Shake Hands With the Devil (20 page)

The media did its part, and many pictures were taken. The government even issued an official calendar poster of the event, with the president and me seated together, shaking hands under the Rwandan and
UN
flags. Habyarimana did not take questions, however, and soon I was ushering him back to his armoured Mercedes, through an enthusiastic crowd that sang and clapped as he passed by.

We had a small reception afterwards for those who wished to stay, but Hallqvist said he was unable to pay for the refreshments since he had no authority to spend money on social events. Once again Amadou Ly played the angel to the mission and dipped into his budget. Overall, I was pleased with the day. With this official opening, the headquarters and its commander were in place, the flag was up in Kigali and we seemed to be advancing our mandate. The atmosphere of peace and optimism, however, exploded in violence that same night.

At 0600 on November 18, the burgomaster of Nkumba commune called to inform the Kigali media and the government of a series of killings
along the border of the ill-defined demilitarized zone north of Ruhengeri. He was able to supply details about each of the incidents, which he said had taken place at five different locations between 2330 and 0230 that morning. Two of these places were not even under his jurisdiction, and phone communication in the country was not reliable; we wondered how the mayor came into possession of all this information so quickly. The killings seemed to have been very well planned. The victims were men, women and children—twenty-one killed, two badly injured and two apparently kidnapped—associated with the ruling
MRND
party. Among them were people who had won local elections, and candidates for upcoming ones—elections that were being conducted with the assistance of Colonel Figoli and his troops in the demilitarized zone.

The local media leapt on the story, inflating the number of dead to forty and accusing the
RPF
of being the perpetrators. To my mind, the murders came suspiciously on the heels of government complaints, which had been brought to me by Augustin Bizimana and Déogratias Nsabimana, alleging that Ugandan troops and
RPF
reinforcements were massing south of Kabale and in the area of the Virunga Mountains. I had contacted Ben Matiwaza of
UNOMUR
to investigate, since his troops conducted constant patrols of the area. He said they'd seen no sign of large troop movements. When I confronted Bizimana and Nsabimana to ask where their information came from, they were vague, citing Washington contacts they refused to name.

Whether by design or not, the massacres were an immediate challenge to
UNAMIR
. We had just formally declared our presence to applause, song and cheers; now we were being tested on whether we could truly help to establish an atmosphere of security in the country. (Coincidentally, speculation and sensationalism about the killings filled the newspaper pages that might have been devoted to good-news coverage of our official opening.) If we investigated and found conclusive proof that the
RPF
had committed the murders, we'd be in tricky territory in which one of the ex-belligerents appeared to be deliberately destabilizing the country; if we investigated and were not able to point the finger at the
RPF
, the media and especially
RTLM
would view us as either in league with the
RPF
or totally incompetent.

I immediately launched a board of inquiry with as much noise as possible, though I was hamstrung by not yet having a civilian police contingent or a legal adviser (the
UN
never did post a legal adviser to
UNAMIR
, which would create enormous complications later on, when the world was arguing over whether a genocide was actually happening). The people who did the killing left enough evidence behind to suggest
RPF
involvement (pieces of clothing, the
RPF
's standard-issue rubber boots, even food) but not enough to dispel the notion that it had been planted. When our investigation proved inconclusive, we invited all sides to participate in an inquiry, but the government was slow to send a representative and the process dragged on well into the next year and was never resolved.

In a way, my bluff had been called. I'd taken a risk in opening our headquarters in such a public way before we had all the personnel in place and now our credibility was taking a hit. Our failure to find the perpetrators of the November 17 to 18 massacre became “proof” for the hard-liners that
UNAMIR
was biased against the regime and was a closet
RPF
supporter. My request for urgent deployment of personnel skilled in legal, media, investigative and political strategy in theatre went unheeded. No matter how sympathetic the
DPKO
was about the hits I was taking over this, they could not influence the already over-extended personnel branch of the
UN
to fill the positions. I had two comforting thoughts: Brent Beardsley, who had nurtured this mission with me, was scheduled to arrive on November 22 to take up his role as military assistant in my personal cabinet, and Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh was expected to land in Kigali the day after Brent.

