Shake Hands With the Devil (57 page)

Two days later, his wife called and found him nearly paralyzed with pain and delirious. She contacted the Canadian Forces Operations Centre in Ottawa, which contacted our air force detachment in Nairobi, which picked him up and took him to the hospital. The next day he was evacuated to Canada. He had nearly died and would take almost a year to get healthy again. First from Nairobi and then from Ottawa he called to say he was being replaced. I felt like I had lost my right arm. After all that we had been through together, we were now split without even a proper goodbye. His replacement would be Major Phil Lancaster, an officer I knew very well since Phil and I had been junior officers together early in our careers. He was fluently bilingual, staff-trained, experienced and extremely skilled. Somehow I'd have to get along until he got to Kigali.

In the afternoon of the day Brent was shipped out, I had a chance to meet with Kagame regarding the ceasefire and the airport. He had promised to keep his guns clear of the airport, but not only had some of his rounds fallen on the runway, but the terminal housing the Ghanaian battalion had suffered deliberate artillery and mortar assaults, and we had established that the firing had come from
RPF
positions.

On the way up to Mulindi, taking a new route through the bush and swamps north of the city, the two vehicles of my convoy came under directed mortar fire at a prominent crossroads. Not only did the initial rounds come close enough to spray the vehicles with dirt, a couple more nearly hit us as we hastened to drive through the ambush. In this case, either side could have been the culprit, as fighting had not ended for control of the crossroads.

Kagame was waiting for me not far from his quarters. Our greetings were curt and we got right down to business. I wanted him to deal with the airport situation. He said he would instruct his troops to be careful of
UNAMIR
but that the
RGF
were well dug in en masse at Camp Kanombe, right at the end of the runway, and the airfield was inevitably going to be the focus of a big fight. I reminded him that the airport was
the principal source of aid and the humanitarian buildup, and if the airport got thoroughly blown up, I had no engineering capabilities to repair a runway.

I shared the points in the letter Booh-Booh had obtained from Bizimungu, which echoed Bagosora's enumeration of conditions for a ceasefire. Kagame surprised me by saying that the idea of the belligerents returning to the pre–April 6 positions was an invention of the French. He said that last week, the diplomatic corps in Uganda had met under the auspices of the French ambassador in Kampala. President Museveni had also attended. Kagame had sent a representative, who made it quite clear that such a return was a no go. He was surprised that I raised it again today and that I was so obviously in the dark about the Kampala meeting. As far as Kagame was concerned, I was the
UN
representative in Rwanda and I had to sort this out.

He had one more subject he wanted to discuss, out of the blue it seemed to me at that moment. He was not going to be happy with any reinforcement of
UNAMIR
that looked like an intervention force. With the ceasefire going nowhere fast and his successes mounting on the battlefield, it was obvious why he wouldn't be.

I told him outright that there had been no discussion of an intervention force coming from
UNAMIR
and that if a force was being considered, it was to help stop the massacres and then work on the ceasefire and its potential application.

But Kagame contradicted me. “The
UN
is looking at sending an intervention force on humanitarian grounds, but for what reason?” he asked. “Those that were to die are already dead. If an intervention force is sent to Rwanda, we will fight it. Let us solve the problem of the Rwandans. This force is to protect the criminals in power. The international community cannot even condemn the massacres of poor innocent people. It is presenting the Rwandan problem as an ethnic one, which is incorrect as the massacres were against Tutsis and the opposition. All my soldiers that I command have individually lost family, starting with myself. My idea is not to divide the country but to hunt the criminals everywhere they might be.”

He berated France and world indifference and blamed the
UN
for
not giving me an appropriate mandate when the time was right. And then, as a final shot, he banished Booh-Booh: “The
SRSG
is not welcome anymore in Rwanda. We do not recognize him, and if he stays we will cease to collaborate with the
UN
.” After politely offering me and my party beds for the night, he excused himself.

