Shake Hands With the Devil (64 page)

Scrambling to the top of the nearby defensive earthworks, I looked east and there they were: thin black silhouettes that seemed to rise out of the earth and the morning mist as they crested the lip of the plateau, the sun at their backs, like illustrations out of
Don Quixote
. Lieutenant Colonel Adinkra broke the spell by asking, “What are those things?” I jumped in my vehicle and, followed by a couple of four-by-fours carrying
UNMO
s, sped down the runway, weaving around chunks of shrapnel that could puncture a tire. The hundreds of wavy silhouettes took clearer form as we drew near. Moving slowly toward us were a number of
RGF
soldiers, some with their rifles above their heads, others hanging on to the hands of their wives and children, all with their heads down, along with Hutu civilians who had been left behind when the bulk of the troops moved out of Camp Kanombe. When their first officer reached me, he stated in impeccable French that they were the remnants of the
RGF
battalions from Camp Kanombe and wanted to surrender to me and to
UNAMIR
. The major added that he hoped his men and their families would be treated as prisoners of war. More of my Ghanaian soldiers had now arrived and, in rather quick time, seized their weapons and escorted them to an area near the main terminal.

I had a problem. These troops and civilians—nearly eight hundred men and their families—had just given themselves up to a neutral force. Technically I couldn't protect the soldiers against their enemy, even though I believed there was a very good chance they would be slaughtered by revengeful
RPF
troops if I didn't. I told Adinkra to provide tight security for the groups and to have his battalion doctor look to their medical needs, as some of them were severely wounded. He and his Ghanaians were to count them, record their names and wait for further orders. They were not to let the
RPF
take these people away under any circumstances. The new
UNAMIR
2 rules of engagement were to be applied without hesitation.

I left the site as
RPF
patrols were approaching the airfield. I was not sure of the status of the prisoners, but I was determined that the
RPF
would not get them without a fight. After consulting with Gaillard,
Henry reminded me of the Geneva Convention statute that allows prisoners of war to be accounted for under Red Cross auspices. Later Gaillard went to the site with a team and conducted official registration procedures as well as providing medical help and sustenance. It took several weeks and the withstanding of threats and bullying from the
RPF
, but in the end, the soldiers and their families were formally put in the hands of the Red Cross and then handed over to the
RPF
, with due process observed. Gaillard said we had to trust the
RPF
in this and that is what I agreed to do.

On May 22 Yaache and his humanitarian team held an important meeting at the Diplomates with Bagosora and the Interahamwe, to discuss the transfers. The meeting was caught on film and is definitive proof that Bagosora controlled (as well as anyone could) the genocidal militia. I was more and more certain that he had some other card up his sleeve but couldn't yet figure out how he would be able to use the transfers to his advantage.

That same day Bizimungu improbably explained to me that he had withdrawn from the airport in order to give it to us as neutral territory. Of course he had never told us he was withdrawing. Since the
RPF
had moved right in,
RTLM
soon billed the airport incident as another
UNAMIR
scandal—we became the ones who had handed the airport over to the enemy. I taxed Bizimungu on the artillery attack on the
HQ
, though he insisted he had never ordered such an attack.

I had to find another airhead: I didn't trust the
RPF
to respect my operations. Kagame's forces would now be calling the shots at the airport, and we had found them very uncooperative and single-minded when they wanted to control a situation. My options for a new air base were Bujumbura, Entebbe or Goma, which meant I'd have to undertake negotiations with the governments of Burundi, Uganda and Zaire. These weren't the best prospects. Establishing the airhead at any one of these places would mean that all of the incoming troops and supplies would have to travel significant distances overland. That morning at prayers I had given orders to prepare a thinning out of the force. Henry's Ghanaians had come under fire at the airport; our
HQ
had been
bombarded the day before. Because the airport situation was so dicey, I instructed my commanders to start sending troops out overland. Even with the new mandate, we wouldn't necessarily be able to stay. We were already running the risk of having to fight our way out.

And here I was, expecting Riza and Maurice in the morning. The
RPF
did not want to guarantee them safe passage on the direct road from Kabale down to Kigali. Instead we had to move them by a circuitous route to the northeast of Rwanda and drive them in the long way. If the
RPF
had wanted to, it could have opened up the road. I did not buy the argument that it was so beset by the
RGF
it couldn't do it. But the good thing about Riza and Maurice having to come into the country by such a route was that they would have a snail's-pace tour of the areas ravaged by the slaughter.

Still, that night, for a change, I didn't feel alone. I was looking forward to seeing Maurice. I also hoped that Riza, a diplomat with the ability to cut through to the heart of matters, would bring some light to the negotiations. I had run out of silver bullets and needed any sort of magic that the two of them could provide.

When Maurice and Riza drove into the compound the next day, I was overjoyed to see them. It was nearly seven weeks into the genocide, and for the first time I felt as though I could let my wildly mixed emotions show. As the commander, you just can't vent on your subordinates and, with Maurice's arrival, I suddenly had a peer in whom I could confide. Riza, by nature more formal, was still a welcome colleague. In a sense, they had not been shocked by the scenes that had greeted them. These gentlemen were running sixteen other missions. They'd been in Somalia during the worst of the killings and the famines. They'd been in Cambodia, Central America, the former Yugoslavia. To a degree they were inured to horror, experienced with it. They weren't neophytes as I had been.

