Shake Hands With the Devil (65 page)

The trouble was (as Riza, Maurice and I all knew) that the
UN
did not have the capacity to achieve this aim by itself: the international community had to step in. “Our readiness and capacity for action has been demonstrated to be inadequate at best and deplorable at worst. . . . the entire system requires review to strengthen its reactive capacity. It is my intention that such a review be conducted.” The report became the catalyst for Security Council Resolution 925, passed on June 8, to authorize the concurrent advance of the phase-one and phase-two troops. I was amazed that Boutros-Ghali and the Security Council were able to secure that change so rapidly after the visit of the senior
UN
officials and the delivery of their report. It is a travesty that no one came sooner.

Over those two days with me, Riza and Maurice experienced nearly all the dangers
UNAMIR
encountered on a daily basis; despite the supposed three-day safe passage, we were fired upon. I still remember the look on their faces when we all climbed into an
APC
in the
UNAMIR
compound for the trip across Kigali to meet with Bizimungu at the Diplomates—a journey that would last thirty to forty minutes. As we settled ourselves as best we could, Maurice and I commented on the poor internal design of the old Warsaw Pact—
APC
but Riza stayed quiet. Maurice told me later that Riza suffered excruciating pain from a very damaged back that plagued him, to varying degrees, most of the time, and that the
APC
ride was almost more than he could take. We were reasonably safe for a while as we travelled through
RPF
territory, but when the crew commander informed me that we were approaching the
RGF
zone, I took my pistol out of its holster and chambered a bullet, and the Tunisian escort nearest to the door did the same with his light machine gun. Maurice and Riza clearly wondered why I felt such measures were necessary inside a supposedly secure if elderly
APC
. I explained over the vehicle noise that the Interahamwe and self-defence groups regularly stopped the
APC
s and looked inside. The escort and I wanted to be ready if somebody recognized me and decided to be a hero and “kill Dallaire.”

The trip to Gitarama and back brought them face to face with the true dimension of the displaced population inside Rwanda. We left my
HQ
mid-morning, travelling in my four-by-four, an escort vehicle with my protection squad behind us, along with two functioning
APC
s. The road was packed with tens upon tens of thousands of Rwandans fleeing the
RPF
. It took us three tense hours to reach our destination, slowly edging our way through the crowds, witnessing up close the suffering of old people too tired or sick to put one foot ahead of the other, men stooped under the burden of carrying the remaining family possessions on their heads, women in despair because their children could not walk any farther and they hadn't the strength left to carry them. My Ghanaians stuck close, but the
APC
s, underpowered and much larger than our four-by-fours, were left far behind.

We had our meeting but also knew that we had to be back in Kigali before dark or face the consequences. We were just heading out of the compound when the
APC
s lumbered into view and I had to tell the crew commanders to turn right around and follow us back.

The usual afternoon deluge had started, the rain beating down so hard at times that the wipers could not keep up and we'd have to stop. We lost the
APC
s, even though we were barely inching along the winding road with its endless procession of lost souls. Maurice made a comment about the missing
APC
s. The fact that there were still another fifteen or so barriers of half-drunk, ruthless and totally unpredictable Interahamwe between us and Kigali may have been bothering him, along with the fact that every extremist of whatever kind knew my face and was aching to shoot me on the spot. Then, in the midst of this drenched, tired and unfriendly human serpent of suffering and death, I hit a long-horned cow.

Though I had only been creeping along, the cow had been knocked clean over. I could only imagine the reaction of the person who had managed to get the animal this far along the road. The cow was a very precious commodity as well as a sign of standing in the community in Rwanda. If I had killed it, it would be very bad news.

The crowd that surrounded us stopped moving and stared at us menacingly: we were three non-African gentlemen, in dry clothes, sitting in an air-conditioned vehicle. As far as they were concerned, we had been elbowing them off the road down a rather steep slope or
squeezing them against the side of the muddy hill. And now we had hit a cow.

But before I could open the door (still debating if I should), the cow staggered up in front of us, shaking its head and leaning slightly on the hood. It then dragged its owner off to the ravine side of the road, to the sudden laughter of everyone around.

I took a few very deep breaths before pushing on. My colleagues had been silent throughout the incident, but soon similar war stories from other conflict zones came pouring out of both of them, laced with black humour.

One last note on that visit: Riza and Baril had to leave as they had come, circuitously by road, because I still couldn't guarantee their safety on the main route north to Kabale. They were picked up by helicopter at the Ugandan border and flown to Entebbe. There, a
UN
plane was supposed to carry them to Nairobi and beyond. Booh-Booh was now established in Nairobi and was hopping all over the continent, contacting African governments to ask for troops, even though that was a job that needed to be coordinated out of the
DPKO
. He had demanded that staff in Nairobi rent him a house so he could live in proper ambassadorial style but was ordered to make do on his various trips with only one aide. Riza and Maurice were temporarily stranded in Entebbe because Booh-Booh had commandeered the aircraft that was supposed to be seconded for their use.

Heavy negotiations were in full swing in New York regarding the problems of scrounging equipment and finalizing the troop-contributing nations. Ethiopia was still in, though I was very surprised that the Ethiopians were capable of sending a peacekeeping force, given that they were just finishing their own civil war and were not trained in peacekeeping—in fact, they were a rebel army, not a professional one. (Moen also passed on to me his concern that Rwandan Hutus might take Ethiopian peacekeepers the wrong way, as they were viewed as being genetically linked to the Tutsis, though neither the interim government nor the
RGF
ultimately raised any objections.) But the days of calling upon the dozen or so veteran troop-contributing nations were
over and, in desperation, complete neophytes were being thrust into some of the most complex operations ever managed by the
UN
. I thought this was not only technically wrong, but ethically wrong in some cases. Booh-Booh had even gone looking for troops in some nations where I'd be surprised if the politicians could spell the words “human rights.”

