Back at the headquarters, the news wasn’t great. Many observer teams were off the radio net and had either become hostages, casualties or had decided to run. We could do nothing for them except ask New York to contact bordering nations to offer asylum. I was also informed that a large U.S. convoy, escorted by UNAMIR military observers and RGF troops, had left the American ambassador’s residence that day and headed south to Burundi. The night before, Brent had received a telephone call from a man who claimed to be a U.S. Marine officer with an American force in Bujumbura, Burundi. He told Brent he was just checking whether he had the right number for my office. We never heard from him again, but we later discovered from a number of sources that about 250 U.S. Marines had been flying into Kigali when they were diverted to Burundi and that they had believed they were being sent to reinforce UNAMIR and protect U.S. nationals.
That evening I called New York and described the situation. They had my reports in hand: along with political assassinations and indiscriminate killings, we now had an example of systematic ethnic killing in the Polish Mission massacre, and twenty thousand Rwandans under our supposed protection. But even though Kigali was crawling with elite foreign forces, no nation was interested in reinforcing us except the Belgians and a few non-aligned Third World states. By now there were five hundred French para-commandos working out of the airport, and a thousand Belgian paras staging in Nairobi. To that I could add the 250 U.S. Marines in Bujumbura. A force of that size, well-trained and well-equipped, could possibly bring an end to the killings. But such an option wasn’t even being considered.
As I toured Force HQ during the evening, it was obvious that everyone was exhausted but that morale was improbably high. You have to know where your people are morally, mentally and physically, and how much more you can ask of them. That night I was convinced that we could carry on. When I retired to my office, Brent surprised me with a plate of rice and curry he had scrounged from the Bangladeshis, and a promise that Belgian rations were coming the next day. Robert had also conducted a run to our home in Kigali and had grabbed whatever he could, including a change of uniform for me and more toiletries. The final treat was a sink full of hot water, already an unimaginable luxury.
On Sunday, April 10, I awoke to reduced gunfire in the city and the odour of death in the air. I directed the Ghanaians to sweep the area for corpses and to remove them in order to minimize the risk of disease to us and the Rwandans sheltering with us. They found eighty dead people within a few hundred metres of the Force HQ, behind a slope in a local slum. They put the bodies into a pile, poured diesel oil onto them and burned them. The terrible smell lingered in the heat. I wondered whether these were the people whose moans I had heard through my window while waiting for the French to land. If so, they had been real moans and not the wind.
I had to control the airport; it was the only way to sustain or eventually reinforce the mission. The French and the Belgians were there now, but they would soon withdraw. The one incentive I could offer both the RPF and the RGF was the hope of humanitarian aid, which could only be forwarded if UNAMIR secured the entranceway to the nation. That realization was the beginning of the Kigali International Airport Security Agreement. But first I would have to get the parties to actually agree.
I embarked on my daily attempt to meet the political and military leaders, shuttling back and forth between the RGF and RPF, looking for ways to negotiate. The trip to the heart of Kigali was a road into hell, with thousands and thousands of people on the move, even more checkpoints and even more bodies at those checkpoints. What shocked me was the resignation of the people who stood patiently in line, waiting to be identified as victims.
At the RGF headquarters, I was told that Bizimana was now back from Cameroon, so I headed over to the Ministry of Defence to speak with him—another man not so happy to see me. I told him I was here to expedite a truce within a broader ceasefire negotiation. As I had suspected, he told me that the interim government was now in charge of the military and that the Crisis Committee had been disbanded. He felt that by noon the next day the government and the local authorities would bring the situation under control. He told me he was meeting with Jean Kambanda, the newly declared prime minister, in a couple of hours. I asked him to eliminate the roadblocks and told him I wanted the airport to remain open so that humanitarian aid could enter and the expatriates could leave with less risk. Bizimana didn’t like the signal sent by the sudden departure of the expatriates but told me that he, too, wanted a ceasefire and a return to the KWSA rules.
