The following day, we flew on to Addis Ababa and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, a palatial building with more black Mercedes in its parking lot than I had ever seen in my life. The UN staff waltzed around in expensive tailored suits and couture dresses as if they were in downtown Geneva rather than smack in the middle of the Third World; it seemed to me that they were inured to the poverty around them. If you had the temerity to raise the issue with them, they would look at you with a world-weary cynicism so cold it could freeze your heart.
At our meeting with Salim, Pédanou presented himself as the reconnaissance expert. In Dar es Salaam I had been patient, but the time had come to shut him down. I waited for him to take a breath, and in that brief pause I just started talking and didn’t stop until I had thoroughly briefed the OAU secretary-general on my proposed operational plan. Salim listened attentively to my briefing and then stated quite baldly that though he was most concerned about Rwanda, the OAU didn’t have the resources, cash or equipment to sustain beyond the end of October the fifty-five unarmed OAU military observers and the light Tunisian infantry company who were currently monitoring the ceasefire in the demilitarized zone. He was scrambling to put together a three-hundred-member force for Rwanda, but he couldn’t do that without UN assistance. He was eager to hand the whole works over to us as soon as possible.
I remember that I settled back in my seat with some satisfaction as our plane left Africa. I felt that I had worked very hard and had come up with a mission plan that could work. I had taken into account all the major political, military and humanitarian concerns and had gotten positive feedback from all the major players of the Arusha process. Real peace and contentment washed over me. I truly did not realize that the devil was already afoot.
I did not understand that I had just met men in Rwanda who would become génocidaires. While I thought I was the one who had been doing the assessing, I was the one who had been carefully measured. I still thought that for the most part people said what they meant; I had no reason to think otherwise. But the hard-liners I had met on my reconnaissance of Rwanda had attended the same schools that we do in the West; they read the same books; they watched the same news; and they had already concluded that the developing world, as represented by the OAU, would not have the resources or the means to deploy in force to Rwanda. They had judged that the West was too obsessed with the former Yugoslavia and with its peace-dividend reductions of its military forces to get overly involved in central Africa. Were they in fact already betting that white Western nations had too much on their hands to attempt another foray into black Africa? Were the hard-liners playing us, and me, for fools? I think so. I believe they had already concluded that the West did not have the will, as it had already demonstrated in Bosnia, Croatia and Somalia, to police the world, to expend the resources or to take the necessary casualties. They had calculated that the West would deploy a token force and when threatened would duck or run. They knew us better than we knew ourselves.
5
THE CLOCK IS TICKING
I ARRIVED BACK in New York on September 5, consumed with a sense of urgency. The first deadline of the Arusha accords was only six days away. The momentum of the peace process couldn’t be allowed to dissipate: I believed the goodwill was there and those opposed to Arusha hadn’t had time to consolidate their positions. The clock was running and the time to act was almost past.
The next morning, I met with Kofi Annan, Maurice Baril, Iqbal Riza and others in the DPKO to brief them on the situation in Rwanda. While they listened attentively and seemed to think I had a good handle on how to go forward, their response to my desire for immediate action was sobering. The process of mission approval and troop deployment could take up to three months or longer, they reminded me. This I already knew. What I wasn’t prepared for was their near-impatience with the whole affair. Some of the people in the meeting made strong comments to the effect of, “Who let this irresponsible milestone of September 10 even get on the table?” It was clear that no one was looking forward to the work involved in manhandling the financial and administrative Goliath of the UN in order to launch another mission.
Over lunch that day, Maurice explained to me that we needed a committed “lead” national contingent of troops upon which we could set in motion the grinding slave work of UN bureaucratic procedures. Belgium had come forward, but as a former colonial power in Rwanda, its participation wasn’t favoured by the UN. Baril told me that starting a mission from scratch, with only a few inexperienced but good-willed officers using their own paper, pencils and laptops in a borrowed conference room required extraordinary zeal, willpower, the patience of Job, and luck. But my sense of dedication survived even that brutal dose of reality. I debriefed Brent and Miguel Martin with these words: “They are skeptical of it ever coming off, the sense of urgency is not quite there, and we have a hell of a lot of work ahead. So let’s get at it.”
At a second meeting, the DPKO triumvirate directed me to complete the technical mission report and to include a recommendation calling for the immediate deployment of a small force in Rwanda. This document would form the basis of a formal report to the secretary-general, which in turn would form the basis for his report and recommendation to the Security Council, which in its turn (I hoped) would form the basis for a Security Council resolution mandating our mission.
I felt I had to find some way of accelerating the process, but this was to prove tricky. Brent and I had no access to models or any kind of doctrine covering the process for the development and approval of a peacekeeping mission at the UN, even though we asked repeatedly how it was supposed to be done. I was stuck in the tactical weeds just trying to put together a cogent, persuasive report to effectively argue the case for a UN-led mission, let alone spur it to a faster pace. As I’d suspected, when we got back to New York the other members of the reconnaissance team disappeared to their respective workplaces or went on leave. I was left with only Brent, the part-time help of Miguel and a lone political officer—but not Rivero, who had travelled to Rwanda with me. She, too, had taken leave.
