Shake Hands With the Devil (51 page)

That night the fate of the Rwandan refugees at the Mille Collines kept me awake. I knew that an attack could occur any minute. I wanted to use force to defend all the sites under our shaky protection, but I
knew I didn't have the military capability—I could only hope the militia did not call our bluff. I called Moigny (the Congolese
MILOB
who commanded the site) and asked him to call me directly to check in every night, especially if an attack started. For many nights to come I talked to him over the radio, offering encouragement if nothing substantive. Over the next weeks he would prove himself to be a magnificent leader of men, fending off with his Tunisians three large force attacks against the hotel, as well as a couple of bombardments.

There were more requests for assistance as the rogue elements of the
RGF
and Gendarmerie overtly allied with the Interahamwe and other militias. This alliance was fuelled by a call over
RTLM
from the interim government for all ordinary citizens to take up arms nationwide and mount barricades or roadblocks to protect themselves against what
RTLM
billed as a rebel army bent on infiltrating and killing Hutus. It was a sort of mass mobilization of the population, and the result was that there were now three belligerents in the fight, one fanatically dedicated to exterminating an entire ethnic group.

Our blue-beret neutrality was under fire. It was only a matter of time before my troops would be engaged in battle with the murderous hordes of militia, or even with one or both of the warring parties. We were entering a new phase of the conflict, where our bluffs would be called.

At the roadblocks throughout Kigali, there were more youths with machetes and spears. Ten days into the genocide (a word I had yet to start using to describe what was going on around me, for reasons that still elude me: maybe simple denial that anything like the Holocaust could be happening again), most streets were vacant except for the patrols of prisoners from the Kigali jails who were loading corpses into dump trucks for disposal in mass graves outside the city.

The memory of those trucks is indelible. Blood, dark, half-coagulated, oozed like thick paint from the back of them. One day I saw a young Hutu girl in a light dress, wearing sandals, lose her balance as she slipped on the blood beside the truck. She landed hard, and though she got up immediately, it was as if someone had painted her body and her dress with a dark red oil. She became hysterical looking at it, and the more she screamed, the more attention she drew. Soon we were surrounded by
hundreds of people, many carrying weapons. In seconds, such a crowd could lash out at any target. I rolled down my window and greeted them in Kinyarwanda. Some of them started to hammer on the vehicle. I kept my open palms quite visible in the traditional expression of friendship. People in the crowd recognized me and called my name, even smiled, and I was able to ease the vehicle forward until we were clear of the mob. The scene took only fifteen minutes but felt like an eternity.

For the last four days we had been forwarding our radio logs to the
UN
at the end of the day, as requested by the
DPKO
, a practice we carried on until the end. I thought that if the
UN
knew what we were dealing with day to day, someone might still come to our aid. Instead, the log was used to inform troop-contributing nations of the state of risk to their national contingents, effectively scaring off the timid. We finished the newest military assessment late that night and sent it on: by now one would have had to have been blind or illiterate not to know what was going on in Rwanda. In this report, I informed my superiors that, with all of these hard-liners now in positions of authority in the
RGF
and the Gendarmerie, we were witnessing the death of any desire on the
RGF
side for a ceasefire. Over the last few days while the Security Council considered, the extremist movement had been emboldened. Was it possible, I asked, that the interim government had concluded that there would be no international intervention and that they had carte blanche to exterminate the Tutsis?

I also reported that Kagame was obviously achieving his goal, though his campaign was slowing down even further. Three days ago the
RPF
could have overrun Kigali in a matter of hours, if not days. They didn't, and that was either Kagame's intention or perhaps he was slowed because they encountered stiffer resistance than they expected because of the mass mobilization of the population sparked by
RTLM
, or possibly because they were running out of supplies. If supplies were the problem, the
RGF
might potentially produce enough defensive capability to stop the
RPF
and turn this into a protracted war. As it stood, I wrote, the killings were increasing in scale and scope “just ahead of the
RPF
advance” and under the eyes of the
RGF
and the Gendarmerie.

I was pushing the
NGO
community, the humanitarian agencies and the
UN
Department of Humanitarian Affairs to link up with my nascent humanitarian branch in response to the immense effort needed in Rwanda, but we faced a huge quandary in the risks we were required to run. “Rapidly
UNAMIR
is being dragged into a peace enforcement scenario for humanitarian reasons,” I reported. “If this mission is to be changed into a peace enforcement scenario to stop the massacres and rescue threatened civilians then a change in mandate will be required and the mission must be reinforced with men, weapons and equipment.” I added, “ . . . the [Bangladeshi] contingent's junior officers have clearly stated that if they are stopped at a roadblock with local people in the convoy, they will hand over these local people to the inevitable killing rather than use their weapons in an attempt to save them. . . . 
UNAMIR
must be prepared to defend the airport with one battalion as it is our and the humanitarian agencies' lifeline.”

In conclusion, I wrote, “The force simply cannot continue to sit on the fence in the face of all these morally legitimate demands for assistance/protection, nor can it simply launch into Chapter 7 type of operations without the proper authority, personnel and equipment. It is thus anticipated that over the next 24 hours or so, the Force Commander will either recommend a thinning out of the force down to a responsible level needed for security of airport, political process, humanitarian support tasks . . . a force of 1,300 personnel, or the
FC
will recommend . . . the 250 men force.”

On Sunday I received another of Riza's cables. He provided some surprisingly direct guidance on the intransigence of the
RPF
. “It should be impressed upon the
RPF
that without some quick agreement on a cease-fire—even a limited one—by Wednesday [April 20] at the latest, the Security Council can be expected to decide to withdraw
UNAMIR
from Rwanda. At that time the
RPF
could be blamed for not accepting the cease-fire to allow discussions to begin. Only once a durable cease-fire has been established, [can we move on to] the creation of a framework for the resumption of the Arusha [process] . . . Please stress to them that without a cease-fire, humanitarian assistance operations cannot begin.”

