We finally reached the main road, about twenty kilometres south of Mulindi. We had forded streams full of bodies and passed over bridges in swamps that had been lifted by the force of the bodies piling up on the struts. We had inched our way through villages of dead humans. We had walked our vehicles through desperate mobs screaming for food and protection. We had created paths amongst the dead and half-dead with our hands. And we had thrown up even when there was nothing in our stomachs. My courageous men had been wading through scenes such as this for weeks in order to save expatriates and members of religious orders. No wonder some of them had fallen off the face of the world and had entered a hell in their minds. We had absolutely no medication to help them.
It was getting dark by the time we reached Kagame’s office and residence in the Mulindi compound, its defences orderly—nearly impregnable unless you had considerable heavy fire to support an assault. Kagame looked fit and impeccable amongst the magnificent tropical flowers of his garden. He had no time for small talk, so I quickly covered the issues of the troop reductions, the ceasefire, the neutral airport, the civilian transfers. He told me several times that he would not tolerate UNAMIR conducting any actions that could be interpreted as interventions. I told him that not only was intervening in the war not my mandate, I had been stripped of any capability to carry out such offensive operations. I told him in return that I would not tolerate any actions from his troops or the RGF that would endanger those Rwandans under my protection. He promised to make all the necessary preparations for the transfers to commence as soon as possible. He said that he had delayed his offensive on Kigali specifically to let the civilians leave the capital before the battle. He had refugee sites already marked out and asked for my help in getting aid to those locations. I told him that I would consider this request only if the aid did not end up in the vehicles and mouths of his forces. He said we should let our staffs work that out, which did not reassure me.
We then entered into a discussion of the situation on the battlefield, and I laid out my commander’s operations map on the ground between us. There was no doubt that Kagame had pinned down, with minimum effort, a number of RGF battalions defending the Ruhengeri Hutu heartland. This permitted him, after seizing Byumba and the main road in the east, to proceed south as far as the Tanzanian border and seal it up at the river. Concurrently, he was moving his assault forces west, below Kigali, on the main axis of the paved road to the capital. Kigali was clearly being surrounded for a showdown. With one more hint about possibly consolidating along a north-south river, he abruptly ended the map exercise and moved on to discuss the Arusha meeting that was to start the next morning. He had not gone because it was up to the political wing to sort that out. He was not optimistic at all on the potential outcome, however, and basically thought that the Arusha accords I’d been mandated to support served only “to save the lives of the military and not those of the civilians.” When we finished our session, he invited me to sleep over as it was too risky to head back to Kigali after dark. We shook hands firmly and wished each other well, and then I was escorted away.
The diplomats would posture tomorrow in Arusha, but the die had already been cast: we were moving methodically on one side, and at best haphazardly on the other, to a major fight for Kigali. During our meeting I had asked Kagame why he wasn’t going straight for the jugular in Kigali, and he ignored the implications of my question. He knew full well that every day of fighting on the periphery meant certain death for Tutsis still behind RGF lines.
I found my escort and officers having a drink at a small cantina in the camp. Pasteur Bizimungu (who, after the RPF victory, would become the president of Rwanda) was there with a few politicos, and I sat down with him at the edge of the cantina as my guys and the RPF soldiers had a good time together, as soldiers will always find a way to do. Pasteur and I spent about an hour talking about his past, the present catastrophe, the SRSG, the international community, and the future of the country if the RPF won. We then walked up the hill and entered the house where we had held our formal meetings. There was a small fire in the fireplace, since it had gotten quite chilly when the sun went down. On a small rickety table, surrounded by four equally uncertain wooden chairs, we sat down to eat as two bowls, one of beans and the other of starchy and bland miniature bananas, were placed between our cracked plates.
