Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

by Roméo Dallaire

  I arrived in New York on March 29, early enough to attend the morning briefing at the DPKO. I guess hope does spring eternal, because I went to the UN that day earnesdy seeking real help in solving UNAMIR’s perennial dilemmas and critical shortages—where were my helicopters, defensive stores, ammunition, medical supplies, spare parts, mechanics, and humanitarian and legal specialists? Even food, water and fuel was in short supply. But, as in Ottawa, my Rwanda mission was overshadowed by more familiar crises: the former Yugoslavia, Mozambique, Haiti, Cambodia and Somalia. As I looked in turn at the concerned faces of Annan, Baril and Riza, I knew that these were decent men who supported me as best they could, but that I was most certainly not the only game in town. And no one in the DPKO had ever been to Kigali to see for themselves the surreality of a headquarters infiltrated by spies, the lack of security, the unworkable mishmash of languages. In a private briefing with the triumvirate after the morning meeting, Maurice told me that the contract had finally been signed for the helicopters and that I should expect to receive the first four the following week. On the other fronts they were sympathetic and concerned, but offered me no firm commitment for resupply. In fact, they insisted, in UN terms the mission was actually moving quite swiftly, and they suggested I drop by the FOD to personally thank the desk officers there for their efforts in expediting my requests. This was not the message I would have chosen to deliver to the FOD.

  I felt stymied on how to bring my plight home to them. For the past three months, I’d sent directly to the DPKO very detailed sitreps, special incident reports and periodic political and military assessments. I’d done media interviews. I had produced several comprehensive military and political analyses of the situation, with options and recommendations, which I had provided to the SRSG for his action. Rarely did I get any response. Who really read this material in New York and what did they do with it? Maurice told me over lunch that he had seen only one or two reports. Was the SRSG actually passing on everything I was producing? I was also sending some stuff to Maurice directly, breaching all the unwritten rules of DPKO etiquette, a practice no one ever called me on, but was the material actually making it to Maurice’s desk? Or Miguel’s? Or Hedi Annabi’s? How much of it was getting through to the Security Council, where our mission mandate was being reviewed? Maurice assured me he would check up on the matter.

  On all the big issues they shut me down. We were wildly overextended in trying to deal with the refugee situation from Burundi, and Henry and I had both supported the idea of a peacekeeping mission to Burundi that Henry would perhaps command. Annan told me the Burundian army had refused the offer of a UN force, and so there wouldn’t be one. I wanted just forty-eight more MILOBs to help me stem the flow of men and matériel across all borders, which was feeding the not-so-surreptitious military buildup. At the end of February, a truck with a Burundian licence plate speeding through a routine roadblock set up by a Belgian patrol in downtown Kigali—the heart of the supposed KWSA—had overturned, spilling its cargo of guns and grenades. Maurice shut me down: there would be absolutely no more troops. When I mentioned the deterrent operations I was continuing to press for and the plan I’d worked out with Luc to train teams of gendarmes along with UN soldiers to take on these tasks, Riza once again reminded me of the limits of my mandate. We were planning our first raid for April 1: each individual raid, he said, would have to have prior UN approval.

  As best as I can remember, it was Riza who filled me in on the political state of mind in the Security Council regarding the future of the mission. The unequivocal position of the United States was that if there was no BBTG in the next very short while, the whole mission should be pulled. However, both the French and the Belgians were adamant that they didn’t want to be dragged back into Rwanda because the UN had left the place in a state of potential catastrophe. As a result, the United States seemed amenable to a sixty-day extension and both France and Belgium accepted this compromise.

  That evening I joined Maurice and his wife, Huguette, for dinner at their spacious apartment on the forty-fifth floor of an elegant building close to the UN. We tried to catch up on our friendship, but it wasn’t long before we drifted back to matters at the DPKO, with Maurice regaling me with horror stories from other missions. Later that night, as we walked his dog in a nearby park, he elaborated on the growing uneasiness at the Security Council about my mission, with France and the United States particularly active. Despite talk of a sixty-day extension, the council viewed the political impasse as a red flag, and if the situation dragged on much longer they would pull us out and let the country sink back into civil war and chaos, washing its hands of the whole situation. I told Maurice that we could not let that happen—it would be immoral. He said someone had to give in or something had to change—and soon. I couldn’t argue with that.

  I left New York the next day. My leave had passed in a blur of faces and sensations, some pleasant, some loving, some frustrating, some shocking, but none seemed to carry the depth and complexity of Rwanda. I had picked up one other disturbing piece of news on the trip, though try as I might I haven’t been able to recall or uncover who it was who first delivered it to me. France had written the Canadian government to request my removal as force commander of UNAMIR. Apparently someone had been reading my reports and hadn’t liked the pointed references I had made to the presence of French officers among the Presidential Guard, especially in light of the Guard’s close links to the Interahamwe militias. The French ministry of defence must have been aware of what was going on and was turning a blind eye. My bluntness had rattled the French enough for them to take the bold and extremely unusual step of asking for my dismissal. It was clear that Ottawa and the DPKO were still backing me, but I made a mental note to keep a close watch on the French in Rwanda, to continue to suspect their motives and to further probe the presence of French military advisers in the elite RGF units and their possible involvement in the training of the Interahamwe.