It was already past 1700. With direct death threats uttered against me, I knew it would be dangerous to try to get back to the city in our unmistakable white
SUV
s with the blue
UN
flags after nightfall, but I decided I had to pass on this pronouncement to Booh-Booh that night as well as touch base with the triumvirate. I also had to review the first draft of our response on the future of
UNAMIR
.

Dark descended on us as we wove our way back over the hills and down into valleys, our headlights picking out the roadblocks manned by drunken militia and half-asleep
RGF
soldiers. Around one curve, out of the pitch-black we fell into what looked like a swarm of fireflies, an entire cosmos. For as far as we could see, on the mountain slopes and seemingly high into the sky, thousands upon thousands of small fires and candles flickered in the perfectly still night. We had driven into a displaced persons' camp. We cut our speed drastically to manoeuvre through crowds of people still moving on the main route, hardly able to make out their dark shapes against the night. We crept along, our hearts in our mouths, hoping that we wouldn't attract the wrong kind of attention, for what seemed like endless kilometres, and then, just like our sudden stumbling into this unusual carpet of stars, we were out of it and back into utter blackness.

When we made it to the Force
HQ
, Henry was very relieved to see us. I spoke separately to Dr. Kabia, confiding to him alone Kagame's comment about Booh-Booh. I then called the triumvirate and briefed them on my session. Since Brent was gone, the draft notes to the secretary-general's report were not ready for my review. For a time I slept in my big chair by the window in my office-cum-bedroom. An hour later, I was awoken with the news that my new aide-de-camp, Captain Ndiaye, had gone to the Meridien hotel to bring some papers to Booh-Booh and had been ambushed about five hundred metres from the hotel. One of the bullets had creased the left side of his head, giving him an awful
headache. The
RPF
soldiers controlled the area and were undoubtedly the culprits. Kagame's troops were getting more and more trigger-happy, and it was time for him to sort them out. So far, his troops had handled themselves quite well. There had been a case of rape that was dealt with summarily—the guilty soldier was shot. We had witnessed no looting per se. Bizimungu had told me that all the families of the senior officers in Byumba had been killed outright after the fall of that city. An
RPF
non-commissioned officer had come across his own uncles, aunts and cousins who had all been slaughtered by machete in Ramagana. He had gone on a rampage, killing Hutus until he was stopped.

The next morning I met with Bizimungu at the Diplomates, in our regular place looking out on a magnificent garden now full of artillery and mortar shell holes. A window was cracked and splattered with mud from the explosions. Once I briefed him on my meeting with Kagame, Froduald Karamira, the vice-president of the
MDR
, slipped into the room and joined us. I had a proposition for them: I wanted them to arrange for me to meet the Interahamwe leadership. If I was going to approve humanitarian efforts and civilian transfers I wanted to form a personal impression of the militia's willingness to let this happen since it would be impossible to get through all those barriers, back and forth, without having a firm commitment from the militia leaders. I needed their personal agreement in order to hold them accountable if things went wrong. I also wanted to talk to them directly about the refugee transfers between the lines because Bizimungu refused to do so. He and Karamira told me they could arrange such a meeting for later in the day.

I then made my way to the airport to see Lieutenant Colonel Joe Adinkra and his battalion in the air terminal. The Ghanaians had done a first-class job of reinforcing the interior with the sandbags and revetting that had finally commenced to come in with our twice-daily Hercules flights. Although the battalion had been bombarded on two separate occasions, there was little damage to their area of the massive building. They had established good defences from any ground assault, had excellent observation and fire positions over the tarmac and had laid land line (to link field telephones) to the support troops on the other side of the airfield.

