It was around two when I drifted into a fitful sleep. At about a quarter to three I was awakened by a phone call from Maurice to tell me that in forty-five minutes—around 0330—the French, followed by the Belgians, would begin landing a military force at the Kigali airport to conduct an evacuation of expatriates. I was livid, and not only because of the short notice. I reminded Maurice that I no longer controlled the airport. What if the RGF (or as they had threatened, the RPF) shot down the aircraft? Why was I only being informed when the planes were already in the air and possibly even entering Rwandan airspace? Maurice insisted that he had only just been told himself and directed me to help with the evacuation.
Since the phones were out, I had to use our insecure radio to get Luc to warn the airport company of the imminent arrival of the French. Luc himself had just gotten a call from General Charlier, the Belgian chief of staff. I radioed Ballis at the CND and told him to assure the RPF that the French forces were being deployed only to extract the expatriate community, and to request that they take no action.
With the lights off to avoid making a tempting silhouette, I stood by the small open window in my office, waiting for the call from Luc that would spell disaster or inform me that the planes had landed safely. A light breeze was blowing in through the screen. For a time I thought I heard human moaning, as if hundreds of distant voices were being carried on the wind. I do not recall how long I stood there, uneasily listening, but at last I heard the distinctive roar of aircraft landing at the airport, and to my relief there was no answering sound of gunfire or explosions.
Ignoring my pallet on the floor, I decided to rest in my armchair for a while while I tried to sort out how the various parties would perceive this action. The RGF would be suspicious, angry and concerned about the new Belgian troops. The RPF would be suspicious, angry and concerned about the French. UNAMIR would be caught in the middle. But perhaps it would also turn out to be an opportunity to assert my influence over both parties, as each would have to go through me as a conduit to the French and the Belgians. I prayed that there would be no confrontation between the French and the RPF in this already chaotic situation—or between the Belgians and the RGF. The RPF had anti-aircraft guns, mortars and possibly surface-to-air missiles in the CND, which was only four kilometres from the airport—well within range. The tension was too much, and despite myself I fell asleep in my chair.
The Bangladeshi contingent never faced the test I’d set them. That night the RPF moved into our area. By dawn on April 9 there were no crowds, no mobs, no militia, only disciplined and co-operative RPF soldiers who had secured our area either to protect us (they later claimed they had intercepted a radio message ordering the para-commando unit at Camp Kanombe to assault the Force HQ and capture or kill Faustin) or more likely, to safeguard the thousands of terrified people in the stadium.
In the operations centre, the duty officer confirmed that three French aircraft had arrived, that there were already about three hundred French paratroopers on the ground at the airport, and that more aircraft were landing. Were the French going to get involved once again with the fight or were they really only here to evacuate their expatriates?
Luc arrived a few minutes later and jubilantly told me that Willy Claes, the Belgian foreign minister, was lobbying New York for immediate reinforcement of UNAMIR and a massive logistics resupply. If we were given a new mandate and the necessary force, we might be able to get the two parties back to the negotiating table. At morning prayers, I told Kigali Sector to carry on with as many rescue missions as could be managed and also ordered that our gates be kept open to anyone seeking asylum. I was told that the resupply route for our troops in the demilitarized zone was now cut; we would have to figure out whether we should, or even could, move them to Kigali. Given our resources, there was no way we could accomplish moving these troops in one lift. We’d have to shuttle them in over several days, and the effort would require most of our vehicles and fuel.
My first stop that morning was the CND. I knew I would be in for a cold reception. On top of the French landing at the airport, the radio had announced that RGF reserves should report for duty, and word was also out that the new government was being installed and the names of the ministers announced. To the RPF, these actions were an overt declaration of war. Seth stated categorically that there would be no recognition whatsoever of this illegitimate and clearly extremist government: this crisis was not an overreaction to the sudden death of the president but a coup. The RPF would be prepared to open discussions with the military representatives of the RGF in areas related to stopping the killings and arresting the Presidential Guard, but only after the Crisis Committee had complied with their preconditions. I raised the possibility of local truces that would permit the foreign troops and UNAMIR to conduct humanitarian activities including the evacuation of the expatriates, and Seth was grudgingly open to the idea. He was clear, however, that this humanitarian effort had better not turn into military assistance to the RGF. If the French, the Belgians or UNAMIR got involved in such a way, the RPF would use force to stop us. I told him I wanted a forty-eight-hour truce to be in place in Kigali by 1600. Our goodbyes were sullen, suspicious and without pleasantries.
I headed for the Ministry of Defence to find Bagosora and get more information on this new “interim government.” The city was descending into chaos. Large numbers of people were moving toward the outskirts of Kigali carrying bundles of belongings. There were bodies on the street, surrounded by large pools of blood that had turned black in the heat of the sun, which made the corpses look burnt. Groups of Interahamwe and RGF soldiers were roaming between roadblocks, which were often simply a few stones or empty plastic crates. The guards at the barriers were aggressive, more like animals that have had the taste of blood than security officers legitimately seeking supposed RPF “infiltrators.” At each roadblack, portable radios blasted the music and exhortations of RTLM over the heads of Rwandans of all ages paralyzed with fear who were lined up to have their papers checked. Clearly more and more people were being drawn into acts of violence, as if a blood frenzy was multiplying exponentially.