  Still, I did not regret for a moment leaving the bright lights of Manhattan behind in favour of night skies so dark the stars seemed close enough to be street lights. In the recycled cabin air of the long flight back, I physically longed for Rwanda, its rich red earth, the smell of its wood fires and its vibrant humanity.

  I arrived in Kigali on Thursday morning, March 31. In my absence, the whole political landscape had changed. Henry met me at the airport, where he handed me a detailed report that he wanted me to read before verbally bringing me up to date. On the drive back to the bungalow so I could shower and change, Brent filled me in. There had been serious complications with the installation of the government, which was causing a further deterioration in the security situation. The president had insisted on the inclusion of the extremist CDR in the BBTG. All the foreign politicos, with the SRSG leading the pack, had agreed with this initiative in the spirit of “inclusion,” and now, instead of tackling the extremists and the president, they were pressuring the RPF to compromise.

  Shortly after I had left Rwanda on March 10, both the RPF and President Habyarimana had sought the assistance of President Mwinyi of Tanzania, the facilitator of the Arusha Peace Agreement, to arbitrate a solution. Mwinyi had sent his foreign minister to Kigali. If the only outstanding issue in the impasse was the split within the PL, he had suggested that the problem be resolved by sharing the ministerial and deputy positions between the two factions. He had then proposed that Faustin Twagiramungu should have final approval on the lists of ministers and that Prime Minister Agathe should have final approval on the list of deputies, but that they should consult everyone with an interest in the lists, including the president.

  In a nationwide radio address on the evening of March 18, Faustin had read out the final list of ministerial candidates for the new BBTG and emphatically assured the nation that the political manoeuvring was now at an end. Nothing would stand in the way of the new government, he promised, which would be installed on March 25. On the following evening, Prime Minister Agathe had
announced the names of the deputies for the assembly.

  Prudence Bushnell, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, chose that very day to suddenly arrive in Kigali and meet with both Kagame and Habyarimana. What did she tell them? Was she simply delivering a warning that the international community was beginning to lose patience with them all? She also met with Booh-Booh and told him that the Security Council’s forthcoming meeting to review the renewal of the mandate could be “difficult” if there was no progress toward the installation of the BBTG or if there was violence.

  Habyarimana had been displeased with the lists and publicly chastised the prime ministers on national radio for not consulting him before their broadcasts. On March 21, he called Faustin into his office and told him that he had received a letter of complaint from members of the PL on the choice of the justice minister. He suggested that Faustin needed to continue his consultations with the party. Habyarimana said he had received letters from the CDR and the PDI (the tiny Islamic party) stating they were both now willing to sign the Arusha accords and the Political Code of Ethics and therefore wanted to claim their respective seats in the Assembly. In the spirit of reconciliation, the president said, the transitional government should go out of its way to include members from all of the official parties that were identified in the Arusha Peace Agreement. Faustin knew that including the CDR in the government was completely unacceptable. It was a blatantly fascist organization that espoused a radical pro-Hutu, anti-Tutsi agenda and was intimately linked with the Impuzamugambi militias as well as the infamous RTLM. And of course the RPF categorically rejected the inclusion of the CDR in the chamber of deputies and blamed Habyarimana for throwing insurmountable obstacles in front of an already stalled political process.

  Considerable political effort had gone into the preparation of the March 25 swearing-in. There had been verbal assurances from the minister of defence and from Enoch Ruhigira that there would be no demonstrations to block the ceremony. But once again it had failed disastrously, this time because the RPF refused to attend. A subsequent attempt on March 28 failed too, touching off a significant increase in banditry and armed attacks against the more moderate elements of the population. The gendarmes had very limited transport and couldn’t control the situation. Some people had sought protection in churches at night.

  The Kigali diplomatic corps, jointly led by the papal nuncio and the SRSG, essentially endorsed the president’s proposal that all parties acknowledged at Arusha should be included in the BBTG. They issued a joint declaration that was also signed by representatives from Zaire, Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania—in effect, the entire Great Lakes region. In one master stroke, Habyarimana had isolated the RPF as the sole party holding up the political process. The DPA in New York, the UN and the entire political and diplomatic community fell into his trap. We, the international community, caused the demise of Arusha the day all our diplomats, with the SRSG of the UN in the lead, accepted the president’s gambit. In the Security Council deliberations on the future of the mission, the United States wanted to force the council into agreeing to a very stringent time limit for the swearing-in of the BBTG. The RPF would have little time to figure out a political countermove—but they were in a good military position for a swift offensive. No one at the UN had thought to fill me in on any of these events while I was in New York, and I had to wonder again whether anyone was paying real attention to Rwanda.

  The security situation had deteriorated in concert with the political chaos, Brent told me. Many of the moderate politicians had received death threats. Henry now had UN troops camped out permanently in the backyards of five prominent politicians: Judge Kavaruganda of the constitutional court, who would have to rule on some of the contested deputy positions; the two prime ministers; Lando Ndasingwa; and Anastase Gasana. On March 15, in an incident reminiscent of the Gatabazi killing, Enoch Ruhigira’s sister and her husband had been ambushed in their car and killed. Both were influential moderates. Chez Lando had come under grenade attack on March 19, a Saturday night when the hotel disco was packed. Eight people were injured.