I left him and went to the CND, running the ever more dangerous gauntlet of roadblocks. There was an exchange of fire going on when I arrived, and I had to leave my vehicle and walk up the hill to the complex. I was ushered into a dark room where the three politicos were waiting for me. I passed on Bizimana’s reassurances and congratulated them on their restraint regarding the French forces, but floodgates of resentment were then opened. Seth angrily told me that the French had been using UNAMIR vehicles to move Rwandans of known extremist background to the airport, where they were flown out of the country. He also alleged that the French had opened fire on a number of occasions from these vehicles. It was absolutely unacceptable for the French to use UNAMIR this way, putting my troops at risk and confusing everyone about what our blue helmets meant, and I told them that Luc was arguing this point with the French commander. I moved on to the truce and airport negotiations, and they said they’d pass the request to Major General Kagame immediately. I hadn’t seen Kagame since the Easter weekend and offered to travel anywhere in Rwanda in order to meet with him. The RPF wanted the terms of the truce to be clearly laid out on paper and signed by both parties and were justifiably outraged about the continued widespread killings.
I left the complex by a safer route, passing by the ad hoc surgery area where RPF soldiers and some civilians were being treated. The room with its dark green walls, black furniture and poor lighting, the screams and the blood, was like a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.
I went directly to the American ambassador’s residence nearby, arriving just in time to see Ambassador Rawson and his staff put the last piece of their luggage into their vehicles. The ambassador was pleased to be able to say goodbye to me and thankful for the support of my MILOBs in their evacuation. Rawson had worked hard to try to break the political impasse during the preceding months and was one of the most influential members of the country’s small band of ambassadors. I have to confess that his departure extinguished one more ray of hope in my heart.
I decided to check on the Belgian ambassador, who had been named the coordinator of the expatriate evacuation plan. While climbing the hill to his residence, I passed by an assembly point where French soldiers were loading expatriates into vehicles. Hundreds of Rwandans had gathered to watch all these white entrepreneurs, NGO staff and their families making their fearful exits, and as I wended my way through the crowd, I saw how aggressively the French were pushing black Rwandans seeking asylum out of the way. A sense of shame overcame me. The whites, who had made their money in Rwanda and who had hired so many Rwandans to be their servants and labourers, were now abandoning them. Self-interest and self-preservation ruled. Large numbers of Belgian blue berets were in the area of the ambassador’s residence, and inside the building, military personnel were working the radios and charting the evacuation. I told Ambassador Swinnen that we hoped to have a truce in place by noon the next day, which would make his convoys much less vulnerable.
I headed to Kigali Sector headquarters to find Luc in the midst of a satellite conversation with the Belgian chief of staff in Brussels. As I waited for him, I wandered throughout the headquarters, where the radio nets were squawking and a flurry of staff officers, tired and jumpy but obviously still effective, were in constant motion. After Luc finished his call, he briefed me on the status of his sector as well as his work with the French. Basically the new Belgian forces were going to secure the airport and, for obvious reasons, stay as much as p
ossible off the streets of Kigali. UNAMIR would organize the convoys to and from the airport, and French troops would guard the assembly points and provide escorts. The evacuation would start in earnest the next day at 1000.
I raised with Luc the issue of his airport company having been unilaterally ripped from my command and given to Operation Silverback, which was the Belgian portion of the expatriate evacuation. He told me it was a direct order from Belgium and he was unable to do anything about it. The DPKO hadn’t been able to do much about it, either. A good number of my Belgian staff officers had never come back from leave, including Frank Claeys, my intelligence officer. Luc had heard that these men wouldn’t be coming back to UNAMIR at all and had been reassigned to the Belgian evacuation force. Tactically this made all kinds of sense from the Belgian perspective, but to take these important officers away from me at this critical time in the mission struck me as irresponsible and dangerous. Luc assured me that the rest of his Belgians were still under my command, but he was at the receiving end of a lot of my frustration over the coming days as the situation regarding the Belgian forces was played out.