On November 19, the first Belgian transport aircraft began landing and unloading their human cargo—about seventy-five members of the 2nd Paratroop Battalion, who we were putting up temporarily at the Amahoro Stadium. I can't say that the Belgians and I hit it off at the welcoming parade the next day. I gave my speech in French, not realizing that they were the advance party of the last remaining bilingual unit—Flemish and Walloon—in the Belgian army. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel LeRoy, a self-confident, rather long-in-the-tooth
parachutist, did not project any particular excitement about the mission.

The
UN
had requested an 800-man motorized infantry battalion, with one company (125 men) mounted in wheeled armoured personnel carriers, but it was not to be. Instead we had been told back in September that Belgium could send 450 para-commandos, with light weapons, few vehicles, only a handful of
APC
s, and a small logistical sub-unit, medical-surgical platoon and headquarters. (We ended up having to make up the difference in force strength with a 400-man half-battalion from Bangladesh; the two half-battalions never equated the strength and cohesion of a whole.) Many of the Belgian soldiers had completed a tour in Somalia, which was a chapter-seven mission, and they came to
UNAMIR
with a very aggressive attitude. My staff soon caught some of them bragging at the local bars that their troops had killed over two hundred Somalis and that they knew how to kick “nigger” ass in Africa. I was compelled to call a commander's hour when the bulk of the half-battalion arrived, in order to walk them through our rules of engagement and impress upon them that they needed to change their personal attitudes toward the locals and operate in accordance with a chapter-six mandate. I left them with no doubt that I would not tolerate racist statements, colonial attitudes, unnecessary aggression or other abuses of power.

Much of the Belgian equipment had been shipped directly from Somalia without being cleaned or serviced and was much the worse for wear. Even so, the Belgians would still be my best combat troops. Since in Rwanda, all roads lead to Kigali, and whoever controls Kigali controls the country, I planned to deploy them in the city. Standard
UN
practice is to name units for their countries of origin; the Belgians in this case would have been called
BELBAT
. I decided to pass on this custom, as I thought the best chance for melding my motley force was to keep them all focused on their mutual tasks, so the Belgians became
KIBAT
, for Kigali Battalion.

Our information gathering in southern Rwanda during this period was restricted to informal reports from Amadou Ly's field teams, moderate politicians,
NGO
personnel and the odd journalist. They all suggested tension was building in the region as a result of the coup in Burundi.
An estimated 300,000 refugees had crossed the border into Rwanda, and massacres inside Burundi had left the streams and rivers full of bloated bodies. The refugees were occupying makeshift camps and ravaging the small forests that decades of labour had re-established on the mountainsides to prevent soil erosion. The region was into a second year of drought and had suffered extensive crop failures, forcing many of the Rwandans in the area to depend on food aid. The
UNHCR
rapidly moved in to provide the essentials to the Burundian refugees, but since it is only mandated to look after refugees who cross borders, it couldn't provide for the displaced or hungry Rwandans. This meant that local people watched refugees eating while they and their children starved.

We were getting reports from
NGO
s that arms were going into the refugee camps in the south. There was an alarming increase in assaults and thefts in and near the camps, and also a report of arms smuggling. In order to put a lid on the violence, the Rwandan government decided to move the Burundian refugees into camps divided along ethnic lines. While this diminished the chance of ethnic violence, it provided fertile ground for radicals to move into the camps and stir up trouble. We could do little except maintain a thin presence in the area—hoping that it would help to cool tempers—diverting some of our precious
MILOB
teams south to conduct sporadic inspections of the camps.

On November 23, the
SRSG
arrived. I put together an honour guard of my Tunisians, who were becoming quite expert on the parade square, but I got the feeling that Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh had expected something more elaborate.