The warm food and the fireplace took a toll on me, and I was nearly delirious with fatigue by the time Pasteur led me to a small guest room. On a little night table was a candle already half burned. There was a military cot with clean white sheets and a magnificent bulging pillow under a mosquito net. I got undressed, did the usual field bath with not much water, and climbed into bed, feeling a bit guilty about my troops and Brent in Kigali but so overwhelmed with the smell of clean sheets, the feel of a warm blanket and a decent meal in my stomach that I fell asleep in what seemed that night to be a brief heaven on earth. I do not remember dreaming.
* * *
1. “Outgoing Code Cable 8 April 1994 Supplementary Report on UNAMIR Humanitarian Activities” and “Outgoing Code Cable 8 April 1994 An Update on the Current Situation in Rwanda and Military Aspects of the Mission.”
2. Linda Carroll was the epitome of what a diplomat should be in a crisis. Since the president’s plane went down, she had warned her area wardens, calmed everyone by radio, located most of the Canadians she knew to be in Kigali and managed to gather them in key locations. With assistance from our embassy in Nairobi and others, Brent and his team conducted dozens of missions over the next two weeks to rescue and evacuate not only Canadians but also Rwandans and other nationals. There was one large complicating factor. From her records, Linda believed there were only about 65 Canadian citizens in Kigali, but we evacuated over 195. Many travellers and expatriates do not take their security seriously and feel under no obligation to check in with their local embassies or consulates—which causes enormous effort and grief among the men and women who must try to save them when conflict breaks out.
3. I found Dounkov’s investigation incomplete. On July 14, however, I signed off on the board of inquiry, since it ultimately provided sufficient information to be used as the basis for UN compensation of the Belgian soldiers’ families and the Belgian government. I added the caveat that the board required a follow-up investigation.
4. Major Diagne attended nearly every meeting with me after the war started, taking detailed notes and then rewriting the minutes so that they would be legible. One evening as he sat at his desk transcribing, he felt the sudden need of prayer and slid off his chair to his knees on his prayer carpet, his head toward Mecca, as required by his Islamic faith. At that exact moment, a huge piece of shrapnel smashed through his window from a mortar explosion, flying through the space he had just vacated, bouncing off the walls and landing still red-hot near his feet. He came within a hair’s breadth of certain death. Always dignified and composed, Diagne reported the damage to his window and then returned to his desk to complete his tedious but essential transcribing.
12
LACK OF RESOLUTION
I GOT UP at first light to head back to Kigali. The return route was a little shorter but no less ugly. Morning fires of wet banana leaves and a few lumps of hoarded coal added an acid sting to the omnipresent putrid smell of death. By 0700, I was in my HQ for morning prayers. Moen presented the troops-to-task plan under the reduced force, and it was immediately evident to all of us that the original target of about 250 personnel would be drastically insufficient for us to render any humanitarian assistance such as transport, surveillance, distribution of aid or the transfer of persons between the lines. I ordered the Ghanaian battalion to hold back as many qualified drivers as possible from the withdrawal. Orders went out, and over two hundred Ghanaian soldiers who had originally been scheduled to leave stayed behind with the rest of us. My force, by the end of the day, would be 454 of all ranks, along with our dozen UN civilians.
Peter Hansen, the UN under-secretary for Humani
tarian Affairs, was due that day with his group of analysts—he was the first senior UN executive to visit us since the war began. The major point I made to him, after he had toured the protected sites and had been briefed by our humanitarian section under Yaache, was that UNAMIR had to be the conduit on information to the NGOs and agencies coming into Rwanda, and that we had to control their movements. I could not tolerate individual aid organizations wanting to do their own thing in ignorance of the overall situation and possibly jeopardizing ceasefire negotiations or the security of the mission. The best thing Hansen could do was send me a solid emergency team to marry up with my humanitarian section. Hansen was courageous, determined and quick to grasp the situation. He left a team behind with orders to integrate with the Force HQ and promised to convey my plan and directives to the aid agencies, though he could not guarantee that they would all fall in line. I told him to pass on a simple message: if any one of them aided and abetted the belligerents by even inadvertently allowing aid resources to end up in the hands of troops, I would expel them from Rwanda and answer questions later.
