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

by Roméo Dallaire

  June 6. At morning prayers, Yaache informed me that the numbers of people who were entering our compounds, including the Mille Collines, had increased by thousands in the past few days. He was having a tough time creating lists of people for the transfers because more kept arriving and others kept changing their minds about whether they should go or stay.

  That same day the RGF attempted one of its only offensives to open the road from Kigali to Gitarama and was easily defeated by the RPF (leading to the fall of Gitarama to the RPF by June 13 and causing the interim government to flee first to Kibuye and then on to Gisenyi, in the extreme northwest, on the border with Zaire). I had to make another trip to see Kagame that day, this time travelling not to Mulindi but to a temporary headquarters in newly won territory. I made my way through the usual horror show to find Kagame sitting on the patio outside a small cottage with easily twenty to thirty soldiers deployed around him. Patrick Mazimhaka, Kagame’s senior adviser on political matters, was also there. It struck me how serene they both were as they sat in their wicker chairs in the shade of the patio, and what a contrast their situation seemed to the life I was living with my troops at the Amahoro. Kagame’s clothes were pressed and clean, and he greeted me with warmth and composure. Inside the cottage, the furniture was thrown around and on the floor was a picture of Habyarimana amid broken glass. We sat down on a long sofa with a fairly large coffee table in front of us. And I, as always travelling with my battle map, laid it out on the table. We proceeded to talk informally about the evolution of the campaign, with me trying to intuit his future moves from the little he’d say. When I told him of my concern about the human wave that was sitting just this side of the southwestern forest near Butare, he gave me the same old line, that his aim was to stop the killing wherever it was happening.

  I asked Kagame what his estimate was of the RGF’s situation. He was sanguine. The road between Kigali and Gitarama was now a very risky route. He had the best of the RGF troops locked up in Kigali so they couldn’t fight him elsewhere; he could close the gap any time he wanted and wipe them out. My distinct impression was that he was toying with his enemy.

  I mentioned Ephrem Rwabalinda’s initiative to reduce tensions between the warring parties: he thought a meeting between Kagame and Bizimungu might crack some of these hardened differences. But Kagame saw no value in that. Why would he meet with the enemy when he held all the cards?

  June 7. I was wracking my brain, trying to think of a way to give the troops a brief respite from the constant stress. Henry was stranded in Nairobi when I had to close the airport; we all felt his absence, and our isolation. That evening, I was asked by the staff at prayers whether it would be possible to find a television and an antenna so they could watch the World Cup soccer final on June 17. (UNOMUR had sent me a personal invitation to join them in Kabale to watch it; the Dutch and the Brazilians, two of the countries who were part of that mission, were in the finals.) This was one small thing I could do. I authorized my staff to scrounge up a TV and go, taking as few risks as possible, to my former residence to see if the antenna there was still intact. If it was, they were to bring it back and install it on the HQ. Having the TV was a great boost to morale, though as it turned out, by the time June 17 arrived, no one in UNAMIR was thinking about soccer.

  When Henry discovered that I had closed the airport, he diverted to Kampala and took on the Herculean task of organizing an overland logistics route from Nairobi to Kampala by air and then by road to Kigali. In three days, he negotiated and secured agreements from the Kenyan and Ugandan governments, the UNDP in Kampala, UN headquarters in New York, our UN administrative staff in Nairobi, and the RPF to open a route. He borrowed trucks from the UN World Food Programme and then personally led the first convoy with the Ghanaian reinforcements—about fifty soldiers—to Kigali.

  When they entered our compound on June 8, we clapped and cheered. This was the first signal that UNAMIR 2 might actually unfold (albeit fifteen days late and with soldiers who did not have the requisite training, equipment and troop carriers), and it created the logistics route that would have to sustain the refugees and us in the weeks and months to come. The co-operation of World Food Programme in this operation was crucial: it provided us with heavy lift trucks, and we in turn provided it with a route, coordination and security to deliver humanitarian aid into Rwanda. (This was a classic example of what can be achieved when aid organizations co-operate with a peacekeeping force instead of frustrating it.)

