Even so, I was glad to be away from the UN headquarters and in the field, commanding troops and getting on with the job of surveillance along the 193 kilometres of unmarked border. Kabale is set amid rolling hills, a little bit of heaven on earth. There is one main street with a few shops and more churches than you can count. The local population seemed very appreciative of the U.S. dollars that we were pumping into the economy. We rented a large bungalow from one of the local businessmen to serve as our headquarters. It was on the edge of town and had enough land around it for us to construct a small heliport.
My second-in-command was a Zimbabwean colonel named Ben Matiwaza, a Zulu who had fought for several years against the Rhodesians in his country’s war of independence and a veteran of the OAU mission to the demilitarized zone in Rwanda. As a former member of a rebel force, he knew how to sniff out RPF movements and offered terrific insights into their psychology. Willem de Kant, a young Dutch captain and a staff officer in the mission’s operations room, briefed me on the status of the mission shortly after I arrived. I was immediately impressed by him.
The border was a sieve, riddled with little mountain trails that had been there for millennia. Given my tiny force of eighty-one observers and the fact that we had no access to helicopters with night-vision capability, the task of keeping the border under surveillance was at best symbolic. The troops, who were from the Netherlands, Hungary, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and nine other nations, worked with great determination and courage for months with or without the support of the NRA and the RPF.
There was one other snag, and maybe I should have taken it as a sign of things to come. My mandate, signed by the government, permitted me to range a hundred kilometres into Uganda, which put the town of Embarara within my area of verification. The Ugandan army was now insisting on a twenty-kilometre limit. I kept on negotiating. Embarara looked like a town out of the Wild West, with its wide dusty streets lined with one-storey buildings, large warehouses and a few bars. It was a transportation hub, and key to stopping the cross-border arms traffic. Intelligence reports had alerted us to weapons caches in the area. If we went after them, not only would we go a long way to securing the border and helping President Museveni detach himself from any implication that he was aiding the resupply of the RPF, but such an action was well within the mandate and the competence of my troops. After much futile talk and many messages to the DPKO, I was ordered to back off. I would have to let Embarara go.
Unamir’s mandate was approved by the Security Council on October 5, and I was officially appointed force commander. I had been told and told again that the UN usually took up to six months to get a mission on the ground after the approval of the mandate and if there was a reasonable infrastructure to work with in the field. That was certainly not the case with Rwanda: fuel, food and spare parts were in the hands of a few well-placed individuals who expected the UN to pay through the nose for what it needed. As far as I was concerned, we had already missed the first Arusha deadline by almost a month and this wouldn’t do. I had spent time in Kabale, overseeing UNOMUR. I had a strong team in place and could rely on it to do what it was able to do within the limitations and with the few resources we had. It was time I turned my attention to Rwanda.
I had no headquarters in Kigali, no chief of staff, and the political head of the mission had yet to be appointed. With me in Kabale, however, were some fine officers already familiar with the players in the conflict and who would surely be a help to me. I thought that if I could get a few of us on the ground in Kigali, I might be able to force the pace at which the UN moved and get the mission up and running faster. Since I was already in theatre, I insisted that my DPKO superiors allow me to go in.
I booked a flight out of Kampala for the morning of October 21 and planned to take Captain Willem de Kant as my aide-de-camp, along with a few carefully selected, capable officers. Before heading to the hotel, we went to the airport to check on the schedule and our status and found out that we’d been put on some kind of standby list, even though we all had tickets in our hands. I searched out an airport chap and threw down fifty dollars, telling him, “We’ve got to be on that plane, make it happen!” Later that night, we got a phone call confirming that all four of us were on the plane.
When we got to the airport the next day, we were told that the flight had all kinds of room now. Overnight there had been a coup d’état in Burundi, and as a result, the plane was not going to continue on from Kigali. Everything had changed. Not only would the coup in Burundi shake the fragile political situation in Rwanda, but the stable southern flank, which I had relied on in my mission plan, had vanished.
On the plane, on the last leg of a trip that would change my whole life and that of my young family, I was neither melancholy nor fearful. I wanted this command and I would throw everything I had at it. As we landed at Kigali’s bright and modern airport, I thought of my father and also of Beth’s dad, the colonel, and I wondered about what must have gone through their minds fifty-odd years ago as they were about to land in England and enter their first theatre of war.
6
THE FIRST MILESTONES
AT THE AIRPORT in Kigali, we were greeted by the foreign minister, Anastase Gasana, a few other dignitaries and a sprinkling of press. We were hardly the focus of attention. Instead, everybody was anxiously following the progress of the coup in Burundi. The democratically elected government, headed by a Hutu moderate, had been toppled by Tutsi military leaders; the president and several cabinet ministers were already dead, and the nation was headed for an ethnic bloodbath. The fallout in Rwanda was immediate. Kigali was thick with rumours and suspicion, and the local media was full of hysterical talk of Tutsi hegemony. The contrast between the almost sunny optimism of Kigali in August and the sombre capital I returned to on October 22 couldn’t have been more marked.
