Shake Hands With the Devil (28 page)

In the midst of all this turmoil, I received an unusual invitation. André Ntagerura, the minister of transport and the acknowledged dean of the
MRND
, wanted to see me. On January 24, I agreed to meet him for supper at the Restaurant Péché Mignon, a stone's throw from the
MRND
party headquarters. Perched on a hillside, the restaurant had a reputation for fine cuisine and a lovely courtyard that boasted a garden and fountain. When I arrived (with Willem de Kant, who would provide some discreet security) shortly after 2100, the place was almost empty. I found Ntagerura seated at a secluded table, a small pudgy man with a jovial air about him and an exceptionally round face. His features were unusual, with exaggerated curves, and he could overwhelm you with the power of his expressions, whether of joy or anger. Ntagerura had been involved with the Habyarimana regime for close to thirteen years and had occupied some of the most influential government ministries. He was a member of Habyarimana's inner circle, and I was curious as to why he wanted to meet with me, though I had worried that accepting his invitation could be misconstrued as a partisan gesture.

When Ntagerura did not order, or offer me, any alcohol, I realized how important he felt the meeting to be. It turned out that he was another Rwandan politician who had spent many years in Quebec. He could swear better in Québécois than I could and was extremely knowledgeable about the political culture of my home province and Canada. After he spent some time charming me, he got around to the point of the meeting. The president was no longer in charge, he said, and the
MRND
was operating independently of him. Faustin Twagiramungu's inflexibility regarding nominations to the
BBTG
within his own party was the source of much of the political impasse, he said. Leaning toward me, taking care to shut up when a waiter came near, Ntagerura insisted that pursuing Habyarimana for the solution to the impasse was useless. The better road was to persuade Twagiramungu that the nominations from his party to the
BBTG
should reflect the wishes of the party rather than his own. He went on to address the internal problems of the
PL
, saying that Lando and Justin Mugenzi should just agree to disagree.

As he warmed to his subject, his essential mean-spiritedness showed through. He said that the transitional government should reflect the
country's real makeup and not the sudden resurgence of a minority ethnic entity seeking to dominate the majority. He suggested that the
RPF
was seeking to control the
BBTG
by wooing the majority of the cabinet over to its side, leaving the
MRND
isolated. To him, it all smelled like a return to the Tutsi-dominated pre-independence feudal system.

His eyes grew wild and his voice rose alarmingly as he insisted that the
RPF
was going to impose a Tutsi hegemony over the Great Lakes region of Africa. He claimed that the number of
RPF
soldiers inside the
CND
complex had increased since December to more than a thousand and that
RPF
agents were trying to influence the local population and distribute arms. I pointed out that under Arusha the
RPF
had the freedom to operate like any of the other parties, and that included holding political meetings and getting their message out to the local population. He threw me a skeptical look and said
UNAMIR
was being far too soft on the
RPF
, particularly the Belgians. Pursing his lips with disapproval, he said the Belgians had been observed running after women and causing fights in local bars and discos. Stabbing the air with his chubby finger, he charged that
UNAMIR
had not found out who had committed the November killings and seemed to be providing escorts and protection only to Tutsis and their supporters.

Things were coming to a head, he warned, and
UNAMIR
would no longer be able to sit on the fence.
UNAMIR
was not well understood by the local population, and unless we took the initiative, we would continue to be the brunt of misinformation. He hinted that the violence and the negative press would escalate if the situation remained unchanged.

By the time we finished talking, it was close to one in the morning. The fanatic in him disappeared and Ntagerura was all civility and charm. I thanked him for his candour and deliberately gathered up the many notes I had taken. As we stood, he reached, almost affectionately, to shake my hand, patting my upper arm with his other hand in obvious satisfaction at how the meeting had gone. As Willem and I headed home, I replayed the meeting in my mind. I determined that I had to improve security at the
CND
. Ntagerura's attitude confirmed what we had learned through Jean-Pierre: the regime felt that the tide was turning against them. I saw that a great chasm was opening up and the only way to bridge it would be through political involvement and diplomacy at a higher
plane than the fiddling around that
UNAMIR
had been doing. We had to find a way of reaching out to the hard-liners while not pandering to their ethnic extremism. Ntagerura, for all intents and purposes, had asserted that the president was no longer in full control of the
MRND
movement. Who was running the show on the extremist side?

The following day I briefed Booh-Booh and a few of his staffers on my meeting with Ntagerura and handed him a written analysis and report of the conversation for his action. I told him that we had to start pushing harder, putting more pressure on the parties to solve their disagreements and get the
BBTG
installed. Booh-Booh responded with alarm. On the contrary, he said, we needed to
slow down
the process in order to build consensus. He pointed to the correspondence that was going on between Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Habyarimana and said that we should wait and see if the president's diplomatic efforts bore fruit. I couldn't believe what I was hearing: hadn't I just told him that the dean of the
MRND
had claimed that the president was no longer in control of his own party? I returned to my office furious.

The next day I received from Dr. Kabia a copy of the analysis done by one of the politicos who had attended my meeting with the
SRSG
. Instead of getting the point that one of the major powers in the
MRND
was saying the president was no longer in control, this adviser concentrated his comments on the fact that it was inappropriate procedure for me to have met with Ntagerura: “According to
UN
practice and guidelines, staff members are warned that in conflict situations as we do have in Rwanda, they should not have any close ties with individuals, organizations, parties or factions, so as not to raise any doubts as to their ability to remain impartial and objective in discharging their duties.”

Rwanda was adrift, and no one either wanted to or seemed to be able to do anything about it.