  Ironically, that same day, the UN Security Council voted on Resolution 925, extending the mandate of UNAMIR until December and authorizing the phase-two deployment of UNAMIR 2 concurrently with phase one. What a farce. Twenty-three days had passed since the mandate had been approved, and we should have been nearing full strength for rapid intervention. Much as we’d cheered to see the Ghanaian reinforcements arrive, fifty men were nowhere near enough.

  The day that Henry returned with the Ghanaians, June 8, Major Luc Racine led a small team of UNMOs, accompanied by a French journalist, into Nyamirambo, a suburb of Kigali, to do a reconnaissance of a French-run orphanage called St. André’s. The orphanage was one of the places that Bernard Kouchner had on his radar, and the situation there was desperate. The children, mostly Tutsis, were crammed into the building with little food or water and they could rarely even venture safely out into the yard. The orphanage was surrounded by unfriendly people, including militiamen.

  To get there, Racine had to negotiate past twenty-one barriers. Nyamirambo was one of the few densely populated areas left in Kigali and was full of militia. All the barriers there were set up close to drinking joints, and the people at the barriers were boozed up on homemade banana beer. Huts were so jammed together on the sides of the road that driving along it was like going through a tunnel. As Racine drove deeper and deeper into Nyamirambo, he seemed to be penetrating the heart of the Interahamwe. The people of the suburb were so poor it was hard for them to imagine a future and they had been receptive to the Hutu hate message.

  The orphanage was a square building surrounded by a fence, and jammed up against the fence on all sides were more huts. When Racine and his team drove into the orphanage compound and parked near the one big tree, the French missionary who ran the place burst into tears. But the arrival of the UN vehicles had drawn attention, and soon hundreds of locals had climbed onto the roofs of the surrounding huts, and some even hopped down to stare in the orphanage windows at the children.

  Inside the building, a couple of the adults who had been attempting to care for the children had lost it and become near-crazed with fear. Racine knew there was no way he could bring the children out that day. The crowd was getting ugly, and the UN’s evacuation of orphans was a potentially explosive issue. But he decided to try to move the adults who had suffered breakdowns. With the occasional militiaman now firing his weapon toward the orphanage, getting anyone out was going to be tricky. They managed to dodge the bullets and reach the cover of the tree, but on the way to the truck, the French journalist was hit in one buttock, and they had to grab him, fling him inside and make their escape.

  Racine stepped on the gas and started ramming his way through the barriers, making it past each one just ahead of the word being passed on to stop them. Before he headed back to the Force HQ, he dropped the wounded journalist off at the King Faisal Hospital, leaving him in the care of Dr. James Orbinski. In Racine and his team’s wake, Nyamirambo exploded—the Interahamwe had no compunction about firing at their own people when denied a target. The suburb became so chaotic, we weren’t able to get back into the neighbourhood until Kigali fell to the RPF three and a half weeks later—even Kagame’s troops had trouble taking control of the area.

  That failed mission was exactly the nature of the tasks I had to ask the UNMOs to do in order to try to deliver medical supplies and save, protect, feed and possibly evacuate innocent people. That night Yaache brought me up to date, as he did every day, on the humanitarian work being done. By this poi
nt we had received 921 requests from the outside world to go in and save Rwandan individuals or entire families, and 252 requests to rescue expatriates. All of those people had connections pulling strings for them through New York, or even calling us directly. Even though Racine and his team had made it out of St. André’s orphanage alive, Racine was devastated by the thought of not being able to rescue the children. He knew that after he’d left there was a good chance that all the kids would have been murdered—people had been looking in the windows waiting to pounce.

