Shake Hands With the Devil (70 page)

On the afternoon of June 17, the day after I got back from Nairobi, I was in my office attacking paperwork with a vengeance, when Phil appeared at my door. Behind him were Bernard Kouchner and another Frenchman, introduced by Kouchner as a representative of President Mitterrand's crisis committee on Rwanda. I thought that they were not especially smart to be here, with the
RPF
in Kigali and not fond of the French. Still I was in some ways pleased to see Kouchner, a man of great energy and presence, even if I never knew when or if his humanitarianism masked the purposes of the French government.

Unlike the first time we had met, when he had just barged in, Kouchner asked politely if I could spare him an hour or so, explaining that he was acting as an interlocutor for his government in the field and had been sent specifically to see me. At least this time his role was clear. Kouchner opened the conversation by recapping the horrendous situation and deploring the lack of action by the international community—it was easy for me to agree with that. But then he floored me. The French government, he said, had decided that in the interests of humanity, it was prepared to lead a French and Franco-African coalition force into Rwanda to stop the genocide and deliver humanitarian aid. They would come in under a chapter-seven
UN
mandate and set up a safe haven in the west of the country where people fleeing the conflict could find refuge. He asked me for my support. Without a pause, I said, “Non!”—and I began to swear at the great humanitarian using every French-Canadian oath in my vocabulary. He tried to calm me with reasons that probably sounded high-minded to him but, considering the track record of the French in Rwanda, struck me as deeply hypocritical: surely the French knew that it was their allies who were the architects of the slaughter. Just then Phil Lancaster opened the door, cutting Kouchner off. Phil needed me outside right away. I excused myself and went to see what the crisis was. It wasn't one crisis, but two.

An
UNMO
patrol had either hit a mine or been ambushed on the outskirts of Kigali—the picture wasn't yet clear. Phil had received a report that one of our officers was probably dead and another injured.
The ambulance that had been sent to retrieve them—”ambulance” in this case a fancy word for a van with a stripped interior, a rudimentary first-aid kit and one stretcher—had run into trouble.

At the same time, the ceasefire negotiation meeting being held that day at our headquarters had just erupted into a potential hostage crisis. It turned out that while the meeting was in progress, the
RGF
had shot at a transfer convoy of Tutsis, preventing the transfer from taking place. When the
RPF
representatives at the meeting heard the news (via radio) they arrested the whole
RGF
delegation, including Gatsinzi. My officers intervened but were now caught in a Mexican standoff. Phil asked me to look out the window: in the compound was a melee of yelling officers, ringed by the armed escorts of both sides. I saw Henry down there, and Tiko, but even so it was clear that panic reigned and mayhem was only a split second away. Phil said, “General, you better get down there or you are going to lose this command.”

I don't actually remember how I got to the compound, it just seemed that I was suddenly in the thick of it. I ordered my senior officers out of there: they were to meet me in the operations centre immediately. I spotted Frank Kamenzi off to one side talking on his Motorola. Interrupting him, I told him to tell his bosses to call off this absurd action at once: any attempt to remove or harm hostages from my compound would spark a forceful response from my troops, as well as his own arrest. Kamenzi rarely showed emotion, but he stepped back from me with his eyes wide and got back on his radio.

In the operations centre, I asked Henry and Tiko, who was clearly having a hard time restraining his anger, what was going on with the patrol. I was told that at about fifteen minutes to noon the report had come in that the
MILOB
team—an Uruguayan major, Manuel Sosa, and Major Ahsan from Bangladesh—had seemingly hit a mine about twenty-one kilometres north of Kigali. Our only doctor, an officer from Ghana, hopped into the van-ambulance with a
MILOB
team and headed out, accompanied by an
APC
, to rescue the wounded
UNMO
s. They successfully negotiated fifteen kilometres of bad roads and roadblocks, then the van got a flat tire. The doctor and crew abandoned the vehicle and continued on in the
APC
, but the
APC
was leaking oil and also broke down.