I was receiving reports from
UNOMUR
in Uganda of increased movements of food, fuel and young men into the
RPF
zone in northern Rwanda. Ben Matizawa and the others were certain that the
RPF
was gearing up for action. The government forces were equally busy. My
MILOB
teams were reporting troop movements from the southern sector to the area north of
the
KWSA
, close to the
RPF
and the demilitarized zone. The army chief of staff had requested permission to reinforce Kigali with elite commando troops, at a meeting he called in the office of the minister of defence, using the lame excuse that the
RGF
had resupply problems and needed to concentrate their troops closer to their depots in Kigali. The minister of defence then intervened with a request to deploy the military police battalion of over four hundred troops inside the
KWSA
in static guard duties, to relieve the Gendarmerie of those tasks. The minister argued that the Gendarmerie was burning out and needed reinforcement. I categorically refused both requests, as the Gendarmerie, although stretched, was still able to deploy its two rapid reaction companies, and the balance of troops inside the
KWSA
was already overwhelmingly in their favour. Even after we lost contact with Jean-Pierre, we continued to receive reliable reports that the armed militias aligned with the
MRND
and
CDR
parties were continuing to stockpile weapons and distribute them to their supporters. Both sides were hedging their bets. If the political process failed, they wanted to be ready to fight it out.

The
RPF
battalion sequestered inside the
CND
complex was beginning to display a siege mentality. Recently they had broken out of the compound on a couple of occasions, firing their weapons and forcing their way through
UNAMIR
roadblocks. Both the troops and the political leadership showed an increasing tendency to vent their frustrations on
UNAMIR
, threatening my
MILOB
s if they turned up late for escort duty or flagrantly disobeying the rules of the
KWSA
agreement by showing up armed at the Amahoro headquarters. The battalion had been penned up in the
CND
compound for almost six weeks, often with hostile demonstrators on its doorstep, and I thought nothing good would happen if the political stalemate continued. During this time, Colonel Marchal visited my headquarters to inform me that, because the
RPF
had stepped up their meetings around Kigali in order to prepare for the
BBTG
,
UNAMIR
was being swamped by unreasonable requests by the
RPF
for escort parties. In his opinion, this was a ploy on the
RPF
's part to pressure
UNAMIR
to act more vigorously to break the political impasse.

For a while, Justin Mugenzi had seemed open to a political compromise on the makeup of the
PL
's representatives in the
BBTG
, but then
his car was ambushed on the way home from a meeting on January 19, and one of his bodyguards was killed. He reverted to his hardline stance. We never found out who had tried to kill Mugenzi. When I confronted Paul Kagame about the attempt, he said that the
RPF
was not involved because if it had been, Mugenzi would be dead.

Even with our best efforts to enforce the
KWSA
rules, Rwanda was still awash in guns; grenades were readily available in the local market for about three U.S. dollars. In early January, you'd hear grenade explosions in Kigali every couple of nights. By mid-month it was every night, and by the end of January there were several a night. Attacks against our mission or against people closely associated with
UNAMIR
had now begun. On January 29, persons unknown had tried to assassinate Major Frank Kamenzi, the new
RPF
liaison officer to
UNAMIR
, with a grenade; the next day someone had thrown a grenade into the Kigali Sector headquarters. Luckily there were no casualties. All these factors were piling up like dry kindling waiting for a match.

I had to find some way of gaining an edge. As far as I could see, the only way to do this was to appeal to the
DPKO
again to allow me to launch deterrent operations aimed at recovering illegal weapons. This time I would propose that we share such operations with the Gendarmerie, or even with the
RPF
where appropriate. We needed to demonstrate that we were helping to create an atmosphere of security and abandoning our reactive, defensive posture.

On January 31, I sat down with Brent to draft a detailed security analysis of the situation for Booh-Booh's action. This was to be my third formal and comprehensive military and political analysis that month. The first was sent to the
DPKO
with Booh-Booh's endorsement on January 5; the second, on January 21, barely got a hearing from the
SRSG
and was sent on to the
DPKO
with only a cryptic covering note from Dr. Kabia, bringing it to the attention of the New York staff. I never received any direction from New York on either document. I concluded that either the
DPKO
was not receiving the documents or had no capacity left to deal with the information. I decided to implement any measures I could in Kigali, keeping Dr. Kabia and Maurice Baril in the loop.

In my third report I showed how we would conduct the weapons
search and seizure operations in a transparent manner using a coordinated public relations campaign to inform the local population of our purpose. I requested that we set up a
UNAMIR
-run radio station with
UN
equipment that Brent had tracked down, which had been mothballed in Italy. We needed to circumvent the misinformation dished out by the local media. I supported my argument by referring to the Arusha Peace Agreement, specifically article 54, which tasked the neutral international force to “assist in the tracking of arms caches and neutralization of armed gangs throughout the country” and to “assist in the recovery of all weapons distributed to, or illegally acquired by, the civilians.” Booh-Booh responded quite positively to my proposal and sent it off to the triumvirate in New York.

The response I got back on February 3, signed by Annan himself, was yet another body blow. Once again, he reinforced the passive posture of the mission. He wrote, “ . . . we are prepared to authorize
UNAMIR
to respond positively, on a case by case basis, to requests by the Government and the
RPF
for assistance in illegal arms recovery operations. It should be clearly understood, however, that while
UNAMIR
may provide advice/guidance for the planning of such operations, it cannot, repeat, cannot take an active role in their execution.
UNAMIR
's role . . . should be limited to a monitoring function.” They were tying my hands.