Shake Hands With the Devil (29 page)

^1
.
For the duration of the mission I continued to communicate information and intentions directly to, and to seek direction and advice from, the
DPKO
without reference to the
SRSG
or the authority of his office. Having been head of mission as well as the conceiver of the mission, I simply continued to use the channels that had been open to me before the
SRSG
arrived in Kigali. At no time did the
SRSG
or the
DPKO
advise me to stop this practice, although on occasion a response to a code cable of mine would go directly to the
SRSG
for action.

^2
.
On January 1, 1994, according to the Arusha Peace Agreement, the military leaders of the
RPF
, the
RGF
and the Gendarmerie were all promoted to the rank of major general, and other officers' ranks adjusted so that the three faces shared equivalent ranks for the coming demobilization and creation of a new force for Rwanda.

^3
.
I asked for de-mining equipment to be provided to my Bangladeshi engineers, as they had deployed without any. We were sent some old, ineffective equipment, and some new equipment that the
UN
wanted us to try out, which the Bangladeshi engineers did not have the skill to use and with which they showed no interest in training. When we asked for usable equipment, I was told yet again that there was no money in the budget to purchase it. My Belgian contingent had a limited de-mining capability, but it was under strict national orders not to engage in de-mining operations except in emergency situations where the lives of
UNAMIR
personnel were directly in danger or if mines were discovered in the immediate vicinity of Belgian quarters. As a result of the bureaucratic and financial limitations of the
UN
, and the restrictive national policies of the troop-contributing nations, we were never able to address the mine threat in the country.

^4
.
On January 26, Ly convened a round table in Kigali of representatives from humanitarian agencies, the World Bank, the
IMF
, concerned
UN
agencies, the
RPF
, the Rwandan government, donor countries and
UNAMIR
to discuss the funding strategy for the demobilization and reintegration of surplus troops. This meeting became the basis of the donor-country round table in Europe in March.

FEBRUARY MARKED THE
tail end of the dry season. The freshness was gone from the air, and the landscape was coated with a film of fine, red dust, which sudden wind squalls would pick up and swirl into dust devils. The political atmosphere was heavy with anticipation. On February 1, the minister of defence invited me to a meeting at his office. Augustin Bizimana had always struck me as a man who was carrying around a pocketful of secrets. Though he tried to project an air of detached calm, he seemed propelled by internal forces that pushed his mobile features into absurdly dramatic scowls. No meeting I ever had with him was dull, because at any moment it seemed like he might let something slip.

But on that Tuesday morning, Bizimana decided to be uncharacteristically forthcoming. He raised issue after issue, as if he had gone through my list of security concerns for the Kigali Weapons Secure Area and was ticking off each one. He actually suggested that we work together on the problems: the banditry, the grenade attacks, the illegal demonstrations, the occasional riots. He said we needed to get the Gendarmerie to pull its weight in order to get things under control. He'd just come from a meeting with the
MRND
leadership, concerning the armed militias and how to get a grip on them, and he was planning similar sessions with the other political parties. He also offered to set up a meeting between
UNAMIR
and the leadership of the Interahamwe so that we could begin a dialogue with them and perhaps direct them to play a more constructive role in this very delicate transition period. I listened to him intently, sure my ears were deceiving me.

The door to his office was ajar, and both Colonel Ntwiragaba, the head of military intelligence, and Théoneste Bagosora, were lurking within earshot. I was very uneasy about Bizimana's sudden change of heart—just a few days earlier he had been slandering
UNAMIR
to the local media. However, I used the opportunity to press for an invitation for Luc Marchal and myself to attend a big security and public safety meeting we had heard about, a gathering of all the burgomasters and sous-prefects in the area, under the auspices of the prefect of Kigali. The minister seemed a little taken aback but agreed to arrange it.

On the drive back to headquarters, I puzzled over what could have precipitated Bizimana's dramatic change of attitude. The only recent event of any significance was the visit by Doug Bennett, the assistant U.S. secretary of state for international organizations. (It was customary for the state department official to visit the capitals of nations after they had taken up one of the rotating seats on the Security Council in order to brief their senior political and diplomatic leadership on U.S. policy and try to bring them onside with American interests.) Bennett had met the president, the interim prime minister, the prime minister designate, the foreign minister, the defence minister and others and, at each meeting, had stressed the importance of the Rwandans ending the political impasse and getting the transitional institutions into place.

On the following day, February 2, I had the opportunity to brief Bennett myself, in the Amahoro conference room, along with Booh-Booh and representatives from several
NGO
s. I was very frank about the problems plaguing Rwanda, but I wanted to get the message through to Bennett that
UNAMIR
still stood a good chance of succeeding if we received the resources that had been promised and the authority to act. He was a pleasant fellow who listened patiently to what I had to say and asked a few insightful questions. But then he was gone, and if he actually did communicate my message when he got back to the United States, nothing happened as a result. However, his visit and the message he delivered may have caused reverberations through the hardline community, to which Bizimana was reacting.

Later that day, I travelled up to Kilometre 64 for a meeting of the Joint Military Commission.
¹
The one positive thing to come out of the political impasse was that it left me more time to work out the complicated process of demobilization. One of the first steps, and a critical one, was redrawing the demilitarized zone so that the two forces would be far enough apart that their longest-range guns no longer posed a threat to each other. As it stood now, at some points the parties were almost twenty kilometres apart, and in other places, within a few hundred metres of each other. The Arusha Peace Agreement gave the neutral international force the task of redefining the demilitarized zone and persuading the former belligerents to move their forces in order to comply with it; the area in between was to be controlled by
UNAMIR
troops. It was yet another example of the accords leaving a contentious issue deliberately vague, and
UNAMIR
had to sort it out.

