Shake Hands With the Devil (75 page)

The road trip through the Kagera National Park was beautiful despite the fact that at this time of year bush fires were burning, and in some places enormous clouds of smoke filled the sky. It was ghost country—though the
RPF
had the area firmly under control, there were still no civilians in the desolate and garbage-strewn villages.

We got back to the Amahoro that afternoon just in time for Canada Day celebrations: frivolity in the middle of hell. My Canadian contingent had determined that since everyone in the world knew we produced the best hockey players, a field hockey game was the right way to mark the holiday. For a field we would use the
HQ
parking lot, and Henry had agreed to assemble a Ghanaian team to play against us. My overconfident Canadians gloated about how they would trounce the Africans. Due to the possibility of shelling, the game would be played in flak jackets.

We adhere to a tough brand of hockey back home. As play started, the Canadians dominated for about a minute—until one of the Ghanaians floored Major John McComber. John was a solid, firmly planted infantry officer who took to competition like it was combat. His fall was a sign of things to come. I joined in for the first few minutes, but after being bodychecked onto my stick, which broke immediately, and landing on the unforgiving asphalt, I surrendered my place and limped off. When Henry, who is over six feet tall and weighs in at close to three hundred pounds, stepped onto the lot, the Canadian team revised its tactics and played a more European style of hockey. As the game progressed and the score went up, not in our favour, we realized that we had been had. The Ghanaians play field hockey as a national sport, and Henry had assembled a high-calibre team of fit, talented
young men to counter the older and somewhat less fit Canadians.

Even so, it felt to us as if we had managed to put aside the troubles of the mission for an hour or two. Later, Colonel Hanrahan, who was in Kigali leading the Canadian Signals Regiment team recce party, wrote, “On the evening of 1 July 1994, the reconnaissance team asked MGen Dallaire and six Canadian
UNMO
s for a beer, which was carried in by us from Uganda to celebrate Canada Day. It was a surreal celebration. MGen Dallaire and his team were ‘zombies.' They were in the same room as us, but their minds were elsewhere. Hollow eyes lost in thoughts of what they were experiencing. The stress was taking a huge toll.”

That same day in New York, the Security Council passed Resolution 935, which requested that the secretary-general establish a committee of experts to investigate “possible” acts of genocide in Rwanda. The world could still not bring itself to call this slaughter by its proper name.
RTLM
wasted no time in denouncing the resolution. In its view, the Rwandan Supreme Court was both competent and impartial enough to handle the task. The station relentlessly pumped out lies to all Hutus able to find batteries for their radios. Even a month later, amid the horrors of the refugee and displaced persons camps that I would visit in Zaire, I saw people with small portable radios at their ears, listening to this vile propaganda. The radio remained the voice of authority, and many could not detach themselves from it. Because of its accusations against Hutu extremists, Médecins Sans Frontières joined white men with moustaches and Canadians in general on
RTLM
's hate list, having been pronounced pro-Tutsi; as a result I ordered more security around the King Faisal Hospital where James Orbinski (the head of the Médecins San Frontières team
and
a Canadian) and his team were working.

As predicted, the creation of the
HPZ
lured masses of displaced people out of central Rwanda and into the French zone. This was the terrible downside to Opération Turquoise. Having made public pronouncements about their desire to protect Rwandans from genocide, the French
were caught by their own rhetoric and the glare of an active international media presence, and now had to organize the feeding and care of them. Realizing the news potential in the
HPZ
, many of the journalists who had been with me for weeks moved on to Goma or Cyangugu.

Still, we were guardedly optimistic in Kigali because the arrival of some more
UNAMIR
2 troops was finally imminent. My staff officers were busy coordinating flight schedules, visiting donor nations for briefings on the mission, organizing troop reception and the thousands of other things that have to happen if a military deployment is going to work. My plan was to send troops out soon after they got to Rwanda to the most likely points of contact between the French and
RPF
. I tried not to think too much about the irony of having to devote forces intended to serve the cause of peace in Rwanda to preventing confrontation between one of the belligerents and another
UN
-mandated force. This stands as one of the crueller twists of cosmic irony foisted on the long-suffering Rwandans.

