Shake Hands With the Devil (52 page)

I had meetings with the
RGF
that day to move them toward turning the airport completely over to
UNAMIR
as neutral ground so that we could support our force and bring in humanitarian aid for Rwandans. The
RPF
would agree with the proposal only if the
RGF
complied with airport neutrality. Meanwhile, I was worried about the last two convoys of our Ghanaians coming in from the demilitarized zone. They were terribly exposed, driving slow-moving vehicles that were prone to breakdowns along a route that was open to ambush. An overnight stop would bring them in too late to arrive before the departure of the last of Dewez's Belgian battalion.

At a ceasefire meeting late in the day, Gatsinzi and Ndindiliyimana took a new hardline stance. Previously they had both agreed on making the airport a neutral zone, and had even accepted participation by the
RPF
on a joint commission to supervise the application of the agreement. Now they rejected the neutrality proposal and objected to the
RPF
being part of the discussions. The airport was a national infrastructure, they argued, and must be under
RGF
control. They became particularly defensive about the
RPF
precondition that demanded the outright condemnation and imprisonment of all Presidential Guards; some weren't involved in the massacres, they said. Ndindiliyimana even insisted that the slaughter had dramatically declined—a ridiculous statement. I suspected they were now being forced to dance to the extremist tune.

The possibility of a ceasefire started to recede. Someone had obviously got to the two generals. As for the
RPF
monolith, it was absolutely plain that they didn't want a ceasefire. But why? They knew the slaughter was escalating. They knew that we were diminished by the departure of the Belgians and even more limited in our movement and interventions because of the militias. They knew now that the moderates had lost all possibility of influencing the outcome. Why destroy the ceasefire negotiations? It meant the killings wouldn't stop, and any humanitarian aid would be in jeopardy. I had to confront Kagame.

Late that afternoon, I received a message from Dewez. He had been ordered to accelerate the departure of the remaining Belgian troops. To buy time for the Ghanaians to get down from the demilitarized zone, for three days Luc Marchal had ignored direct orders from the Belgian
chief of staff to get out. Now Dewez was having to pull out and the Ghanaians had not yet taken over all of the Belgian positions at the airport. I was afraid that if there was a gap in occupation, the
RGF
would move in and take total control. The last aircraft would leave sometime early the next morning. Then we would be alone.

Code Cable 1173, signed by Riza for the triumvirate, arrived that night under the heading “Status of
UNAMIR
.” In essence, the message was simple: If the
RPF
and the
RGF
wouldn't agree to a ceasefire by nine the next morning New York time,
UNAMIR
was to start its withdrawal. There was no discussion of any of the other options. The cable went on to ask for our assessment of the consequences of the withdrawal on those who had “taken refuge” at our sites. I noted the use of the phrase “taken refuge” as opposed to “under
UN
protection.” The cable stated, “We feel that appropriate handover arrangements should be negotiated with both sides.” I could not imagine how anyone at the
UN
could believe that these desperate Rwandans would be safe in the hands of either of the belligerents. I wondered about information Booh-Booh was sending to New York over his satellite phone.

I had no choice but to set Henry, Brent and our staff to the task of preparing for our evacuation, and turned my mind to producing a risk assessment for the
DPKO
on the consequences of total withdrawal. But I needed to know whether Booh-Booh and his staff had anything to do with this new turn and headed off in the pre-dawn with Dr. Kabia to the Meridien hotel. There was considerable shelling going on around the airport, mostly directed at Camp Kanombe by the
RPF
. All was quiet in the hotel lobby; people were still sleeping or simply too weak to get up. We walked up to the top floor through crowded corridors and stairwells to find ourselves in the clean, dark solitude of Booh-Booh's emptied floor, where a lone
UN
security officer stood guard at his door.

Booh-Booh looked troubled. When I started to review the cable with him, it was clear that he was already aware of its content. I told him that total withdrawal was out of the question—we needed to keep the
UN
flag flying in Kigali, even if only to bear witness. He replied that I was to stop arguing and prepare to withdraw as ordered to Kenya, where
UNAMIR
could operate out of Nairobi. What followed was a
va-et-vient
of opinion, spiced by Mamadou Kane's interventions on the side of his master, including the charge that I was fear-mongering. Exasperated, Booh-Booh turned to Dr. Kabia and asked him point-blank to state his position on the matter. I suddenly saw that the future of
UNAMIR
hung totally on what Dr. Kabia would say.

It seemed to take an eternity for him to speak, but when he did, he wholeheartedly supported my proposal to retain a skeleton force of 250 inside the country. We could not totally abandon the Rwandans. To give him credit, Booh-Booh agreed without flinching, but Kane shot looks at me that could have killed. Dr. Kabia knew just how crucial his support had been, and over the roar of the car engine as we drove back to Force
HQ
, he told me that he had no regrets. We were doing the right thing, or as right a thing as we could do given the circumstances.