There was disturbing news in the cable as well: “Your plans to start sharp reduction of
UNAMIR
personnel is approved. This also will demonstrate imminence of withdrawal of
UNAMIR
if cease-fire is not achieved.” I had given them an argument for pulling out, and they jumped on it, though that hadn't been my intention. Henry and I, talking late that night, mulled over how little the massacres and the plight of the Rwandan people seemed to inflect the instructions we were receiving. Maybe they believed a ceasefire would automatically stop the killing, which was naive in the extreme given what was happening behind
RGF
lines. I felt helpless and frustrated by what I viewed at the time as my inability to make the horror sink into the minds and souls of the people in the
DPKO
, the security council, the secretary-general's office, the world at large.

Before going to sleep, I went downstairs to spend some time with the six civilian communications staff who had insisted on staying with us after the rest of their colleagues had been evacuated. Although they were living in squalor in the back of what had been the Amahoro hotel kitchen, their morale seemed to soar with each passing day. They had scrounged some Primus beer and offered me one, and we sat together in a fug of fatigue and cigarette smoke and a whirl of their loud commentary on where I could stick the Security Council and all its dithering, along with our gang in the “Club Med” in Nairobi. On a serious note, their manager brought to my attention the fact that the main satellite and control system, located near the operations centre, was not sufficiently protected against heavy fire from either party. I made a mental note to cover the communications system in sandbags the next morning and then headed off to try to sleep. Two days later, a bomb exploded no more than five metres from the new sandbag barrier around communications central. The system was damaged and went down for nineteen long, isolated hours, but it wasn't destroyed. I scrounged a bottle of whisky as a thank-you present to those men for their prescient advice.

On April 18, I awoke to machine-gun fire and the sound of exploding grenades. The Force
HQ
was under bombardment. Today was the day that Luc was leaving with the Belgian contingent. He had been one of the first
on the ground, and his steady nerves and professionalism, his rock-solid moral sense, had provided me with a certain feeling of confidence, even security. He was handing over airport security to Colonel Yaache, the Ghanaian commander in the demilitarized zone, and Yaache and I met with Luc at 0800 to discuss the last details. Luc did not look well. The fatigue, the stress, the physical and mental pain and the crushing weight of his Kigali Sector command had finally worn him down, and he stood before me slightly hunched and short of breath. I could see the shame, sorrow and uncertainty of his position reflected in his eyes. But he soon straightened his back and got on with the job at hand, conveying the necessary information.

I had wanted to have a little leave-taking ceremony for Luc at the airport, but the
RPF
had vetoed that, so we made do at the Force
HQ
, presenting Luc with the
UNAMIR VIP
gift of a wooden statuette of a traditional Rwandan warrior. (We had bought a few of these impressive statuettes before the war; we later found the bodies of the Tutsi carvers slaughtered in their shop.) I know my words were inadequate to thank him for the services he had performed for the mission and for the people of Rwanda.

The Belgian government had offered Faustin sanctuary, and Luc had already stashed the prime minister designate in the
APC
. Before Luc left, I took him aside to try to express privately how sorry I was about the loss of
KIBAT
and to thank him for leaving us with Belgian equipment, weapons, supplies and ammunition. I was about to tell him how proud I was of him and how sad I was at his departure when several artillery and mortar rounds landed inside the Force
HQ
compound and the stadium. Glass broke all around us, and for a moment panic reigned. More than a dozen people were killed, and more than a hundred were wounded, including a Ghanaian blue beret, but the drills we had practised served the situation well and things calmed down.

Then Luc said his quick goodbyes and was gone.

As I sat down amongst the crowd of military and civilians waiting for either a direct hit or an end to the bombardment, the full realization of his departure struck me with a potent sense of loss, and something more bitter. Dewez and his two hundred paras would be gone
tomorrow, as well. The former colonial masters were running from this fight with their tails between their legs.

People were huddling in every corner of the main hall. I'd been able to come up with enough sandbags to protect the satellite system, but we had not been able to reinforce the doors and windows. Around me were young children with tears in their eyes, trying to be brave; poorly clothed men and women, using their bodies to make human shields to protect their kids; soldiers smoking nervously, flinching slightly with each explosion. If a round were to hit the front or the back of the building, there would be a horrific mess of human arms, legs and brains.

The bombardment lasted an hour. When it stopped, Brent and I made a quick survey of the damage: broken windows, a part of the outside kitchen wall blasted away, a number of vehicles in the compound damaged but most still workable. As we made our way back to the office, Brent looked through a broken panel on the roof and saw an unexploded 120-millimetre mortar bomb wedged between some pipes. He passed on the job of safely removing it to one of the Polish engineer officers who had witnessed the Gikondo Parish Massacre. We found out later that he had simply picked up the unexploded bomb and carried it through the building, out of the compound and across the street where he set it down. It could have exploded at any time. Brent suspected he had suffered psychological damage and had a death wish after witnessing the Gikondo massacre. The officer was repatriated shortly afterwards, not the last psychological casualty of
UNAMIR
.

Rgf troops were still billeted at the airport and in Camp Kanombe nearby, but during the French and Belgian evacuation operations, they had been prevented from engaging in any military action at the airport by well-armed foreign troops. We now had neither the mandate nor the muscle of these troops, and when the Belgians flew away, the
RGF
moved back into the airport. If the
RGF
didn't sign the airport neutrality agreement by the next day, April 19, we would have to cohabit with them in a worsening security situation. Their presence at the airport would also draw
RPF
fire, leaving us and any humanitarian resupply or evacuation flights much too vulnerable for comfort.