The only way I saw to avoid a total slide into absurdity was to effect a relief-in-place of French forces by
UNAMIR
2 as my troops became available. The trap the French had rushed into would inevitably begin to close. Either they would pull out as soon as they could—even before the sixty-day limit to their mandate—or they would be cast in the role of protectors of the perpetrators of one of the most severe genocides in history. Given the large numbers of terrified displaced people who were moving into the
HPZ
, and the difficulties the
RPF
would almost certainly have in controlling victorious troops who knew all too well the dimensions and horrors of the genocide, it had become absolutely critical to get
UNAMIR
2 troops onto the ground in the
HPZ
well before the French forces left. I emphasized to my staff that a relief-in-place of the French could not be delayed. But it would be a delicate and dangerous task: the Rwandans who had fled to the French zone, mostly Hutu, did not have as much faith in our ability to hold off the
RPF
as they had in that of the Turquoise forces. Their minds had been filled with lies about
UNAMIR
's collaboration with their enemy, and they themselves knew the level of their own complicity in the deaths of their neighbours.

The fighting was still intense in the city. Despite our warnings to stay inside, a reporter went out on his balcony at the Meridien hotel to watch the explosions and the arc of tracer bullets in the night and got shot in the leg (our second, and last, media casualty). He had been foolish, but even being cautious was inadequate protection at times.

Around this time I had a final, memorable encounter with Théoneste Bagosora. I had gone to the Diplomates to see Bizimungu, and was waiting for him at the front desk, when Bagosora opened his office door and spotted me there. From almost ten metres away, he started to shout, accusing me at the top of his lungs of being an
RPF
sympathizer. I was undermining the very important transfers from the Mille Collines and Meridien, he yelled, and he continued to berate me and
UNAMIR
for having failed the Arusha peace process as he passed me and started to climb the long stairway that swept in a curve up to the second floor of the lobby. When I mildly responded that it was his side that had been failing to keep truces for the transfers, he ratcheted up to an even more intense level of rage, and paused to lean over the metal railing in order to look me in the eye. With menace in every line of his face, he promised that if he ever saw me again he would kill me. Then he resumed climbing the stairs and carried on ranting even as he moved out of sight. Everyone in the hotel lobby had stopped to listen, and for several minutes after Bagosora's voice faded from hearing, all of us, civilians and soldiers alike, stood speechless and rooted to the spot. That was the last time I was to see Bagosora, who is now about to stand trial in Arusha as the chief architect of the genocide. When I see him again, it will be in the courtroom as I testify against him.

During those long nights in early July while the
RPF
fought to control the city, I sometimes let myself think about the evil that men such as Bagosora wrought—how the Hutu extremists, the young men of the Interahamwe, even ordinary mothers with babies on their backs, had become so drunk with the sight and smell of blood and the hysteria that they could murder their neighbours. What did they think as they were fleeing the
RPF
and stepping through blood-soaked killing fields and over corpses rotting into heaps of rags and bone? I rejected the picture of the génocidaires as ordinary human beings who had performed evil
acts. To my mind, their crimes had made them inhuman, turned them into machines made of flesh that imitated the motions of being human. The perpetrators on both sides had their “justifications.” For the Hutus, insecurity and racism had been artfully engineered into hate and violent reaction. In the
RPF
's case, it was willing to fight to win a homeland at all costs, and its soldiers' rage against the genocide transformed them into machines. And what of the witnesses—what drove us? Had the scenes we'd waded through frayed our humanity, turned us into numbed-out machines too? Where did we find our motivation to keep going on? Keep on going is what we had to do.

