Shake Hands With the Devil (16 page)

Afterwards, I heard on the rumour net that the bureaucrats in the departments of foreign affairs and national defence were having a turf war. Defence supported a contingent for Rwanda: it is customary for a nation to provide a substantial military component when one of its generals is given the prestigious job of force commander. One simple reason is that other nations do not like to put their soldiers in harm's way under a foreign commander unless that commander's own country commits its troops to him as well. But foreign affairs opposed a contingent because it was in the process of reorienting Canada's diplomatic attentions toward eastern Europe and the Balkans and away from Africa. Foreign affairs wanted the prestige of the position without the cost of troops, and since it is the lead department, it won the battle.

It was hard not to be dragged down into futility. The administrative skirmishes were endless—Brent must have filed a volume of paperwork for the helicopters we needed, but it went around and around and around. (In the end, the helicopters did not arrive in Rwanda until late March 1994, and they abandoned the mission the day the war started in April.)

We continued to lobby and to work on the mission plan through
September. Many of my colleagues in the
DPKO
pointed out that there was still some question as to whether I would be selected as force commander; they probably wondered why I was so passionately interested in the job. It is an unwritten rule at the
UN
that, wherever possible, African peacekeeping missions are to be led by Africans. The frontrunner was actually the Nigerian general who was commanding the
OAU
observer group monitoring the current ceasefire in the demilitarized zone. I had met him on the technical mission and was less than impressed with him as a soldier and as a leader. His own men had told my staff that when fighting had broken out in the demilitarized zone in February and the observer group had found itself in the middle of a war zone, the general had abandoned his soldiers to their fate and retreated to his compound in Kigali, refusing to offer direction or support.

The bulk of my time during the last ten days or so of September was spent briefing formal
UN
delegations and anyone else who would open a door to me. In addition to the under-secretary of state for Africa affairs, I also briefed a large and important delegation from Paris, the very influential department heads of political affairs, humanitarian affairs,
FOD
and human rights, and the lesser heads of offices in areas such as personnel, aviation, finance, transport and so on.

With Annan, Riza and Baril primarily focused on the Balkans, the key player on Africa in the
DPKO
was Hedi Annabi, who seemed to carry the woes of the continent on his back. His office resembled that of a medieval alchemist, with dockets and papers piled so high you wondered when one of the teetering masses would fall and increase the obstacle course already on the floor. You could not deploy a map in that office, since there was no horizontal surface on which to do it. Annabi was the only one at the
UN
who ever expressed any skepticism over whether the Arusha agreement would stand. He reminded me that the Hutu hard-liners had signed the accords under enormous pressure. I tucked his doubt away in some pocket of my mind and carried on.

The concept of operations that we developed under the direction of the
DPKO
stretched over a period of thirty months and called for four phases and a maximum force strength of 2,548, to be deployed only when absolutely needed.

Phase one, as outlined in Arusha, would begin on the day the Security Council approved the mission and would last for ninety days, requiring a buildup to 1,200 personnel. The immediate task would be to provide security for the city of Kigali and ensure the withdrawal of the French troops in accordance with Arusha. This was extremely important as the
RPF
viewed the French as a partisan force allied with the
RGF
and would not enter the city if the French were still there.

Then we would have to turn Kigali into a weapons-secure area, negotiating an agreement whereby the
RGF
and
RPF
would secure their weapons and only move them or armed troops with
UN
permission and under
UN
escort. As peacekeepers, we had to know where all the weapons were. With the French gone and Kigali declared a weapons-secure area, the
RPF
could move their political leaders and the battalion of soldiers necessary to protect them into Kigali, and the
BBTG
—whose members had already been negotiated in Arusha, though there was still much debate over the exact composition—could be sworn in.

In phase one we also had to take over the monitoring of the demilitarized zone and establish teams of unarmed military observers to roam the ten prefectures (provinces) within the country to keep an eye out for possible flare-ups.

Burundi, the country to the south of Rwanda, had just held its first democratic elections since independence and had seen the peaceful transition from a minority Tutsi military-run dictatorship to the installation of the first Hutu president to head a government in that country—I was not worried about security on Rwanda's south flank. The south was generally held to be the most moderate area of the country, and I was sure my small teams of unarmed
MILOB
s would be effective there. Eastern Rwanda, toward Tanzania, was also fairly peaceful, but the west, close to the border with Zaire, would bear closer watching—the hardline heartland was in the northwest, and there were reports of weapons being smuggled into the country from Zaire. Nevertheless I was confident that I could do the job with that first contingent of 1,200 troops.

After the transitional government was in place and Habyarimana was installed as temporary head of state, as directed by Arusha, we would roll out phase two, which would take another ninety days and
require the deployment of the maximum 2,548-member force. I thought this would be the most dangerous part of the mission. A battalion group of about eight hundred, supported by an engineer company of another two hundred personnel, would be moved into the demilitarized zone to provide a buffer between the
RPF
and the
RGF
while each army retired from their defensive positions to demobilization centres. All weapons would be collected in cantonment points. I estimated that for this phase, I would need support elements such as eight helicopters equipped with night-vision capability to patrol the demilitarized zone (hence Brent's huge file on the matter). The Ugandan border was hard to monitor because of its altitude, its terrain and mist-filled valleys, and I suspected that the
RPF
was already sneaking all kinds of supplies into the country, using an old Viet-Cong ploy: loading up bicycles and taking the stuff over the tiny mountain paths that criss-crossed the border. My
UNOMUR
mission was supposed to get a handle on these potential supply lines; for the peace process to succeed, we had to shut them down. If I was going to be able to get troops out fast to contain hostile situations, the force would also need twenty armoured personnel carriers (
APC
s), since most of the roads outside of the immediate vicinity of Kigali were a mess.

