Shake Hands With the Devil

by Roméo Dallaire

  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.

  Scrambling to the top of the nearby defensive earthworks, I looked east and there they were: thin black silhouettes that seemed to rise out of the earth and the morning mist as they crested the lip of the plateau, the sun at their backs, like illustrations out of Don Quixote. Lieutenant Colonel Adinkra broke the spell by asking, “What are those things?” I jumped in my vehicle and, followed by a couple of four-by-fours carrying UNMOs, sped down the runway, weaving around chunks of shrapnel that could puncture a tire. The hundreds of wavy silhouettes took clearer form as we drew near. Moving slowly toward us were a number of RGF soldiers, some with their rifles above their heads, others hanging on to the hands of their wives and children, all with their heads down, along with Hutu civilians who had been left behind when the bulk of the troops moved out of Camp Kanombe. When their first officer reached me, he stated in impeccable French that they were the remnants of the RGF battalions from Camp Kanombe and wanted to surrender to me and to UNAMIR. The major added that he hoped his men and their families would be treated as prisoners of war. More of my Ghanaian soldiers had now arrived and, in rather quick time, seized their weapons and escorted them to an area near the main terminal.

  I had a problem. These troops and civilians—nearly eight hundred men and their families—had just given themselves up to a neutral force. Technically I couldn’t protect the soldiers against their enemy, even though I believed there was a very good chance they would be slaughtered by revengeful RPF troops if I didn’t. I told Adinkra to provide tight security for the groups and to have his battalion doctor look to their medical needs, as some of them were severely wounded. He and his Ghanaians were to count them, record their names and wait for further orders. They were not to let the RPF take these people away under any circumstances. The new UNAMIR 2 rules of engagement were to be applied without hesitation.

  I left the site as RPF patrols were approaching the airfield. I was not sure of the status of the prisoners, but I was determined that the RPF would not get them without a fight. After consulting with Gaillard, Henry reminded me of the Geneva Convention statute that allows prisoners of war to be accounted for under Red Cross auspices. Later Gaillard went to the site with a team and conducted official registration procedures as well as providing medical help and sustenance. It took several weeks and the withstanding of threats and bullying from the RPF, but in the end, the soldiers and their families were formally put in the hands of the Red Cross and then handed over to the RPF, with due process observed. Gaillard said we had to trust the RPF in this and that is what I agreed to do.

  On May 22 Yaache and his humanitarian team held an important meeting at the Diplomates with Bagosora and the Interahamwe, to discuss the transfers. The meeting was caught on film and is definitive proof that Bagosora controlled (as well as anyone could) the genocidal militia. I was more and more certain that he had some other card up his sleeve but couldn’t yet figure out how he would be able to use the transfers to his advantage.

  That same day Bizimungu improbably explained to me that he had withdrawn from the airport in order to give it to us as neutral territory. Of course he had never told us he was withdrawing. Since the RPF had moved right in, RTLM soon billed the airport incident as another UNAMIR scandal—we became the ones who had handed the airport over to the enemy. I taxed Bizimungu on the artillery attack on the HQ, though he insisted he had never ordered such an attack.

  I had to find another airhead: I didn’t trust the RPF to respect my operations. Kagame’s forces would now be calling the shots at the airport, and we had found them very uncooperative and single-minded when they wanted to control a situation. My options for a new air base were Bujumbura, Entebbe or Goma, which meant I’d have to undertake negotiations with the governments of Burundi, Uganda and Zaire. These weren’t the best prospects. Establishing the airhead at any one of these places would mean that all of the incoming troops and supplies would have to travel significant distances overland. That morning at prayers I had given orders to prepare a thinning out of the force. Henry’s Ghanaians had come under fire at the airport; our HQ had been bombarded the day before. Because the airport situation was so dicey, I instructed my commanders to start sending troops out overland. Even with the new mandate, we wouldn’t necessarily be able to stay. We were already running the risk of having to fight our way out.

  And here I was, expecting Riza and Maurice in the morning. The RPF did not want to guarantee them safe passage on the direct road from Kabale down to Kigali. Instead we had to move them by a circuitous route to the northeast of Rwanda and drive them in the long way. If the RPF had wanted to, it could have opened up the road. I did not buy the argument that it was so beset by the RGF it couldn’t do it. But the good thing about Riza and Maurice having to come into the country by such a route was that they would have a snail’s-pace tour of the areas ravaged by the slaughter.

  Still, that night, for a change, I didn’t feel alone. I was looking forward to seeing Maurice. I also hoped that Riza, a diplomat with the ability to cut through to the heart of matters, would bring some light to the negotiations. I had run out of silver bullets and needed any sort of magic that the two of them could provide.

  When Maurice and Riza drove into the compound the next day, I was overjoyed to see them. It was nearly seven weeks into the genocide, and for the first time I felt as though I could let my wildly mixed emotions show. As the commander, you just can’t vent on your subordinates and, with Maurice’s arrival, I suddenly had a peer in whom I could confide. Riza, by nature more formal, was still a welcome colleague. In a sense, they had not been shocked by the scenes that had greeted them. These gentlemen were running sixteen other missions. They’d been in Somalia during the worst of the killings and the famines. They’d been in Cambodia, Central America, the former Yugoslavia. To a degree they were inured to horror, experienced with it. They weren’t neophytes as I had been.

