Shake Hands With the Devil (60 page)

I insisted that the first task of the new
UNAMIR
would be to address the humanitarian crisis. Their non-paper spoke of a mandate to provide safe conditions for people and safe delivery of humanitarian support, based on self-defence against persons or groups who threatened the safe corridors and areas we would establish, as well as our already protected sites. This read very much as if they would endorse an active defence by strong, highly mobile forces. I pushed for levels of clarity on the risks these troops were prepared to take. I'd asked not for a chapter-seven mandate but for my chapter six and a half, which would allow us to take aggressive action to
prevent crimes against humanity as well as in self-defence. I wanted the term “safety assured” attached to our safe sites in Kigali and the churches, stadiums and schools around the country where people were sheltering. I would be able to provide “significantly enhanced security” to the two million internally displaced. I grew elated as I worked. Yes, it was a non-paper, but it finally looked as if the
DPKO
wanted to give me the right mandate and tools. I signed the code cable the next morning after passing a copy through Dr. Kabia to Booh-Booh for comment.

My spirits had risen and stayed that way even after writing a detailed tactical analysis of what would happen if the
RPF
attacked the airfield in the next few days. But I could not shake my fears of waking up in the morning to be told that everyone at the Mille Collines had been slaughtered during the night. I called Moigny, who had proven his worth several times already, fending off
RGF
soldiers, gendarmes and Interahamwe. The militias had only breached the building once, kicking down doors in search of Tutsis. But Moigny and his unarmed officers, supported by some very determined Tunisian soldiers, were able to persuade them to leave before any harm was done—aided by the hotel manager's deft and generous gift of many bottles from the hotel wine cellar.

Drafts of the
UNAMIR
2 mandate were flying between NewYork and us. On May 9, I had to cancel the Hercules flights, one of which was supposed to bring in Ayala Lasso and the investigation team, because heavy artillery and machine-gun fire in and around the airfield were simply too intense. The
RPF
shelled several parts of the city that day, including my protected sites. At the Amahoro Stadium, a Ghanaian private was about to enter his room when a mortar shell exploded inside the stadium. Fragments flew through the window and hit him under the armpit where there was no protection from his
UN
flak jacket, and one struck his heart. He was dead before he hit the ground. Several civilians were injured as well. Henry was on the phone to his bosses in Accra right away, defending the need to keep the contingent in place and to augment it as soon as possible.

Late that afternoon, I was called to meet with the minister of social welfare at the Kigali hospital. He was absolutely hysterical by the time
I got out of my vehicle at the main gate. Before me was a scene of chaos and horror that simply seemed to explode in my face.

The
RPF
had fired three to four artillery rounds into the hospital compound. Fumes and smoke still hung over the site, filtering the brightness of the sun and turning everything into a dreamlike image of atrocity. One bomb had landed in the middle of a large tent erected as shelter for about thirty injured persons. Staff were cleaning up pieces of charred bodies and trying to put the tents that had surrounded it back up. Inside the nearby walled compound stood the pharmacy and dispensary. It had a wired service counter in a doorway; people would line up along the front wall waiting for their prescriptions to be filled. The yellow-painted, one-storey building was still standing although all the windows were smashed. After a closer look I was aghast. On the wall there were outlines of people, of women, of children, made of blood and earth. It was like a scene out of Hiroshima. There had been over forty people standing against the wall, caught between the shell blasts and the solid building. A medical person said that some people just exploded into the air. None survived.

I could not absorb the carnage. As an artillery officer, I had seen the effects of explosions on all sorts of targets, but never could I have imagined the impact of such hits on human beings. The age of abstract “exercises” was over for me. Hundreds of people of all ages were crying and screaming, and staff ran every which way trying to attend to all the wounded. With tears and crazed gestures, the minister of social welfare screamed at me that
UNAMIR
and I were accomplices to this savagery and that he hoped I would never be able to erase this scene from my mind. Then my aide-de-camp came up to me with the Motorola. It was Henry. The Force
HQ
was under heavy artillery attack.