  It took every ounce of our effort, resources and courage to produce tiny results, yet all around us hundreds of thousands of human beings were being ripped apart and millions were running for their lives. Sometimes we did more harm than good. After each and every mission, failed or “successful,” I had to wonder whether it was ethical for me to keep my men at such a level of operational intensity and risk. After I got home from Rwanda, and the years slowly revealed to me the extent of the cynical manoeuvring by France, Belgium, the United States, and the RPF and the RGF, among others, I couldn’t help but feel that we were a sort of diversion, even sacrificial lambs, that permitted statesmen to say that the world was doing something to stop the killing. In fact we were nothing more than camouflage. When I hit my personal rock bottom in the late nineties, after I testified at Arusha for the first time, it was because I had finally realized the extent to which I had been duped. I had pushed my people to do real things that ultimately saved human lives, but which in the scheme of the killing seemed nearly insignificant, and all the time I had thought I was leading the effort to try to solve the crisis.

  We eventually received word that there had been a large massacre in Kabgayi, the place the Pope had asked us to protect. A group of RPF soldiers who had been part of the force that had secured the area had gone into the monastery and killed an archbishop, three bishops and ten priests. The rebel troops had been travelling for weeks and encountering everywhere the effects of the Hutu scorched-human policy, and they were well aware that the church was very intimate with the Habyarimana family and members of the former government. Quite simply, they killed the princes of the church out of vengeance, their discipline frayed to the breaking point by the atrocities they’d witnessed. At the ceasefire meeting held on June 9, the RPF acknowledged a total breakdown of military control at Kabgayi and that it was a group of its soldiers who had viciously slaughtered the clerics, all of whom were Hutu. Henry took on the job of coordinating between the RPF and the RGF the logistics of retrieving the bodies and handing them over to the interim government for burial. That night, when Henry sent a code cable sitrep to Maurice, he signed off, “Would appreciate the arrival of the cavalry soon.”

  That morning I had left Henry in charge in order to go to Nairobi. I needed to talk face to face with Golo, the new CAO, and see if I could persuade him and his staff to respond to our needs more expeditiously. I also wanted to meet with the unruly gaggle of NGOs and aid agencies who were fetching up in increasing numbers in Nairobi, and who presented themselves as knowing better than anyone else how to solve the humanitarian crisis in Rwanda. While a few of the more reputable agencies, notably the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières, continued to carry their enormous burdens quietly, others seemed caught up in assessment missions and photo opportunities. I wanted to persuade them to think twice about their dealings with the RPF and see if I could build a fire under them to stop their eternal “assessments” of the crisis and take action. As for the UN humanitarian family, with the exception of World Food Programme, as far as I could see its members were few on the ground.

  The loyal and unflappable Amadou Ly thought it was about time I came and spoke to the international community directly. I also had a personal incentive for the trip. When he had got back to Canada, Admiral Murray had decided that it would be good for my state of mind to have a few days with Beth, and he had made arrangements to fly her to Nairobi to meet me.

  I made my way north by four-by-four through RPF-held territory without any incident. The countryside was deserted, the fields were brown and without crops, and a number of villages had been completely destroyed by fire. The RPF refused to let our vehicles across the Gatuna bridge, so I walked across the small river into Uganda and felt as though I was stepping into a zone of peace and sunshine. I was picked up on the other side of the river by UNMOs from UNOMUR. We stopped briefly to see Colonel Azrul Haque, my local commander, who was waiting for me with a warm cup of tea and a succinct report on the state of things along the border. For a time, the UN had wanted to disband UNOMUR entirely, arguing that with the arms embargo in place, there was no more need for the mission. The day before I’d left on this trip, I sent the DPKO a report arguing strenuously that the arms embargo was a joke and that I needed the mission to stay put. Haque told me that the NRA remained uncooperative and was preventing observer operations. But he had deployed our UNMOs not too far from the major border checkpoints, even leaving them there at night to keep watch, and they were seeing significant traffic between Uganda and Rwanda.

  I climbed aboard a helicopter for the flight to Entebbe, where I was to rendezvous with a Hercules for the last leg to Nairobi. Soon I was flying over the old Entebbe airport, doing a visual inspection before landing at the new air terminal. Entebbe would be my main staging base for UNAMIR 2; the old airfield was still reasonably serviceable, and it and the tarmac could be transformed into the site of a tented city for training and for the maintenance and repair of incoming equipment. (In the weeks to follow I would end up competing with humanitarian organizations for precious cargo transport and buses to get the new forces from Entebbe to Kigali, a full day on the road if the trip was smooth. Word of our needs had made it as far as Mombasa and even Dar es Salaam, and rental prices of heavy transport skyrocketed. Was that the capitalist system of supply and demand at work or was it the hovering of vultures?)

