Shake Hands With the Devil (50 page)

Only New Zealand's Colin Keating, the president of the Security Council, thought they should move to stop this catastrophe. He actually proposed that the
UN
should
“increase the strength of
UNAMIR
and . . . revise its mandate to enable it to contribute to the restoration of law and order and the establishment of the transitional institutions within the framework of the Arusha Peace Agreement.”
In case my heart lifted too high, Riza pointed out in the cable that neither the language nor the resolution had been agreed upon.

Later that morning I was handed another cable from Riza. I had requested clarification from his office as to the Standing
UN
Operational Orders in regards to persons under our protection. His answer: it was my call on the priority, feasibility and level of response to
these demands. “In the abnormal circumstances prevailing,” he wrote, “these orders may be overridden at the discretion of the
SRSG
and
FC
[force commander], for humanitarian reasons.” I felt sickened as I read. On the morning of April 7 Riza ordered me “not to fire unless fired upon.” Now he was saying that all along it had been the Force Commander's prerogative to take offensive action for humanitarian reasons.

Ten days into the killing, Captain Deme summed up the state of the war as far as the belligerents went. In an intelligence report to me, he wrote, the “general intention seems that [the
RPF
] are conducting a deep penetration to control the main
RGF
supply routes, to surround the main targets and to make assaults only once they are ready. They have no interest in the airport at this time. They are slowly, calmly and coolly gaining terrain. Many important targets like Byumba are surrounded. They are installing Tutsis in areas already under their control.” When pressed on that issue, Seth and the other
RPF
politicos simply said that they were letting the Tutsi refugees come home—surely there was nothing wrong with that since it was one of the aims of the whole Arusha exercise. But once the Tutsis were in place, the
RPF
guaranteed some humanitarian
NGO
s safety behind the front lines, and the
NGO
s—hotheaded and undisciplined in my view—moved in to feed and aid these supposedly displaced people. Of course, the
RPF
controlled all the aid distribution points and “recuperated” their share from the people the
NGO
s were pledged to help. This was a flagrant instance of
NGO
s providing aid and comfort to a belligerent, and as far as I could see, there was no way to stop it except by making the issue part of the ceasefire negotiations.

Deme's assessment of the
RGF
was revealing. The troops were receiving very little tactical information or direction at the front; soldiers were deserting, while others looted to feed themselves. Some troops wanted peace and had confidence in
UNAMIR
(once the Belgians were gone), and a rift was starting between some military units and the Interahamwe. As anticipated, the
RGF
front-line troops and recruits, undisciplined and disorganized, would not put up much of a fight.

I went back and forth between the
RPF
and
RGF
, trying to arrange a meeting to discuss the terms of a ceasefire. They all finally agreed to
meet at the Meridien hotel. On the government side, the delegate was supposed to be Ndindiliyimana, but when I arrived with an
APC
and some Bangladeshi troops to pick him up, the
RGF
had decided to send Marcel Gatsinzi instead, telling me that the head of the Gendarmerie would be saved for the next, more senior round of discussions. It was a very nervous Gatsinzi, charged with pleading for an unconditional ceasefire, who joined me in the
APC
. He would hold his breath each time we hit a roadblock and I would pop my head up through the hatch to help argue us through. Getting out of the
RGF
and Interahamwe zone was really slow, but in the
RPF
-held areas we were flagged right along. I got the driver to run the
APC
right up the stairs at the front of the hotel to get us as close to the doors as possible and got out first to cover Rusatira's exit from the vehicle.

The meeting was being held in the spacious hotel dining room, flanked by two walls of windows. When we walked in, the curtains were wide open, and my first move was to get help pulling the drapes. With the curtains closed and the doors shut, it made for a hot, uncomfortable afternoon. Mamadou Kane was there and took charge of the formalities, but the
RPF
was late, as was Booh-Booh. Gatsinzi's face fell when he saw that the
RPF
delegation was indeed very low-level, just Commander Charles from the
CND
and Frank Kamenzi, the
RPF
's liaison to
UNAMIR
. When Booh-Booh arrived, flanked by his personal security detail and accompanied by Dr. Kabia, it was clear he was also disappointed in the
RPF
showing.

