That wasn’t the worst of it. The attempted transfer ran into trouble just outside the Mille Collines and nearly cost the lives of the seventy Tutsi leaders in our trucks. To protect them, Don MacNeil put himself between the threatening militiamen and the trucks and came within inches of being killed, as did most of the Ghanaians attached to his part of the convoy. Over the force radio net I reminded MacNeil that he could use deadly force. He stated that he was going to negotiate them out of harm’s way. (For this action MacNeil was awarded a mention-in-dispatch decoration from the Canadian government.) They had to retreat back to the Mille Collines, which as a result was even more insecure because the identities of some of the prominent persons inside were now known to the RGF and the militia. I feared that an assault would come that night. The hotel was shelled at sunset, but apart from broken windows and the smashed-up pool area, that was the extent of the damage. I kept my line open all night to Major Moigny, who was stationed there with his half-dozen UNMOS and the Tunisians.
The Force HQ also came under attack. The shells that landed in our compound destroyed a few vehicles and smashed several windows in the operations rotunda. The word went out that flak jackets and helmets were de rigueur for the next while. I was surprised at the quantity of artillery and mortar ammunition being expended by both sides to little tactical advantage. Not much of the fire seemed to be coordinated with infantry actions. Instead, the belligerents were posturing for better positions in and around the city, the RGF reinforcing their positions around Camp Kanombe and the eastern part of the airfield. The RPF was manoeuvring around the north. The fighting had intensified in the area between the HQ and the airport and we were being hit with peripheral explosions. The platoon sleeping room at the end of the top corridor of the HQ, just under the machine-gun position on the roof, was hit by an anti-armour rocket. The five Ghanaian soldiers who hot-bedded there had left the room barely minutes before the impact. A four- to five-foot hole was blown through the rooms, and no one would have survived.
It struck me that I was in the dark regarding the evolving situation in New York. Before morning prayers, I went through the cables that came in during the night and had to stifle white-hot rage when I read a copy of a May 2 letter from Rwanda’s permanent representative at the UN, stating that his government wanted immediate action to stop the killing and bring the fight to an end for humanitarian reasons, and “offers its full cooperation for the success of the operation, which should be envisaged without delay, with respect for the principle of the sovereignty and institutions of the Rwandan State [my emphasis].”
The other code cable was a summary of the previous afternoon’s deliberations in the Security Council. The play at the table between members left me perplexed. The French were for intervention either by neighbour states, the OAU or the UN. The United Kingdom said that the Security Council should avoid terms such as “forceful action” and “intervention.” China supported the United Kingdom’s position. Russia said the only way forward was to get the OAU more involved. New Zealand insisted that the words “forceful action” be retained. The United States proposed that a group from the Security Council go to Rwanda and get the needed information first-hand. Nigeria shot that down because such a trip would delay any decision by at least a week. All members supported cross-border humanitarian action and an arms embargo. Someone raised the fact that Boutros-Ghali’s May 3 letter to the president of the Security Council (as requested in response to the president’s report of April 30, which was prepared with lots of information from UNAMIR) had “infelicitously” suggested that the Security Council had made the wrong decision about the troop withdrawals. What really stuck in my craw was that now they were wasting time on finger pointing. What were they thinking? Why even think of passing the buck to the OAU when its troops had little equipment and no strategic lift?
The Hercules arrived at dawn to pick up the injured Ghanaian soldiers, and I went to the terminal to send them off. As the Hercules was turning back onto the runway, several rocket rounds hit the big hangar that housed the support company. A frantic call came in over the radio to hold the Hercules because another Ghanaian had been seriously injured. I told my aide-de-camp to get the plane to hang on for a few minutes.
The pilots were very uneasy on the ground, as they had already had so many narrow escapes. They kept the engines running and the ramp open as they waited in front of the terminal. A UN vehicle bounced across the open fields and then raced toward us. The soldier was brought inside so that the doctor could look at him and stabilize him enough for the trip. The plane had been on the ground for over twenty minutes when a couple more rounds landed across the airfield. I pressed the doctor to get the patient to the plane—Canadian air-evacuation nurses were on board to tend to him, and we simply could not let the other injured soldiers perish with the aircrew in a burning ball of fire. I was moving toward the doors to wave the plane on, leaving the terribly injured Ghanaian behind, when a hodgepodge of medical assistants in white, the doctor and troops ran for the plane with the cut-up soldier on a makeshift stretcher, nearly dropping him twice before they got him on board. The plane was on the runway before the ramp was totally up. All the wounded men pulled through.
I went to the other side of the field to look at the damage. It was obvious that the hangar had been specifically targeted with rocket fire and that the projectiles had come from the sprawling Camp Kanombe at the end of the airfield. What was Bizimungu trying to prove? Or perhaps more likely, what were Bagosora and the para-commando battalion based at that camp trying to achieve? Did they want us out, and if yes, what was yet to come? Bagosora would know better than I did the state of play at the UN, that the Security Council was once again discussing increasing my force. Was he trying to scare us off before the UN took the reinforcement decision?