Miguel continued to be a stalwart supporter of the mission. He was a commando officer with an unyielding sense of duty, which sustained him over months of fast-paced, pressured work with few clear victories. His usual frown reflected his true nature as a man who meant business; it said, “Stay out of my way.” But Miguel believed deeply in justice and human rights, despite his tough exterior. I don’t think he ever initiated a joke, but he sure enjoyed hearing them. We assaulted him daily with our questions and problems, and he gave unstintingly of his time and expertise—whatever he could steal away from the other half dozen missions he was responsible for.
Brent and I relied on him heavily as we finished the technical report, commenced the formal guidelines for troop-contributing nations and polished our rules of engagement and operational, logistics and personnel plans. Because I didn’t have a permanent office, I had to continuously scrounge around for a phone to use. Brent and I were camped out in one of the large conference rooms on the thirty-sixth floor, as there was no place set aside for staff who were trying to mount new missions. We soon came to appreciate the silence, serenity and fresher air of very early mornings and weekends, compared to the chaotic noise and interruptions of the normal workday. Worn down by the constant swirl of people and noise in the DPKO, we usually stopped around six o’clock and took our work back to our hotel rooms for the evening.
I still felt that the “ideal” option of 5,500 troops and personnel was best, but there was no way to reopen that discussion. By the end of my first week back at UN headquarters, I realized that we had to go with the “reasonable viable” option. We needed to put together a small force of at most 2,600 soldiers, including a mobile reserve equipped with armoured personnel carriers and helicopters, which would be capable of quickly neutralizing violent flare-ups wherever they occurred in the country. A force of this size could handle monitoring the demilitarized zone and the K
igali area. I could cover the rest of the country with small, unarmed military observer teams instead of garrisons of armed peacekeepers. These military observers (MILOBs) could alert our small but highly trained and well-equipped rapid-reaction force to trouble. But I had to make serious compromises to achieve that force level and maximize the number of bayonets. I wanted a military headquarters and signals squadron, but Maurice told me that no troop-contributing nation would provide them. So I accepted the option of a small UN civilian communications section. This would mean that I would have no inherent headquarters support staff and communicators to run the command posts and operations centre. (This scenario would later cost me dearly.) The engineer and logistics companies would also be very weak and ill-equipped, which was risky for a force deployed in a mountainous country with limited hard roads and no infrastructure.
The questions that would haunt me later were, “Did I compromise too much?” and “Did I want the mission so badly that I took on an unacceptable risk?” In one of our chance encounters at the time, Maurice reassured me that missions in general, and especially small ones like mine, had to exist on a shoestring; you had to fight for what little you could get. He advised me not to use a shortage of resources as an excuse to back off. There were many officers who would give their right arms for the job, and not necessarily because they believed in the Rwandan peace process. From that point on, I was sure to make clear in all my conversations and mission documents that this was my mission and that I was the one who would lead and be responsible and accountable. Instead of quitting an impossible task, I was determined to do the best I could to secure peace for Rwanda.
We finished our technical report and sent it in for distribution and consideration by Kofi Annan’s staff on Friday, September 10. Later that day, the president of the Security Council issued a lukewarm statement, suggesting that the UN was still reviewing the options. His attitude obviously set off alarm bells in Kigali. On Wednesday, September 15, a joint delegation of the Rwandan government and the RPF arrived in New York to goad the UN into action. Patrick Mazimhaka headed the RPF contingent, and Anastase Gasana represented the interim government. I had not met Mazimhaka in Africa, but he was usually the chief negotiator for the RPF in sensitive situations. He also had Canadian ties. He had immigrated to Canada, taught at the University of Saskatchewan and been part of the anti-apartheid movement before going back to Africa to join the RPF. His wife and children were still living in Saskatoon, where she was a doctoral student.
Coming to the UN was a gutsy move, and the Rwandans were savvy enough not to overplay their hand. At a meeting with all the key DPKO players, held in the conference room adjacent to Kofi Annan’s office, Gasana went on at length about the necessity for rapid approval and deployment of the international force. Mazimhaka was more succinct but just as eloquent. By the time they had finished, you could have heard a pin drop in that room. Visibly moved, Annan immediately swung into action, making rapid annotations on his copy of my mission plan as he urged the delegation to meet with the ambassadors who sat on the Security Council.