Amadou Ly had his hands full with reports of a sudden influx of refugees from Burundi, but as always, he did his utmost to help us get set up. The UN had finally appointed the head of mission, whose proper title was the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG); his name was Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, and he was a former Cameroonian diplomat and a friend of Boutros Boutros-Ghali. But until he arrived, I was in charge of both the political and the military sides. That weekend, I scrambled to put together a temporary headquarters in the Hôtel des Mille Collines as well as keep abreast of the situation in Burundi. Amadou found us a few vehicles with local drivers to help us get around, as well as some much-needed cash. (Without his constant generous bending of UN regulations, we would never have made our phase-one objectives.)
Within a few days of my arrival, an advance party of officers from Uruguay, Bangladesh and Poland, who had been serving on the mission in Cambodia, joined us in Kigali. To a man these officers were magnificent. They were led by a handsome and resourceful Uruguayan, Colonel Herbert Figoli, who, until he was posted home three months later, served as the demilitarized zone sector commander. The others would be the backbone of the mission until the end. I took them into our conference room and gave them an extensive personal briefing on my concept of operations and our tasks. They paid close attention and asked interesting and insightful questions, and we seemed to bond immediately. I committed the essence of what we discussed to paper as “Force Commander’s Directive Number 1,” which laid out the plan that would guide us through phase one. I then issued our interim rules of engagement as “Force Commander’s Directive Number 2,” which I had drafted with Brent back in September. I forwarded both documents to New York and to the capitals of all the troop-contributing nations, asking for confirmation of my rules of engagement. Not only did I not get formal written approval of my rules from the UN, I never received any comment, positive or negative, from any nation, with the exception of Belgium, which had some concerns about its troops being used in crowd control, and Canada, which protested as too broad the sanctioning of deadly force in defence of all UN property. We eventually amended the rules to address these
concerns and considered the silence on all fronts as tacit approval.
In these early days, I also met Per O. Hallqvist, a retired UN employee who had been recalled to serve as our mission’s chief administration officer (CAO). He had arrived in Kigali a day or so ahead of me, along with a small civilian advance party, to begin building our mission infrastructure. Hallqvist made it abundantly clear to me that he was a stickler for process and that he expected it to take upwards of six months before UNAMIR’s administrative and logistical support system was fully functional. He told me that the UN was a “pull system,” not a “push system” like I was used to with NATO, because the UN had absolutely no pool of resources to draw on. You had to make a request for everything you needed and then you had to wait while that request was analyzed. If you did not ask, you did not get. For instance, soldiers everywhere have to eat and drink. In a push system, food and water for the number of soldiers deployed is automatically supplied. In a pull system, you have to ask for those rations, and no common sense seems ever to apply. If we asked for flashlights, we had better also ask for batteries and bulbs, otherwise they would likely arrive without them. The sheer fact that you have to make requests also puts you at a disadvantage. The civilian UN logistician, and not the operational commander, has the power of supply. If he judges that the item is required, the UN will supply it; if not, it won’t.
We were soon to learn more of these hard realities, but at our first meeting, I was simply astounded by Hallqvist’s dogged adherence to “process.” We had to be fully operational in days, not months. I was determined to defy the rules, cut the red tape, bend the regulations and do whatever I had to short of illegal acts to achieve our first milestones.
January 1, 1994, was the last day of the interim government’s mandate. We planned backwards from that date to include all of the tasks we had to complete in order to install the BBTG, upon which the entire Arusha peace process rested. I divided my staff into three working groups and subdivided the large meeting room into ad hoc cells set up around sets of rectangular tables. Coming in one morning, I was hit with a strong sense of déjà vu: the whole affair looked exactly like the command-post war-gaming that we’d undertaken back home before exercises, except here there was no clearly defined enemy and I wasn’t so sure about the friendlies, either.
One group focused on the reception and logistics of troops, finding billets, equipment and figuring out how to pay and feed them. Those poor men had to fight the minute-to-minute battles with Hallqvist and his staff. The second group focused on operational plans, such as what we needed to do to make Kigali a weapons-secure area. The third group was largely concerned with information-gathering by way of reconnaissance throughout the country; for instance, we had to quickly assess what effect the situation in Burundi would have on our plans.
On Monday, October 25, Amadou Ly gave me his own reading of the current state of affairs. I was already unsettled by the fact that President Habyarimana had not yet taken the time to meet with me or to formally welcome UNAMIR to Rwanda. I needed to know what stage the political process was at, but as of yet, I had no political staff to advise me. Amadou didn’t mince words. The hardline radio station, RTLM, was building quite a following in Kigali with its African rock music allied with racist hype. We were expecting a Belgian army reconnaissance group of about fifteen officers and NCOs to arrive the next day, and Amadou informed me that RTLM was conducting a public opinion campaign against the arrival of the ex—colonial power’s troops in the capital. He wanted me to understand that the political landscape was not as it seemed; the implementation of the transitional government was stalled and needed some deft coaching to get it back on track.
