Shake Hands With the Devil (63 page)

Around this time, I found out that Mamadou Kane had commandeered an
APC
to go meet directly with the chief of staff of the
RGF
. I had no idea what he thought he might achieve by talking with Bizimungu on his own, since we usually went together. When I confronted him about the visit, he denied that he'd even gone.

The pressures on all of us were beyond extraordinary. The fighting around the airport, with the
RGF
and the
RPF
firing on each other and
anything else that raised its head, curtailed the Hercules flights, cutting drastically the emergency supplies that could get in. We had little food, little medicine and much stress: the result was a sapping of will and commitment among my troops. On a daily basis I saw the increase in sick parade, as more and more soldiers went down with disease, especially malaria. I can't tell you how disgusting daily life could be; the corpse-eating dogs that we shot on sight now had no qualms about attacking the living. One day while I was driving in Kigali, a lone dog attacked my side window while the vehicle was on the move. If I had not had the window up, the dog would have ripped off my arm. Another time, several officers taking a short coffee break saw a strange-looking dog wandering in the compound, then realized it was a rat that had grown to the size of a terrier. One of the officers, who was from Ghana, said that he had seen this after natural disasters back home: the rats fed and fed on an inexhaustible supply of human flesh and grew to an unbelievable size.

We had completely run out of water and were unable to find a source inside the country. I called the new
CAO
in Nairobi, Allay Golo from Chad, and asked him why there was no water.
¹
Golo was a career
UN
civilian administrator, and he responded that he was bound by
UN
rules. Even though we had had no water for days, he still had to conduct a call for proposals and then do an analysis of the three best bids. The minimum estimate was a million litres, but securing that much water would take weeks, and we didn't even have days. I told him that even twenty thousand litres would tide us over, but he insisted on following procedure. I couldn't wait, and instead arranged to bring water in from
UNOMUR
. Even so, all of us, including the people we were sheltering, went without water for two more days.

RTLM
was escalating its personal attacks on me. I already knew that I was the target of “third force” death threats. But what brought the
hostility out into the open, I think, were my continuing efforts to negotiate safe passage for Tutsis trapped behind
RGF
lines—combined with the lie that I was plotting to export orphans from Rwanda. It didn't seem to matter to the hate-mongers that I was also trying to transfer Hutus in the other direction. On May 18,
RTLM
broadcast propaganda against what it described as the Canadians' desire to deport orphans, portraying it as an
RPF
-inspired attempt to put the extremist government in a bad light. It claimed that Bernard Kouchner and I were part of a cabal working to release the Tutsi refugees from the Mille Collines and the Meridien, ignoring the fact that most of the people in the Meridien were Hutu. The radio recommended the usual culling: “We do not oppose the principle of the release of these refugees, but we must first sort out the
RPF
sympathizers, who will not be allowed to leave.” The extremists were also incensed about Canada's role in pushing for a
UN
Commission on Human Rights investigation of the genocide.

With hate propaganda targeting us directly, no water and little food, relentless killing all around, military buildups happening on both sides, and clear preparations being made for the escalation of the war, Riza sent me a message on May 20 announcing that he and Maurice Baril aimed to arrive in Kigali in three days for their first visit to
UNAMIR
. Their stated purpose, Riza said, was not political but humanitarian, to explain the new mandate and advance the ceasefire negotiations. My immediate job was to arrange a two- to three-day truce so that Riza and Baril wouldn't get shot in my company.

The threats got even more personal on May 21, the day that
RTLM
first openly exhorted its listeners to “kill Dallaire,” describing me as the white man with the moustache. If I was seen, the broadcasts said, I was to be stopped and killed immediately. At that point I became the target of any Hutu with a machete. I recognized the escalation of danger to myself, but what this threat also did was put all my white
MILOB
s in jeopardy, particularly the ones with moustaches. I immediately ordered them to stand down from operations, but even so, a couple of them narrowly escaped from roadblocks with their lives. If I sent them out again, they would run even more than the ordinary risk of being killed.

The
RPF
forwarded a communication it had intercepted between Bizimungu and his head of operations, in which the chief of staff told the officer that “the order was to eliminate Dallaire.” I had no way of corroborating this intercept, and I didn't move on the information since I didn't have definitive proof. Also, with the broadcasting of the command to kill me, the damage had been done.

Whatever stress Mamadou Kane was under did him in around this time: he totally lost it one afternoon. I was in my office when I heard screaming and the sound of running footsteps on the floor above. Kane had gone berserk in the halls, apparently from fear, and locked himself in one of the rooms. His colleagues from political affairs had to break the door down and Beadengar Dessande, a large man, had to sit on him to physically restrain him. The next morning, we flew him out to Nairobi, where he was treated for his breakdown.

The day the death threat went out over hate radio, the
HQ
came under sustained artillery attack. A few of our troops were injured, vehicles were destroyed, windows were broken, strewing glass all over the place, and the operations centre was damaged. Our crater analysis confirmed that the attack had come from the
RGF
at Camp Kanombe.

It seemed like another unending marathon. Before the attack, I had met at the Hôtel des Diplomates with Ndindiliyimana, who had finally reappeared earlier in the month at a political session in Gitarama. He had approached me to arrange to meet with him alone in Kigali. And so Ndindiliyimana and I sat together, ostensibly to resolve some Gendarmerie operational concerns with the transfers between the lines. He seemed terribly ill at ease but determined to speak his mind. He warned me that the prefect of Kigali was not to be trusted, and confided that Bizimana, the minister of defence, was despondent due to the failures in the field, the loss of his properties in Byumba, and the deaths of his relatives there. He told me that the moderate faction in the
RGF
, including Gatsinzi and Rusatira, was growing in strength, yet he could give me no specifics except that most of its members had left Kigali and were now in the south. (Later Deme found out that Gatsinzi had left after he had proposed to the high command that the
RGF
withdraw to southern Rwanda, and his own troops had threatened him with death.)