Meanwhile, the two-man
MILOB
team that had been travelling just behind Sosa and Ahsan managed to report in that they had picked up both casualties but were now being held up by the
RPF
.

The situation was extremely ugly. The
RPF
soldiers were refusing to believe that the wounded Ahsan was actually an unarmed peacekeeper, despite the fact that he was wearing his Bangladeshi uniform and
UN
insignia. Furthermore, Ahsan and Sosa had not actually run over a landmine; they had been targeted by a rocket, and when Ahsan had tried to pull Sosa out, they were fired on again. The troops took the money Ahsan was carrying, and then the sergeant leading the party told his soldiers to drag the Bangladeshi officer away and kill him. When Major Saxonov, one of the
UNMO
s from the second team, rushed forward to plead for Ahsan's life, he too was placed under guard. What ultimately saved Ahsan was that the
RPF
soldiers stopped to squabble over how they would split the stolen money. Throughout the confrontation, no one had been allowed to touch Sosa, who was badly wounded but still alive. After almost an hour, the
RPF
decided to let all of them go.

Along with their wounded colleagues, Saxonov and his partner. Major Costa, reached the spot where the
APC
was broken down at about 1310. But it was too late for Sosa, who had died on the way in Saxonov's arms. When they found the ambulance, they had to spend tense minutes fixing the flat tire. By this time, Tiko had launched a second rescue team, led by Lieutenant Colonel Mustafizur Rahman, but their
APC
, not to mention the drawn-out haggling to get through every roadblock, slowed them down terribly. North of the Kadafi Crossroads, they were fired on constantly and had a close shave with a mortar bomb. When they finally met up with the ambulance and the
UNAMIR
four-by-four heading south, Rahman sent part of his team to try to recover the broken-down
APC
and led the rest of them directly to the Red Cross hospital.

Upstairs at Force
HQ
, Phil had gotten in touch with the Hercules detachment in Nairobi to request an immediate medical evacuation. They agreed to come even though the airport was closed, and said they would arrive in about three hours. The hostage standoff was not yet completely resolved, but Phil got the
RGF
and the
RPF
liaison officers to
call for clearance for the Hercules to land.

In the operations centre, I asked Henry to take over negotiating the
RGF
's way out of here, and told Tiko to get his observer headquarters back under control. We had suffered a terrible blow, but losing our heads was not going to help anything. Even so, I could not blame my officers. They were obviously affected by the stress and strain of the impossible situations they faced each day and their living conditions. I announced that I would deal with the
RPF
. Kamenzi was still on his Motorola in the compound, talking with great passion to whomever was on the other end. When I approached him, he told me that the
RPF
was backing down.

Kouchner and his colleague, who were settled uneasily in two springless armchairs, were still waiting for me in my office. I told Kouchner I could not believe the effrontery of the French. As far as I was concerned they were using a humanitarian cloak to intervene in Rwanda, thus enabling the
RGF
to hold on to a sliver of the country and retain a slice of legitimacy in the face of certain defeat. If France and its allies had actually wanted to stop the genocide, prevent my
UNMO
s from being killed and support the aims of the
UN
mission—something France had voted in favour of twice at the Security Council—they could have reinforced
UNAMIR
instead.

But Kouchner and his compatriot clearly wanted me to stop arguing. They did not say that my mission should be subordinated to the French one but nonetheless left me with that impression. They said that I should concentrate on getting
UNAMIR
2 operational in the
RPF
zones over the next four months, while they sorted out the
RGF
-held territories and their supposed safe area. I concluded that they had come to see if I would voluntarily agree to subordinate
UNAMIR
to the French force. There was no chance of that.

