Shake Hands With the Devil (79 page)

The situation in Goma was truly desperate. As the media converged to cover the refugee influx, world public opinion began to pressure governments to act. The
NGO
s, broken free from
UNREO
now that camps were overflowing in Zaire, cast co-operation and coordination aside, followed the cameras to Goma and began what can only be described as an exercise in over-aid. Meanwhile, a hundred kilometres to the south, almost as many people still inside Rwanda were under-aided and
there was little to no media coverage of that situation. Nothing we could say was able to shift any of the attention south.

New York still waffled on providing my minimum requirements. Except for national reconnaissance parties,
UNAMIR
2 had still not deployed sixty days after mandate approval and thirty days past the deployment date. I got tired of asking where my troops were.

Life began to return to Kigali. The Amahoro Stadium and our other protected sites slowly emptied after the government was sworn in as at first one person and then a family and finally all of our companions left us to find out what had happened to their relatives and their homes. Too often the news was bad. Everyone had lost someone in the genocide. With almost ten percent of the pre-war population murdered in a hundred days there were very few families who did not lose at least one member. Most lost more. It has been estimated that ninety percent of the children who survived in Rwanda saw someone they knew die a violent death during that time.

As far as homes and businesses went, first the
RGF
, the Interahamwe and ordinary civilians had stripped the city of anything they could lay their hands on. In my pre-war house the only items left were a set of golf clubs I had borrowed from the Belgian military attaché, and a single copy of
Maclean's
magazine. Sinks, faucets, windows, light fixtures—everything was gone.

Some of the more recent recruits to Kagame's army also engaged in looting. Kagame had promised that they would receive their back pay after they had won, but he did not have the money—no government cash reserves were left in the capital (they had evaporated along with the interim government). His troops began to pay themselves with whatever they could find; genocide survivors and diaspora returnees also scrounged what they could. I am told that for years afterwards you could buy the material goods of Kigali on the street markets of Uganda.

I believe Kagame tried his best to control his new recruits who were lusting for revenge and the returnees who were scrabbling for what they could find, recognizing correctly that word of their excesses would leak out of Rwanda, draw unwanted media and political attention, foil his
attempts to acquire loans and aid to rebuild his country and most importantly fuel
RGF
propaganda and Hutu fears about returning to an
RPF
-controlled Rwanda. The myth of the “double genocide” was now in full swing—some people actually bought the line that the racial war had cut both ways. The last thing Kagame wanted was to legitimize these claims in any way. Unfortunately, we could not ignore the reports we received of revenge murders, looting and rape, as undisciplined rear elements of the
RPF
and returnees sought their own retribution. Rumours of secret interrogations at checkpoints for returnees were making people nervous. We investigated and publicly denounced these atrocities just as we had condemned the genocide. The only chance for reconciliation in Rwanda was for everyone to drop their machetes and focus on true justice against the planners and perpetrators of genocide.

The country also had to focus on rebuilding. Water, that most essential life-sustaining requirement, was not potable, as the waterworks had long since been sabotaged. Wells were dry or tainted and the only other sources were the creeks and rivers that flowed through Kigali, and they didn't bear thinking about. Food was scarce. All over Rwanda, crops had rotted in the fields because no one was left to harvest them and bring them to market. The city's sewage system, not even close to acceptable before the war, now presented a significant health hazard. There was no fuel, no electricity, no telephone or other communications—the list of nothings increased by the day. The infrastructure of government, which should step in at such times, did not yet exist, even if the ministers had been sworn in. Kagame used all the resources he had to guard the border with Zaire in the northwest and to build up against the French in the southwest, and who could blame him? We continued to offer what little we had to try to get the government running. But the
UN
would not authorize us to loan or give any of our resources to the Rwandan civilian administration. Even as millions in humanitarian aid flowed into Goma we could not get a few thousand dollars to help in Kigali. We often ignored the bureaucrats and helped anyway, digging into our own pockets when we could, embarrassed that we couldn't do more.

Life for Rwandans trying to survive inside Rwanda seemed impossible
in those days of late July and early August. However, the people demonstrated a lack of self-pity and admirable resilience. Slowly, small markets began to appear on street corners, people could be seen working the land and harvesting the rare late crop, small businesses reopened and occasionally even some laughter could be heard in the streets if you listened hard enough. Immense problems remained but with a little help we hoped the survivors would endure to rebuild their nation.

But I had to wonder about the kind of help on offer from the outside world. As it became safe to venture into the country, the tourists inevitably arrived. On a daily basis, delegations of politicians, bureaucrats,
NGO
staffers, celebrities, actors, singers and any Tom, Dick or Harry who could manage it (if my tone seems harsh, I have to say that's what it felt like to us) came to Rwanda requesting that we coordinate their visit, their accommodations, their transportation and their itineraries. They tied up our staff, our time and many of our precious resources. While I recognized that the visitors were absolutely essential in the political fight to obtain aid for Rwanda and to get the troops of
UNAMIR
2 deployed, I wasted more hours than I care to remember explaining the unspeakable situation over and over and over again. Every word began to rip at my soul. The one humorous aspect of these visits was that Khan and I would make a point of inviting our distinguished guests to a supper of expired German rations. Maybe it was adolescent of us, but we truly enjoyed the amazed looks on people's faces at the sight of these “state” dinners, along with their pained gulps as they attempted to eat the hideous fare that had been our staple for months. As time went on I begged out of these endless briefings and visits, and Henry filled in for me.

In Goma, on July 21, the United States began a massive and magnificent airlift of humanitarian aid that amazed any who saw it. Within three days of the presidential order authorizing the aid, the first U.S. planes were landing. In order to hasten food distribution, the Americans even tried bombarding areas with large loads of aid using low-flying transport aircraft, though they called a quick halt to this initiative as too many people on the ground were wounded by these
enormous bundles of food. Such a practice had worked in Somalia, but here, between the jagged and unforgiving terrain and the swarming masses, there was no spot where such drops could be made safely.