Booh-Booh turned to Gatsinzi first, and Gatsinzi did his best to make an impassioned plea for the immediate cessation of hostilities and of the massacres. The soldiers who were killing civilians had received no orders from him or his headquarters; they were rogue elements that must be stopped. And he closed by saying he regretted the terrible loss of
UNAMIR
personnel and thanked us for staying on in Rwanda.

In response, Commander Charles did not budge an inch but simply restated the
RPF
's preconditions for the ceasefire, that inexorable chicken-and-egg scenario of having to stop the killing before they could stop the killing. I quote: “All these conditions are not negotiable and must be executed immediately.” He even handed out copies.

Booh-Booh in his capacity as chair summed up. Both positions reflected a desire for peace, he said. Well, yes, but the
RPF
was the intransigent party. It had the
RGF
on the run and had just essentially demanded that the moderates conduct a
coup d'état
of their own. We'd then have a three-way civil war on our hands in addition to the massacres. I felt pity for Gatsinzi, and something close to disdain for the smug Commander Charles, who was clearly willing to countenance all the killing while his side remained cloaked in bogus superiority. At that moment, as if on cue, gunshots sounded behind the hotel. A glass door behind the drapes opened with a crash, and all our hearts skipped a beat. Then a Belgian officer fought his way through the curtains to report that the shots had been fired by a single trigger-happy
RPF
soldier. We resumed our negotiations in an even tenser state and got absolutely nowhere. After the meeting ended, I drove a morose Gatsinzi back to army headquarters. He was a man fighting a losing battle with the extremists, and after sticking his neck out to attend this meeting and being rebuffed so firmly, he had become more vulnerable. The lack of progress at this first formal ceasefire negotiation would only give weight to the option of total withdrawal at the Security Council.

When I got back to the Amahoro, I found out that the Security Council deliberations had ended that day with a split between those supporting option one (the non-aligned nations, as well as China, France and Argentina) and those supporting option two (the United Kingdom, Russia, and the United States under duress). Colin Keating had concluded the discussions by saying that it wasn't necessary to reach a final decision that day. Seeing as it was Friday, we would have to wait until at least Monday for word on our future. We were in limbo. There would be no cavalry coming over the hill. How many thousands of Rwandans would die that weekend?

Each new day there were new rounds of ceasefire negotiations and discussions aimed at an agreement to bring the airport under
UNAMIR
control. The killings were accelerating. More and more Rwandans were coming to us for protection. There were continuous ambushes, firefights and shelling that resulted in casualties in most of our protection sites. Lost or forgotten expatriates called every day asking to be rescued
from impossible and dangerous circumstances. Every day we scrambled for food and water and tried to get simple items like paper from a support base a thousand miles away, in Nairobi, Kenya. My people were edgy and exhausted, and nothing was more wearing on them than the endless bickering of diplomats.

On April 16, I received a letter from the manager of the Mille Collines saying there were now over four hundred people, mostly Tutsis, taking sanctuary in his hotel. The Tunisians and some
MOLOB
s had done an excellent job in bluffing the militia and keeping the hotel safe, but the manager thought it only a matter of time before the militia assaulted the hotel and asked that the people be moved. I ordered Bangladeshi troops to reinforce the hotel but received a formal letter of protest from their commanding officer, stating the mission was too dangerous and informing me he had passed his protest of the order on to Dhaka. I retracted the order. What was the use? If they'd obeyed the order there was a good chance they would have fallen apart in any confrontation. For the time being there was nothing we could do. Moving four hundred people would be more dangerous for them than maintaining the uneasy détente with the militia.

I can't say enough about the bravery of the Tunisians. They never shirked their duty and always displayed the highest standards of courage and discipline in the face of difficult and dangerous tasks. That morning at the King Faisal Hospital, for instance, Tunisian troops were confronted by a platoon of
RPF
soldiers desperately low on medical supplies, who argued that whatever was in the hospital was theirs as spoils of war, and then broke in with two sections of infantry. The head of the Tunisian contingent, Commandant Belgacem, stopped them in their tracks with his small reserve force. He had his men in a solid position to defend the medical supply section of the hospital and made it clear to the
RPF
that he would open fire—the few supplies they held had been flown in for the over seven thousand wounded Rwandans in the hospital compound. The Bangladeshi field hospital commander then came forward and worked out a deal with the
RPF
, and the troops retreated with not a shot fired.

