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

by Roméo Dallaire

  But there were many matters troubling his sleep. We both knew how stretched the force was. Luc now told me that if either side launched a major action in the capital, his units simply couldn’t defend themselves or protect UN civilians or foreign nationals. The 225 Ghanaians were still deploying. The new Belgian battalion hadn’t yet adjusted to their area of responsibility or to the rules of engagement of a chapter-six mission. Then there was the Bangladeshi contingent. Their commanding officer was demanding that every order be delivered to him on paper and was resisting the use of his troops for operations. On the brighter side, the medical evacuation plan was well advanced, but we still hadn’t received any medical supplies. Neither New York nor Brussels had solved the ammunition problem, and no one would pay for ammunition to replace what the first Belgian contingent had expended on training. The force had approximately two magazines, or forty to sixty rounds, per man—a pitifully inadequate amount. It could sustain a one- to three-minute fight and then we would be reduced to throwing rocks.

  I went home that night exhausted and full of the warnings that were coming from all sides. But on some deep level, I was glad to be back. The people of Rwanda were not an insignificant black mass living in abject poverty in a place of no consequence. They were individuals like myself, like my family, with every right and expectation of any human who is a member of our tortured race. I was determined to persevere.

  On April 3, Easter Sunday, I flew to Byumba to review the bulk of my forces in the demilitarized zone—the remaining Ghanaians and the Bangladeshi engineering company. We had a magnificent fifty-minute flight at very low altitude over the rounded mountaintops of central Rwanda. Below me that morning it looked like all the villagers in the country were dressed in their finest, walking in near-procession toward their places of worship. Here is what my experience in Rwanda has done: I am unable to remember the serenity, order and beauty of that scene without it being overlaid with vivid scenes of horror. Extremists, moderates, simple villagers and fervent worshippers were all in church that day, singing the message of Christ’s resurrection. One week later, the same devout Christians would become murderers and victims, and the churches the sites of calculated butchery.

  We landed in Byumba in a terrible cloud of dust. The site was a superb piece of modern architecture, a sprawling complex under the care of nuns, which was to open as a school the next year: an expression of the vast amounts of Canadian aid that had been invested in this small Franco-African country. Proportionally, Rwanda had been the largest recipient of Canadian aid in all of sub-Saharan Africa. The nuns had put the Bangladeshi engineers to work on various tasks and informed me that this would be our rental bill. There were discreet CIDA stickers with the Canadian flag on nearly every door. I wondered again why Brent and I constituted the entire Canadian military commitment to the country at this perilous time. A battalion or even a company of French-Canadian troops would have made more sense. The Department of Foreign Affairs and CIDA had a long history in the country, but there had been no contact between me and these agencies before my departure, no sharing of cultural and historical information as I prepared to try to secure a peaceful future.2

  I was greeted by the sector commander of the demilitarized zone, Clayton Yaache, along with the Ghanaian and Bangladeshi company commanders. Since my last visit, more than a month ago, the Bangladeshi engineers had received about a third of the operational equipment they needed. Among the tasks facing them was building or repairing bridges to move troops and patrols and to serve the needs of Rwandans in the future. The Gatuna bridge was a priority, as I was still pushing to open the corridor between Kabale and Kigali. De-mining was also on their plate, along with preparing the camps for demobilizing soldiers. The Ghanaians were hobbled by all the usual shortfalls in their efforts to patrol the zone. The issue foremost in Yaache’s mind was that he had no workable plan for medical evacuation from the area. There was a small medical team to stabilize the seriously wounded, but the trip to Kigali by road would take a couple of hours. There was no ambulance, though the recent arrival of the helicopters would help—I intended to dedicate one to casualty evacuation. Although suffering enormously from the lack of vehicles, equipment and supplies, both units remained keen and morale was high.

