Shake Hands With the Devil (35 page)

I reflected bitterly on what the Bangladeshi army chief of staff had said to me when he'd come to Rwanda in February for an inspection: “You realize that your mission here is to see to it that all of my men get home safely.” He said that he intended that their experience in Rwanda would help to “mature” his officers and
NCO
s. He was too proud to come out and say that he would prefer that his troops not be drafted for the Quick Reaction Force. He had shocked me to the core. Putting the safety of soldiers above the mission was heresy in my professional ethos,
and his view confirmed for me that Bangladesh had only deployed its contingent for selfish aims: the training, the financial compensation and the equipment they intended to take home with them. I would have to rely on the Tunisians instead.

While the military situation was tense, there was some hope on the political front. Gatabazi's assassination had galvanized the international community into seriously trying to sort out the mess. Nobody backed Habyarimana's solution to the impasse; the diplomatic community in Kigali, seconded by New York, was convinced the president was simply trying to hang on to some vestiges of power if only to avoid jail or worse. Instead the diplomats focused their efforts on the
RPF
and also on pressuring Lando to sort out the rift in the
PL
. By the second week of March, there seemed to be some movement toward a political solution, which involved postponing the healing of the
PL
split until after the transitional government was installed. A new date of March 25 was set for the installation ceremony.

With this improvement on the political front, I decided to take two weeks' leave. I had been putting it off since Christmas, as one swearing-in ceremony after another failed or was postponed, knowing that if the
BBTG
was actually installed we would finally begin demobilizing close to forty thousand troops. Although all of the funds, plans and other resources were not yet in place, a contract had been signed to provide food for the demobilized troops, and shipments had already begun to arrive in Dar es Salaam. We had plans for temporary housing and areas for storing surrendered weapons. The actual reintegration process of pensioning and retraining was still at an embryonic stage, but once the
BBTG
was sworn in, I hoped the international community would start to invest. I didn't think either army would take any action if the political process continued to move forward, and I trusted Henry to keep the operation running smoothly in my absence—though I have to confess he was a little surprised when I handed him a list of thirty-nine action points to carry out while I was gone, including briefing the Belgian minister of defence, Léo Delcroix, who was arriving in Kigali the night I was flying out. I wanted Henry to confirm with Delcroix my written
request that Luc stay on as Kigali Sector commander for another six months, even though he was due to be rotated out. Like Henry, Luc understood and lived the mission, and I couldn't afford to lose him now.

When on March 10 I stepped on the plane out of Rwanda, I felt I was being transported to another dimension, one of happy families and warm sunny beaches. In twelve hours I was hugging my wife and children, but I felt oddly artificial. Before leaving Rwanda, all I could think about was them, but when I was with them, all I could think about was Rwanda. I called Henry practically every day during my first week away, then finally gave in to exhaustion and stopped calling. I think I slept most of the second week, which I spent at home in Quebec City. My only Rwandan obligation was to walk five blocks from our apartment to hand-deliver a letter from President Habyarimana to his daughter.

I was to return to Rwanda by way of Ottawa and New York. In Ottawa I tried to drum up more Canadian support and lobby for the ten bilingual staff officers I desperately needed. On March 28, I addressed the daily executive meeting attended by the deputy minister of defence, Bob Fowler; the chief of the defence staff, General John de Chastelain; all of the three-star generals in Ottawa; the head of military intelligence; and the civilian assistant deputy ministers. I had ten minutes to make my case. As a symbol of Rwanda's poverty and spirit, I had brought with me one of the soccer balls that the Rwandan kids made out of banana leaves. I startled de Chastelain by tossing it to him as I started to speak. I explained that I wanted to take a Hercules-load of real soccer balls emblazoned with the Canadian maple leaf or the
UN
logo back to Rwanda for the troops to hand out as a gesture of goodwill. The current situation was stable though tense, I said, but if no political solution was found soon, I was sure that something catastrophic would happen: the peace agreement would fail and the civil war would resume.

They gave me my ten minutes, but I felt that my briefing was viewed as a sideshow to other crises. It was a difficult time for the Defence Department. A new Liberal government had just come to power with an aggressive cost-cutting budget and the Armed Forces were going to be hard hit. We also had major troop commitments to the former Yugoslavia, where the situation was very grave. And there were the soul-destroying details,
which were just beginning to surface, of the murder of a Somali teenager, Shidane Arone, by Canadian peacekeepers in the ill-fated Somalia mission. However, before the meeting was over, I was told that my request for ten staff officers was finally being processed and that I would see them in the mission area by June.
¹
I had to settle for this because it was dear it was all I was going to get. No one volunteered to send the soccer balls.

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
MILOB
s 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.