I awoke that morning to the now familiar sounds of hammers, saws and shovels as the advance party of the 1st Canadian Headquarters and Signals Regiment were on the job repairing and setting up the place for the main force. Riza had sent a code cable to Khan asking for
UNAMIR
's sense of “broader anticipated tasks” in the “emerging situation.” We had already produced operational directives to cover the
HPZ
mission and the exercise we were calling “Homeward Bound,” to bring people back safely from the camps in Zaire. I was glad the
SRSG
was now the one to lay out the mission's broad political strokes, and the one who would have to travel to Dar es Salaam and to Kampala to try to engage the neighbouring countries in the political and diplomatic efforts to shore up Rwanda and the region. Khan agreed to provide an aircraft so that President Bizimungu could visit Zaire and Tanzania on his own to test the waters and also to discuss with his fellow African leaders the presence and effect of extremists in the camps.

My own operational priorities were clear. One, we had to move the
UNMO
s under Luc Racine into the
HPZ
to prepare the way for our takeover; two, we needed to get our MamaPapas into Gisenyi and the Gikongoro area to help the displaced persons still on this side of the border and to link up with the French, Zairean and
RPF
forces to calm the situation there; three, we needed to carry on monitoring the
HPZ
line and to discourage the
RPF
from probing the zone; four, staff had to work flat out to coordinate the arrival, training and deployment of new contingents with equipment and vehicles. Our chief of plans, Mike Austdal, was not only working feverishly on all these fronts, he also took on the job of head of training. Instead of conducting paper exercises, he took the new officers and
NCO
s as they arrived out to role-play situations that would test their comprehension of our rules of engagement. I cannot praise enough the way my tiny headquarters staff kept rising with great invention to meet the urgency of the situation.

The international community was hedging its bets on the legitimacy of the new government. The Human Rights Rapporteur not only harshly
criticized those countries who were harbouring the génocidaires, but also condemned the looting, revenge killings and summary executions inside Rwanda, which not even Kagame could prevent. This did not help the new government's image and, as Kagame and Pasteur Bizimungu had feared, kept a number of nations on the fence about offering help. The cholera epidemic now raging in Goma continued to be a bigger draw on the world's compassion than the starving displaced persons in the
HPZ
or the survivors trying to stitch back together a civil society in Kigali. I found myself in the disgusting position of mentally comparing magnitudes of horror: how could the world allow 3,000 deaths a day in Goma to overshadow the effects of the genocide inside Rwanda and let the toll on the 1.7 million people inside the
HPZ
go on unnoticed? (In the end, as I suspected, the cholera epidemic, which would kill about 40,000, did pale in comparison.) Yet the men who witnessed cholera at its height were beyond such calculations. On July 25, Major St-Denis took a trip to Goma where he was to liaise with the French. Years later, he wrote me a description of what he had seen. “As I was moving through the streets I could not take my eyes off the hundreds of bodies that were littering the roads. All of them . . . had succumbed to cholera. The air reeked of putrefaction, and all I wanted to do was to throw up. For a while we followed a dumptruck filled with bodies that had been picked up by French soldiers. . . . I remember the soldiers' eyes; they were lifeless and full of sadness. . . .

“On the return trip, I drove in front of a hospital and saw one of the most gruesome scenes. . . . A pile of bodies at least twenty feet high stood in front of that hospital. . . . Some of the people still had their eyes open and I felt that they were looking at me with an intensity I could not bear. I had to turn my head away.” Nearby, St-Denis saw a mother tending to her young son in a group of exhausted women and children. That day happened to be his own mother's seventy-fifth birthday, and the scene struck him with incredible force. “I wanted to stop and see if I could provide them with assistance, but I had been forewarned that the
UN
was not overly welcome here and that I should not stop anywhere until I crossed back into Rwanda. I left the scene wondering what would happen to this family, would they survive?” When
he got back to the Force
HQ
, he was able to get a line out to call his mother, but “I could not shake this image of the young boy and his mother. I did not talk for long. [When] I hung up, I drank from a bottle of scotch, something I had never done before, but I had to do something to remove the stench of death from my mouth.”

Radio Rwanda, now in the hands of the new government, was broadcasting to the refugees in Goma, telling them to come back. Its announcers quoted a letter, dated July 19, from Boutros Boutros-Ghali that promised that the big
UN
agencies would assist the homeless and the have-nots. Boutros-Ghali also announced that he was calling for a
UN
inter-agency appeal for victims of the crisis in Rwanda, and that the head of the
DHA
, Peter Hansen, would chair a conference on August 2 in Geneva to bring about a coordinated response from all donors. But first Hansen would have to head to Rwanda to do his personal assessment on the ground.

Hansen was an old hand at humanitarian crises and his visit was a professional piece of work. He had at least twenty people with him, including senior representatives from the other
UN
agencies. At a meeting with Khan and myself, he acknowledged the wisdom of immediate repatriation and even accepted the idea of aid coming from within Rwanda. He and Khan visited the president and other members of the new government, and then toured the camps in Goma and Bukavu (but not the displaced persons camps inside the
HPZ
). By this point Lafourcade's support troops, stationed principally at the Goma airport, were totally overwhelmed, even paralyzed by scenes such as St-Denis described. Lafourcade had come into the country heavy with combat assets and light on the tools of humanitarian relief. Frozen in its tracks by the spread of cholera and by the knowledge of the health risks its troops would be exposed to due to the high infection rate of
HIV
/
AID
s among Rwandans, Turquoise remained limited.