Shake Hands With the Devil (69 page)

I made my way north by four-by-four through
RPF
-held territory without any incident. The countryside was deserted, the fields were brown and without crops, and a number of villages had been completely destroyed by fire. The
RPF
refused to let our vehicles across the Gatuna bridge, so I walked across the small river into Uganda and felt as though I was stepping into a zone of peace and sunshine. I was picked up on the other side of the river by
UNMO
s from
UNOMUR
. We stopped briefly to see Colonel Azrul Haque, my local commander, who was waiting for me with a warm cup of tea and a succinct report on the state of things along the border. For a time, the
UN
had wanted to disband
UNOMUR
entirely, arguing that with the arms embargo in place, there was no more need for the mission. The day before I'd left on this trip, I sent the
DPKO
a report arguing strenuously that the arms embargo was a
joke and that I needed the mission to stay put. Haque told me that the
NRA
remained uncooperative and was preventing observer operations. But he had deployed our
UNMO
s not too far from the major border checkpoints, even leaving them there at night to keep watch, and they were seeing significant traffic between Uganda and Rwanda.

I climbed aboard a helicopter for the flight to Entebbe, where I was to rendezvous with a Hercules for the last leg to Nairobi. Soon I was flying over the old Entebbe airport, doing a visual inspection before landing at the new air terminal. Entebbe would be my main staging base for
UNAMIR
2; the old airfield was still reasonably serviceable, and it and the tarmac could be transformed into the site of a tented city for training and for the maintenance and repair of incoming equipment. (In the weeks to follow I would end up competing with humanitarian organizations for precious cargo transport and buses to get the new forces from Entebbe to Kigali, a full day on the road if the trip was smooth. Word of our needs had made it as far as Mombasa and even Dar es Salaam, and rental prices of heavy transport skyrocketed. Was that the capitalist system of supply and demand at work or was it the hovering of vultures?)

I had an hour or so before the flight to do my rounds at the airport, and I headed out to see the few
UNMO
s from
UNOMUR
who had already been moved here to set up shop. But I soon forgot all about that: coming down the tarmac toward me from the waiting Here was Beth. I wanted to run toward her as people do in the movies, but I was too stunned at seeing her. Home had seemed so far away. We climbed into the Here and were given seats up front with the crew. I found I could say very little during the flight to Nairobi, but I remember noticing tears falling onto my hands even though I wasn't aware I was crying.

Of course I had no time with Beth once we arrived in Nairobi. I was immediately whisked away from the airport to a major information and coordination meeting with all the humanitarian groups and diplomats. I gave a detailed briefing on the military situation and the genocide, and described the
UNAMIR
2 concept of operations and my mission's new roles, which included providing support and protection to the aid agencies as well as to Rwandans in danger. I forcefully warned them about freelancing in the
RPF
zone and told them how much it was aiding
and abetting one of the belligerents; as long as they continued to deal directly with the
RPF
, the
RGF
would never allow the groups to claim neutral humanitarian status, which meant they would not get access to the displaced camps in the
RGF
-held territory. I left that meeting feeling uncertain about whether these strong-willed aid workers would get the message and play by my rules.

I then spent almost an hour with the international media, accusing them fairly candidly of dropping the ball. As far as I was concerned, their mission was to report the truth and to embarrass the fence-sitting political leaders in their home countries without reserve, to never let them off the hook for the Rwandan genocide. “I need troops and I need them now,” I told them. “So get out there and help me sell the Rwandan cause.” At least they listened.

By the time I got to the
UN
headquarters in another part of town, it was well past 1700 and most of the staff had gone home. Their nine-to-five attitude nearly made me blow a gasket, and I was only restrained by the ever-sensible Amadou Ly. Even so, after describing once again the dire situation in Kigali and receiving bureaucratic answers from Golo and the few staff who had stayed behind to meet with me that evening, I found myself threatening my
CAO
: “I have more rifles than you, Mr. Golo, and you don't want to see them here.” After calming down a little, I realized that no amount of telling would demonstrate to the administrative staff the conditions we were living in, and I resolved to put on the pressure to bring them on field trips to Kigali so they could smell first-hand the acrid odours of death and starvation, and experience what it was like to eat expired tinned rations and to cope with the resultant diarrhea without toilet paper or running water. Then they'd know how serious I was when I said that the loyalty of my troops was being pushed beyond decent limits by the conditions they were forced to endure.

By this time I was long overdue at the Canadian embassy, where Ambassador Lucie Edwards had made arrangements for Beth and me to have quarters and some good cooking. I can't tell you what being inside a comfortable house again felt like, though I have to confess it took me three complete scrubbings to feel clean enough to pretend for a while to be normal.

For the next two days I went into hiding with Beth at an isolated British colonial-style hotel in one of Kenya's game parks. On the second night, I was called from dinner with my wife to take an urgent phone call. I immediately assumed something terrible was happening in Kigali. But no, to my considerable ire, it was the French ambassador to Kenya on the phone. How he got the number is still a mystery. His pressing business was orphans—he wanted to meet with me when I got back to Nairobi. As I returned to Beth, I wondered what it was with the French and their obsession with orphans: what did it mean that they were now approaching me directly rather than going through Kouchner? When I sat down again, I told Beth that I thought the French were up to something and I needed to figure out what. I never would have guessed at the time the extent to which the interim government, the
RGF
, Boutros-Ghali, France and even the
RPF
were already working together behind my back to secure a French intervention in Rwanda under the guise of humanitarian relief. But what was new about that? I was truly the pawn in the field, expected to simply react to the higher political game that bigger people than I were playing.