It was getting dark as I arrived back at the Force HQ. My new chief intelligence officer, Captain Amadou Deme, was ready with a detailed briefing on events outside of Kigali. The RPF noose around Byumba was closing in on between five and seven battalions of RGF. Byumba was Bizimana’s hometown, and the minister had extensive economic and property holdings in the area. The town itself was indefensible, and clearly Bizimana was sacrificing the lives of his men to try to secure his own wealth, a stupid move that Kagame would not fail to exploit. Deme also reported that the RPF appeared to have withdrawn from Ruhengeri and were focusing on strangling Byumba and opening a land link to Kigali. An RPF column that had left Mulindi by foot on April 8 had arrived, singing, at the RPF garrison in the CND this morning. Two days of walking over sixty kilometres through enemy territory, carrying heavy packs and weapons, and they got to Kigali still singing. They were kids—young, tough and dedicated. There was no doubt in my mind that they would win this war. But could they save their people?
The other offensive, in the east, through the Kagera region and toward Kibungo, had gained momentum—the RGF troops were running for their lives. Gabiro had fallen, and UNOMUR reported that the entire Ugandan-Rwandan border in the east was now held by the RPF. I thought Kagame would avoid fighting in Kigali until the French left because he wouldn’t want to provide them with an excuse to intervene. He would strangle the RGF in Byumba and seize the Tanzanian border area while closing in on Kigali from the east. He was possibly one of the greatest practitioners of manoeuvre warfare in modern military history, but his brilliance exacted a toll. As he conducted his time-consuming manoeuvres, the killing of civilians only escalated.
Jean Kambanda and the new foreign minister, Jerome Bicamumpaka, wished to see me at the Diplomates. We drove to the hotel in almost complete darkness; there was little movement in the streets and a number of the roadblocks were unmanned. A dozen fires burned around the city, and the acrid smell of smoke filled the air. It was past seven by the time I got to the hotel. I was led into another darkened meeting room, where Kambanda and Bicamumpaka were waiting. It was just the three of us, and despite the polite handshakes, they didn’t bother to mask their hostility. I warned them not to mistake my presence for recognition of their government. I was there simply to listen. They raised all the old political issues, as if Arusha wasn’t derailed, as if a massacre wasn’t happening in the streets. In their skewed universe, the RPF had initiated hostilities by attacking the Presidential Guard, and UNAMIR was to blame, too, for letting the RPF out of its compound. And where, they wanted to know, was Faustin? I told them I didn’t know. The meeting ended abruptly. My last shot was to warn them to make no mistake, UNAMIR was not pulling out. I left them with surprise in their eyes.
That night an adviser to the Secretary General called me to find out what was going on. I told him if I had four thousand effective troops I could stop the killing. I called the DPKO around 2230. Maurice was wondering where my options analysis was—what options analysis? Were they pulling me out, were they reinforcing me or was I staying? He said that six APCs were on their way from the UN force in Somalia to provide more protection and mobility, and that the FOD was working diligently on our logistics problems. I hit him with all my anger over the French and Belgian actions, including the fact that the French were shooting from my vehicles, which they had stolen from the airport. Once again the call ended with words of encouragement that couldn’t have seemed more futile. Maurice promised to call Beth. After I hung up, exhaustion finally caught up with me, and I slipped between my curtains on the mattress on the floor and fell into a deep sleep.
April 11, the fifth day of slaughter. The Security Council and the office of the secretary-general were obviously at a loss as to what to do. I continued to receive demands to supply them with more information before they would take any concrete action. What more could I possibly tell them that I hadn’t already described in horrific detail? The odour of death in the hot sun; the flies, maggots, rats and dogs that swarmed to feast on the dead. At times it seemed the smell had entered the pores of my skin. My Christian beliefs had been the moral framework that had guided me throughout my adult life. Where was God in all this horror? Where was God in the world’s response?