A couple of hours later, I stopped to congratulate the soldiers and
toured the facility. Every room and corridor was filled with sick, injured and dying Rwandans. Families were huddled with children, who were crying, hungry and dehydrated. The operating area was dispensing what care and bandages they had amid the smell of unwashed bodies, congealed blood, and death. With no water supply for washing, they risked a cholera epidemic. In the back of the building, a large fenced area held thousands of people of all ages and a collection of small tents, clothes, latrines and garbage. It was like a concentration camp. Here the elderly suffered a slow death, and newborns brought anguish to their mothers, who couldn't feed them.

There was no water and very little food, with nothing to cook it in and next to no wood to heat it. As I walked among the sick they were begging on their knees, pulling at my clothes, holding their babies up to me. I had nothing to ease their plight. I was guided by a few of the leaders to the site where a large mortar bomb had exploded the day before. The ground had been only lightly disturbed because the impact fuse most likely hit some humans first and exploded instantaneously, spreading a maximum of shrapnel at surface level. There were traces of flesh, brain and blood in the immediate area. Dozens of shredded bodies had been moved and buried. There were over a hundred people still alive who had horrific gashes from the shrapnel. There had been a panic to get inside the hospital itself, and children had been trampled to death. Fights had broken out for space, but in the end everyone had settled down again because they had nowhere else to go—if they went beyond the compound fence they would be killed. Death was all around them, and now death had started to invade from the sky. I wanted to scream, to vomit, to hit something, to break free of my body, to end this terrible scene. Instead I struggled to compose myself, knowing composure was critical with so many despairing eyes upon me. I thanked the medical teams for their efforts and promised them all supplies as soon as I could get them.

Before he left, Colonel Roman, the Belgian para-commando commander, gave me a phone number in Tanzania where he was deploying his brigade for the next couple of weeks. He told me he and his soldiers would remain in Tanzania just in case we needed help extricating
ourselves once we were ordered to withdraw. He phoned twice over the next ten days, asking me if I was withdrawing and if I could use any help, and both times I said no. I suspected that the Belgians didn't want
UNAMIR
to take any casualties that could be directly associated with the Belgians' abandonment of the mission.

The first three Canadian officers arrived that day from Somalia, and I barely let them unpack before I put them to work. I asked Major Michel Bussières to take over the personnel branch in the Force
HQ
. Though I'd been told that all our people had been accounted for, the branch had not been able to provide me with even a nominal roll. Within twenty-four hours, Major Bussières had it sorted, and he went on to provide sterling service as we downsized the mission. I gave Major Jean-Guy Plante the job of media officer, escorting and coordinating all journalists in and out of theatre. I told him I wanted at least one report a day to appear on international news networks, and with
BBC
reporter Mark Doyle, that is what Major Plante accomplished, trying to spark the world's conscience. The naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Robert Read, I tasked with building from scratch a logistics base at the airport to unload, sort, store and disperse the supplies that were now starting to flow in on the two Canadian Forces Hercules shuttling back and forth from Nairobi. Read did have to ask Brent, “What's a logistics base?” But once he knew, he settled to his task and within days had created it. That first day, Brent was overwhelmed with rescue missions and tasked Plante and Read to go with a Bangladeshi
APC
to rescue a Rwandan-Canadian hiding at the Mille Collines. He and his family had been vacationing in Rwanda on April 7 and had fled their relatives' home. His wife and daughter had been caught and killed by a mob, but he had saved his two sons and hidden them away. Plante and Read sneaked him out of the hotel and back to the Force
HQ
, where he revealed the location of his sons. Plante and Read then went back out again and rescued his boys. What remained of the family was evacuated to Nairobi and then home to Canada the next day.