We were solving problems from dawn to dusk and long into each night. When Hanrahan went back to Canada, he left two members of his recce team behind so they could help establish an
APC
driving school for the Ghanaian contingent, which was supposed to be deployed by mid-July. The Ethiopian and Zambian battalions were due by the end of the month—we had to locate some English-Ethiopian translators. The Canadians under Hanrahan would arrive in the next three weeks. We were supposed to reach a troop strength of about 2,800 by late July, just in time to implement my aggressive plan to relieve the French forces in the
HPZ
and subsequently open the zone to the
RPF
in phases.

Lafourcade soon sent me a memo confirming his (and his government's) interpretation of our discussions. He wrote that he had no mandate to disarm the
RGF
, though he would prevent it from taking action in the humanitarian zone. His memo stated that Turquoise was not going to disarm the militias and the
RGF
in the
HPZ
unless they posed a threat to the people his force was protecting. As a result, the extremists would be able to move about freely in the zone, safe from any interference from the French, and also safe from retribution from or clashes with the
RPF
. Before we took over, I would have to persuade Lafourcade to disarm the whole bunch or our task would be risky to say the least. While the
RGF
and the militias were unlikely to shoot at the French, they might be tempted to shoot at us.

Lafourcade's description of the demarcation line between him and the
RPF
was still slightly to the east of the one I'd presented to him in
Goma, but was far less ambitious than the one France had originally proposed to the Security Council. When Kagame received his copy, he made it clear that he already had troops to the west of Lafourcade's line and certainly wasn't rolling them back. I had to intervene, and what a day that was. I lost track of the number of meetings and faxes and phone calls, but by the end of it, we had an agreed-upon zone that didn't include Ruhengeri or Butare or Gitarama or even a whisper about Kigali. We also had a working plan with Turquoise.

That night the mood in Force
HQ
was almost festive. Beth and the Canadian wives had sent another huge air transport carton of goodies from home, and we divided up the spoils. There was a small nook with a counter in the hall outside my office, left over from the building's incarnation as a hotel. While I stood there chatting with Henry, someone—possibly Tiko—produced a bottle of Scotch and set it on the counter. I went to my office and found a bottle of wine donated by a grateful
NGO
, and a few beers appeared from somewhere else. I supplied my small yellow radio and tape player and I blasted out our limited repertoire of Frankie Lane and Stompin' Tom Connors. We smoked cigars and kept everyone in the building, maybe even the compound, awake until past midnight. We were celebrating our success with the demarcation line, but even more than that, I think we were celebrating the fact that we had survived. Henry, Tiko, Phil, Moen, Racine, McComber, Austdal, the complete humanitarian cell and the rest of my ragged band—we had lived to see the cavalry. The night was shot through with jolts of pure sorrow, but it was also full of laughter and an intensity and joy I've rarely experienced since.

Of course, both Kagame and the French had to test the line, and two major incidents nearly blew into open combat between the new belligerents, as I took to calling them.

First, the
RPF
ambushed a French convoy that was returning from Butare with a couple of expatriates and a large number of orphans. The transfer had been approved, but a local
RPF
commander let the convoy through a couple of barriers and then fired on them. The French fired back. Luckily no one was injured, and that mess was sorted out within hours.

The second event was far more damaging to Turquoise's semblance of neutrality. A French officer named Colonel Thibault, who had been a long-time military adviser to the
RGF
, was in charge of the southwest region of the
HPZ
. Thibault publicly announced that he was not in Rwanda to disarm the
RGF
or the militias and that if the
RPF
made any attempt to come near the
HPZ
line, he would use all the means at his disposal to fight and defeat them. This kind of talk was exactly what the extremists wanted to hear from the French. It also made superb copy for the voracious media.
RTLM
put the colonel's posturing to immediate use. Lafourcade had to rein Thibault in and, to his credit, he did, publicly rebuking his subordinate commander. He clarified Turquoise's position in an unequivocal media statement: “We will not permit any exactations in the
HPZ
against anybody and we will refuse the intrusion of any armed elements.” He sent a letter to Kagame through me explaining the situation, and Kagame received it with his usual skepticism. The question did remain: Which man best expressed Turquoise's underlying sympathies, Lafourcade or Thibault?