  I attended Easter service in the chapel, amused at the transformation of the Ghanaian band, which I’d only heard belting out dance tunes or military marches, into credible church musicians. Briefly I let my thoughts turn to home. In Quebec, Easter Sunday is an important family day and it was almost over. No egg hunt with the kids, no sugar bush lunch with the family, just an imponderable distance.

  I rose a little later than usual on Easter Monday and sat on the veranda for a while. I was to meet Henry for a long session later that morning, but I didn’t have to rush—the headquarters was down to a skeleton staff since this was the first weekend in which my troops had been able to take some time off. The house seemed empty without Willem de Kant, who had rotated back to staff school in the Netherlands just before I had gone on leave. And the zoo of house pets that the animal-crazy Willem had acquired were obviously missing him. There was a goat named Gaetan (with Willem gone we had decided to fatten the animal up to serve at our Canada Day celebration on July 1—none of us except Willem had liked that goat); a rooster named Rusty, and two hens—Helen and Henrietta—who supplied us with fresh eggs. The most demanding of the pets was a little black mongrel we affectionately called Shithead. He was incredibly dumb for a puppy, forever running after the goat or rooster and getting butted or pecked. Every morning when I’d get distracted with thoughts of the mission, he’d steal a piece of my toast. Willem had been replaced as my aide-de-camp by Captain Robert van Putten, who was eager to perform his duties but who had less experience than de Kant and also did not speak French, a serious disadvantage in Rwanda.

  As I lingered there looking out over Kigali, I mulled my constant sense of unease and incomprehension. So many times back home when decisions were taken by an English-Canadian majority organization, I had witnessed the effect on the minority. Catching the linguistic and cultural nuances around how information or orders were conveyed and received could make the difference between acceptance or rejection. At home I had prided myself on being sensitive to these nuances. But in my mission, no one had that kind of insight into the Rwandans. Being bilingual, I understood the words the players spoke but not the meaning. Politically, militarily and diplomatically, the tension was undeniably building, and yet most of the time I felt as though I was swinging at phantoms in the dark.

  This was the first chance Henry and I had had to sit down together since I got back, and in a long session, we sorted our order of business. My confidence in his grasp of command and of the situation was confirmed; he had handled matters very well in my absence. Troubling him was the fact that while I was away, the SRSG had kept him and the military side out of the political loop (no surprise there), and neither the Gendarmerie, the RGF chief of staff nor the minister of defence had met with him. He worried about the consequences of this loss of contact.

  After Henry left, I went to the national holiday soiree organized by the Senegalese contingent, which was made up of thirty-nine officers, all of them military observers and most of them bilingual. Along with Moctar Gueye, the mission spokesman, they had arranged a buffet dinner with music and dancing at the Meridien hotel. Representatives of all parties, the government, the diplomatic community and a delegation from every contingent in UNAMIR were invited, and there was a large turnout. Some of the Senegalese officers had taken up a collection for needy Rwandans and literally dumped a large pile of bills in my hands. I thanked them for their generosity and handed the money to Brent, instructing him to find a suitable charity.3

  I made it to the buffet through a flurry of dancing, often males dancing in groups, and noticed Luc sitting with Mamadou Kane and a few Rwandans. I was surprised to see that one of them was Colonel Bagosora, who was there with his wife. He welcomed me to the table. He had be
en drinking and was more loquacious than usual, though the band was loud and we had to yell to converse. As we talked about Arusha, Bagosora repeated the oft-told tale of the Tutsis attempting to form a hegemony over the Great Lakes region. Trying to distract him from his anti-Tutsi diatribe, I asked him if the president had ever anointed someone as his “dauphin.” I was legitimately curious about the line of succession if something happened to Habyarimana. Given the events of the next few days, my innocent question must have been a bombshell to Bagosora. He responded no, it wasn’t in the president’s nature to think of such things. He then returned to his Tutsi hegemony theory, which I’d heard before. Luc remembers Bagosora telling him drunkenly that the only way to deal with the Tutsis was to eliminate them completely, just wipe them out.