I ended the meeting abruptly when I heard the sound of the Hercules overhead. Kouchner wanted some support from us when he went to meet with the
RPF
; I told him we would do our best to help despite my complete disapproval of the French course of action. I thought he was positively nuts to try to argue his position with a rebel army who hated the French. What I did not know at that point was that
the French government and military had already held high-level meetings with
RPF
representatives in Europe about this plan, and that members of the
RGF
, including Ephrem Rwabalinda, my
RGF
liaison officer, had been to Paris to discuss the coming French intervention. I had been kept in the dark like a mushroom—and fed plenty of fresh manure.

At the airport the Hercules kept its engines revving while we loaded the injured officer onto the plane and into the care of a Canadian military nurse. In the airport
VIP
lounge, we performed a solemn, if short, ceremony of remembrance and respect for Major Sosa. He was the twelfth
UN
soldier to be killed in Rwanda and to my chagrin he would not be the last. I grieved for him and for his family. Once again one of my officers was being shipped out wrapped in a blue refugee tarp while my small and tattered force tried to absorb the meaning of his loss—and the world's indifference to the risks we had to take.

That night, French media reported France's plan to deploy troops to Rwanda, news that was soon picked up by
RTLM
and the other local stations and broadcast to the nation. The defending forces in Kigali went mad with joy at the prospect of imminent rescue by the French. Their renewed hope and confidence had the side effect of reviving their hunt for genocide survivors, which put in further jeopardy those who remained in refuges in the few churches and public buildings that had been left untouched. The génocidaires believed the French were coming to save them and that they now had carte blanche to finish their gruesome work.

I had not been able to reach the triumvirate in the
DPKO
by phone before I'd gone to bed, but I'd made sure that full sitreps describing the chaos of the day—including Sosa's death, Ahsan's being wounded and Kouchner's reappearance—were sent to New York. Among the overnight batch of code cables was one from Riza. In short, he told me to keep my head down. “In what appears to be an increasingly dangerous situation, you will take the operational decisions necessary,” he wrote. “Our general advice would be that you adopt a defensive posture in order to [avoid] risks and casualties until a clearer picture emerges.” My mandate for the last month had been to do exactly what I had been
doing. Now Riza was advising me to isolate the mission in Kigali and stop trying to maintain contact with the
RPF
and the interim government. He told me that until the reinforcements arrived, which could take two to three months, I should limit
UNAMIR
to passive guarding of our sites in and around Kigali.

In the same cable he officially informed me of France's desire to send troops into western Rwanda, and told me to sort out what my role would be in relation to the intervention. Riza confirmed that the French were mounting a separate operation that would not fall under my command, and said it would resemble the U.S.-led Operation Restore Hope in Somalia. Riza advised me that the new mission could be on the ground even before the Security Council authorized it. “You should ensure that only the cooperation absolutely necessary is provided by
UNAMIR
and that cordial relations are established,” he wrote. In
UN
-ese this was a circumlocution designed to let me know that I should cover for the
DPKO
and the secretary-general by not being
too
co-operative with the French before their mandate was approved. The trouble was that this meant I should not be in touch with the French force until they actually landed. The humanitarian disaster was huge and growing, the need was urgent, and I was the one with the most current information on the ground, yet I was to observe the niceties and not try to enlighten the French.

Much as I resented the mission that the French would dub “Opération Turquoise,” I thought that not sharing the picture on the ground was a mistake. I later realized that a number of officers who became part of Turquoise had been French military advisers to the
RGF
until the start of the war. How would their presence strike the
RPF
, who had to suspect that the French were not on a purely humanitarian mission? And how much encouragement would the presence of their former advisers bring the
RGF
and the extremists of the Presidential Guard, who were already ecstatic in the streets of Kigali? The appearance of
UN
-sanctioned French soldiers was going to make it even tougher for
UNAMIR
to deal with the
RPF
. Riza wrote, “
RPF
perceptions of the operation itself will determine their attitude and we hope that this will not strain relations with
UNAMIR
.” If I hadn't felt so grim, I would have
laughed. Of course, all my remaining Franco-Africans would be at even greater risk.