Shake Hands With the Devil (13 page)

The
RPF
portrayed itself as a group of Rwandan refugees who only wanted to go home and live in peace. They claimed that their desire was to build a multi-ethnic, democratic society in Rwanda. While I didn't doubt their sincerity, I was aware that having been successful in the civil war they had nothing to fear and everything to gain from the successful implementation of the peace accords. We hit only one awkward snag: the chairman expressed his concern that, since the signing of the Arusha agreement in early August, the displaced population of the demilitarized zone—which numbered 600,000—had started to wander back into the
area. The
RPF
was worried that its security could be compromised as a result. Having just witnessed the hell of the displaced persons camp, I ventured that these poor people were desperate to return to their homes and small farms and that it should be one of the first orders of business to de-mine the area to prepare it for resettlement. Bizimungu did not agree. According to the provisions of the Arusha agreement, the neutral international force had to keep the area clear and closed. At the time, I put his concern down to the paranoia of an insurgent rebel force. Later on, the thought crossed my mind that the reason the
RPF
raised the issue had less to do with security and more to do with the resettlement ambitions of Tutsi refugees then in Uganda.

Our inspection of the
RPF
army was conducted in closely guarded convoys over terrible tracks. This struck me as a deliberate attempt to waste our time and prevent us from taking a really good look at the
RPF
headquarters and units. However, without helicopters, which could fly over the heavily forested and mountainous terrain, we were going to be very limited in our observations of the force. The officers were good at giving the impression of full co-operation, but they offered very little information about their force structures and true capabilities. The soldiers we did see were clearly well-led, well-trained and motivated. They wore an idiosyncratic combination of East German summer uniforms and rubber boots, but were always clean and neat. The rank and file tended to be young, sometimes even boys; the officers, too, were young but clearly knew how to work their troops. When not training, soldiers had lectures to attend and equipment to clean and maintain. This was a combat-proven and battle-ready army.

The
RPF
's only limitation was in logistical support. They had very few vehicles, and while their troops appeared to be fit, well-fed and reasonably well-equipped, they were a light infantry army that had to fight and resupply by foot or bicycle. Yet they had won all recent contests because of their superior leadership, training, experience, frugality, mobility, discipline and morale. If Kagame was responsible for nurturing this force, he was a truly impressive leader and perhaps deserved the sobriquet that the media had given him: the Napoleon of Africa.

The
RGF
was a pronounced contrast. The army's chief of staff, Major General Déogratias Nsabimana, was a big man with facial expressions that betrayed a deceptive nature. He was not an impressive soldier and had proven less than effective in the last campaign against the
RPF
in the spring of 1993. He hung on to his position after hostilities ended because of his closeness to President Habyarimana. Despite the presence of an interim government, the army and large parts of the Gendarmerie (the Rwandan police) were still controlled by the regime due to the fact that well-placed hard-liners from the president's party, the
MRND
, had hung on to power in the ministry of defence.

Among the senior officers of the
RGF
was a cadre of a few colonels who appeared to be committed to Arusha and who eagerly anticipated the end of a conflict they had lost on the battlefield. But there were many others within the officer corps, particularly from northern Rwanda, who seemed less committed to Arusha and made no secret of their hatred of the
RPF
. It was clear that there was a group to work with and a group to watch.

I visited the
RGF
side of the demilitarized zone and the southern part of the country in a light Gazelle gunship helicopter and also flew north to see the training camps of the elite units of the
RGF
in Ruhengeri, close to Habyarimana's birthplace. As we approached Ruhengeri, the Virunga Mountains rose up in front of us like blue giants from the sea of verdant hills. This breathtaking vista (made famous by the film
Gorillas in the Mist
) was the heartland of the former regime.

The elite units in the area were based in a commando camp; a Gendarmerie rapid reaction force and elite military units were based at the Gendarmerie school in Ruhengeri. All were being trained by French and Belgian military advisers.

On the other hand, the front-line units of the army were composed of poorly trained recruits who lacked weapons, food, medical supplies and, above all, leadership and morale. Atrocious living conditions meant desertion rates were high and units had to be frequently rotated due to the high incidence of malaria. There was a double standard in this army: high for the elite units and low for the rest of the army.

The
RGF
unit that caused me the most concern was the Presidential
Guard, which Brent and Tiko had observed closely at its camp in Kigali near the Meridien hotel. It was made up of highly trained officers,
NCO
s and soldiers, and was the best equipped and staffed of the elite units as well as the most aggressive. They were Habyarimana's praetorian guard, and they acted with arrogant self-assurance. I did not appreciate their standard of discipline. While they were respectful and obedient to their own officers, they treated all others in the
RGF
, and even myself, with contempt. It was clear they would have to be handled carefully. Reintegrating them into society when they were released from military service or rolling them into the new army planned for Rwanda would be difficult, to say the least. They would be a first priority during the demobilization phase, and I was sure that controlling them would require the personal intervention of the president.

While the
RGF
's conscripted troops lived for their two beers a day and well-nigh mutinied when that ration was cut in half, the young officers who commanded them were generally hard-hitting and dynamic. The gulf between officers and enlisted men was explained to me by a senior local commander in the Ruhengeri garrison, who said that the only way for officers to advance was “to make a name for themselves.” He didn't elaborate, but I understood him to mean “in the field.” This was not a comforting thing for a potential
UN
peacekeeper to hear, as it meant that the more ambitious young officers with nothing to lose and all to gain might be willing to risk the lives of the men under their command to advance their own careers.