Between the visit of Riza and Maurice and June 6, I sent the
DPKO
three separate assessments regarding the way events could unfold and how that might affect the mission and future deployment. For days on end I sent reconnaissance teams out in large numbers to gather any possible field intelligence. I even created a small fifth column of four
UNMO
teams chosen by Tiko, who received orders from me personally. They were exceptionally courageous officers who became precious assets in my search for operational information. They also conducted delicate missions between the various players, including the
RGF
moderates, Kagame and me.

I again reported to the
DPKO
my fear that the
RGF
, faced with defeat, might receive instructions from the interim government to commence a slow thinning out and withdrawal of military and militia forces west into Zaire in order to fight another day. By making a strategic withdrawal westward, they could pursue their policy of scorched humans while moving the bulk of the Hutu population ahead of them into exile in the surrounding provinces of Zaire. Many powerful members of the extremist regime were alive and well in France and even Belgium. They were in touch with the interim government as well as the Rwandan ambassador to the
UN
and could be tapped to come to the aid of extremists at home. Half a million Rwandans had already flowed into Tanzania, where they lived under the tacit control of the extremists; I thought we could expect four to five times that number to move into the Kivu province of Zaire. I needed up-to-date information on the movements of large numbers of internally displaced persons in the western part of the country in order to help them in situ and prevent this massive human exodus. Repeated requests to Western nations for aerial photographs and satellite pictures fell on deaf ears. (Later, the Russians were prepared to sell me satellite images, but I had no budget
for such an expenditure and could persuade no one to give me one.) I had no choice but to employ my
UNMO
s, putting their lives at risk every day, in order to keep up with the interim government and the state of the masses of displaced Rwandans, who were dying in droves from hunger, fatigue and sickness along the escape routes or were being weeded out and executed by the machete strokes of the extremists. If the refugees made it to Zaire, the extremists most likely would be running the camps in no time, preparing for revenge. If such a scenario came to pass, it would not only guarantee instability in Rwanda for years to come but destabilize the entire region.

Still, for a brief time I felt as if we were on a bit of a roll. The day after Maurice and Riza left, carrying with them a report that basically endorsed everything I had been saying about how to proceed, I got a copy of the report of the
UN
Human Rights Commission's Special Session on Rwanda in Geneva. The session recognized without hesitation that this horror show in Rwanda was a human rights violation and that the world should be acting to stop it. The session agreed to send in a team, which would arrive in early June, to begin the investigation to determine who the perpetrators of the genocide were.

I was fascinated to find out that at the Geneva meeting (which happened at the same time as Riza and Maurice were with me in Kigali), the United States, France, Germany and Australia had all issued statements that acknowledged the horrors taking place in Rwanda, but none of them offered concrete help. Geraldine Ferraro, who led the U.S. delegation, actually announced that she supported
UNAMIR
's efforts. The French claimed that the word “genocide” was not too strong to classify the events in Rwanda. Lucette Michaux-Chevry, the French minister of human rights, declaimed to the assembled diplomats, “As requested by France, the Security Council had significantly expanded
UNAMIR
.” She patted her nation on the back shamelessly: “Without delay, France had provided exceptional assistance to the victims of the conflict.” Yes, I thought, to the French expatriates who wanted to flee and to members of the Habyarimana family.

Around this time we received a fax from the Canadian Association
of African Studies in Montreal informing us that members of Faustin's family were still alive in Kigali and asking if
UNAMIR
could do something. This request may seem unusual seven weeks into the genocide, but during the last week of May, General Kagame also sent word to me that ten members of his extended family were still in hiding in the city. How was it possible that he, the bitterest foe of the extremists, still had surviving family in this extremist-controlled ghost town? We sent
UNMO
s to the places where Faustin's and Kagame's relatives were hiding. We managed to save Faustin's brother-in-law with help from the Red Cross. In the case of Kagame's relatives, my
MILOB
s went to the house, knocked on the door, checked around and found no one. They decided to try again the next day, but when they returned they discovered only bodies lying on the floor. Somebody had obviously noticed the
MILOB
s' visit and had staked out the house, flushing out the family. These were the kind of situations that absolutely haunted us: by going to help we sometimes imperilled those we hoped to save.

As I had guessed from my private session with Ndindiliyimana, late May marked the last gasp of the moderates. One day at the
HQ
I received a letter from Rusatira and Gatsinzi, passed to me in secret. They told me they were living in the south with some former students of the military school, and they wanted me to tell Kagame that when the
RPF
got to them, they would not resist and did not want to be attacked. When I conveyed the message, Kagame was not impressed. As far as he was concerned, these men should have publicly resisted the extremists right from the start and now had to accept the consequences for themselves, their few living supporters and their families.

The first successful transfer happened on May 27, organized impeccably by Clayton Yaache and the humanitarian cell. We moved
RPF
sympathizers from the Mille Collines to a town southeast of Kigali, and Hutus from the Amahoro to a drop-off point outside the city, which was still in
RGF
hands—about three hundred people in total. I wanted to be part of the first transfer and joined the
RPF
convoy because we thought it might run into the most trouble. I made sure that everyone
knew I was part of that convoy, and we passed through checkpoints without incident. When we got to the town where the refugees were to be handed over, crowds were waiting to greet them. There was such an explosion of pent up emotion—so much hugging and crying—that these hungry people hadn't even touched the meal that had been laid out for them as I headed back to my headquarters. (On my way back to Kigali that day, I met the little boy who so deeply tested my resolve about orphans, an encounter I described in the introduction of this book.)