Shake Hands With the Devil (54 page)

With Resolution 912 now in writing, I ordered the accelerated withdrawal of about one thousand troops to Nairobi to be held there no more than three days so that I could perhaps get them back if a ceasefire was agreed upon in Arusha. By mid-afternoon, I was informed that the
UN
staff in Nairobi was redirecting the troops toward home as the Kenyan government refused to permit them to leave their camp at the airfield, and conditions there were appalling. Once they were sent home, even if still earmarked for
UNAMIR
, they would disappear in their garrisons and we would have to start again from scratch.

Some fine pickle I was in with my depleted command. I had to explain to my troops—many of whom were very tired and sickly because of the lack of proper food and medicine, while others were in a zombie state after living horrific and traumatic experiences in this cesspool of guts, severed limbs, flesh-eating dogs and vermin—that although acts of heroism had been performed by many of them, the world had decided not to support us in our efforts but instead to pull most of us out to safety. I told their commanders to stress to them that there was no shame in this withdrawal and that they should remain ready for a potential return.

To my great displeasure, later that afternoon I received a call from Riza asking me what was going on with the withdrawal. He said that the
Washington Post
had just published on its front page a large picture of
UNAMIR
soldiers rushing an evacuation aircraft like a scared herd of cattle. Some, he said, were actually kissing the aircraft while others were dropping belongings on the tarmac as they raced to the plane.

I asked Brent to look into this, and within fifteen minutes he confirmed that during the first airlift of the day, the Bangladeshi officers and
NCO
s—leaving their troops to wait for the next plane—had conducted a very embarrassing rush on the plane. All the other flights had gone smoothly and over six hundred troops had been airlifted out. What could I say? The harm had been done. The picture of a
UN
rout in Rwanda after the resolution to withdraw had been signed had already
been flashed around the world. We were portrayed as scared rats abandoning a sinking ship. Even in their departure, the Bangladeshi contingent was able to bring my mission even further down in the eyes of those who saw us as a joke in the first place.

I had to bring the
RGF
and
RPF
leadership up to speed on the troop reductions and explain my new mission. I could not hope to bluff any longer concerning our ability to protect the roughly thirty thousand people now being held by us behind each belligerent's line. The solution I was going to propose was to begin transfers of these people to safety on their own side and thus eliminate our need to keep our sites open and protected.

First I met with Seth at the
CND
. He wanted us not only to start the transfers but also to rescue the Rwandans in hiding. I replied that though I couldn't intervene in the war, we would attempt to help. Second, I met with Bizimungu at the Diplomates, where Bagosora was again holding court with anxious and well-dressed men carrying briefcases. Bizimungu had no problem with the truce at the airfield to cover the
UNAMIR
withdrawal. But he had to get approval from the interim government about the transfers of refugees and the ongoing neutrality of the airport, which he indicated might be forthcoming. He recommended that I take up these matters with the prime minister himself the next day in Gitarama. Kambanda was not going to Arusha but was sending Colonel Gatsinzi, a powerless figure who would agree to nothing that would restrict the interim government because if he did, his life and the lives of his family would not be worth a nickel. The extremists were obviously emasculating this new attempt at a ceasefire although they overtly insisted they wanted it. And the
RPF
would not budge an inch. Once again the belligerents were set to outwit the regional and international diplomatic efforts to sort the situation out. Bizimungu ended the meeting by demonstrating considerable emotion about the
RPF
in the
CND
, and he asked me to remove all
MILOB
s and liaison officers from that site. I replied that I would not do so before I got a firm indication of when any artillery or ground attack would be conducted; my personnel were crucial in keeping me in touch with the
RPF
authorities.

I left him and headed for Mulindi, where Paul Kagame had finally agreed to meet with me.