I knew this, but as far as politics was concerned, I was out of my milieu. I was hungry to grasp the political subtleties that were passing me by, but back home, generals were kept as far away from Parliament Hill and politics as possible. I had expected to have a skilled and knowledgeable diplomat at my side from the start. On the military and logistical front, I didn’t yet have a chief of staff or deputy commander to back me up, though in less than a week, on October 30, the OAU peacekeeping contingent that had been patrolling the demilitarized zone was to come under UNAMIR’s command. I was in uncharted waters—the geography, the culture, the politics, the brutality, the extremism, the depths of deception practised almost as a Rwandan art form—all were new to me. However, I knew about the sensitivities of minorities, of the weight of being different in style and attitude; by nature I was a moderate and a conciliator, and I burned with the desire to help fulfill the Arusha Peace Agreement—this best chance at a new social contract for the people of Rwanda. I was like an orchestra conductor who was supposed to put on a concert in five days and was determined to do so even though his musicians did not yet have any instruments. I was building my orchestra from scratch with a group of officers who not only adhered to different doctrines of peacekeeping but did not share a common language, and I was determined to put on the concert even though the UN seemed to have little capacity to respond to an urgent situation.
Those early days introduced me to begging and borrowing to a degree I’d never dreamed of. I spent far too much time trapped in the details of running the force, drawn into lengthy arguments with Hallqvist about everything from toilet paper to the form of official communiqués, while it slowly sank in that arguing with him was not worth the time, because even when he agreed with me, he had no discretionary power. My mind was constantly torn between military matters, mulling over what I could do to alleviate the political problems that were stalling the installation of the BBTG, and sorry details such as the fact that I couldn’t pay the phone bills to New York, and my own line of credit was about to run out.
On top of it all, the mission so far was operating in total obscurity inside Rwanda. Most of the population seemed to be unaware of who we were and what we were doing, while at home, some UN-based reporters were already starting to snipe at our “inaction.” I had to find a way to announce UNAMIR’s presence, and I struck upon the idea for a flag-raising ceremony to be held in the demilitarized zone to mark the handover of the OAU contingent (from a commander who was still disgruntled that he had not been given the force commander’s job). The UN flag was already revered in Rwanda, associated with such good things as education, health care and food aid. Our new role needed to be added to that list.
To patrol the demilitarized zone, which was about 120 kilometres long and about 20 kilometres at its widest point, I would have fifty-five unarmed observers, and a sixty-man contingent of lightly armed Tunisian soldiers limited by a lack of transport, basic equipment and cash. I was changing the mandate of these troops from monitoring a ceasefire in a limited area to participating in implementing a peace agreement for the whole country, which would increase the level of risk to them. I had no real idea of when I could improve their situation and capability, but I needed to send a strong signal to the UN that we were now fully committed—we were into “operational risk”—and the DPKO needed to step up the pace of deploying troops and logistical support. To be blunt, my flag-raising was also an attempt at brinkmanship.
I chose Kinihira as the location for the ceremony because a number of the protocols that made up the Arusha agreement were negotiated there, and the site was well-known both nationally and internationally. The village sits on the top of a small, rounded mountain from which you can see the juncture of two small rivers that feed the headwaters of the Nile. On the slopes down to those rivers, verdant rows of coffee alternate with the geometry of tea plantations.
Kinihira rapidly became one of my favourite places in Rwanda. The village school was a rectangular, mud-brick, one-room affair; sunlight streamed through holes that had been ripped in its corrugated roof by strong winter winds. The blackboard was a cracked patch of black paint on the wall, streaked with crude white chalk. Morning and afternoon shifts of fifty or so primary students sat on stones arranged in neat rows and scribbled their work on slates, under the c
are and direction of two teachers who had not been paid in months and had no paper and only one book at their disposal: a dog-eared teaching handbook from France. Out back was a dusty little playground that overlooked a green paradise that seemed to be perennially capped by the bluest of skies. It was one of the most serene spots I’d ever seen.
From my early days as a young captain, I had exhibited a flare for the Cecil B. DeMille productions of military life, showcase occasions put on to influence and impress people and bring home the symbolism of events. I have never had the capacity to “do lunch,” but I have always been able to take full advantage of the opportunities of military display to regale, excite and sway a crowd. At the flag-raising, I wanted the Rwandan people to see us as a friendly force; at the same time, I wanted the belligerents to realize that we were here to do business. A symbolic flag-raising on a mountaintop that had been fought over, rendered neutral territory and then used as a place to negotiate peace seemed just the thing.
The day, November 1, was perfect: bright and sunny with a hint of a breeze, even though it was well into the rainy season. People from the surrounding villages turned out in droves. While the kids were running around having a grand time, at first the adults seemed exceptionally reserved, if curious. The Tunisian soldiers and unarmed military observers were kitted out in blue berets, which had taken two weeks of constant badgering for us to get. Obtaining 115 blue berets with UN badges didn’t seem like much of a miracle to me, but old UN hands were impressed by the “speed” with which my staff officers, with Brent and Miguel in situ at the DPKO, had pulled it off. Still, it was worth the effort, for both the Tunisians and the military observers looked smart, disciplined and professional.