Shake Hands With the Devil (76 page)

This was a political question that the new
SRSG
, Shaharyar Khan, would have to deal with; he was due to arrive in Kigali on July 4. Khan had a reputation as a well-respected crisis manager; Maurice assured me he was competent and well-briefed, a hard worker who had put in serious time in such complicated places as Afghanistan. I looked forward to handing over the political and administrative functioning of the mission to him.

By first light on July 4, reports started to come in that the
RGF
had withdrawn from Kigali and made a clean break toward the west. (From the evidence we later found in and around their defensive positions, it looked like they had run out of ammunition.) By morning prayers, the battle for Kigali was over and the city was unusually quiet.

We would devote most of the day to receiving the new
SRSG
. Khan flew to Entebbe and then on to the Rwandan border by helicopter. Dressed in a blue
UN
bullet-proof vest and surrounded by an impressive number of
UNMO
s and
UN
vehicles, he carried on to Kigali by road. He arrived around 1800 and was greeted by a Ghanaian honour guard at
the stadium, while the roughly ten thousand displaced persons still behind protective razor wire looked on with curious eyes. From our first handshake, he struck me as a leader to be relied upon. He did not blanch at the sight of his office-cum-bedroom in the Force
HQ
, and he greeted everyone he met with warmth and sincerity. Over the coming weeks he dined with us on the usual terrible German rations, and experienced our ongoing privations and rationing. Khan was a man of ideas and initiative who rapidly put his imprint on the political team. For the first time in a long while, Dr. Kabia looked happy.

^1
.
Little did I know the impact that the death of Major Sosa would have on the political situation in Uruguay. When elections were held, the incumbent president almost lost power. Voters could not understand why the government would send its officers to such a far-off place to die.

^2
.
UNAMIR
2 did not complete its deployment until December 1994, fully six months after the genocide and the civil war were over and when it was no longer required.

^3
.
At a conference in 1997, the
RPF
ambassador to the United States, Théogène Rudasingwa, confirmed to me that he and the
RPF
representative in Europe, Jacques Bihozagara, had been invited to Paris and had been fully briefed on Opération Turquoise before I had even heard of it.

^4
.
Médicins Sans Frontières returned to Rwanda in late May, led by the Canadian doctor, James Orbinski. By mid-June, James and his team had the King Faisal Hospital operational.

^5
.
The MamaPapa moniker was the creation of Marek Pazik. As the first Humanitarian Assistance Cell (
HAC
) officer, he was tasked with checking on the aid agencies still in Kigali and providing them with Motorola radios. Not familiar with the phonetic alphabet used by Western military forces, he translated his initials
MP
into MamaPapa (it should have been MikePapa) as the radio call sign for the aid agencies to reach him. Radio traffic during the failed evacuation attempt from the Hotel des Mile Collines on May 3 was heard by all
UNAMIR
personnel who had tuned in on the frequency to monitor the situation, and everyone heard the MamaPapa call sign—the Ghanaian troops in particular thought it was great. Attempts were made to change the call sign to standard military form, but the Ghanaian troops wouldn't hear of it and continued to call all members of the humanitarian cell MamaPapas, to the particular consternation of Colonel Yaache. The name stuck throughout
UNAMIR
and
UNAMIR
2, with many aid workers throughout the world using their assigned MamaPapa call sign to check in with
UNAMIR
.

^6
.
That didn't happen. Brent's mission medal was first handed to him by his commanding officer. Later I arranged for Louise Frechette to present Brent's medal to him at a small reception in the
DPKO
conference room at the United Nations in New York.

JULY 5 WAS
the start of a new phase in the civil war and genocide. Kagame wanted to meet me as soon as possible, but I spent a good part of the morning briefing the
SRSG
and then taking him on an orientation tour of our sites in Kigali. Shaharyar Khan described his first encounters with the genocide in his book
The Shallow Graves of Rwanda:
“As General Dallaire drove me past places where massacres had taken place, there were corpses and skeletons lying about picked bare by dogs and vultures. The scene was macabre, surrealistic and utterly gruesome. Worse was to follow. We went to the
ICRC
hospital where hundreds of bodies lay piled up in the garden. Everywhere there were corpses, mutilated children, dying women. There was blood all over the floors and the terrible stench of rotting flesh. Every inch of space was taken up by these patients. The day before, as government forces (the
RGF
) left, they had fired mortars indiscriminately and one had hit the casualty ward in the
ICRC
hospital, killing seven patients.” (In fact, when we got there, the staff were still cleaning up body parts.) Khan continued: “I have never witnessed such horror, such vacant fear in the eyes of patients, such putrid stench. I did not throw up, I did not even cry: I was too shocked. I was silent. My colleagues who had lived through the massacres were hardened: they had seen worse, much worse.”

The scene was essentially the same at the King Faisal. That hospital tour, however, included a locked ward. When Khan asked James Orbinski why, James explained that these casualties had been identified by the
RPF
as having participated in the massacres, and the
RPF
wanted them to live to face the courts instead of lynch mobs. Khan considered
this an extraordinary example of discipline from a victorious rebel force.