Something else that disturbed and angered me was the
RGF
's use of children on the front line. I had gotten somewhat used to seeing children doing heavy physical labour in Rwanda, but as I toured the government forces I realized that the soldiers were using children as servants to wash clothes, cook, and clean, and the men demonstrated a disturbing fondness for them while off duty. I was told on more than one occasion that these children were undoubtedly better off with the army—at least they were being fed. But the intimate connection between children and combat troops seemed downright wrong. I never saw children that young with the
RPF
, though a large number of its soldiers were definitely below eighteen years of age.

The more candid
RGF
officers told us about the low pay, poor (if any) training, limited reinforcements, troubling desertion rates and lack of confidence among the men, who had been thrown into battle against the proficient
RPF
and had suffered a heavy toll of casualties, particularly during the last
RPF
assault in February 1993. An army in this state of disorder could become a very dangerous entity; rallied by a charismatic leader, it could degenerate into a ruthless rabble. I decided that in any mission, the bulk of the
UN
forces should be deployed south of the demilitarized zone, in the
RGF
sector.

The Gendarmerie, a paramilitary force built on the French model, was the third structured force in Rwanda and was about six-thousand strong. Its chief of staff, Colonel Augustin Ndindiliyimana, reported to the minister of defence for operational taskings, support and logistics, and to the minister of the interior for day-to-day police work around the country. Bizimana, the defence minister, had a strong hold over the Gendarmerie during periods of war, when it could be mobilized for the front to augment the army. Before the last war, the Gendarmerie had had fewer than two thousand members, but young recruits had tripled its size. In the process, it lost cohesiveness, discipline, training, experience and credibility. Of all the officials with whom we had to work during the mission, Ndindiliyimana was by far the most helpful, candid and open.

Tiko and Major Eddy Delporte, a Belgian military police officer who was attached to us from the
UN
mission in Western Sahara, conducted the analysis of the Gendarmerie. Their survey revealed an erratically led and undisciplined body of men who ranged from true professional police officers to out-and-out criminals in uniform. Although scattered around the country, the bulk of its force was in Kigali and Ruhengeri. By and large, its members seemed more educated than their colleagues in the army and had a sense of pride. Delporte confirmed that France and Belgium had advisers with the
RGF
and the Gendarmerie, from their headquarters to their training institutions to their units in the field, an advisory network far more extensive than their ambassadors or military attachés had let on. Delporte tried to get more information from the
Belgians but ran up against a brick wall, which we were never able to penetrate. What was their actual mission in Rwanda?

Our staff also made contact with the French para-battalion in Kigali, but the visit yielded little except some map references of
RGF
sites around the city. The battalion, too, was close-mouthed about its strength and true mission in Rwanda. We rarely saw French soldiers, except at the airport or at night when they operated patrols and roadblocks in and around the capital. On the whole the situation in the city was quiet and restrained, an atmosphere to which the battalion probably contributed. Nights in Kigali and in central Africa are usually extremely dark. The city usually shuts down at last light. I found African nights a startling contrast between peace and quiet, darkness and danger.

Despite the warning signs I could read in the
RGF
, as we drew our technical mission to a close, I was certain that Rwanda was a place that could benefit from a classic chapter-six peacekeeping mission, if we could invest it with a sense of urgency. The operation would referee the ex-belligerents to ensure that the peace agreement was being implemented and that everybody was playing by the rules. The force would be a combination of armed troops and unarmed observers, deployed with care to all the possible areas of mischief and with strict rules of engagement: we would use our weapons only in self-defence. The alternative to a chapter-six operation was to try to contain the conflict diplomatically (which was a non-starter in the case of Rwanda) or to go to a chapter-seven, or peace-enforcement mission, where the
UN
would sanction a coalition of nations to invade the country with offensive military force and impose peace on the parties. No nation would be prepared to contribute to a chapter-seven mission to a country where there were no strategic national or international interests and no major threat to international peace and security. Chapter seven had only been used in Korea at the start of the Cold War and, more recently, in the Gulf War and Somalia. Chapter seven scared the war-allergic liberals who dominated the governments of the major powers; it reeked of colonialism and violated national sovereignty; it would ultimately cost vast amounts of resources and blood.
If I had even suggested a chapter seven in the case of Rwanda, I would have been on a one-way flight back to Ottawa. Chapter six was the only real option we had.

However, I also knew that given the ethnic nature of the conflict, the presence of some who opposed the agreement, and the potential for banditry or ethnic killings by demobilized soldiers, I needed to be able to confront such challenges with military force. Therefore, in the rules of engagement (
ROE
) that I proposed for this mission (largely cribbed from the Cambodian rules), we inserted paragraph seventeen, which authorized us to use force up to and including the use of deadly force to prevent “crimes against humanity.” We were breaking new ground, though we didn't really understand it at the time. We were moving toward what would later be called “Chapter six and a half,” a whole new approach to conflict resolution.

In those twelve days in August in Rwanda, I found plenty of reasons for optimism. Among the most productive and informative meetings I held were two joint sessions between the
RPF
and the
RGF
, convened in Kinihira, in the heart of the demilitarized zone, the site where a number of the articles of the Arusha Peace Agreement had been signed over the previous months. The
RPF
sent Pasteur Bizimungu as its chief spokesman. His counterpart from the
RGF
was Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, the chef de cabinet of the minister of defence. Bagosora was a bespectacled and pudgy man who seemed slightly bemused by the proceedings. He said he supported Arusha, but more often than not, he was confrontational, especially with the
RPF
delegation.

Language was a real issue. The
RPF
delegation, composed mostly of Rwandan refugees who had grown up in English-speaking Uganda, was mostly anglophone, and the Rwandan government representatives were exclusively francophone. I summoned up a lifetime of experience in mediating between the two language groups and expended much energy acting as official translator. I wonder if I might have picked up more of the undercurrents that must have been playing around the negotiating table if I hadn't been put in that position. Then again, as translator I had to be attentive to every word.