I had thought out the problems of this process during the reconnaissance in August. Knowing any redrawing of the demilitarized zone would be controversial, I had kept the actual plan confidential until I had been able to build up a strong enough rapport between the
RPF
and the
RGF
to present it. I had only released it publicly on February 1, and this would be the first time that any of the men had seen it. The new line of separation that I had worked out required the
RGF
to pull back 75 per cent of their forces a few kilometres, since I couldn't push the
RPF
back any farther without shoving them into Uganda.

Gathered around the rough wooden table at Kilometre 64 were about twenty people: Major General Nsabimana, Major General Ndindiliyimana, Major General Kagame, and respective staff members—this was the first time these former bitter foes had actually met. Because Kagame spoke no French and Nsabimana spoke no English, once again I provided the simultaneous translation so there would be
no room for misinterpretation, and a minimum of wasted time. Again the staffs mingled easily; I was also struck by the politeness and civility that each of the commanders afforded the others. However, as I laid the map out in our makeshift meeting-hut and traced the new line of demarcation, I saw Nsabimana's face fall. He had absorbed most of the blame for the military defeat of the
RGF
in February 1993, and he had barely managed to hang on to his job. Sitting across the table from him was the man who had defeated him. Lifting his eyes from the map to confront me, Nsabimana demanded to know why I was asking him to retreat. Kagame kept silent.

I told Nsabimana that I wasn't asking him to retreat but requesting him to reposition his force so that both armies would be beyond the range of each others' guns, and my troops could safely interpose themselves between them. The
RGF
had to move because Kagame's forces had nowhere to go. But if this scenario was unacceptable to him, there was another option. If each force consigned their medium- and heavy-weapons systems, including the
RGF
's helicopters, into
UNAMIR
's care, we would not have to conduct such massive troop redeployments. From the charged silence in the room, it was clear that no one was going to accede to this new plan today. I asked them all to take it home to their headquarters and come back to me within seven days, which they all agreed to do. That seven-day period for deliberation turned into weeks, and the new line of the demilitarized zone was never resolved.

As I left the meeting, however, I thought that we had achieved a breakthrough. If the highest military authorities on both sides were still willing to meet to discuss demobilization, there was a chance that we could continue to move forward in the peace process. But I had no way to leverage these small military advances into progress on the political level. The fact was that at any of my meetings with Kagame, Nsabimana or Ndindiliyimana, all three were far better briefed on the political situation than I was. The relationship I had been able to foster with Booh-Booh when he first arrived had been disrupted when he had gathered around him a group of Franco-African advisers who, with few exceptions, such as Dr. Kabia and Beadengar Dessande, were hostile to me. We were not a cohesive team.

Prime among the group was Mamadou Kane, Booh-Booh's chief political adviser and the leader of this clique. From the moment he landed in Kigali in mid-December, he manoeuvred constantly to increase his authority, his salary and his rank. In just two months, he managed to get himself promoted twice, until in
UN
terms he outranked me and just about everybody else in
UNAMIR
except Booh-Booh. In the end, Booh-Booh and the clique became isolated from the rest of the mission; the right hand never knew, let alone understood, what the left hand was doing.

The next day, Luc and I attended the town hall meeting on public safety and security in Kigali. It was packed. We were seated at a long table on the podium along with an impressive gathering of politicians, ministers and local officials. The meeting started at about ten in the morning and ran non-stop for six hours, with more people trying to squeeze into the room the whole time.
UNAMIR
took a lot of questions, some posed by ordinary citizens from the floor, which gave me insight into how the political stagnation was affecting their lives. People complained that the government was no longer really governing: a lot of salaries were not being paid, public schools were closed and government-sponsored medical care had been starved of resources. They were extremely disturbed by the increased banditry and lawlessness. Even so, the local leaders and the ordinary citizens had not given up but wanted to find solutions. They asked good questions and listened attentively when Luc and I explained the mission mandate, making it very clear why we weren't able to achieve all the objectives spelled out in the Arusha accords. They wanted us to do more to control the violence and hoped that we would take on the security of Kigali with the Gendarmerie working under our direction, and were disappointed in the limits set on our mission.

It was clear that the general public still did not know what all the blue berets running around in white vehicles really meant. I cursed the
DPKO
and the
FOD
in my heart for not understanding the vital need the mission had for a radio station or for a competent public information office so that we could build on the desire of the vast majority of Rwandans to reach out with both hands for peace. After the endorsement of
UNAMIR
by the crowd, the ministers at the table each pledged
their support for
UNAMIR
, even encouraging us to go after arms caches in order to get a tighter grip on the
KWSA
. Ndindiliyimana appealed to me once again to ask the
UN
for non-lethal riot gear so that his gendarmes could control the violent demonstrations without having to resort to lethal force. One of the politicians even suggested that the minister of information and his office be utilized to help us get our message out.

Afterwards, I visited Booh-Booh to fill him in on the highlights of the meeting, and he seemed quite encouraged by the news. I then asked him point-blank once again when he expected the other components of his staff to arrive. We needed legal advisers to help work out solutions to the stalled investigations into the November killings and provide us with expert guidance. For instance, did our rules of engagement authorize us to defend an ex-belligerent who was attached to our force? I was thinking of the assassination attempt against Major Frank Kamenzi, the
RPF
liaison officer to
UNAMIR
. We also needed human rights workers to help us find solutions to the ethnically motivated violence and to liaise with the many activists and organizations in Rwanda, who had a wealth of information but would not share it with us. The
NGO
s for the most part treated
UNAMIR
as if it was one of the belligerents, and handed their excellent information over to the international news media, not to us.