The rest of the day was devoted to routine patrols to the safe sites, assisting the Red Cross in its distribution of some aid, licking our wounds from the transfer fiasco of yesterday, composing letters of protest to all the transgressors and getting up to speed with the DPKO about our future. To my great delight, after the second Hercules flight of the day managed to land and take off safely, a very large box was delivered to my office from Quebec City. Beth and the wife of one of the new Canadian officers, Luc Racine, had bought us a few hundred dollars’ worth of peanut butter, Cheez Whiz, jams, crackers, chocolate bars, jujubes (my favourite) and other goodies. Then Beth had tracked down a resupply Hercules that was leaving the base in Trenton, Ontario, and after all the expected runarounds, got the box on that plane. It had made its way from home to Kigali without mishap. I spent a few hours distributing the goodies all around. My military wife knew that we would share, so she had tucked a smaller box inside for me—my own personal care package of peanut butter. (The Canadian Army kept its troops rolling on peanut butter.) We savoured every spoonful.
May 5 was the fiercest day of artillery, rocket and mortar fire throughout the city so far. At about midday, the shells were flying in all directions from both belligerents—at the CND, the airport terminal (causing one flight to return to Nairobi without off-loading), the Mille Collines and Sainte Famille—and none of our sites were sufficiently protected because of the lack of defensive stores. My troops’ nerves were being frayed to levels of considerable concern, worn down by their powerlessness to help the people they were protecting from these threats from the sky. I set off again to meet with the manipulating leaders and protest, protest, protest. We were being targeted by both sides, yet both sides said they wanted us here. I did not want to abandon the field nor those under our protection, but unarmed military observers could not intimidate bombs.
Later that day I learned that José Ayala Lasso, the high commissioner for human rights, and an investigative team were coming to Kigali on May 9. That was excellent news. I instructed the commanders and staff to make available to him all personnel who had witnessed any crimes against humanity, and that he should be taken to see Kagame and, on the government s
ide, Bizimungu at least. Ayala Lasso was going to get an earful.
I was also handed a copy of a letter from the foreign minister of Belgium—sent on to me by Riza, possibly as an expression of black humour. In the letter Willy Claes reminded the secretary-general that the UN had to provide protection for Rwandan hospitals and NGO staffs, as well as ensure that those who were responsible for the massacres did not go unpunished. Was there no decency at all in either Claes or his government? They certainly missed a good opportunity to remain quiet.
By late afternoon I was finally able to sign our “Proposed Future Mandate and Force Structure of UNAMIR,” which was an in-depth option analysis of what we needed if the Security Council decided to reinforce us on the military, humanitarian and political fronts. I could lay it all out here; experts have studied the plan since and have agreed that if enacted, it would have stopped the killing and even allowed stability to reappear in central Africa. All I can say is that forwarding the plan briefly allowed us to live again in hope that the world would do the right thing, but nothing I outlined in it ever happened. At the time I thought, “Now they cannot procrastinate anymore. My troops are under fire on a daily basis, the politicos have a detailed concept of operations and a plan, and all we need is approval from the Security Council.”
But I sent it in on a Thursday, the next day was Friday and then came the weekend. The fastest they would get to it would be Monday, and tens of thousands more Rwandans would be dead, and hundreds of thousands would be on the move to another possible campsite in the mountains, in the rain, the mud and the horror. We did not have another week to fiddle. When I expressed some of my despair to Maurice, he told me to keep my head down and hope for the best. He had no power in the UN. He was the secretary-general’s military adviser in an organization swamped and sinking under the dead weight of useless political sinecures, indifference and procrastination. Between the buildup of the former-Yugoslavia mission, the Somalia debacle and the near-total absence of funds and support from the UN Fifth (financial and budget) Committee, UNAMIR ended up being just another catastrophic failure that was simply getting worse.
I knew Maurice had seen first-hand the suffering and destruction caused by this new era of conflict, and at one point he had come very close to dying of malaria picked up in a war zone. How was it possible that he had not become jaded? I still held him in high regard even though we had had our serious differences over these many months. But where could I find the means to prod the world into action? Living with the constant stink of death in my nose, carried on the breezes I had once found so seductive, I was forced to keep thinking: What was the spark that lit the fuse that blew up into all this degradation and perversion? And why were we so feeble, fearful and self-centred in the face of atrocities committed against the innocent? I woke the next morning with my head on my desk, pulled out of my stupor by birds singing in the trees inside the compound, and with one thought in my head: more Rwandans would die today.
Booh-Booh sent a report to Annan on the status of the ceasefire meetings in Arusha, with a copy to Dr. Kabia (not me). What a circus. It turned out there were two copies of the ceasefire agreement. Tanzania and the OAU had signed both, but the interim government and the RPF had signed different copies. Booh-Booh and the diplomats had tried to get the RPF to sign the copy that had the interim government’s signature on it, but of course the RPF stormed out. Why did all these fine people in authority not understand that they would never persuade the RPF to deal with the interim government? The RPF might sign such an agreement with the military directly, but Bizimungu was far too much of a Tutsi-hater, even killer, to give up on the interim government and negotiate with Kagame directly.
