Shake Hands With the Devil (25 page)

Drawing from the copious notes he had taken, Luc described his encounter with the informant we code-named Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre told Luc that he had been an officer in the commandos and the Presidential Guard. He said that he had left the army to become the chief trainer for the Interahamwe, and in 1993, he had begun drilling cells of young men in the communes (villages) of Rwanda, initially under the guise of preparing a civil-guard-style militia to fight the
RPF
if it resumed the offensive. Jean-Pierre said that his direct superior was Mathieu Ngirumpatse, the president of the
MRND
party. He reported to and received his orders from Ngirumpatse, along with a salary of 150,000 Rwandan francs a month (at the time, about $1,500 U.S.). He told Luc that in the past few months, the real plan behind the training of the Interahamwe had begun to be articulated.

He and others like him were ordered to have the cells under their command make lists of the Tutsis in their various communes. Jean-Pierre suspected that these lists were being made so that, when the time came, the Tutsis, or the
Inyenzi
as Rwandan hate radio called them—the word means “cockroaches” in Kinyarwanda—could easily be rounded up and exterminated. Jean-Pierre said he hated the
RPF
and saw them as the enemy of Rwanda, but he was horrified that he had been drawn into a plan to create a series of highly efficient death squads that, when turned loose on the population, could kill a thousand Tutsis in Kigali within twenty minutes of receiving the order. He described in detail how the Interahamwe were being trained at army bases and by army instructors in several locations around the country, and that on a weekly basis a number of young men would be collected and transported for a three-week weapons and paramilitary training course that placed special emphasis on killing techniques. Then the young men were returned to their communes and ordered to make lists of Tutsis and await the call to arms.

I was silent, hit by the depth and reality of this information. It was
as if the informant, Jean-Pierre, had opened the floodgates on the hidden world of the extremist third force, which until this point had been a presence we could sense but couldn't grasp.

Luc told us that until now the only weapons the Interahamwe possessed were traditional spears, clubs and machetes, but Jean-Pierre had claimed that the army had recently transferred four large shipments of AK-47s, ammunition and grenades to the militia. These weapons were stored in four separate arms caches in Kigali. He offered to show us one of the caches to confirm the information he was giving us. For revealing all four arms caches and everything else he knew about the Interahamwe, including its leaders, financing, links to the
MRND
party, the civil service, army and the Gendarmerie, he wanted all his Rwandan francs exchanged for U.S. dollars and to be given passports for himself and his family to a friendly Western nation. He also warned us to be careful about who we told about him: not only was the local civilian staff of
UNAMIR
infiltrated, but the extremists had also recruited a civilian Franco-African on Booh-Booh's staff. Jean-Pierre said a stream of information about mission decisions at the highest level was being passed directly to Mathieu Ngirumpatse.

To demonstrate his authenticity, Jean-Pierre said that he had helped organize and control the demonstrations that had occurred the previous Saturday morning. He said the aim of these violent demonstrations had been to provoke
UNAMIR
's Belgian troops. At each location, selected individuals were to threaten the Belgians with clubs and machetes in order to push them into firing warning shots. Had this plan worked, as soon as shots rang out, members of the Presidential Guard, the Gendarmerie and the
RGF
para-commando regiment, already mingling with the crowd, would uncover hidden firearms. The roundabout near the Presidential Guards' compound had been littered with hidden weapons and radios. The ambush would be sprung for one purpose only: to kill Belgian soldiers.

Jean-Pierre told Luc that the trap was intended to kill some ten Belgians. The leadership of the Hutu Power movement had determined that Belgium had no stomach for taking casualties in their old colony, and if Belgian soldiers were killed, the nation would withdraw from
UNAMIR
. He said that the extremists knew the Belgians had the best contingent in
UNAMIR
and were the backbone of the mission, and they assumed that if the Belgians left, the mission would collapse. Jean-Pierre warned that the leadership was about to make a decision to distribute the arms caches to every Interahamwe cell in Kigali. If that happened, he said, there would be no way to stop the slaughter.