There were only a few guards at the Ministry of Defence, and they told me that everybody was at the Diplomates. At the hotel, I encountered a number of ministers and their families packing their suitcases and belongings into vehicles. No one wanted to stop to talk to me, since they were concentrating on getting out of town. I found out later that they were heading for safety in Gitarama, which was about sixty kilometres west of the capital. The scene reminded me more of the fall of Saigon than of the supposed installation of a government determined to take control of the country. Bagosora was nowhere to be seen.
Gatsinzi, Ndindiliyimana and others on the Crisis Committee were still at army headquarters. They told me that the mobilization of the RGF reserves was a terrible mistake and that they had sent messages and telegrams to all units instructing that it was to cease. I could not see a way forward and neither could they. They couldn’t guarantee the RPF preconditions. With the interim government now supposedly in place—Bagosora’s doing, I was certain—the Crisis Committee was likely to dissolve. And what government? The ministers had decamped and there was no infrastructure left. Still I asked them for a truce so that the French and Belgians could evacuate their expatriates, another futile gesture since no one on the Crisis Committee controlled the elite units of the RGF. Bagosora did, and without his co-operation, the evacuation operations would be in jeopardy, especially when the Belgian troops Luc was expecting arrived later that day.
Returning to Force HQ, I saw more dead bodies discarded like piles of rags beside the road as displaced people streamed past them, looking to escape the same fate.
Brent and a team of MILOBs had spent the day conducting rescue missions in one of the APCs. On the first effort, he’d picked up several UN civilian staff and their families and also the Canadian chargé d’affairs, Linda Carroll, who was able to provide him with a list of addresses of C
anadian expatriates in Kigali.2
With Brent that day were Marek Pazik and Stefan Stec, both Polish officers who had briefly been billeted in the Gikondo Parish Church, known as the Polish Mission because it was run by priests from Poland. Pazik and Stefan had not lasted long under the austere regime at the mission, but two of their fellow Polish MILOBs had stayed on. That morning, a faint radio call had come from the men at the mission begging for help. The batteries on the radio were dying and all Brent could make out was that there had been killings at the church.
Not knowing what to expect, Brent, Pazik and Stec armed themselves and, hatches down, set off to Gikondo in the APC with a Bangladeshi officer and three men. Along the route, they passed through fighting between the RGF and the RPF, through Gendarmerie roadblocks and through the ever-increasing and chaotic militia roadblocks. They saw the bodies of men, women and children near these roadblocks. So many civilians were on the move, it looked like the entire population was abandoning Kigali.
At the church, they came to a halt and dismounted. Pazik and a Bangladeshi soldier went to the rectory to find the Polish MILOBs, while Brent and Stec confronted the first evidence of wholesale massacre. Across the street from the mission, an entire alleyway was littered with the bodies of women and children near a hastily abandoned school. As Brent and Stefan were standing there trying to take in the number of bodies, a truck full of armed men roared by. Brent and Stefan decided to head for the church. Stefan went inside while Brent stood by the door to cover him and to keep the APC in sight. They confronted a scene of unbelievable horror—the first such scene UNAMIR witnessed—evidence of the genocide, though we didn’t yet know to call it that. In the aisles and on the pews were the bodies of hundreds of men, women and children. At least fifteen of them were still alive but in a terrible state. The priests were applying first aid to the survivors. A baby cried as it tried to feed on the breast of its dead mother, a sight Brent has never forgotten. Pazik found the two Polish MILOBs, who were in a state of grief and shock, hardly able to relate what had happened. The night before, they said, the RGF had cordoned off the area, and then the Gendarmerie had gone door to door checking identity cards. All Tutsi men, women and children were rounded up and moved to the church. Their screams had alerted the priests and the MILOBs, who had come running. The priests and officers were seized at the church doors and slammed up against the wall with rifle barrels at their throats. They were forced to watch at gunpoint as the gendarmes collected the adults’ identity cards and burned them. Then the gendarmes welcomed in a large number of civilian militiamen with machetes and handed over the victims to their killers.
Methodically and with much bravado and laughter, the militia moved from bench to bench, hacking with machetes. Some people died immediately, while others with terrible wounds begged for their lives or the lives of their children. No one was spared. A pregnant woman was disembowelled and her fetus severed. Women suffered horrible mutilation. Men were struck on the head and died immediately or lingered in agony. Children begged for their lives and received the same treatment as their parents. Genitalia were a favourite target, the victims left to bleed to death. There was no mercy, no hesitation and no compassion. The priests and the MILOBs, guns at their throats, tears in their eyes, and the screams of the dying in their ears, pleaded with the gendarmes for the victims. The gendarmes’ reply was to use the rifle barrels to lift the priests’ and MILOBs’ heads so that they could better witness the horror.
Killing with machetes is hard work, and sometime in the night the murderers became fatigued with their gruesome task and left the church, probably headed for some sleep before they moved on to the next location. The priests and MILOBs did what they could for the few survivors, who moaned or crawled from underneath the corpses that had sheltered them.