  The future of UNAMIR’s participation in implementing the Arusha Peace Agreement was being decided by fifteen men sitting in a backroom beside the Security Council hall in New York, one of whom was a hard-line Rwandan extremist. He represented a group in Rwanda that was against Arusha and now found himself allied with the Americans, Russians and Chinese, who all wanted the mission to end. On the morning of April 6, we received the Security Council’s Resolution 909, which extended our mandate for six weeks. If the BBTG was not in place by the end of that time, the mission would be “reviewed”—UN-speak meaning it would end. How could we pull out? Would we have any credibility left? Would we have to evacuate all the UN civilians and expatriates? I read on. Although the resolution did not add any new restrictions on our modus operandi, it gave me no more room to manoeuvre in deterrent operations. And we were also being asked to find ways to reduce costs. This last point was absurd. The UN was spending millions of dollars a day in the former Yugoslavia. I had roughly $50 million for the year and had to fly everything in because there were no ports, only one airport, three roads to the border and no trains.

  The report sent the wrong message, and the consequences were truly devastating. It confirmed for all Rwandans—the moderates attempting to hang on to hope and the extremists plotting extermination—that the world didn’t give a damn about Rwanda.

  April 6 would turn out to be the longest day of my life. The president was in Dar es Salaam meeting with the regional leaders, who were pressuring him to install the BBTG, I hoped against hope that this would make him deal—that is, if he could control the hard-liners and extremists in his party and the CDR. He still had a number of supporters, and he retained control of the army and the Gendarmerie through Nsabimana and Ndindiliyimana. I had to regard this diplomatic initiative as a last chance.

  In the wake of Resolution 909, the DPKO wanted my withdrawal plans immediately. UNAMIR would be the central instrument, coordinating with any foreign forces that might arrive in Rwanda to evacuate their expatriates. Working on the withdrawal plan was anathema to my priorities. I thought, “Who evacuates the Rwandans?” The answer was no one.

  I went home that evening still thinking about how to make Arusha work. I hadn’t seen the SRSG since before his ill-advised visit with the president, and we absolutely needed to confer over the direction we had just received from the Security Council. We had an arms-cache raid planned for the morning: with luck, I could bring him news of a success. In Dar es Salaam, a plane was warming up at the airport to bring President Habyarimana back to Kigali. That plane and my hopes were on a collision course that would sink Rwanda into the abyss.

  * * *

  1. Canada’s decision to supply two Hercules aircraft for my mission during the war permitted us to stay in Rwanda, as they provided just enough transport for medical evacuation and logistical backup for my small force. Canada was also the only nation to reinforce my mission in April and May 1994 in the form of excellent staff officers and MILOBs.

  2. Canada did not have a coherent and integrated policy toward Rwanda, only isolated departmental initiatives that in a time of crisis did not come together. Howard Adelman, a Canadian academic, has written an excellent chapter on Canadian policy in Rwanda in The Path of a Genocide: The Rwandan Crisis from Uganda to Zaire (1999), which certainly reflects my confused experience of my country’s relationship to Rwanda.

  3. Brent did not have time to see to this before the war started, and he gave the money to our Hutu and Tutsi servants to help them through what he thought at the time would be the difficult period before we regained control of the situation. Tiso and Célestin were both stopped at roadblocks and murdered, Tiso because he was a Tutsi and Célestin because he had a large amount of cash on him.

  10

  AN EXPLOSION AT KIGALI AIRPORT

  AT ABOUT 2020 hours on April 6, the duty officer relayed disturbing news from our UNMOs at the airport: “There has been an explosion at Kigali airport.” At first the UNMOs thought our ammunition dump had blown up, but then we learned otherwise. A plane had crashed but no one could confirm that it was Habyarimana’s. Presidential Guards and members of the RGF’s Para-Commando Battalion from Camp Kanombe were running wild at the airport, threatening people with their weapons, and the observers had gone into hiding. I radioed Luc Marchal to send a patrol to find the crash site and to secure the area so we could conduct an investigation.