  We welcomed them as best we could. We had a supper of the terrible demobilization rations—canned sausages, sardines and beans. Over the next two days, May 24 and 25, I stayed with them all the time. What became noticeable to me as I looked at the city through their eyes was that Kigali had become a ghost town. At most there were maybe twenty to thirty thousand people still living here, clustered in the worst of the shantytowns. Nobody was coming into the city, and no one was escaping it any more. Around us was not a scorched-earth scenario so much as a scorched-human scenario. The RPF was conquering an empty country and conducting its own exactations against any enemies stranded behind the lines. Bizimungu said it this way: “Th
ey may gain the country but not the people.”

  Yet killings were still going on in the city. People who had been hiding for so long were trying to escape to the RPF, who were now as close as the airport. The Interahamwe and the Presidential Guard were going around in the streets presenting themselves as RPF. People would come out to them seeking their protection and instead would be killed. The RPF advance inspired the extremists to get back to work in a ferocious way.

  The advance was also concentrating the population in the west, creating a new humanitarian catastrophe of displaced persons and refugees. Hutus, scared to death by hate radio accounts of RPF atrocities, were moving ahead of the withdrawing RGF—vast numbers of them, at least two million. If they continued to move west and into Zaire through Gisenyi and Goma in the north and Cyangugu and Bukavu in the south, it would be a total disaster—those regions were rugged, forbidding, unfriendly, impoverished. In the northeast, where Kagame was securing the countryside, members of the Tutsi diaspora were starting to come back, taking over the lands, even cultivating new crops. It was a very complex humanitarian problem. There was no such thing as an isolated incident. Every event, even the smallest, had ramifications for one side or the other.

  I needed Riza and Maurice to be more conscious of the vulnerability of the Kigali airport and my tattered outfit. I wanted them to support me in finding an alternate airhead. I needed a place where the new equipment and the troops could marry up before coming into theatre. Training in front of the belligerents wouldn’t exactly impress them with our new ability to use force. A logistics base outside of Rwanda was critical.

  I also briefed them on all the ways in which the RPF was conducting a deliberate campaign to undermine us. In meetings the leaders would say yes to all our reasonable requests, but then they would restrict our movements, prevent my people from attending meetings and run independent humanitarian discussions with NGOs. At the same time, the NRA in Uganda was blocking UNOMUR from doing its job, which I was sure was no accident. And, I reminded them, the RGF was still firing on UN installations, the argument being that the RPF had positions around us and we were in the way.

  I deeply appreciated Riza’s straightforward approach. He led Maurice and me through the night of May 24, reasoning that negotiating the ceasefire directly was an excuse for it never to happen. The strategy he hit on was to create a “declaration of intent to negotiate a ceasefire” that everyone could sign on to as a way to deal with cleaning up all the troublesome preconditions. Once that impasse was broken, we could move on to the ceasefire proper.

  I organized four sets of meetings over the two days, since there were really four sets of players—though the thought of counting the interim government as one of those parties made me deeply uneasy. My argument was yes, there were two sides, but one of the sides had partially disappeared. The interim government bore no relationship to the original government, even though Rwanda’s representative on the Security Council reported to it. The majority of the members of the original Arusha-bound government were either dead or in hiding because they were moderates. If you acknowledged the interim government, you were acknowledging the power of the Hutu ethnicity. And that was exactly what the ministers of the interim government in Gitarama told Riza when they met. They bluntly said that the war was an ethnic war. The RPF insisted it was a political war—a fight for democracy in Rwanda. But the RPF refused to recognize that the RGF’s strings were being pulled by the politicians in Gitarama. Riza was being drawn toward negotiating with the interim government even though we had not resolved how to recreate the political side of the RGF so that it could negotiate under Arusha rules. Apart from my attempts to support the moderate members of the RGF, no one was working on how to establish a moderate political voice in this killing zone.

  My superiors’ other brief was humanitarian. The RPF insisted that it had to control aid distribution in its zones, and the result was that the NGOs were directly sustaining the war effort: quantities of aid ended up feeding RPF troops on the front lines. On the RGF side, humanitarian aid was limited to what could be provided by the Red Cross, whose special immunity generally allowed it to move reasonably unimpeded in RGF zones. But other NGOs attempting to help were attacked, injured or robbed at the roadblocks and there seemed to be no way to guarantee their safety. Riza and Maurice believed that the way to move forward here was the way outlined in my concept of operations for UNAMIR 2: create safe sites where people could congregate, be protected and receive aid. (This gave me great satisfaction because Maurice told me he was still fighting the Pentagon regarding the effectiveness of my operational plan.)

  Their final report, shaped by what they saw, was written in UN-ese by people who were far more skilled than I at expressing themselves in terms that the institution would accept. There was nothing new in the report, but it was presented by a senior authority within the echelons of the organization. And it finally recognized (in Riza’s words and presented to the Security Council on May 31 as a report from the secretary-general) that “[i]t would be senseless to attempt to establish a ceasefire and to allow deliberate killings of civilians in the RGF zone to continue. There is the danger that if not stopped this would lead to the setting off of a prolonged cycle of violence. I repeat that a halt to the killings of civilians must be concomitant with a ceasefire. . . . The immediate priorities are to relieve the suffering of the displaced population and the fears of civilians under threat.” This was music to my ears because it brought to the fore the potential mass movement behind the RGF lines of millions of people scared insensate by the spectre of RPF retribution. “This requires organized humanitarian relief operations, which cannot be launched on the scale required unless adequate security conditions for them can be established. UNAMIR has already prepared its plans to provide these conditions, which encompasses the second priority, the security of concentrations of civilians in peril.” That was another major breakthrough: I now had the offensive authority to actually, finally, be able to do something to stop the killing.

  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 APCs 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 APCs. 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 APCs, 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 APCs 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 APCs, even though we were barely inching along the winding road with its endless procession of lost souls. Maurice made a comment about the missing APCs. 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.