Both of the MILOBs were overwhelmed by emotion as they recounted the night’s events. One fell completely silent while the other admitted that though he had served in places, such as Iraq and Cambodia, this was it, he was going home. The men needed to get out of there, to get back to the security of headquarters and regain their equilibrium, and they urged the priests to join them. But the fathers refused, saying they had to stay with the wounded, who were too many to carry in the APC. Brent and the others gave the priests a radio and a charged battery, what water they had and a small first aid kit, and promised to report the incident and mount a rescue mission. They warned the priests that since it was already mid-afternoon, it was unlikely that a large armed escort with ambulances or heavy transport could be mounted and then negotiate the dozens of roadblocks before nightfall, but the priests were confident they could hide overnight, as the militia and gendarmes had surely finished with them.
Feeling like deserters, the UNAMIR group returned to Force HQ, and the Polish MILOBs were put to bed. Kigali Sector was directed to conduct a rescue mission, but as Brent had suspected, it couldn’t comply until the next day—dozens of missions were already underway. Early the next morning, the priests called on the radio and reported that the militia had returned during the night. Our APC had been spotted at the church, and the killers had returned to destroy the evidence of the massacre. They had killed the wounded and removed and burned the bodies.
The decision to leave the priests and the victims had had disastrous consequences, but such are the decisions that soldiers make in war. Some days you make decisions and people live, other days people die. Those innocent men, women and children were simply Tutsi. That was their crime.
The massacre was not a spontaneous act. It was a well-executed operation involving the army, Gendarmerie, Interahamwe and civil service. The identity card system, introduced during the Belgian colonial period, was an anachronism that would result in the deaths of many innocent people. By the destruction of their cards, and of their records at the local commune office, these human beings were erased from humanity. They simply never existed. Before the genocide ended, hundreds of thousands of others would be erased. The men who organized and perpetrated these crimes knew they were crimes and not acts justified by war, and that they could be held accountable for them. The Interahamwe returned to destroy the evidence. The faceless bureaucrats who fed the names to the militias and destroyed the records also played a part. We were not in a war of victors and vanquished. We were in the middle of a slaughterhouse, though it was weeks before we could call it by its real name.
I got to the airport that day at about 1400, avoiding firefights between the RPF and the RGF para-commando battalion to the northeast of the airport, less than a kilometre from the Force HQ. On the way to meet the French commander, I really had to wonder about what the speed of this effort to evacuate foreign nationals meant about the UN commitment to stay in place. Were they getting the foreign civilians out of the way of a future military intervention in the conflict or were they intending to abandon Rwanda?
My conversation with Colonel Poncet was curt, and the French commander showed no interest in co-operating with us. This unhappy exchange was an indication of how the French evacuation task force, Operation Amaryllis, would continue to behave with UNAMIR. Poncet said his mission was to evacuate the expatriate community within the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours. We had heard from the MILOBs at the airport that the French had already evacuated a number of Rwandans and that twelve members of the presidential family were part of this group, but Poncet insisted to me that he was only here to evacuate expatriates and “white people.” I told him that within two hours there should be a truce in place but that there was no guarantee from the RGF that they could observe it. At that Poncet asked to be excused and, without waiting for a response from me, simply turned his back and walked off. I decided then that Luc would handle all future dealings with this rude Frenchman.
Late that afternoon I went to the Meridien to meet with Booh-Booh. The Belgian battalion command post was now set up at the entrance to the hotel, and I stopped to talk with Lieutenant Colonel Dewez, whom I hadn’t seen since the murder of his men. I
offered him my condolences and commended him for maintaining restraint and discipline in his unit.
In the lobby I was swarmed by hundreds of UN civilians and Rwandans wanting information. I addressed them, saying that the Belgian battalion command post had moved into the hotel to provide security. There was food and water in the hotel and they should be rationing it. I told them that some evacuations had started and that my MILOBs would continue to assist in co-ordinating lists of people in order to be prepared for evacuation when it was judged relatively safe. I asked them to be calm, to rest and to stay away from windows and balconies.
The SRSG’s suite was on the top floor, and since the elevators weren’t working, I arrived slightly out of breath. His wing was empty save for him and his staff; he’d asked the hotel manager to clear all civilians from the floor for security reasons. Booh-Booh was seated in a large chair surrounded by political officers, including Mamadou Kane. My welcome wasn’t particularly warm. A bullet had come through one of their windows and they were scared. I told them that, for one thing, it wasn’t wise to be on the top floor—if they insisted on staying there, they needed to be very cautious near the windows. We discussed the installation of the interim government. Booh-Booh insisted that neither the UN nor the international community should recognize this illegitimately established extremist regime, though he agreed with my suggestion that it would be wise to maintain contact with it, if only to find out its intentions. I told him that the RPF would only negotiate with the military leaders of the Crisis Committee and that I had encouraged both Ndindiliyimana and Gatsinzi to obtain such a mandate from the new government. Augustin Bizimana, the minister of defence, was due back from Cameroon tomorrow, and he would most likely be their political master once again.