I set off for Gitarama to brief the interim government members and the RGF on the new mandate and troop reductions. The trip was yet another descent into the inferno. You can handle such scenes for a while, but as we once again became engulfed in a slow-moving, suffering human mass, my tolerance for the brutality waned and I see-sawed from rage to tears and back again, with brief interregnums of numbed-out staring. I could not look away. All those eyes staring back at us. Tired, red, sad, fearful, mad, bewildered pairs of eyes.
I was late for the meeting, and as we drove into the compound where the interim government was holed up, the contrast between the site and the scenes along the road really got to me. The compound was a peaceful modern schoolyard. A large number of well-dressed gentlemen and a few middle-aged women milled aimlessly about under the avocado trees amid a large flower garden. The prime minister and a particularly aggressive minister of information seemed to be at work in small offices, but no one else was doing much and there was no apparatus of government to be seen—the interim government had been here for over a week and still looked as if it was sorting out the seating plan for a meeting that was not about to convene any time soon.
Kambanda was uneasy, and no one looked particularly pleased to see us, so I got right to the point. The prime minister had no reaction one way or the other to news of the reduction of my force and the new mandate. He said he would support the secure transfer of people between the lines and would confirm with the minister of defence a militia truce for such transfers. When I mentioned the relentless killing at the barriers, Kambanda insisted that the “self-defence personnel” had an important security job to perform in weeding out rebel infiltrators. We ticked off a few more items on the list, and then he singled out the fact that UNAMIR was “cohabiting” with the RPF at the Amahoro complex: How could he go along with a neutral airport when we would fold up if the RPF decided to take over the airport? I said that I was not cohabiting with the RPF: my headquarters area had been overrun and was now behind their lines. I said I would move the Force HQ to the airport as a guarantee that my actions were independent of the RPF, which caused the minister of information to scoff loudly.
Then the minister surprised me by requesting a public funeral for the murdered president. I replied that unless I could get access to the presidential residence and the crash site, I could do nothing about it—international inspectors had to be allowed in to do an independent investigation. He and Kambanda agreed and asked when the inspectors could come. I said they were waiting for my call. Lastly, I firmly decried the verbal abuse and disinformation being broadcast about UNAMIR and the Tutsis by RTLM. I wanted to go on air and tell my version of the situation. To my surprise, the minister agreed and said he would set it up for the next day.
Shaking hands automatically, I left the small office and walked among the ministers and others on my way to my vehicle. As I walked, I brooded on their complacency, on how clean and at ease they all seemed; either they were outside the decision loop or they had ulterior motives in this catastrophe befalling their homeland. And where was Bagosora?
We arrived back at the HQ by 1800 and held prayers soon after. The news from the Arusha meeting was that the RGF delegation hadn’t shown up. The RPF had sent their secretary-general, Théogène Rudasingwa, as head of a small delegation, and he presented a ceasefire proposal that still included the demanding preconditions. In the words of Booh-Booh in his report to UN headquarters: “Having waited in vain for the arrival of the Government delegation and with the departure of the RPF delegation, I plan to leave Arusha for Nairobi. . . . I however took advantage of the presence of the OAU Secretary-General and the Tanzanian delegation (President) to exchange views on our efforts to help the peace process and also to prepare a cease-fire proposal which I believe could form the basis of ending the present hostilities.” Not only did Booh-Booh decide to leave for Nairobi, from that point on he mostly stayed there, as did his politicos, making only brief visits to Kigali. So the political wheel went spinning into a vacuum, and everyone could say on their way home that they had tried their best.