While listening to Luc's briefing, I made the decision to go after the weapons caches. I had to catch these guys off guard, send them a signal that I knew who they were and what they were up to, and that I fully intended to shut them down. I knew that such a raid carried a high degree of risk and might incur casualties, but I also knew it was well within my mandate and capabilities. The spectre of the peacekeeping disasters in Somalia did not come to mind. These weapons caches were a violation of the Kigali Weapons Secure Area agreement; the arming of militias violated the Arusha accords and our mandate and presented a great risk to the safety of my force. My rules of engagement allowed the use of unilateral force in self-defence, in the defence of the force overall and the prevention of crimes against humanity. We needed to confirm the existence of the caches before we acted, just in case Jean-Pierre was baiting a trap for us. But if the informer was telling the truth, we had to act.

When Luc finished his report, there was a moment of absolute silence. I looked over at Brent to find his face flushed with what I can only describe as elation. Finally it looked like we could identify the third force, grab hold of it and wrestle it down. After months of frustration, of being forced to act after the fact, we had a chance to seize the initiative.

Luc's debriefing had gone on for nearly two hours, bringing us to midnight. I thanked him for a job well done and instructed Captain Claeys to keep meeting with Jean-Pierre for more information. I then led what amounted to a council of war. I ordered Luc to have his staff begin planning four simultaneous search-and-seizure operations on the arms caches within the next thirty-six hours, and to keep this planning on a strict need-to-know basis within his headquarters. There was to be another attempt at a swearing-in ceremony on Wednesday, January 12, two days from now. Jean-Pierre represented a fork in the road. By acting on his information, we would either galvanize the political process or reveal it as a sham.

After Luc left, I decided to inform the
SRSG
first thing in the morning—I was gravely concerned about the security of this information within the
SRSG
's staff—and also to put together for General Baril a carefully worded code cable, which I would send as soon as possible. By sending the code cable directly to Baril, I was breaking the usual protocol. The standard operating procedure was to route all communications on matters of substance between a force commander and the
DPKO
through the civilian political hierarchy—in this case, through Booh-Booh and his office. The only time a force commander was to deal directly with the military adviser or any other concerned department at the
UN
was in order to discuss purely administrative matters or requirements. My decision on January 11 to send this code cable under my signature directly to the military adviser—Maurice Baril—was unprecedented. I was opening a line of communication in an area where I had no authority to do so. But I believed that these revelations from Jean-Pierre had to be acted upon immediately.
¹
I ended the cable with my high school and 5ième Brigade motto: “
Peux ce que veux. Allons-y!
”

Sending the cable was also a risk on several fronts. While the code cable to New York was secure from intercept, documents often travelled through many hands before they reached the desks of Baril, Riza and Annan. In one of those ironies of life, as of January 1, the Rwandan regime had a seat on the Security Council—the luck of the rotation that saw member nations take up temporary duties on the council alongside the permanent members. As a result, the Rwandans were now privy to many secure documents concerning the mission in their home country.

I needed New York to realize that, even though I wanted to move quickly, I was not blind to the possibility that this could be a well-laid
trap to force
UNAMIR
onto the offensive and jeopardize our role as keepers of a fragile peace. I also wanted to make it clear in the cable that I was not asking permission to raid the caches but was informing New York of my intentions, as was my responsibility as force commander. I was finally going to be able to wrest the initiative from the hard-liners. Brent and I fiddled around with the wording for over two hours. When we were satisfied with the document, Brent raced to the Amahoro to print it out and send it. I went to bed with the firm belief that we now had a handle on a situation that had been spiralling out of control.

When I woke up the next morning after a few fitful hours of sleep, I was still in seventh heaven. I was convinced that we were on the verge of regaining the initiative or at least of throwing the extremists off-balance, making them vulnerable to defections, to panic, to making foolish mistakes. Little did I realize as I waved to the local kids on the side of the dirt road on my way to work, that New York was already shooting my plan of action out of the water.