The main road to Mulindi was still a battleground. On the back roads running through very small villages and over hilltops, I encountered ample evidence of the disastrous state of the countryside. Most of the area had recently been in
RGF
hands, and signs of fighting, including military casualties on the roads and in the ditches, littered our way. A few villages had been burnt to the ground, and bodies formed a carpet of rags in all directions. We took turns walking in front of my vehicle to make sure that we did not run over any of them. Even to this day, if I encounter an article of clothing dropped on the street, I go around it and must control the urge to check if it is a body.

Thousands of people of all ages, carrying what they could, lined dirt paths, huddled beside streams, built small shelters among the banana trees or simply sat in total despair. Everywhere one looked, children were crying, their mothers and sisters trying to console them. The putrid smell of decaying bodies in the huts along the route not only entered your nose and mouth but made you feel slimy and greasy. This was more than smell, this was an atmosphere you had to push your way through. Attempting to move bodies out of the way of the vehicle without touching them with our hands was impossible. With no real protection and amongst a population that had epidemic levels of
HIV
/
AIDS
, with every body that we moved, our hands became more covered in dried blood, in pieces of flesh. It seemed that traces of this blood stayed on my hands for months.

We finally reached the main road, about twenty kilometres south of Mulindi. We had forded streams full of bodies and passed over bridges in swamps that had been lifted by the force of the bodies piling up on the struts. We had inched our way through villages of dead humans. We had walked our vehicles through desperate mobs screaming for food and protection. We had created paths amongst the dead and half-dead with our hands. And we had thrown up even when there was nothing in our stomachs. My courageous men had been wading through scenes such as this for weeks in order to save expatriates and members of religious orders. No wonder some of them had fallen off the face of the world and had entered
a hell in their minds. We had absolutely no medication to help them.

It was getting dark by the time we reached Kagame's office and residence in the Mulindi compound, its defences orderly—nearly impregnable unless you had considerable heavy fire to support an assault. Kagame looked fit and impeccable amongst the magnificent tropical flowers of his garden. He had no time for small talk, so I quickly covered the issues of the troop reductions, the ceasefire, the neutral airport, the civilian transfers. He told me several times that he would not tolerate
UNAMIR
conducting any actions that could be interpreted as interventions. I told him that not only was intervening in the war not my mandate, I had been stripped of any capability to carry out such offensive operations. I told him in return that I would not tolerate any actions from his troops or the
RGF
that would endanger those Rwandans under my protection. He promised to make all the necessary preparations for the transfers to commence as soon as possible. He said that he had delayed his offensive on Kigali specifically to let the civilians leave the capital before the battle. He had refugee sites already marked out and asked for my help in getting aid to those locations. I told him that I would consider this request only if the aid did not end up in the vehicles and mouths of his forces. He said we should let our staffs work that out, which did not reassure me.

We then entered into a discussion of the situation on the battlefield, and I laid out my commander's operations map on the ground between us. There was no doubt that Kagame had pinned down, with minimum effort, a number of
RGF
battalions defending the Ruhengeri Hutu heartland. This permitted him, after seizing Byumba and the main road in the east, to proceed south as far as the Tanzanian border and seal it up at the river. Concurrently, he was moving his assault forces west, below Kigali, on the main axis of the paved road to the capital. Kigali was clearly being surrounded for a showdown. With one more hint about possibly consolidating along a north-south river, he abruptly ended the map exercise and moved on to discuss the Arusha meeting that was to start the next morning. He had not gone because it was up to the political wing to sort that out. He was not optimistic at all on the potential outcome, however, and basically thought that
the Arusha accords I'd been mandated to support served only “to save the lives of the military and not those of the civilians.” When we finished our session, he invited me to sleep over as it was too risky to head back to Kigali after dark. We shook hands firmly and wished each other well, and then I was escorted away.

The diplomats would posture tomorrow in Arusha, but the die had already been cast: we were moving methodically on one side, and at best haphazardly on the other, to a major fight for Kigali. During our meeting I had asked Kagame why he wasn't going straight for the jugular in Kigali, and he ignored the implications of my question. He knew full well that every day of fighting on the periphery meant certain death for Tutsis still behind
RGF
lines.