At our first meeting, my head of mission seemed impressive. A tall, heavy-set man with an assured walk, Booh-Booh was clean-shaven and dressed in a light blue suit. His grey hair was cropped close to his head, and he looked every inch the diplomat or man of business. And in fact, since his retirement from the diplomatic corps, he had become very successful in the world of banana production and sales (he once showed me a few pictures of his vast holdings in Cameroon and expressed regret about not being there to take care of things). Booh-Booh said that only a direct appeal from his friend Boutros Boutros-Ghali had brought him out
of retirement to take up this post. With his background in politics, diplomacy, business and
UN
affairs, and his relationship with the secretary-general, he seemed like the right man for the job and certainly someone I thought I could work with. His presence meant that I was no longer the head of mission. I hoped he would be able to do an end run around the party infighting that was obstructing any movement toward installing the
BBTG
.

Dr. Kabia and I briefed him to the best of our ability. In September, two of the major moderate parties, the
MDR
and the
PL
, had fractured into moderate and extremist “Hutu Power” wings. Each wing had then laid claim to the ministerial positions and representative seats that had been allocated by party in the Arusha Peace Agreement. The
RPF
, of course, preferred the moderate candidates in each of these parties; the president's party and an increasingly visible Hutu extremist party, the
CDR
, preferred the Power candidates. These intrigues were only now coming to the surface and needed astute political handling. I knew I wasn't up to the task and could now hand it over to Booh-Booh and concentrate on the military and security sides.

Booh-Booh's arrival coincided with a worsening of the weather and an increased number of reports of shootings and killings around the country. Every afternoon, large purple clouds would darken the sky and we would hear the rumble of thunder; by nightfall, we'd be drenched with torrents of rain, and lightning would rip the sky apart, bathing the city in its eerie momentary glow.

The day after Booh-Booh landed in Kigali, we received a report that there had been an attack on a village in northwestern Rwanda by persons unknown and that a number of Hutu civilians had been murdered. This was followed rapidly by the news that some children had disappeared while fetching water in the Virunga Mountains. I drove to the area and, with an escort of Tunisian soldiers, confirmed the deaths. Rumours were spreading that the
RPF
had committed the attack, and I was determined to investigate and identify the perpetrators of these hideous crimes. We questioned local people and military personnel, who condemned the
RPF
without any proof or witnesses. I then led a patrol through forests of bamboo up a volcano called Mount Karisimbi.
We found some abandoned water cans but no sign of the missing children. As dark was coming down, I tasked the Tunisians to extend the search higher up the volcano the next morning and returned to Kigali to try to quiet flying rumours.

The Tunisians found the children the next day. They had all been murdered except for one young girl, who my soldiers carried to a nearby hospital. I dispatched Brent, another officer and a local translator to the site. After a long drive and foot march, they came to the place where a boy of eight and five girls between six and fourteen had been strangled to death. Deep violet rope burns cut into their necks. All of them had also suffered head wounds and the girls had clearly been gang-raped before they were murdered. Near one of the bodies was a glove in the colour pattern of the
RPF
uniform. Brent collected the glove, wondering why someone would leave such a distinctive signature.

A small party of civilians, who claimed to be relatives of the dead children, had also climbed to the site. Once Brent had finished his initial assessment, he turned to the group and, through his translator, asked who they thought had committed the massacre. The translator was from the public affairs office of our mission in Kigali and should have been reliable. But Brent noticed that the man repeatedly used the word
Inkotanyi
when he spoke to the group, which Brent knew was slang for the
RPF
. (The rough translation is “freedom fighter,” a term the
RPF
meant seriously but opponents used sarcastically.) The translator turned back to Brent and told him that the villagers believed the
RPF
was responsible for the murders. Brent was sure the man was coaching the testimony. From that day forward, we did not trust that translator, and it was later strongly suspected that he was an
RGF
spy who had been ordered to infiltrate our mission. (After the war, the
RPF
identified six of our local staff as spies for the
RGF
. My first civilian driver turned out to be a militia member, and it was alleged that a francophone staffer in the
SRSG
's office was an informant to the
MRND
.)