I then moved on to tour the rest of the positions with Lieutenant Colonel Joe, a fine young battalion commander, solid and straight as a metal rod, whose troops were very loyal to him and responded to his orders with energy. The support troops, many of whom were members of the regimental band, had built themselves a veritable fortress, which would sustain artillery fire without any doubt. The problem was that they had poor observation and fire control around the site. They did not like digging in and so they had few people posted outside. I took Joe along with a few of his officers and
NCO
s to the old Belgian trenches. Although well-disposed, they needed to be expanded and connected by either open or covered communications trenches. A media crew joined us as we went, though I didn't realize it at the time. The newscast the next day showed Joe and me standing on the old Belgian trenches, binoculars in hand, as I pointed farther afield. I am saying, in the most collegial of fashions, “If you don't dig in here and place a heavy machine gun under cover there, the f–––––s are going to be right on top of you before you can even fart.” The comment was followed by footage of extensive scurrying about with orders at top voice and troops with shovels and picks leaping into holes in the ground followed by dirt flying in the air. It felt good to do some classic soldiering.

Later on the afternoon of May 1, I had my first meeting with the leaders of the Interahamwe. Not only was Bizimungu present, but so was Bagosora, who had deigned to come himself. I had made my way to the Diplomates, jostling through the ubiquitous roadblocks, drunken and downright mad militiamen, and hundreds of children jumping around, all excited among today's kills. These kids were being egged on to throw stones at our vehicles and yell at us as we stopped for the militiamen to open the gate. I had tried to anaesthetize myself to the ethical and moral dimensions of meeting with the génocidaires, recognizing that if they refused to assist in the transfers I might not ever get anyone out. Arriving at the hotel, I took the bullets out of my pistol just in case the temptation to shoot them was too extreme, and went inside.

The three young men Bagosora introduced to me had no particularly distinguishing features. I think I was expecting frothing at the
mouth, but the meeting would be with humans. Until now, these men had never figured in any official discussions. They had been perceived as gang leaders, punks, criminals. However, today they had been asked to meet me for formal discussions on security. They had come of age, and they conveyed a certain cockiness as they greeted me. I remember smiling at them, with my heart beating so hard I was sure they could see it. I nearly lost my composure when I noticed that the middle guy's open-collared white shirt was spattered with dried blood. There were small flecks on his right arm as we shook hands. I moved on before I could think. They were Robert Kajuga, president of the National Interahamwe; Bernard Mamiragaba, representing the National Committee Interahamwe, and Ephrem Nkezabera, whose title was special councillor. At the end of the receiving line, Bizimungu was polite. We all sat down at once. Bagosora presided as Kajuga, the most senior of the three, whose mother had been Tutsi, began with words of respect, admiration and support for
UNAMIR
and its efforts with the Arusha peace process—at which point Bagosora excused himself and was out the door so fast we barely had time to respond.

Kajuga continued, offering to help
UNAMIR
. He proposed putting some of his youths with us as we patrolled our different protected sites. He said he had passed the word to all the barriers to let the Red Cross through while on humanitarian activities. What other kinds of activities did the Red Cross do? I wondered to myself. “We are at your disposal,” he insisted and then was interrupted by the chap to his right, who said they were ready to work on the details of the transfers. He also said that they had “sensitized” all their people to stop the massacres. I could not believe my ears. He had actually blurted out the fact that they were doing the killing. Kajuga took over again, a little put out. He repeated that the Interahamwe had absolutely no problems with
UNAMIR
.

I thanked them for their support, for demonstrating such a sense of co-operation. I said I was overwhelmed with their positive attitude and promised that in the future I would be consulting them on matters of security. They nearly burst their shirts with pride. Whether they were telling me the truth regarding their intentions I could not be sure, but it was clear that they responded well to flattery. After about twenty-five
minutes of this, I had had enough. Delighted with the turn of events, Bizimungu thanked me and I returned the compliment, shaking all of their hands.

What a sick event. I walked out of the hotel and passed by the
RGF
guards without even looking, at odds with myself about what had just happened. I then proceeded to the Mille Collines hotel to meet separately with the vice-president of the
MDR
party, Froduald Karamira who, due to his extremist loyalties, had survived the fate of his party colleagues. He gave me the same story as Bizimungu, only from the stance of a political person from the interim government, not a military man. At least I now had proof that they were all singing from the same song sheet. The links between the army, the militia and the interim government were real.