Shake Hands With the Devil (68 page)

Just after the incident, Frank Kamenzi came to me to say that it had been the
RGF
that had targeted the plane. His people had intercepted the order from the
RGF
head of operations to shoot on the aircraft. When I confronted Bizimungu that morning, he flatly denied it, though he did admit that the
RGF
had not been warned of the Italian minister's arrival and had not been thrilled with the unannounced visit.

I had no choice but to order the airport closed until further notice, leaving us exactly where I had most feared to be: stranded in Kigali with no quick resupply or evacuation route.

That night before I fell asleep, I realized that the next day was the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. The week before the war in Rwanda had started, I had targeted June 6 as our own personal D-Day to be ready for demobilization. I lay sleepless on my mattress, taking stock of where we were instead: out of food, being shot at, the slaughter in full flood, and still no cavalry coming over the hill.

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
UNMO
s, 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
UNMO
s 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 point 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
NGO
s 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.