The last of the six troop flights was leaving Kigali airport as we wrapped up prayers, and the HQ was readjusting for the second time in two weeks. I retained a Force Headquarters, a reduced Military Observer Group, a little more than a platoon of Tunisians and a small battalion of Ghanaians. The MILOBs were with us at the Amahoro Hotel in our familiar headquarters, protected by the Tunisians. I based the Ghanaian battalion at the airport, as my alternate headquarters, with the medical section, the service support element (which would run the logistics base) and one rifle company to defend the airport. The other rifle company I based at the Amahoro Stadium to protect the refugees.
I had also placed small detachments at the other sites throughout Kigali where we were protecting persons, with mobile MILOB teams travelling between them. I gave the APCs to the Tunisians, who without tools, spare parts or mechanics, managed to increase the working number from three to five within hours. The “deadheads” (an old military term for unserviceable vehicles), which had arrived in February from Mozambique, could not be redeemed, and we hauled them to the gates of our camps and employed them as bunkers.
Despite the best efforts of the Tunisians, the vehicles progressively broke down—eventually all of them did. After much wrangling, the United States authorized its mission in Somalia to “loan” UNAMIR six old, stripped-down (no guns, no radios and no tools), early Cold War–era APCs in mid-April. Brent had taken a call one night from an NCO at the Pentagon, who asked why we needed the APCs. With some eloquence, Brent described our substantially reduced force structure, our desperate logistics state and our precarious situation on the ground, ending his explanation with: “It gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘light forces,’ doesn’t it?” The good old boy in Washington responded, “Buddy, you’ll get your APCs, good luck to you and God bless.” We got more and faster support from that one sergeant than from the rest of the United States government and armed forces combined.
How could I spark the conscience of the world? We were diminished but determined to stay put and continue to tell the story of what was happening in Rwanda. I had to press the right buttons and I had to do it as fast as possible. Since my reports seemed to keep vanishing into the abyss of non-action in New York, I stepped up the media campaign. For those politicians and generals who distrust and avoid the free media, I can assure them that the media can be an ally and a weapon equal to battalions on the ground. With the Belgian departure, it appeared that Mark Doyle of the BBC might also leave. I called him into my office and made him an offer he could not refuse. He could live with us, be protected by us, be fed and sustained by us, and I would guarantee him a story a day and the means (my satellite phone) to get that story to the world. I did not care if his story was positive or negative about UNAMIR as long as it was accurate and truthful. The key was for him to become the
voice of what was happening in Rwanda.
Mark agreed and in the coming days he did become that voice. Other news agencies noticed, and journalists began to flow into Rwanda to cover the slaughter. Jean-Guy Plante was on the case, helping them in any way he could. He loved to be around people, and he organized the reporters already in country, establishing a system of rotation of media between Nairobi and Kigali with the help of the Canadian movement staff in charge of the Hercules flights. Plante decided how long reporters would stay in theatre in order to permit a maximum of different media outfits and journalists to report what was going on in Rwanda. I wanted no stupid casualties. Plante had UN vans, rooms in the Meridien, food cards, and electronic hookups in the Force HQ ready for them. He guaranteed them security, at least one story every day and delivery of their stories to Nairobi. This was achieved on occasion by UNMOs driving to the Ugandan border and handing the material to UNOMUR, who would take it by helicopter to Entebbe and beyond.
I also directed Brent to ensure each night that any journalist calling for an interview was given access to me. With our own national broadcasting network, the CBC, Brent exercised his initiative, with very positive results. The producer of As It Happens, an internationally well-regarded radio interview show listened to at home by hundreds of thousands of Canadians, finally secured our phone number and called to set up a live interview with the show’s host, Michael Enright. Brent refused to put me on the line unless the producer provided the scores of the NHL (National Hockey League) playoff games. We had no news at all from home but knew the playoffs were on. Brent, a confirmed Toronto Maple Leafs fan at the time, and I, a resolute Montreal Canadiens fan, were grateful for this news. In the weeks that followed, we always got our scores, and Enright got his live interviews. In our conversations, Enright became the voice of home to me.