  There was also disturbing news from the south. Both my unarmed observer teams and aid workers with UNHCR reported that the RGF was continuing to recruit young men from the Burundi refugee camps of Ruheru and Shororo. The recruits were taken to a nearby forest, where they were being trained using dummy rifles and wooden grenades. In some northern areas of the demilitarized zone, the RPF was preventing my MILOBs from conducting patrols.

  I had to tackle all these issues, but first I had to take on my political boss. The first piece of news I encountered upon arriving at headquarters that first day back was that Booh-Booh had accepted an invitation from the president to spend the Easter weekend at his retreat near Gisenyi. Not only that, the SRSG was requesting a UNAMIR escort. Dr. Kabia and I went immediately to confront him in his impossibly neat office. We tried to be diplomatic, pointing out that the only advantage to his trip was that he might be able to gain insight and intelligence. Of course, he said, that was entirely his intention. He’d known the president since he had been the foreign affairs minister of Cameroon, and he was well placed to penetrate Habyarimana’s intentions. We quickly pointed out that any benefits he might reap were outweighed by the terrible optics: the RPF and the moderates would assume he was on the president’s side. Booh-Booh shrugged and repeated that it would be a working weekend where he would continue to pursue strategies to bring about the transitional institutions. Nothing I nor Dr. Kabia could say would dissuade him, and he actually implied that our misgivings were the result of our imperfect understanding of the ethos of francophone Africa.

  The next day was Good Friday, and I rose to the longed-for smell of charcoal fires and the cacophony of beautiful birds, but the first thought in my head was the fact that the head of mission would be leaving at noon that day in the service of a disastrous impulse. And sure enough, Booh-Booh went, with a UNAMIR escort and Kane in tow. The next morning we received a formal protest from the RPF questioning the SRSG’s impartiality.

  I needed immediate contact with the military leaders on both sides to see for myself where things stood. On Saturday morning, April 2, I met with the minister of defence, bringing Brent with me to take notes. I think Bizimana wanted to gauge UNAMIR’s resolve after my trip to New York; he would certainly have known the status of the mission at the Security Council by way of Rwanda’s ambassador. I came out swinging, rattling off his sins of omission and commission: Why had Bizimana done nothing to assist in the investigation into the Gatabazi assassination? Why had he not provided me with the list of those individuals who had special permits to carry self-protection weapons in the KWSA, or the lists of small arms that had been distributed in the countryside over the last couple of years? He had not had the mines removed from the Gatunda-Kigali corridor; he had obstructed further meetings of the Joint Military Commission that was attempting to plan the demobilization. I asked him, why were his troops preventing humanitarian traffic from getting through to the refugee camps inside the RPF zone? At this last question, he counterpunched: yes, he had promised to aid NGOs and humanitarian efforts, but some of this aid was being siphoned off to support the RPF troops, and he was not going to tolerate that. Neither the minister nor I received much satisfaction from the meeting.

  I left him and, after lunch, flew up to Mulindi to see Kagame in one of our two mission helicopters, which had finally arrived. He seemed distant and a little withdrawn as I hit him with a similar long list of troublesome issues. Even when I told him that my helicopters had arrived and that we would be starting regular aerial reconnaissance over the whole country, including his operational area, he hardly reacted, which was odd considering his usual concern for keeping others in the strategic dark about RPF movements and capabilities. I chastised him about an increasing number of ceasefire violations on the east flank of the demilitarized zone where the sides were often separated by only one hundred metres. He had changed his local com
mander in the zone and, since then, there had been four altercations in which no less than six RGF soldiers had been killed and several injured. My UNMO investigation team had been on the site of the most recent incident in less than an hour and it appeared that the firefight had been started by Kagame’s troops. He promised to investigate.

  Finally I asked if he had any issues to raise with me. He wanted to know how the CDR and PDI proposal had come about. I looked at his face and it was as sombre as I’d ever seen it. Something cataclysmic was coming, he said, and once it started, no one would be able to control it.

  As I flew back to Kigali, I realized I had seen two men that day who were both preparing for something I couldn’t yet face: the whole Arusha experiment was about to collapse. I needed to see Luc—Kigali Sector would be key to our security if the worst came to pass—but I also needed to check in with all my subordinate commanders to assess our few strengths and our glaring weaknesses.

  Later that day, Luc walked into my office as keen and confident as ever, though his eyes looked tired. I was happy to see him. The first joint deterrent raid on a suspected arms cache had gone ahead as planned on April 1, with UNAMIR troops providing the security cordon and gendarmes conducting the actual search. The gendarmes had come up empty-handed; obviously the plan had been leaked and the weapons moved. But Luc had not lost faith. He had been training the Gendarmerie and was certain of their good faith, and he thought that next time, if the intended location of the raid was more closely held, we might achieve some success. We picked April 7 for the next attempt.