As if to drive home the stakes, before I left that morning for a last-ditch attempt to persuade both sides to agree to the ceasefire, Tiko asked to meet with Henry and me to brief us on the situation in Gisenyi, the tourist town on Lake Kivu that had been the killing ground of Hutu extremists since the night of April 6. These are notes from that briefing, taken for me by Major Diagne, an officer from Senegal and a new addition to my personal staff:
⁴

I listened to the report without moving a muscle. It wasn't shock any more at the horrific descriptions. Instead I now entered a sort of trance state when I heard such information; I'd heard so much of it over the past two weeks that it simply seemed to pile up in my mind. No reaction any more. No tears, no vomit, no apparent disgust. Just more cords of wood piling up waiting to be sawed into pieces in my mind. Much later, back in Canada, I was taking a vacation with my wife and children, driving down a narrow road on the way to the beach. Road workers had cut a lot of trees down on either side of the road and piled the branches up to be picked up later. The cut trees had turned brown, and the sawn ends of the trunks, white and of a fair size, were stacked facing the road. Without
being able to stop myself, I described to my wife in great detail a trip I had had to make to the
RPF
zone, where the route had taken me through the middle of a village. The sides of the road were littered with piles upon piles of Rwandan bodies drying in the sun, white bones jutting out. I was so sorry that my children had no choice but to listen to me. When we got to the beach, my kids swam and Beth read a book while I sat for more than two hours reliving the events reawakened in my mind. What terrible vulnerability we have all had to live with since Rwanda.

I got to the Diplomates at about 1130. I was not optimistic about the chances of making any headway with the
RGF
on the ceasefire, since Bizimungu had finally taken up his appointment as army chief of staff, replacing Gatsinzi, and no one would ever call Bizimungu a moderate. Bagosora was usually ensconced in an office at the hotel that had a clear view of the lobby, where petitioners and business people lined up to see him, but he was nowhere in sight.

Bizimungu, a short, well-rounded man with an aggressive expression and a well-kept uniform, came into the lobby to greet me. His eyes were bright, even shining, but they did not project confidence nor mastery of the situation. We shook hands and spoke niceties to one another as we headed to the conference room to the left of the lobby. We settled on separate sofas; at my back was a wall of windows giving out to the hotel gardens, where Presidential Guards were patrolling. I was surprised that he met with me alone, but nothing he said to me was the least bit surprising. Sitting on the edge of the sofa in order to maintain a certain height advantage over me, he launched into a litany of complaint. He was quite annoyed that the international media and press were being manipulated by the
RPF
propaganda machine, making the
RGF
and the interim government out to be the bad guys. Why was no one reporting the fact that the
RPF
had initiated considerable massacres behind their lines, a case in point being the wholesale slaughter of all the
RGF
officers' families in the Byumba zone, including the family of the minister of defence. Bizimungu wanted to be interviewed and soon, as he had things to say. (And in fact the next day I brought the media with me to my meeting with him, but the only thing he showed
himself to be was a hawk and a fighter and hardly a credible source of information that might change anyone's mind about who might be the good guys in the situation.)

When I pressed him on the issues of stopping the atrocities, the ceasefire and airport neutrality, he said he was not totally
au fait
as of yet but that he would get me an answer from the government soon. I returned to the Force
HQ
full of an unreasonable disappointment. Bizimungu had merely confirmed the scenario I had already expected: he was going to fight, the massacres would continue, and between the self-interested powers dominating the Security Council and the gun-shy secretariat, the
UN
would do everything in its power to pull us out.

When I got back, Tiko called me on the net to brief me about the fate of the
MILOB
s and the nuns under their protection in Butare. A recent visit to Butare by Jean Kambanda and the Presidential Guard had stirred up the nastiest of fervours for eliminating the moderates and the Tutsis. The local (moderate) prefect had been fired and was probably already dead. The Interahamwe, under the supervision of Presidential Guards who had stayed on after the prime minister left, were killing indiscriminately. The
MILOB
s had been warned by some locals that their lives were in grave danger, and finally the
MILOB
s were asking to be pulled out. But they had about thirty Rwandan religious and locals under their wing and couldn't leave them behind.

In the middle of the phone call, Brent waved at me urgently to tell Tiko that a Hercules aircraft was on its way to Butare. It would be there in an hour, so the
MILOB
s and their charges must make it to the short, grass runway at the edge of town. Tiko acknowledged this and ended the transmission.

Here is the resulting scene in Butare: Three
UN SUV
s, jam-packed with people, speed through town, crashing through a few minor barriers, and make it to the end of the runway. An angry crowd has given chase, hastening to the airfield clearly intending to slaughter everyone in the
SUV
s. With fear getting the better of them, the small unarmed band is scouting the sky desperately, looking for the Hercules. No sooner has the mob broken into the airport than they hear the sound of the four turboprop engines of the Herc, and the aircraft comes into view low to
the ground, lining up for an emergency landing. The huge transport aircraft touches down, screaming to a grinding and slippery halt about two hundred metres from the
UNMO
s and their charges. With dust and dirt filling the air, the ramp is lowered, the engines loud and unforgiving to the ear, and the near-crazed troop—the
MILOB
s pulling, even carrying, nuns and children—rushes to the back of the plane.