Two thousand Rwandans had lost their lives that day as a direct result of the Belgian withdrawal. They had taken refuge after April 7 at the Belgian camp set up at the Dom Bosco School, joined by a few expatriates. That morning, French troops had come to the school to evacuate the foreigners, and after they left, the company commander, Captain Lemaire, called Lieutenant Colonel Dewez, his CO, to request permission for his company to consolidate at the airport. He didn’t mention the 2,000 Rwandans his troops were protecting at the school. When Dewez approved the move and the troops pulled out, the Interahamwe moved in, killing almost all of the Rwandans.
Despite our verbal and written reports of the worsening scenario, and episodes such as this, reinforcement wasn’t being discussed in New York. Maurice had made it clear to me on several occasions that no one was interested in Rwanda, and now, because of the escalating risks, they were even less interested. If the reinforcement option was off the table, as New York indicated, then I wanted to ensure that abandonment was also off the table. There was a void of leadership in New York. We had sent a deluge of paper and received nothing in return; no supplies, no reinforcement, no decisions.
In order for UNAMIR to participate in the evacuation, that night I signed a new ROE that permitted my troops to disarm belligerents and to intervene with force after warning shots. The new rules also permitted local commanders to decide on the level of force they needed to use. The question remains as to whether I had the authority to change my own ROE for the duration of the evacuation mission. I was on the ground, I was in command, I had been given the mission and I took the decision.
My first priority was the truce agreement. But Bizimana didn’t have much clout in the interim government. Bagosora had the skills and the lust for power, but he was hard to find. That day, I left the Force HQ at 0700 to try and negotiate a truce. It took eight separate meetings, travelling back and forth past the increasingly angry, drunken militiamen at the barriers, but I finally secured the signatures of the RPF at 0230, and at 0600 the next morning, the RGF also signed. The truce meant that we were able to safely evacuate 650 expatriates from 22 nations on 10 French flights. Two hundred and eleven UN personnel left on three Canadian Forces Hercules flights. A company of French Marines arrived and more paratroops were standing by in Bangui. Eight flights brought in half of the Belgian para brigade, along with motorbikes and three armoured vehicles.
I mark April 12 as the day the world moved from disinterest in Rwanda to the abandonment of Rwandans to their fate. The swift evacuation of the foreign nationals was the signal for the génocidaires to move toward the apocalypse. That night I didn’t sleep at a
ll for guilt.
Kagame’s forces had ceased to squeeze and were now mounting an assault on Byumba. The major-general had given me twenty-four hours’ warning to get my forces out of the Byumba pocket in the demilitarized zone. After I informed the DPKO of the standoff in the zone and of my contingency plan for a possible withdrawal, New York sent us a little reminder that only the secretary-general could order a withdrawal—we had to stay until further orders. On the one hand, I was being told not to take unnecessary risks, and on the other I was being ordered not to take timely tactical decisions. At that point, I decided that I would take upon myself the decision to move my troops or not.
Kagame’s chief of staff sent a formal response regarding my intention to stay in place in the demilitarized zone: “We have done everything possible to protect UNAMIR. Up to now, we have not shelled Byumba despite the shelling from the enemy. We have lived up to our commitment.” Well that was that.
The battle around us escalated that day. There were several exchanges of artillery and mortar fire, the fighting more intense and determined to the north and east of the city. A few bombs exploded around my headquarters and Luc’s Kigali Sector command, and a few of the thousands of civilians cowering at the Amahoro and the King Faisal Hospital sites were wounded. Reports from the UNMOs still in-country carried fresh horror stories. In Gisenyi, a tourist town on Lake Kivu, an Austrian MILOB reported a festive spirit on the part of the killers, who seemed oblivious to the sheer horror and pandemonium as they cut down men, women and children in the streets. In Kibungo, government soldiers were running a scorched earth policy against Tutsis and Hutu moderates. In parts of Kigali, bulldozers had been brought in to dig deeper trenches at the roadblocks to reduce the piles of bodies. Prisoners in their pink jail uniforms were picking up corpses and throwing them into dump trucks to be hauled away. Think of that for a moment: there were so many dead that they had to be loaded into dump trucks. Whole sectors of the city were deserted except for wild dogs.