  I had an hour or so before the flight to do my rounds at the airport, and I headed out to see the few UNMOs from UNOMUR who had already been moved here to set up shop. But I soon forgot all about that: coming down the tarmac toward me from the waiting Here was Beth. I wanted to run toward her as people do in the movies, but I was too stunned at seeing her. Home had seemed so far away. We climbed into the Here and were given seats up front with the crew. I found I could say very little during the flight to Nairobi, but I remember noticing tears falling onto my hands even though I wasn’t aware I was crying.

  Of course I had no time with Beth once we arrived in Nairobi. I was immediately whisked away from the airport to a major information and coordination meeting with all the humanitarian groups and diplomats. I gave a detailed briefing on the military situation and the genocide, and described the UNAMIR 2 concept of operations and my mission’s new roles, which included providing support and protection to the aid agencies as well as to Rwandans in danger. I forcefully warned them about freelancing in the RPF zone and told them how much it was aiding and abetting one of the belligerents; as long as they continued to deal directly with the RPF, the RGF would never allow the groups to claim neutral humanitarian status, which meant they would not get access to the displaced camps in the RGF-held territory. I left that meeting feeling uncertain about whether these strong-willed aid workers would get the message and play by my rules.

  I then spent almost an hour with the international media, accusing them fairly candidly of dropping the ball. As far as I was concerned, their mission was to report the truth and to embarrass the fence-sitting political leaders in their home countries without reserve, to never let them off the hook for the Rwandan genocide. “I need troops and I need them now,” I told them. “So get out there and help me sell the Rwandan cause.” At least they listened.

  By the time I got to the UN headquarters in another part of town, it was well past 1700 and most of the staff had gone home. Their nine-to-five attitude nearly made me blow a gasket, and I was only restrained by the ever-sensible Amadou Ly. Even so, after describing once again t
he dire situation in Kigali and receiving bureaucratic answers from Golo and the few staff who had stayed behind to meet with me that evening, I found myself threatening my CAO: “I have more rifles than you, Mr. Golo, and you don’t want to see them here.” After calming down a little, I realized that no amount of telling would demonstrate to the administrative staff the conditions we were living in, and I resolved to put on the pressure to bring them on field trips to Kigali so they could smell first-hand the acrid odours of death and starvation, and experience what it was like to eat expired tinned rations and to cope with the resultant diarrhea without toilet paper or running water. Then they’d know how serious I was when I said that the loyalty of my troops was being pushed beyond decent limits by the conditions they were forced to endure.

  By this time I was long overdue at the Canadian embassy, where Ambassador Lucie Edwards had made arrangements for Beth and me to have quarters and some good cooking. I can’t tell you what being inside a comfortable house again felt like, though I have to confess it took me three complete scrubbings to feel clean enough to pretend for a while to be normal.

  For the next two days I went into hiding with Beth at an isolated British colonial-style hotel in one of Kenya’s game parks. On the second night, I was called from dinner with my wife to take an urgent phone call. I immediately assumed something terrible was happening in Kigali. But no, to my considerable ire, it was the French ambassador to Kenya on the phone. How he got the number is still a mystery. His pressing business was orphans—he wanted to meet with me when I got back to Nairobi. As I returned to Beth, I wondered what it was with the French and their obsession with orphans: what did it mean that they were now approaching me directly rather than going through Kouchner? When I sat down again, I told Beth that I thought the French were up to something and I needed to figure out what. I never would have guessed at the time the extent to which the interim government, the RGF, Boutros-Ghali, France and even the RPF were already working together behind my back to secure a French intervention in Rwanda under the guise of humanitarian relief. But what was new about that? I was truly the pawn in the field, expected to simply react to the higher political game that bigger people than I were playing.