The code cable from Kofi Annan, signed by Riza, came to me and the
SRSG
; its contents caught me completely off guard. It took me to task for even thinking about raiding the weapons caches and ordered me to suspend the operation immediately. Annan spelled out in excruciating detail the limits New York was placing upon me as force commander of a chapter-six peacekeeping operation; not only was I not allowed to conduct deterrent operations in support of
UNAMIR
, but in the interests of transparency, I was to provide the information that Jean-Pierre had given to us to President Habyarimana immediately. I was absolutely beside myself with frustration. The November massacres, the presence of heavily armed militias, a rabid extremist press screaming about Tutsi
Inyenzi
and demanding that blood be shed, the political impasse and the resultant tension—all were signs that we were no longer in a classic chapter-six peacekeeping situation. Jean-Pierre simply connected the dots, revealing that the mission—and the Arusha Peace Agreement—were at risk. Something had to be done to save us from catastrophe. For the rest of the week, I made phone call after phone call to New York, arguing with Maurice over the necessity of raiding the arms caches. During these
exchanges, I got the feeling that New York now saw me as a loose cannon and not as an aggressive but careful force commander.

My failure to persuade New York to act on Jean-Pierre's information still haunts me. If only I had been able to get Maurice onside, to have him as my friend in court to persuade Annan and Riza that I wasn't some gun-happy cowboy. I know now that the
DPKO
was still reeling in the wake of the American debacle in Somalia, in which eighteen American soldiers were killed while attempting to arrest a warlord in the streets of Mogadishu. But I was presenting a reasonable, carefully laid-out plan that was consistent with the approach I had adopted from the very beginning: to maximize our rules of engagement in order to ensure the atmosphere of security demanded by the peace agreement. The tone of the
DPKO
's code cable suggested a total disconnect between me and New York; they no longer trusted my judgment to conduct an operation that, while risky, was nowhere near as dangerous as Operation Clean Corridor, which we had pulled off without a hitch. In my view the inside information offered us by Jean-Pierre represented a real chance to pull Rwanda out of the fire. The
DPKO
's response whipped the ground out from under me.

The deaths and injuries suffered by the Pakistani Blue Berets and then the American Rangers in Somalia must have had a huge impact not only on the triumvirate in the
DPKO
but on many member nations. At the time there was simply no appetite for any operation that might lead to “friendly” casualties—the whole atmosphere within the
DPKO
and surrounding it was risk-averse. In my code cable I had pushed for a potentially high-risk offensive, diametrically opposed to the reigning climate at the
UN
. No wonder the reaction had been so rapid, deliberate and unequivocally negative. Still, as understandable as the
UN
decision was, it was unacceptable to me in the field. If we did not react to the reality of the arms caches, the weapons could eventually be turned against us and against many innocent Rwandans.

When I briefed the
SRSG
and Dr. Kabia on the situation on the morning of January 11, Dr. Kabia supported me fully and Booh-Booh was noncommittal. I hoped the
SRSG
might help me make a last appeal to New York, but I was mistaken. He had authority to go directly to
Boutros-Ghali to argue that the
DPKO
's decision be overturned, but he brushed aside any such idea and suggested we follow New York's instructions to the letter. Just before going to see Habyarimana on the morning of January 12, the
SRSG
, Dr. Kabia and I fully briefed the ambassadors of Belgium and the United States and the chargé d'affaires of France. All of them acknowledged the information we provided and stated they would inform their respective governments. None of them appeared to be surprised, which led me to conclude that our informant was merely confirming what they already knew. I pleaded with them to help us find sanctuary for Jean-Pierre and his family, but the Americans, the Belgians and the French refused to assist. We had been able to verify most of the information he had offered us at considerable risk to himself and his family; I knew the diplomatic community had helped other valued informants in tricky circumstances, and I could not and still cannot understand their refusal.