  Our phone began to ring off the hook: Prime Minister Agathe, Lando Ndasingwa and others called seeking information. Madame Agathe said she was trying to get her cabinet together but many of the ministers were fearful and didn’t want to leave their families. She said that all the hardline ministers from the other parties had disappeared. I asked if she could find out whether it was the president’s plane that had crashed and if he was on board, and then get back to me. I called Booh-Booh to alert him to the situation. As soon as I hung up, Madame Agathe called back to confirm that it was Habyarimana’s plane, and that he was presumed to have been on board.

  She wanted any help UNAMIR could give her to get the political situation under control. With the president probably lost in the crash, she was legally next in line as the executive authority in the land. But some of her moderate ministers were already fleeing their homes for safer hiding places, and others, who had UNAMIR, Gendarmerie or even RGF guards, did not feel safe enough to meet with her and devise a plan. And where were all the extremist politicians?

  By this point so many calls were coming in over the phone and by radio that we had to cut off conversations to keep the lines open. I needed to be able to receive accurate reports in order to act. We referred all these desperate callers to Force HQ an option that was less than ideal considering that the Bangladeshi duty officers spoke no French.

  At about 2200 I received a call from Ephrem Rwabalinda, the RGF liaison officer to UNAMIR. He told me that a crisis committee was about to meet at RGF headquarters and asked me to come. I called Luc and told him to meet me there as soon as he had ensured that Kigali Sector was on red alert. I also called Henry and told him to go to the CND and stay with the RPF. He needed to keep them calm until I could confirm what was going on. Just before we left, Riza called from New York. I filled him in as best I could and told him I was on my way to RGF headquarters.

  Brent, Robert and I then headed out into the night. The city was frighteningly silent and the lights in most homes were off. Unless there was a curfew, Kigali was usually alive with people. But we didn’t even see a police patrol. I thought that rogue members of the Presidential Guard might be on the move, and I didn’t want an incident; they would exploit any confrontation involving UNAMIR for full propaganda value. We made our way cautiously through the streets.

  The gates were overmanned by heavily armed soldiers. In the compound, troops in formation were moving around. I left Robert in the vehicle with the radio while Brent came with me into the headquarters. We were directed to the upstairs conference room. The overhead fans were off and the room was mostly in darkness, though a few long fluorescent lights fluttered; the ceiling seemed to press down on our heads.

  Colonel Bagosora sat at the centre of the large horseshoe-shaped conference table. The fact that he was in charge didn’t
bode well. He impatiently waved us to sit down. On his left was Major General Ndindiliyimana, his chair pushed back and his expression noncommittal, accompanied by a few of his staff officers. On Bagosora’s right was a senior RGF staff officer who we knew worked closely with the Belgian and French military advisers to the Rwandan force, but the advisers themselves weren’t present. This worried me, because of all the foreigners in the country, these men best knew what was going on with the Rwandan military.1 Rwabalinda was on the far right. There were about a dozen others, most of them senior army staff officers. Was this a well-planned coup d’etat or were these officers simply maintaining order until the political leadership was sorted out? Bagosora’s presence undermined my frail hope that perhaps this coup, if it was a coup, had been launched by the moderate members of the military and the Gendarmerie.

  Bagosora welcomed us and explained that since the minister of defence was out of the country at an Olympic committee meeting in Cameroon, the group of officers in this conference room represented the senior leadership of the army and the Gendarmerie. The military needed to take control of the country because of the uncertainty caused by the crash of the president’s plane. Bagosora looked at me with a straight face and said he didn’t want the Arusha process jeopardized. He emphasized that the military only wanted to control the situation for the shortest time possible, then hand the situation over to the politicians. He wanted to keep peace with the RPF, he said. He acknowledged that elements of the RGF, especially the Presidential Guard, were out of control, but he assured me that every effort was being made to return them to their barracks. I didn’t trust him for a minute.