Of course, Hanrahan did not get the word in time, and the next day 170 personnel landed in Entebbe. The unit was up to strength, operationally current and ready for a rare deployment as a full unit (usually only individuals were sent to augment missions). They got to the theatre exactly fourteen days after official notification of the mission, and were proud of their speed. Hanrahan took one look at the camp at Entebbe airfield and rented a large warehouse and a bunch of hotel rooms until they could fly into Kigali. This was the kind of despatch and flexibility I desperately needed from contingents, but which only the “have” nations could afford.
The night before I was to meet General Schroeder for the first time the DPKO sent us some pertinent news clips from the U.S. media. The Washington Post was reporting that the U.S. government was planning to put at least 2,000 troops inside Rwanda “to set up a relief network to encourage Rwandan refugees to return home from their horrific camps in Zaire.” A Lieutenant General John Sheehan, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quoted as saying that “the operation would be done in concert with UN forces in Africa and several nations would be taking part.” Their mission, according to officers interviewed in Entebbe by the Post, “would be to establish relief stations with food and water that would tend to refugees on their walk home.” According to Sheehan, “U.S. military teams would fan out from Kigali airport on roads leading to the Zairean border” and establish way stations as the proposed support structure for a reverse trek. “Establishing a multinational HQ in Kigali is also intended as a statement to Hutu refugees that there will be no reprisals.” The triumvirate had done a fine job, because it seemed as if, this time, the United States had accepted my entire concept of operations. We were elated. It looked like we now had the means and a plan that would end the Goma catastrophe and enable the return home of the displaced persons in the HPZ.
Reality struck again at morning prayers with a report from our liaison officer in Goma. Some refugees trickling back into Rwanda in order to escape the hellhole of their disease-infested camps had been attacked by extremists. A few were killed but most were mutilated and returned to the camps to serve as examples—the favoured punishment was using a machete to chop the Achilles tendon, which prevented the victim from walking. The news sent me spinning into a tirade against every nation and body who could have assisted us in preventing this, most especially Turquoise. My ranting was beyond the bounds of decorum, and rendered my own staff and the French liaison officers noticeably ill at ease. When I stopped, the orders group headed quietly off to their duties.
It has never been my way to rant and rave like a cartoon general. In fact, even at the height of any crisis, a model Canadian headquarters was low-key, restrained, efficient. I remained alone for a time, staring at the big map of Rwanda tacked to the wall. I had to recognize that I was exhibiting the signs and symptoms that caused me to send others to Nairobi for a rest. I could rarely sleep, and could not bear to eat anything other than peanut butter from Beth’s last care package. I was moody and overtaken at the most inopportune times by spontaneous daydreaming. I resolved to speak to Maurice about my condition soon, then pulled myself together to meet the American commander.
Schroeder was preceded by a small military police detachment led by a very tense colonel. They were given space in the terminal to set up their preliminary HQ. The general arrived in a small twin-engine commander’s aircraft. When I laid eyes on him for the first time it looked to me like real help had finally arrived. His introductory words to me were, “General, I am here to help you in whatever way I can.”
We spent some time together in my HQ going over the concept of operations for both Goma and the HPZ, my status of forces in theatre, my future capabilities, the priority of effort I needed from his troops (airfield handling; transport for matériel and men between Entebbe, Goma and Kigali; mine clearance, logisitics and security elements for the way stations; water and electricity in Kigali; if possible, the restoration of the hydro dam near Cyangugu); and the humanitarian and political situation as of that day. He and his few staff officers took notes. When Schroeder left, the only outstanding question about the imminent arrival of American help was some political posturing in Washington.
The next morning, July 29, I was reading the Washington clips sent overnight by the DPKO, this time accompanied by a note from the triumvirate warning me that our plan was now running into serious opposition. Schroeder was quoted as saying that the U.S. deployment would take place despite hesitation voiced in Washington, but he added that he would proceed cautiously because of difficult conditions in Kigali: “The one thing you do not want to do is to overwhelm an already overstressed infrastructure.” What kind of doubletalk was this? His resources were the solution to the stress. Clearly between the time he left me and the time he gave an interview to the media in Entebbe he had been told off by his superiors. Apparently the State Department and the Pentagon were at odds, and the State Department viewed it as premature to speak of a large-scale U.S. presence in Kigali, or of the capital as the proper hub for relief efforts, I scanned the clippings to discover that U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry along with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvilli, were to tour the region on the coming weekend; no policy decision about Kigali would be reached until after their visit.
The root of the issue was expressed by an unnamed State Department official, who said that the Clinton administration did not want the U.S. military presence in Rwanda to be seen as a de facto recognition of the new Rwandan government, which had not yet satisfied Washington of its commitment to protecting human rights. They also did not want to station any U.S. military personnel in Rwanda until their safety was “absolutely” assured. While the U.S. military thought it would be more efficient to operate out of Kigali, General Shalikashvilli told reporters that U.S. officials had concerns about how they would ensure the security of participating American forces if they were inside Rwanda. As a possible alternative to the way-station plan, Shalikashvilli offered that “Pentagon officials also are considering a system of airdrops to provide food and other basic supplies to refugees on their way home.” The great humanitarians in the U.S. administration wanted no part of anything inside Rwanda that could lead to American casualties.