We raced back through town with little patience for the barriers, rage welling so hot in me that the militiamen must have taken one look and decided the risk of stopping me was not worth it. As we approached the
HQ
, the smoke of explosions was still billowing and a round landed about three hundred metres away as I drove through the gate, a pillar of earth flying up and then in all directions. A few vehicles were destroyed. Many of the windows in the rotunda were shattered. As I walked into the headquarters, two rounds landed on the edge of the
compound near the street. All the staff and civilians were huddled in the central lobby. As I was being briefed by Henry, another round exploded in the compound right outside the doors. Later I watched media footage of the attack and was quite surprised to see that when a bomb exploded, everyone around me flinched but I was so focused I remained immobile, impatient in fact for them to get up and back into the briefing. About an hour later I gave the all-clear. There was a huge mess to clear up but luckily this time no one was injured.

I spoke a few words of encouragement to the staff and sent people back to their duties. I then asked Frank Kamenzi, our
RPF
liaison officer, to come with me outside. Away from prying ears, I lit into him. Threatening an immediate pullout and world scandal in between curses, I insisted on seeing Kagame the next day. I was not going to bring more forces into this cesspool unless such scandalous and dishonourable actions stopped right now. And I told Frank not to return to my headquarters unless he successfully set up the meeting

The next day in Byumba, Kagame met my outrage over the assault on
UNAMIR
and the killings at Kigali hospital with his own horror stories, including the mass extermination of young Tutsi students in Gikongoro. He agreed to apply more discipline to his troops and said he would personally brief the liaison team to my
HQ
and provide them with the necessary communications to be able to call off misbegotten attacks on us. I left after about an hour, wanting to believe his word but still concerned.

Henry had formally written to me reminding me that Kagame had warned us that he was implementing his tactical plan to take the airport. It seemed to Henry that holding on to our positions at the airport in the face of that threat was of no great benefit to the mission. When we met later that day, I argued that if we withdrew from the airport, the
RPF
would make it nearly impossible for us to return. Henry agreed with me but let me know that he was under pressure from Accra to get his troops out of there. He spent a good part of the next day with his Ghanaians.

The last of my Canadian reinforcements arrived that day, led by Lieutenant Colonel Mike Austdal as contingent commander. Phil
Lancaster arrived that day as well, a sight for sore eyes. The other Canadian officers were Major John McComber, Captain Sarto LeBlanc, Captain Jean-Yves St-Denis, Captain André Demers and Captain Nelson Turgeon. Within hours I put them to work in my headquarters where they rendered sterling service for the duration of their tours with
UNAMIR
. I released two of the three officers who had come from Somalia—Major Plante opted to stay—sending Bussières and Read home with my thanks for a job well done. Major Don MacNeil and Major Luc Racine had arrived from Canada in late April, just before Brent got sick, and both of them would provide excellent service for the next year in Rwanda.

That day the high commissioner for human rights, Ayala Lasso, made it in, and we all briefed him. He did his rounds as best he could on all sides and saw the horrific sites. This was his first trip into a human rights disaster since he had been appointed, and he could not hide his fury nor his disgust. At the end of his fact-finding tour he declared that what he saw in Rwanda was a genocide. The report he eventually made was an accurate account of events as we knew them thus far. He also wanted to send in human rights observers as soon as possible but was well aware of the risks. Kagame encouraged him to do so and said he would provide support. The
RGF
was less enthusiastic and said it would get back to him on the matter.

As we crept further into May, more extremists in the government, including ministers, were encouraging the arming of the Hutu population and demanding more action at the roadblocks to weed out Tutsis and rebel infiltrators.
UNOMUR
reported that the
RGF
was being supplied by boat over Lake Kivu and by land from Goma and Bukavu in Zaire. Reports were coming in of new massacres in towns around the country. Philippe Gaillard called in with news that thousands had been murdered at the great religious centre of Kabgayi, which was next door to Gitarama, where the interim government was set up.