I found my escort and officers having a drink at a small cantina in the camp. Pasteur Bizimungu (who, after the
RPF
victory, would become the president of Rwanda) was there with a few politicos, and I sat down with him at the edge of the cantina as my guys and the
RPF
soldiers had a good time together, as soldiers will always find a way to do. Pasteur and I spent about an hour talking about his past, the present catastrophe, the
SRSG
, the international community, and the future of the country if the
RPF
won. We then walked up the hill and entered the house where we had held our formal meetings. There was a small fire in the fireplace, since it had gotten quite chilly when the sun went down. On a small rickety table, surrounded by four equally uncertain wooden chairs, we sat down to eat as two bowls, one of beans and the other of starchy and bland miniature bananas, were placed between our cracked plates.

The warm food and the fireplace took a toll on me, and I was nearly delirious with fatigue by the time Pasteur led me to a small guest room. On a little night table was a candle already half burned. There was a military cot with clean white sheets and a magnificent bulging pillow under a mosquito net. I got undressed, did the usual field bath with not much water, and climbed into bed, feeling a bit guilty about my troops and Brent in Kigali but so overwhelmed with the smell of clean sheets, the feel of a warm blanket and a decent meal in my stomach that I fell asleep in what seemed that night to be a brief heaven on earth. I do not remember dreaming.

^1
.
“Outgoing Code Cable 8 April 1994 Supplementary Report on
UNAMIR
Humanitarian Activities” and “Outgoing Code Cable 8 April 1994 An Update on the Current Situation in Rwanda and Military Aspects of the Mission.”

^2
.
Linda Carroll was the epitome of what a diplomat should be in a crisis. Since the president's plane went down, she had warned her area wardens, calmed everyone by radio, located most of the Canadians she knew to be in Kigali and managed to gather them in key locations. With assistance from our embassy in Nairobi and others, Brent and his team conducted dozens of missions over the next two weeks to rescue and evacuate not only Canadians but also Rwandans and other nationals. There was one large complicating factor. From her records, Linda believed there were only about 65 Canadian citizens in Kigali, but we evacuated over 195. Many travellers and expatriates do not take their security seriously and feel under no obligation to check in with their local embassies or consulates—which causes enormous effort and grief among the men and women who must try to save them when conflict breaks out.

^3
.
I found Dounkov's investigation incomplete. On July 14, however, I signed off on the board of inquiry, since it ultimately provided sufficient information to be used as the basis for
UN
compensation of the Belgian soldiers' families and the Belgian government. I added the caveat that the board required a follow-up investigation.

^4
.
Major Diagne attended nearly every meeting with me after the war started, taking detailed notes and then rewriting the minutes so that they would be legible. One evening as he sat at his desk transcribing, he felt the sudden need of prayer and slid off his chair to his knees on his prayer carpet, his head toward Mecca, as required by his Islamic faith. At that exact moment, a huge piece of shrapnel smashed through his window from a mortar explosion, flying through the space he had just vacated, bouncing off the walls and landing still red-hot near his feet. He came within a hair's breadth of certain death. Always dignified and composed, Diagne reported the damage to his window and then returned to his desk to complete his tedious but essential transcribing.

I GOT UP
at first light to head back to Kigali. The return route was a little shorter but no less ugly. Morning fires of wet banana leaves and a few lumps of hoarded coal added an acid sting to the omnipresent putrid smell of death. By 0700, I was in my
HQ
for morning prayers. Moen presented the troops-to-task plan under the reduced force, and it was immediately evident to all of us that the original target of about 250 personnel would be drastically insufficient for us to render any humanitarian assistance such as transport, surveillance, distribution of aid or the transfer of persons between the lines. I ordered the Ghanaian battalion to hold back as many qualified drivers as possible from the withdrawal. Orders went out, and over two hundred Ghanaian soldiers who had originally been scheduled to leave stayed behind with the rest of us. My force, by the end of the day, would be 454 of all ranks, along with our dozen
UN
civilians.