The meeting continued for about an hour with Ndindiliyimana doing nearly all the talking. He confided that he had become the protector of a large number of persons in danger in and around Butare. He said that many people had been hiding in the ceilings, the walls and even the latrines of their houses and were now dying of starvation, thirst and worse because we could not get to them. He stressed that it was essential to create a force or a movement that was neither ethnic- nor military-based to govern the country. He gave me names of prominent Tutsis in the Mille Collines who had to be saved from certain death. Yes, I said, the people in the Mille Collines were like live bait being toyed with by a wild animal, at constant risk of being killed and eaten. Yet until the mission was reinforced, I was doing all I could. The militia cordon around the site, the harassing of my
UNMO
s and blue berets to give the refugees up, the deliberate bombardments, the sniper fire through the windows, the random
RPF
rounds through the hotel walls, were enough to wear on anyone's resolve. It was admirable, I said, that the Red Cross still made it through the cordon to patch up the injured and help the sick while bringing in water and food.

Ndindiliyimana had one last piece of advice for me. He said that the roadblocks would disappear if I used the threat of force: the local bullies would abandon the barriers when they realized that the risks of being attacked by a reinforced and bolder
UNAMIR
2 were high. He believed that if
UNAMIR
2 came on strong, the hard-liners would melt away, and he did not think they could readily organize a reappearance. I had sat through most of our session taking in what he said with a healthy skepticism. But he was now essentially confirming the rationale behind my argument for
UNAMIR
2. If he was being candid with me, I was saddened that he had never once offered to take on the mantle of leader of the moderate movement. With support from Kagame or even just from us, we might have helped the moderates create another front, confounding the extremists' belief that they were acting in the name of all Hutus. The moderates' ineptness, and lack of courage and commitment would cost them dearly after the
RPF
victory. As we said our goodbyes, Ndindiliyimana looked like a man who had been to confession but had not received absolution.

Late that afternoon, I had to return to the same hotel to meet with Bizimungu. Because of the now-explicit death threats, I was usually moving around the city in the slow and unreliable
APC
s. The Tunisians had done wonders to keep them mobile, keeping the engines and other moving parts running with wire and even cloth. They assured me that the main weapon, a heavy machine gun, worked and that they knew how to use it. They never hesitated to point the weapon at the person who controlled a barrier, aiming at his upper thorax and keeping the gun on him no matter where he moved. It was enough to intimidate many of those gangsters of the so-called self-defence forces.

As Diagne and I arrived at the hotel and got out of the
APC
, we were faced with more than sixty militiamen who were set up in trenches and bunkers replete with heavy weapons, including armour-piercing rockets. My pleasant “Good afternoon” did not erase their scowls, though they let us pass. As I entered the lobby, I saw Bagosora to my right, talking to an officer I did not recognize. Spotting me, Bagosora launched into a tirade, blaming me for the failure of the evacuation of the orphans. His body was spastic with hostility. He accused me of stalling for time in order to make him and the interim government look bad in the eyes of the world. He demanded to know why I was “deliberately” preventing these transfers from happening.

When he finally paused for breath, I told him that I was not totally convinced that the extremist branch of the militias had agreed to the orphan transfer. His face was about a foot from mine, but he screamed his response. He had made sure, he yelled, that the real authorities in the militias had been present at the meeting to arrange the transfer and they, in front of him, had given their word to support this exercise, and that was that. He stomped away. I had seen him angry in the past, but this time he bordered on the berzerk. I had to wonder what was really eating at him.

Despite everything that was going on, I slept rather well the night of May 21. Maybe I was somehow relieved that the death threats against me were now out in the open. I had protested the extensive bombardment of the
HQ
to Bizimungu and the minister of defence, and I was
scheduled to meet them again the next day about the three-day truce we needed for the safe passage of Riza and Baril. Bizimungu could explain to me in person what his troops hoped to accomplish by bombing
UNAMIR
.

Phil Lancaster woke me up at about 0615 to pass on to me a report from the
UNMO
s at the airport: during the night the
RGF
had totally abandoned its positions there and at Camp Kanombe. They had thinned out through a hole in the
RPF
ring surrounding the camp. I asked him if there had been significant fighting in Kigali overnight or early this morning, since the
RPF
liked to leave openings for their enemy and then ambush them in the open or on the run. Phil said no, but told me that Tiko had reported that an observer had spotted artillery guns in the western part of the city.

I decided to head to the airfield. I had to ensure that we held our positions there, since my rapid deployment plan for
UNAMIR
2 rested on the Kigali airport being open and under our command. I got there in fifteen minutes, moving quickly through checkpoints that had been held by militia and government forces the day before and were now manned by the
RPF
. When I pulled in, the hazy morning sun was just above the horizon and mist was slowly rising over the edges of the plateau where the runway lay.

Lieutenant Colonel Joe Adinkra was outside the main terminal with a few troops, assessing the situation. We spoke about the adept withdrawal of the
RGF
forces and the necessity of maintaining our present positions. I told him to be ready to defend his ground. I was surprised that the
RPF
was nowhere in sight as yet, and thought that it might be concentrating on Camp Kanombe.

The logistics and infantry company were stood-to in their defensive positions across the field. I went directly to the old control tower and looked out over the airfield. I couldn't see Camp Kanombe—it was below the edge of the plateau at the end of the runway. While reports over the Force radio net confirmed that the
RGF
artillery and reconnaissance battalions were indeed gathering in the west end of the city, the situation here was unnervingly quiet. I was back at my vehicle at the foot of the tower, sending instructions regarding morning prayers,
when an observer called out to me that there were people—or were they apparitions?—at the end of the runway.