When we got back to the city, I saw very little of Beth as I was rushed from meeting to meeting, though I never did meet the French ambassador, who did not follow through on his request to talk about orphans. Before Beth left, Ambassador Edwards had us over for a quiet dinner on June 14 with her husband and some of the diplomatic staff. I was in total culture shock: I found normal human interactions—pleasant chat, good food, the world outside Rwanda—surreal. Plagued with the raw experiences of genocide, I rolled with the evening as best I could. Beth was lovely and did a superb job of hiding her concern about what might still happen to me, what had already happened to me. Later she told me that she could tell that serious trouble was brewing inside me—I did not seem to be really there with her and the others. The one light note I remember about the evening was Edwards suggesting a cure for my relentless insomnia. She offered up a recent book written by her husband on the history of the Canadian forestry industry as a perfect soporific. He looked on good-naturedly as I accepted the book from his wife. And she was right—I cracked it open on several
desperate occasions and never got past the introduction.

As I said goodbye to Beth and the bustling city of Nairobi, I was caught in an emotional mental battle that pitted what I now considered the “real” world—genocide in Rwanda—and the “artificial” world—the detachment and obtuseness of the rich and powerful. I asked myself again and again, “Why stay? Why ask my troops to stay? Why ask for reinforcements?” But every time I answered in the same way: it was a moral duty to stay and help, even if the impact of our actions was small. On the way back, I took more time at Entebbe to do a more thorough reconnaisance. I walked the old airfield, past the wreckage of the hijacked airliner, visualizing the heroism of the Israeli assault and thinking of the selflessness of the people I'd left in Kigali.

While I was away, Henry juggled demands on all fronts. The special rapporteur of the
UN
Commission on Human Rights, René Degni-Segui, arrived to begin his formal investigation of the genocide. We did everything we could to help him in his work, facilitating meetings with witnesses and all the political and military players. He and his team stayed with us at the Amahoro, the safest place for him we could find, which on some days was not saying much. One of the first documents he asked us to pass on to the belligerents was an absolute blast from him regarding the killings of the churchmen at Kabgayi. Media all around the world picked up the story, which was embarrassing for the
RPF
. And Degni-Segui warned Kagame off the top that he was going to be conducting that investigation as a priority. At the ceasefire negotiations, which Henry kept trying to push along, all the parties were clearly worried about what the special rapporteur would find, and with good reason the Interahamwe and the
RGF
were really tense about the scrutiny.

On June 13, Henry and the humanitarian cell transferred 550 people from the Sainte Famille church, the King Faisal, the Mille Collines, and the Amahoro Stadium to their respective safe zones. The transfers were becoming more and more crisis-prone. People tried to board the vehicles without going through due process, though due process was hard to achieve when refugees were flooding into our sites and we weren't able to keep the lists up to date and complete. Then once people were
properly boarded, some got scared for the simple reason that the Interahamwe set up roadblocks within view of the gates of our sites. They didn't stop any convoys, but the militiamen were a clear threat.
RTLM
was continuing to claim that
UNAMIR
was only rescuing Tutsis, even though witnesses knew that the Hutu transfers were just as large, and that there were even some Hutus who were refusing to leave the security—however inadequate—of our sites. And then, on June 14, the Interahamwe entered the St. Paul church site, collected about forty children, took them out into the street and killed them, just to show they could. Our
UNMO
s who had been stationed there were outnumbered and, of course, unarmed, and had to watch as the kids were hauled away. Maybe the massacre was a response to the large and successful transfer we had pulled off the day before, or maybe it was an act of defiance directed at René Degni-Segui.

Whatever the explanation for this latest atrocity, by the time I got back to Kigali late on June 16, Henry was glad to see me. Catching up that night on not only what had been happening locally but what was going on at the international level, I discovered that Booh-Booh had tendered his resignation on June 14 and that the
UN
had taken him up on his offer the very next day. And once again the interim government of Rwanda was trying to get me fired, protesting to the secretary-general that my “deficiencies and overt partiality [to the
RPF
] have largely contributed to the failure of
UNAMIR
.” It was perhaps a symptom of how far gone I was that I was glad to be back.

^1
.
Christine de Liso, our acting
CAO
, had been relieved of her duties in early May. A fine human being, she had done everything humanly possible to aid
UNAMIR
despite the enormous restraints placed on her by the
FOD
.

^2
.
St-Denis received a Chief of Defence Staff commendation.

THE BATTLE FOR
Kigali raged through the month of June with no respite. Kagame was a master of psychological warfare and used it to overcome the imbalance in weapons and numbers between his forces and those of the
RGF
. After the initial lightning attack to link up with the
RPF
battalion already based in Kigali, he had begun a more deliberate operation of encirclement and reduction of the defending forces. He was not the least bit intimidated by the elite Presidential Guard, artillery and armoured units, civil defence forces and militia who were determined to defend the capital. He believed they did not have the discipline needed to fight a clever and determined foe and that they were wasting their resources on killing civilians instead of concentrating their efforts on defence. From the first, he focused on what he saw as the main task: defeating the
RGF
in the field.

The story of the Sainte Famille raid illustrates the level of competency and daring of the
RPF
troops. Thousands of Tutsis had taken refuge in the Sainte Famille church, on the eastern side of central Kigali. One night in mid-June, the
RPF
sent a company two kilometres inside what was enemy territory, recovered six hundred Tutsis from Sainte Famille, and pulled them out to safety through
RGF
lines. The mission began as a clandestine operation and ended as a fully supported running battle with carefully planned artillery support—and, by the standards of any military force, ranks as a first-class rescue.

As the June battles chewed off ever-larger bites of
RGF
territory, the defenders' morale dropped. And once again,
RTLM
stepped up its personal campaign against me, airing more accusations from the interim government
about me being the architect of Hutu misfortunes. But the extremist forces were about to receive a boost from an unexpected source.