We welcomed them as best we could. We had a supper of the terrible demobilization rations—canned sausages, sardines and beans. Over the next two days, May 24 and 25, I stayed with them all the time. What became noticeable to me as I looked at the city through their eyes
was that Kigali had become a ghost town. At most there were maybe twenty to thirty thousand people still living here, clustered in the worst of the shantytowns. Nobody was coming into the city, and no one was escaping it any more. Around us was not a scorched-earth scenario so much as a scorched-human scenario. The
RPF
was conquering an empty country and conducting its own exactations against any enemies stranded behind the lines. Bizimungu said it this way: “They may gain the country but not the people.”

Yet killings were still going on in the city. People who had been hiding for so long were trying to escape to the
RPF
, who were now as close as the airport. The Interahamwe and the Presidential Guard were going around in the streets presenting themselves as
RPF
. People would come out to them seeking their protection and instead would be killed. The
RPF
advance inspired the extremists to get back to work in a ferocious way.

The advance was also concentrating the population in the west, creating a new humanitarian catastrophe of displaced persons and refugees. Hutus, scared to death by hate radio accounts of
RPF
atrocities, were moving ahead of the withdrawing
RGF
—vast numbers of them, at least two million. If they continued to move west and into Zaire through Gisenyi and Goma in the north and Cyangugu and Bukavu in the south, it would be a total disaster—those regions were rugged, forbidding, unfriendly, impoverished. In the northeast, where Kagame was securing the countryside, members of the Tutsi diaspora were starting to come back, taking over the lands, even cultivating new crops. It was a very complex humanitarian problem. There was no such thing as an isolated incident. Every event, even the smallest, had ramifications for one side or the other.

I needed Riza and Maurice to be more conscious of the vulnerability of the Kigali airport and my tattered outfit. I wanted them to support me in finding an alternate airhead. I needed a place where the new equipment and the troops could marry up before coming into theatre. Training in front of the belligerents wouldn't exactly impress them with our new ability to use force. A logistics base outside of Rwanda was critical.

I also briefed them on all the ways in which the
RPF
was conducting a deliberate campaign to undermine us. In meetings the leaders
would say yes to all our reasonable requests, but then they would restrict our movements, prevent my people from attending meetings and run independent humanitarian discussions with
NGO
s. At the same time, the
NRA
in Uganda was blocking
UNOMUR
from doing its job, which I was sure was no accident. And, I reminded them, the
RGF
was still firing on
UN
installations, the argument being that the
RPF
had positions around us and we were in the way.

I deeply appreciated Riza's straightforward approach. He led Maurice and me through the night of May 24, reasoning that negotiating the ceasefire directly was an excuse for it never to happen. The strategy he hit on was to create a “declaration of intent to negotiate a ceasefire” that everyone could sign on to as a way to deal with cleaning up all the troublesome preconditions. Once that impasse was broken, we could move on to the ceasefire proper.

I organized four sets of meetings over the two days, since there were really four sets of players—though the thought of counting the interim government as one of those parties made me deeply uneasy. My argument was yes, there were two sides, but one of the sides had partially disappeared. The interim government bore no relationship to the original government, even though Rwanda's representative on the Security Council reported to it. The majority of the members of the original Arusha-bound government were either dead or in hiding because they were moderates. If you acknowledged the interim government, you were acknowledging the power of the Hutu ethnicity. And that was exactly what the ministers of the interim government in Gitarama told Riza when they met. They bluntly said that the war was an ethnic war. The
RPF
insisted it was a political war—a fight for democracy in Rwanda. But the
RPF
refused to recognize that the
RGF
's strings were being pulled by the politicians in Gitarama. Riza was being drawn toward negotiating with the interim government even though we had not resolved how to recreate the political side of the
RGF
so that it
could
negotiate under Arusha rules. Apart from my attempts to support the moderate members of the
RGF
, no one was working on how to establish a moderate political voice in this killing zone.

My superiors' other brief was humanitarian. The
RPF
insisted that it
had to control aid distribution in its zones, and the result was that the
NGO
s were directly sustaining the war effort: quantities of aid ended up feeding
RPF
troops on the front lines. On the
RGF
side, humanitarian aid was limited to what could be provided by the Red Cross, whose special immunity generally allowed it to move reasonably unimpeded in
RGF
zones. But other
NGO
s attempting to help were attacked, injured or robbed at the roadblocks and there seemed to be no way to guarantee their safety. Riza and Maurice believed that the way to move forward here was the way outlined in my concept of operations for
UNAMIR
2: create safe sites where people could congregate, be protected and receive aid. (This gave me great satisfaction because Maurice told me he was still fighting the Pentagon regarding the effectiveness of my operational plan.)

Their final report, shaped by what they saw, was written in
UN
-ese by people who were far more skilled than I at expressing themselves in terms that the institution would accept. There was nothing new in the report, but it was presented by a senior authority within the echelons of the organization. And it finally recognized (in Riza's words and presented to the Security Council on May 31 as a report from the secretary-general) that “[i]t would be senseless to attempt to establish a ceasefire and to allow deliberate killings of civilians in the
RGF
zone to continue. There is the danger that if not stopped this would lead to the setting off of a prolonged cycle of violence. I repeat that a halt to the killings of civilians must be concomitant with a ceasefire. . . . The immediate priorities are to relieve the suffering of the displaced population and the fears of civilians under threat.” This was music to my ears because it brought to the fore the potential mass movement behind the
RGF
lines of millions of people scared insensate by the spectre of
RPF
retribution. “This requires organized humanitarian relief operations, which cannot be launched on the scale required unless adequate security conditions for them can be established.
UNAMIR
has already prepared its plans to provide these conditions, which encompasses the second priority, the security of concentrations of civilians in peril.” That was another major breakthrough: I now had the offensive authority to actually, finally, be able to do something to stop the killing.