I proposed a carrot-and-stick force structure to ensure that the climate of security would be maintained in the demilitarized zone. I would place the armed battalion between the belligerents. Then behind each force, I would station unarmed military observers. Both the battalion and the military observers would be non-threatening and would focus on building goodwill and good working relationships with and between the parties. The stick would be provided by the force reserve, which would intervene rapidly to deter aggression. The mission would need robust rules of engagement to give us the wherewithal to escalate force as required in support of our mandate.

Phase three would be the actual demobilization and reintegration process and would last ten months. This phase would see the creation of the National Guard, a new force that would integrate elements of the
RPF
,
RGF
, and Gendarmerie. We would follow the Arusha guidelines when constructing the new army; the majority of soldiers from all three
forces would be given pensions and retrained for jobs in civilian life. As this process wound down, my own force would decrease to about a thousand personnel, a recommendation I made as a result of pressure from the
UN
to keep costs down, not because I was entirely comfortable that it was the best course.

The final phase of the mission would be the holding of the first democratic elections in Rwanda, bound to be an uneasy time within the country. My hope was that the thousand-member
UN
contingent would be reinforced by the new army and that it would have jelled sufficiently to withstand the potential return to ethnic conflict. Phase four was projected to last twelve months, after which we could pack our tents and go home.

In
UN
terms, the mission was to be small, cheap, short and sweet.

My technical report called for urgent deployment. To pull that off, we needed a commitment from a major Western military power with enough transport, or “lift,” capacity to deal with the fact that Rwanda was landlocked, airports were limited and the nearest seaport, Dar es Salaam, was about a thousand kilometres from Kigali on nearly impassible roads. No one but the Belgians had stepped forward. At the time, I wondered about the real reasons. This was supposed to be a straightforward little chapter-six mission, a win for the
UN
, a win all around. So what held them back? The story of the day in the
DPKO
, as passed on by the white officers from the Western-based troop-contributing nations, was that these countries were “peacekeepinged out” and had no more stomach for far-off missions. All very well, except that Maurice and his staff had continued to obtain substantial troops and equipment with relative ease for the Balkans and Somalia.

When I'd met the diplomatic corps in August in Kigali, I had become familiar with other reasons. Rwanda was on nobody's radar as a place of strategic interest. It had no natural resources and no geographical significance. It was already dependent on foreign aid just to sustain itself, and on international funding to avoid bankruptcy. Even if the mission were to succeed, as looked likely at the time, there would be no political gain for the contributing nations; the only real beneficiary internationally would be the
UN
. For most countries, serving the
UN
's objectives has never seemed worth even the smallest of risks. Member nations do not
want a large, reputable, strong and independent United Nations, no matter their hypocritical pronouncements otherwise. What they want is a weak, beholden, indebted scapegoat of an organization, which they can blame for their failures or steal victories from.

Worst of all, I suspect that these powerful nations did not want to get involved because they had a firmer grasp on the threats to the success of the Arusha accords than the rest of us. Certainly France, the United Kingdom, China, Russia and the United States, the permanent five of the Security Council, all had fully equipped and manned embassies in Rwanda, including both military and intelligence attachés. None of the means of communications used in Rwanda by the political or military hierarchies had encryption capabilities, except for a few communications assets within the
RPF
. Between human and signal intelligence on the ground and worldwide space- and air-based surveillance systems, these nations either knew in detail what was going on or they were totally asleep at the switch. I firmly doubt they were asleep. The French, the Belgians and the Germans had military advisers numbering in the dozens at all levels of the military and gendarme command and training structures in Rwanda.

However, since leaving Kigali in August, I had had no means of intelligence on Rwanda. Not one country was willing to provide the
UN
or even me personally with accurate and up-to-date information. One of the restrictions on a chapter-six mission is that it can't run its own intelligence-gathering; in the spirit of openness and transparency, it has to be totally dependent on the goodwill of opposing sides to inform the mission command of problems and threats. Our lack of intelligence and basic operational information, and the reluctance of any nation to provide us with it, helped form my first suspicion that I might find myself out on a limb if I ever needed help in the field.

So, despite the continued effort of the
DPKO
staff, out of all the developed nations, only the Belgians still wanted to sign up, with the French expressing political interest. The rest of the respondents came from several developing nations on three continents, and these troops had limited equipment capabilities and serious inherent logistic and financial problems. There was only a small list of peacekeeping nations
who were capable of deploying units with all of the equipment and materials they needed to be independent of
UN
support while the
UN
built up its logistics base. These nations were primarily Western and First World. The slowly growing list of countries who were prepared to commit to a Rwandan mission came from a new generation of troop-contributing nations, who had large and untapped pools of soldiers but who were nearly completely deficient in
matériel,
sustainability and training specific to complex conflicts and vast humanitarian catastrophes. Furthermore, such troops sometimes came from nations that had little to no ethos regarding human rights, which raised a whole other set of problems.

As September wore on, I became aware that my presence and my aggressive manner were beginning to grate on many of the senior staff in the
FOD
and the personnel department. The
FOD
had total control of the equipment we needed. Personnel established manning priorities and had the final authority for deployment of
UN
staff in the field. I worried that by pushing so hard, on a mission that hadn't yet been mandated and of which I was not yet the force commander, I was actually hurting my cause.