Schroeder had been too transparent and committed during our briefing to have been sitting on the fence. I phoned his HQ in Entebbe but he was already en route to Goma. An aide assured me he would get back to me later that day. But the fact of the matter was that once again UNAMIR was on its own.
The Canadians started to pour in and were sent to quarters in the Amahoro Stadium. The place had not been touched since our last Rwandan refugee had left and it resembled an overflowing sewer. Within hours of his arrival, Regimental Sergeant Major Lebrun, who had been a signaller in my old regiment, had the troops in full cleaning mode. (They did such a good job that a week later the new Rwandan minister of youth, Patrick Mazimhaka, wanted to move into the Amahoro and displace them. Golo said no—we were the ones who had cleaned the place and, futhermore, we were the ones paying rent.) Those who weren’t on duty setting up communications and HQ assets carried on scrubbing, building and sandbagging. It seemed as though we had been invaded by carpenters, plumbers and electricians. For a time I had the impression that my tiny band of veterans were in the way, but the Canadians soon won us over with their efforts to make us more functional than we had ever been.
The support assets who came in with Hanrahan at my request—a construction engineer company, a logistics and admin group, and a solid transport platoon—would soon take over the whole of the force logistics and administration role and would be the coordinating link with Golo and the UN civilian staff and also with Brown and Root. Chatting with the burly construction engineers in their canteen, I complimented them on the enormous amount of work they had accomplished in a short time. But they were not impressed with themselves. On the way over someone had off-loaded all their power tools at the la
st minute in lieu of something else. They had been working with hand tools, and though they were proud of their old-fashioned blisters, they felt they were wasting too much time.
The Canadians had decided to send a complete 200-bed field hospital, not under my command but as an independent humanitarian support to the Goma UNHCR exercise—though I wasn’t informed of that little wrinkle until they started to arrive in Rwanda. However, after they discussed the matter with me and UNAMIR HQ staff, the Canadian hospital ended up exactly where I had planned for it—along the return route between Gisenyi and Ruhengeri. The Brits were assigned the hospital inside Ruhengeri and, as planned, the Australians were given the Kigali hospital.
More and more contingents were being processed through the UN system, and the U.S. finally offered something useful: it would move our troops and equipment to Kigali by air. Infantry companies and units from Ethiopia, Zambia, Malawi, Mali and Nigeria were prepared to deploy; Kagame had approved a plan whereby Turquoise would hand over its Franco-African soldiers to my command so that I would have enough French-speaking troops in theatre when we began to take over the HPZ. I had the usual UN macédoine to deal with, with all its inherent complexities of command relationships, languages, skill sets and the roulette of assigning tasks to troops whose capabilities were a mystery until they landed. I was starting to get embroiled in the same frustrations, delays and lost operational opportunities of the initial UNAMIR buildup of the previous October. But this time I also had to weather more complex emotions.
Even now I have trouble sorting out my own reaction to the mostly well-meaning people who came into Kigali to help. Perhaps it was their apparent detachment, the ease with which they ignored the imperatives that I thought critical. Perhaps it was the attitudes of some of them or the photo ops they arranged of themselves beside mass graves or the way they were able to step over bodies without seeming to notice those people had once had names. Speed, innovation, imagination and understanding operational priorities were fundamental ingredients of success. Too many of the support staff who arrived once the genocide had ceased brought with them rules, regulations and procedures that weren’t tied in any way to achieving our urgent aims.
More troubling than this conflict in views was the feeling that the new people were outsiders. They had not been with us when we needed them most and had not shared the danger or hardship. I felt as though they were contaminating something private, that they had trespassed on a family gathering. Our experience of the previous few months had separated me and my small band of warriors from the world and, in some senses, had made us all into prisoners of memories too personal to share, and too difficult to express outside of the context of a time that had already passed. The fact that few of the newcomers seemed to show much interest in what had happened—and many were anxious to brush it all aside in their haste to impose a new order on things—did not help. It is also possible that we had been running on pure adrenalin for so long that we couldn’t function as well once the danger passed and help arrived.
Nor can I completely discount the possibility that my own ego had grown unacceptably large during the time I was the focus of all that media attention. Perhaps, like the generals of Roman times, I needed someone to whisper in my ear, “Remember Caesar, thou too art human.” Is the human condition not defined by an endless struggle to control the ego’s subterfuges?
On the other hand, I wasn’t immune to the criticism that whispered its way into my consciousness. Naturally the French had an interest in laying blame for the collapse of their allies and in making it appear that the genocide was in no way connected to them. What better way than to suggest that the whole thing was somehow the fault of the United Nations? As I was the commander of the UN forces on the ground, it was an easy thing for the French to imply that I had somehow failed. Add to this the horrified reaction of the swarm of people involved with NGOs who appeared within hours of the danger passing and who may have been unable to deal with the emotional trauma of what they saw without finding a scapegoat. I do not blame the NGO community, nor was their criticism entirely misplaced. We could have done more. But who are “we” in this case? To ears made oversensitive by self-doubt, the whispers cut like hot knives.