Given that the Rwandans had seized the initiative in such a dramatic way and had received a fair amount of press coverage for it, I expected that the approval process would kick into high gear. Nothing materialized. I was never invited to speak with Boutros Boutros-Ghali or any of the members of the Security Council. I didn’t sit back, either; I actively lobbied for the mission. The doors to the people who held the most influence on the Security Council, the Americans and the British, remained firmly closed. I did end up speaking with the U.S. under-secretary of state for Africa, but his sole concern seemed to be the projected cost of the mission. In fact, the Americans never took Rwanda or me seriously; their position continued to be that the job could be done with much fewer personnel. I talked to the French, remembering the very positive response I had had from Ambassador Marlaud in Kigali, but it seemed that the military attaché had greater influence: France thought a force of a thousand was sufficient. The only NATO country willing to step forward with an aggressive commitment of troops was Belgium, whose offer was on Miguel Martin’s desk before I had even gotten back from Rwanda. But given the Belgians’ colonial past in the country, their offer of support was a mixed blessing. Still, they desperately wanted this mission—I suspect a deal may have been struck with the French for Belgian troops to protect their countries’ interests in Kigali after the French battalion was shipped out.
In the second half of September, Brent and I got down to the business of creating a shopping list of the men and materials the mission would need; guidelines for donor nations, in effect. This quite detailed document stipulated down to the amount and type of ammunition what was required for each formed unit or battalion. If I was going to make do with such a small number of troops, I wanted them well-equipped. But I guess the list was too extravagant; Maurice took me aside and explained as diplomatically as he could that UN force commanders—and I was not yet one—depended on the generosity of donor nations for both troops and equipment. There were never any guarantees on the quality or quantity of either. The best one could hope for was to attract the attention of a NATO member with deep pockets, and so far only Belgium had volunteered.
I approached Canada, hoping that if I could grease the wheels at home, maybe other NATO members would jump on board. Louise Fréchette, then the Canadian ambassador to the UN, was enthusiastic. I had first met her in 1992 in Cambodia at a supper hosted by my troops in their camp on the outskirts of war-ravaged Phnom Penh. I had about 250 soldiers stationed there, providing heavy lift transport for the massive UN mission in that country. Fréchette spoke to the troops as if she had been working with the army for a long time. She was friendly and keen. (Later she would serve as deputy minister of national defence and, later still, as under-secretary general of the UN.) I always considered her a friend at court and believed she would back me to the hilt. So I was doubly shocked by the response I got back from the Department of National Defence. It rejected my modest request for a movement-control platoon of thirty troops to load, unload and dispatch personnel and material from aircraft, and refused to supply any more staff officers or military observers. Its reason: the Canadian military was overcommitted in the Balkans and on other missions.
Afterwards, I heard on the rumour net that the bureaucrats in the departments of foreign affairs and national defence were having a turf war. Defence supported a contingent for Rwanda: it is customary for a nation to provide a substantial military component when one of its generals is given the prestigious job of force commander. One simple reason is that other nations do not like to put their soldiers in harm’s way under a foreign commander unless that commander’s own country commits its troops to him as well. But foreign affairs opposed a contingent because it was in the process of reorienting Canada’s diplomatic attentions toward eastern Europe and the Balkans and away from Africa. Foreign affairs wanted the prestige of the position without the cost of troops, and since it is the lead department, it won the battle.
It was hard not to be dragged down into futility. The administrative skirmishes were endless—Brent must have filed a volume of paperwork for the helicopters we needed, but it went around and around and around. (In the end, the helicopters did not arrive in Rwanda until late March 1994, and they abandoned the mission the day the war started in April.)
We continued to lobby and to work on the mission plan through September. Many of my colleagues in the DPKO pointed out that there was still some question as to whether I would be selected as force commander; they probably wondered why I was so passionately interested in the job. It is an unwritten rule at the UN that, wherever possible, African peacekeeping missions are to be led by Africans. The frontrunner was actually the Nigerian general who was commanding the OAU observer group monitoring the current ceasefire in the demilitarized zone. I had met him on the technical mission and was less than impressed with him as a soldier and as a leader. His own men had told my staff that when fighting
had broken out in the demilitarized zone in February and the observer group had found itself in the middle of a war zone, the general had abandoned his soldiers to their fate and retreated to his compound in Kigali, refusing to offer direction or support.
The bulk of my time during the last ten days or so of September was spent briefing formal UN delegations and anyone else who would open a door to me. In addition to the under-secretary of state for Africa affairs, I also briefed a large and important delegation from Paris, the very influential department heads of political affairs, humanitarian affairs, FOD and human rights, and the lesser heads of offices in areas such as personnel, aviation, finance, transport and so on.
With Annan, Riza and Baril primarily focused on the Balkans, the key player on Africa in the DPKO was Hedi Annabi, who seemed to carry the woes of the continent on his back. His office resembled that of a medieval alchemist, with dockets and papers piled so high you wondered when one of the teetering masses would fall and increase the obstacle course already on the floor. You could not deploy a map in that office, since there was no horizontal surface on which to do it. Annabi was the only one at the UN who ever expressed any skepticism over whether the Arusha agreement would stand. He reminded me that the Hutu hard-liners had signed the accords under enormous pressure. I tucked his doubt away in some pocket of my mind and carried on.