In the second part of the report, Booh-Booh complained bitterly about being accused by the RPF of being an ally of the interim government. He blamed me for not defending him to Kagame and argued that the RPF was framing him. I passed the news back to Annan that when I raised Booh-Booh’s name with Kagame it inspired a torrent of expletives. That was an opinion of Booh-Booh that no one would be able to change.
It was Saturday, May 7. The RPF had now bypassed Kigali to the south and were consolidating. The RGF, still madly recruiting, had held off repeated assaults in Ruhengeri and the north side of Kigali. The fighting around the airport and the terminal was extremely heavy, and I had had enough of hollow promises from both sides about their attempts to “avoid” my positions. All of the helicopters with UNOMUR in Kabale were broken, and the wrong parts had been sent to repair them. With the NRA still feigning that they had no escorts available, my force there was limited to surveillance of the five main crossings. The RPF and the NRA were now in overt cahoots in prosecuting this war.
I decided to drive out to the airport to bring encouragement to the Ghanaians. The firing was so heavy that the morning cargo of much-needed water, medicine and food was still on pallets in the middle of the tarmac. On the way back to Force HQ, we ran into a new roadblock put up by some very scraggly militiamen. I was getting very tired of this; by signed agreement the road to the airport was supposed to be kept open. After slowing down to get a good look at the layout—a dozen youths milling about with a few plastic crates set up on the road—I pressed on the gas and smashed my way through. The crates flew into the air, and the militiamen jumped back in complete surprise. Back at the HQ, Tiko was looking for some action, and I decided to give him charge of my escort to go sort out the problem. The outraged militiamen became very subdued when Tiko approached, backed by my squad of burly muscle-men. Tiko sat down on one of the plastic crates and held court with the AK-47-toting kids, who were no older than sixteen. He was obviously quite persuasive, as the youths decided to withdraw, after shaking hands and promising not to come back to the area. They never did. I enjoyed the story, but it reinforced for me what we could have possibly done with even 5,000 troops and officers of this calibre.
Once more I returned to the Diplomates, this time to meet with Augustin Bizimana, the minister of defence, who had been conspicuously absent from Kigali for most of the month. He told me he had been wrapped up in cabinet affairs, but I knew he had been dealing with his personal losses of family and property in Byumba.
After what now seemed like a ritual of complaints and promises all around, I told him of the plans for the new UNAMIR. Though I was looking for major reinforcements, I said, we were not to be an intervention force. His immediate response was to announce that there would be only one Rwanda, not a country divided into Tutsi and Hutu territories. Where did he get that idea? Not from me and certainly not from Kagame. The only other people who knew of my musings on a Cyprus-style future for the country were in the DPKO. Had they shared that prospect with the Security Council, which still included the extremist Rwandan representative? I let it lie.
I promised Bizimana that when I was reinforced I would deploy a battalion to protect a neutral airport. He said this information would help him with the cabinet. He ended the meeting, heading for cover when a few mortar rounds started to fall in the area. Once again I was left with the feeling that the extremists were better informed than I was about what my superiors were planning.
Not long after, I was heading for my meeting with Kagame, rolling through the countryside with my escort, avoiding piles of clothes and abandoned household goods. We were in newly held RPF territory, and the scenes were as horrific as elsewhere. Several ambush or killing sites were old, not attributable to the RPF, but some huts were smouldering here and there. We arrived at a ford across a creek. There had once been a small bridge here but it had been blown up. For a minute I actually wondered why the RPF soldiers guarding the ford were fishing with long poles but no string. I then noticed large piles of bloated blue-black bodies heaped on the creek banks. The soldiers had been given the task of making sure the bodies would not block the passage, as the creek was very shallow here. The stink was suffocating, and my undigested lunch was soon added to the mess. The soldiers, either tired or having run out of room, were poling the
bodies past the ford to float their putrid way to the nearest river and possibly on to Lake Victoria. Mentally retreating behind the protective shield of command, I plunged my vehicle into the water and carried on along the trail to my objective: Byumba, where Kagame had set up a tactical headquarters that was much easier to reach than his compound in Mulindi.
I raised with the general my worries about the fate of the Tutsis and the moderate Hutus still marooned in the Mille Collines; Bizimungu had threatened to kill them if the RPF didn’t stop shelling RGF positions in the city. Kagame was pragmatic, the complete portrait of the cool warrior: “They are practising their age-old blackmail methods and it will not work anymore. There will be many sacrifices in this war. If the refugees have to be killed for the cause, they will be considered as having been part of the sacrifice.” I instinctively asked if his forces would conduct any reprisals on the Hutus we were protecting in our sites. He told me to get those civilians out of Kigali because the fight would only get worse. On the airport problem, he said that he had given me all the time he could to sort out the neutrality agreement, but he could no longer hold up or change his operational plans. He was not targeting UNAMIR positions per se, but in the fog of the battle, my troops could get hit. In fact they already had been hit. I told him I had no choice but to stay at the airport to protect the field for humanitarian purposes and the Canadian mercy flights. He did not respond, just sat there impassive, so calm his thin chest barely moved with each breath.