the girls had fought or held considerable responsibilities in the rebel formations; if properly supported, there was a chance they could become leaders—the forerunners of change on the gender-equality front. The demobilization and reintegration camps were their best chance, which was nearly no chance at all, especially if the aid community didn’t get behind them and help.

  This was the fate that
may have awaited the boy on the Rwandan road, the fate all the children of the Rwandan genocide would have been lucky to avoid. These disordered, violent and throwaway young lives—and the consequences of the waste of these lives on their homelands, and inevitably on the rest of the world—are the best argument to vigorously act to prevent future Rwandas.

  Too many parties have focused on pointing the finger at others, beyond the perpetrators, as the scapegoats for our common failure in Rwanda. Some say that the example of Rwanda proves that the UN is an irrelevant, corrupt, decadent institution that has outlived its usefulness or even its ability to conduct conflict resolution. Others have blamed the Permanent Five of the Security Council, especially the United States and France, for failing to see beyond their own national self-interest to lead or even support international intervention to stop the genocide. Some have blamed the media for not telling the story, the NGOs for not reacting quickly and effectively enough, the peacekeepers for not showing more resolve, and myself for failing in my mission. When I began this book, I was tempted to make it an anatomy of my personal failures, which I was finally persuaded would be missing the point.