Dr. Kabia came to see me with the news that Booh-Booh had left again for Nairobi and then Paris to meet with Boutros-Ghali. I asked what that was all about, and he said that such consultations were not out of the ordinary. I told him I needed his comments on the most recent version of the non-paper, especially as the United States was working diligently to shoot it all down. Instead of establishing safe sites
based on concentrations of displaced persons in Rwanda, as I had called for, they wanted me to set up a Kurdistan-type of large safe zone on the periphery of the country, arguing that troops would be safer that way. But there the concept had worked because the bulk of the Kurds were already in that general safe-zone area, whereas in Rwanda the people at risk would not be able to get to a safe zone on any border since the militias and armed civilians would simply set up a cordon some distance away and massacre anyone foolhardy enough to try. On top of that, the British representative argued that a more formal report was required before any decision could be taken, and the report also needed to include a budget assessment. The
DPKO
had to write the report and then the Security Council would look at it. Ambassador Keating was insisting that my chapter six-and-a-half wasn't good enough—we needed a chapter-seven mission. I did not want to intervene in the war or become a third belligerent—I wanted just enough authority and firepower to move the humanitarian agenda safely. In a conversation with the triumvirate, it was clear we had to step up the fight for the new mandate.

For four more days, the Americans put obstacle after obstacle in our way, with the British playing a coy supporting role. The French backed
UNAMIR
2 but with conditions; the non-aligned countries were furious at the delays; and the
RPF
published a statement to the Security Council that looked very much like a manifesto against us, arguing that
UNAMIR
2 was too late to stop the killing and could potentially destabilize the
RPF
's struggle for power. In fact it was not too late; the massacres would continue for weeks. If I had been a suspicious soul, I could have drawn a link between the obstructive American position and the
RPF
's refusal to accept a sizable
UNAMIR
2. In the pre-war period, the U.S. military attaché from the American embassy was observed going to Mulindi on a regular basis. In addition, a large Tutsi diaspora in North America backed the
RPF
.

Meanwhile the smell of death continued to permeate the real world in central Africa. We prepared and sent updates on the situation, clarifications of the concept of operations, lists of acceptable troop-contributing nations, vetted by both the
RPF
and the
RGF
, and still it was not enough. I increased my media interviews, and Mark Doyle poured articles into the
BBC
, but nothing seemed to prod the Security
Council into motion. I ordered an attempt to get humanitarian aid into the
RGF
zone under the protection of
UNAMIR
in order to respond to the accusation that we were favouring the
RPF
but also to prove how vulnerable we were.
UNREO
organized the attempt, under the direction of its brilliant coordinator, Arturo Hein, and brought along four journalists. It headed to Runda and the displaced camps there (there were ninety-one such camps around the country). They ran an ambush on the outskirts of Kigali, were searched at several roadblocks, and the journalists had their film confiscated twice. After they unloaded the trucks at the site, the locals, armed with machetes, clubs, grenades and stones, surrounded the vehicles and threatened the whole team. The mob had started to pull the aid persons off the trucks when the local sous-prefect finally arrived to put a halt to it. The
UNMO
s had done their best, but the size of the crowd and its state of frenzy had flummoxed them. On the way back to Kigali they barely squeaked through a rocket attack. We sent a detailed report of this foray to the
DPKO
for promulgation. The bulk of the civilians were behind
RGF
lines. If we did not get to them, thousands would continue to die by the road and in the displaced persons camps. I hoped this account would prove exactly why the humanitarian effort needed muscle.

There were so many life-and-death decisions swirling in my head that I needed to find a stable reference point so I could get my bearings. I decided one morning to go to Kinihira in the former demilitarized zone. After warning the
RPF
liaison officer of my intentions, my escort and I drove north on the main route to Gatuna for about eighty kilometres and then veered off onto a dirt track at the edge of a small village where children still waved at us as we bumped by. The trail was broken up due to the heavy rains, and I was doing quite a job of trying to leap from one hole to another in my
SUV
. We drove for about thirty more kilometres like this. My aide-de-camp, ever polite, and the Ghanaian sniper sitting in the back seat didn't complain but were rather shaken up by the time we arrived at the commune office at the top of the third long ridge in the paint-by-number series of valleys. I badly needed to stand in the little school on the spine of that ridge, where
nearly a hundred children had studied before the killing started.