I remember co-chairing with Charles Petrie one of the first NGO aid-coordinating meetings in the UNDP conference centre. Yaache and MacNeil were reeling under the horrendous tower of Babel the humanitarian relief world had quickly become. The meeting lasted forever. There were so many interventions, so many divergent agendas and so many demands on the resources of UNAMIR that the minutes of that one meeting became a brick of paper. What got under my skin was the way the aid community so unthinkingly rallied behind its first principle: no matter what, they had to protect their neutrality. It was my opinion that, in this new reality we had all inherited, they were defining their independence so narrowly it often impeded their stated aims.
An example of this misguided independence was the time doctors and nurses from the Canadian field hospital, which regularly sent out emergency teams to pick up the injured and the sick, came across a small NGO aid station where hundreds of people were waiting to be treated. Many of the patients were lying in the sun and even dying at the doorstep of this inundated facility. When the military doctors and nurses in their Red Cross armbands offered to help, the NGO staff actually refused. They feared losing their neutrality more than losing the lives of the patients at their door. The Canadian medical teams brushed aside their objection, scooped up the whole stranded group and transported them to the waiting staff at the field hospital.
That the Red Cross remains staunchly neutral, to the extent of refusing to give testimony at the International Tribunals on Genocide, is a fixed point of ethical reference as well as its careful interpretation of realpolitik. But in conflicts where the military have had to become intimately involved with the humanitarian crisis, the neutrality that NGOs cling to needs to be seriously rethought. A man like Philippe Gaillard had had no trouble understanding the new roles.
In these last days of July, Khan and I, along with a small group of staff, entertained the head of the UNHCR, Sadako Ogata, at a supper of expired rations at our headquarters. Ogata’s agency was at the centre of the arena in Goma, directing traffic and dealing with cholera and starvation. Ogata had a keen intellect, and she demonstrated her grasp of the situation during the briefings and discussions we held. By the time she left, both Khan and I thought that she supported our plan to repatriate the refugees without delay. But when she got to Goma she announced that such a plan would be foolhardy. The refugees might export cholera into Rwanda when they returned and spread it through the hills. Militia men might infiltrate with them and destabilize the new government, or the old regime’s burgomasters might sneak back in and wreak havoc. As far as she was concerned, the refugees should stay in place until there was a partial return to normalcy inside Rwanda. Khan was fuming, and once again I totally lost it. Was it a sense of turf that informed the UNHCR’s decision to maintain the camps? The crisis was apparently providing the first real test of their new command and control structure out of Geneva. The decision to wait for a “partial return to normalcy” left more than a million pawns in the hands of the extremists who, as predicted, eventually took control of the camps, even evicting NGOs who displeased them.
After I had cooled down again, Phil approached me. He had been watching me like a hawk, and trying to diffuse situations when he saw me getting too emotional. Phil told me I had to consider my own state and the state of the mission—and soon. That night I spent many hours silently wondering just how far gone I was, and what I could still get done before I needed to get out of there, for the sake of the mission and myself.
On July 31 four hundred men—Henry’s Ghanaians, under Colonel Joe—were scheduled to leave Kigali as the first UNAMIR troops to take over from the French in the HPZ. I drove out to the large parking lot near Kadafi Crossroads with Phil and my aide-de-camp at about 0630 to send them off. The vehicles appea
red out of the orange glow of the dawn, lined up and parked. The troops disembarked and I gathered them around me. I spoke to them of the significance of their mission and the difficult demands I was making of them individually to ensure that their part of the HPZ remained calm. They were eager and their energy was overflowing. I told them that just as I had relied upon them through the heart of the genocide, I was calling on them once again to be the vanguard of this new mission. I wished them luck and told them that I expected nothing from them but the kind of success they had had in the past.
Then, with a call from the regimental sergeant major and a salute from the officers, they clambered back onto their totally overloaded vehicles and set off like a gypsy caravan. Troops lay on mattresses on top of some of the trucks, holding onto pots and pans. Some soldiers perched on a load of everything from steel beds to wicker chairs. Canvas covered some truck beds, while others were open to the elements and had a few goats and chickens along for the ride. I silently prayed that they would take no casualties—the unit had suffered enough death and misery. As they disappeared over the hill, I congratulated Yaache and said that Henry would have been proud to have witnessed this gutsy unit setting off to take on the HPZ.
I’d had to keep a hundred of the Ghanaians back for security and staff duties in the capital, but in this one move I had essentially emptied my garrison of formed troops. It was a gamble, but I had to take it now or face impossible pressure from the RPF to oust the French.
As August began—the fifth month of this grotesque exercise in human destruction and paralysis—we got a report from Goma that Lafourcade was moving troops out of the HPZ faster than we had planned for. The French were now having clashes with the Interahamwe as well as struggling with all the humanitarian challenges, and things were still tense between them and the RPF. At the same time, the prime minister of France announced that the peacekeepers of Turquoise should stay on even after we had taken over all of the HPZ. Who was calling the shots?