Khan had been in Afghanistan during the worst of Soviet and mujahedeen conflict. As a child he had lived through the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1947. In his book he wrote, “The fact is that never in living history has such wanton brutality been inflicted by human beings on their fellow creatures [as in Rwanda]. . . . even the killing fields of Cambodia and Bosnia pale before the gruesome, awful depravity of massacres in Rwanda.” He chose one example from among many others to make his point. “The Interahamwe made a habit of killing young Tutsi children, in front of their parents, by first cutting off one arm, then the other. They would then gash the neck with a machete to bleed the child slowly to death but, while they were still alive, they would cut off the private parts and throw them at the faces of the terrified parents, who would then be murdered with slightly greater dispatch.” Khan was wrong when he wrote that the veterans of the genocide had become hardened to such things. We were simply putting off our feelings until later.

Kagame had moved his command post into a cottage inside Camp Kanombe, and after winning Kigali was trying his best to be magnanimous. He told me he now fully supported the total deployment of
UNAMIR
2 to help move the French out of the
HPZ
; he promised that the airport would be opened in a few days; and he was ready to announce a unilateral ceasefire. If the
RGF
didn't accept the ceasefire, Kagame vowed to push the fight to the Zaire border.

He informed me that he and his political advisers would soon be setting up a broad-based government founded on the Arusha framework—with some modifications, of course. No one who had had any part in the genocide would be included, and despite the fact that the
RPF
was calling for a ceasefire, it would not enter into negotiations with the interim government. The country, as he saw it, was now divided in three: the
RPF
zone; the Turquoise humanitarian zone, which
UNAMIR
2 needed to monitor and then take over in order to evict the French as soon as possible; and in the northwest, the relatively small
RGF
zone, which he would have no scruples about attacking if the former regime's forces didn't lay down their weapons. There we had it, the victor's map.
I asked Kagame to wait until he could meet the new
SRSG
before going public with his plans so that
UNAMIR
could have some time to react to the new circumstances, and he agreed.

I can only dream of what Shaharyar Khan might have done for Rwanda if he had been the one who had led the mission from the start. He had the valuable leadership trait of being able to anticipate. Two days into his mandate, he already understood that the most crucial issue facing us was the need for action in order to bring the refugees home. When he had his first meeting with Kagame, at the damaged
VIP
lounge of the airport on the morning of July 6, he quickly grasped the implications of the
RPF
's position—we had to get to the interim government and Bizimungu as soon as possible because it was up to us to persuade them they should agree to the ceasefire. Otherwise Kagame would push right through the remaining
RGF
territory in pursuit of total victory, and the humanitarian disaster would be complete.

Khan managed to set up his first meetings in Goma and Gisenyi for the next day, and took off with Tiko and a mixture of civilian staff and
UNMO
s by road to Kabale and then by helicopter to Zaire. (Tiko accompanied Khan on this and other risky early missions of shuttle diplomacy since Henry was finally in Ghana seeing to the myriad details of burying his father. Tiko would never allow anyone to come close enough to injure Khan.)

Lafourcade met Khan at the airport and gave him a short briefing on Turquoise. A French escort accompanied Khan and his team across the border to the Meridian Hotel in Gisenyi, where they met with the interim government's minister of foreign affairs, Jérôme Bicamumpaka, whose job was clearly to size up this new player. To be effective, Khan had to persuade both sides of his complete neutrality. Over the next few days, he met the other major figures of the interim government in Gisenyi, as well as Bizimungu, the head of the
RGF
. (The Gendarmerie's chief of staff, Ndindiliyimana, was nowhere to be found, and I was never to see him again.) The ministers were calling their flight to Gisenyi a strategic withdrawal rather than a rout, and while they ultimately agreed to the ceasefire, I suspected they were brokering deals with the local Zairean
authorities (possibly even colluding with sympathetic senior French officers inside the camps) in order to retain their weapons and political structure, thus setting up to come back into Rwanda in force within a couple of years and start the war all over again.

The
RPF
was certainly aware of the use to which its foes could put the refugee camps in Zaire and the Turquoise
HPZ
. On July 8, Frank Kamenzi asked if I would consider forwarding a letter from a new group, “les forces démocratiques de changement,” to the president of the Security Council. Though I didn't recognize the names of the signatories, the group was composed of moderate political leaders who claimed to represent the
MDR
, the
PSD
, the
PDC
and the
PL
parties. The letter expressed vehement opposition to the
HPZ
, which they described as a protection zone and escape route for criminals. The fact that they'd come forward so quickly after the fall of Kigali was a sign that the
RPF
was helping to build a coalition of most of the old Arusha signatory parties.
UNAMIR
's efforts to identify politicians who could speak for the Hutu population after an
RPF
victory—and therefore had the moral right to sit and discuss the future political structure of this disembowelled nation—had been sporadic at best. True to form, the
RPF
took the initiative. I informed Khan and agreed to forward the letter immediately.

The
RPF
also stuck rigorously to their position that they would not deal with any people who had played a role, no matter how reluctantly, in the command structure of the old regime. The next day I received a copy of an open declaration by the
RGF
moderates, who were now holed up in the town of Kigame just southwest of Gikongoro. (I had lost touch with them and had assumed they had already fled to Zaire.) The document was an unequivocal disavowal of the extremists and a total commitment to ceasefire, peace and the reconstitution of the nation according to the terms of the Arusha accords. Nine moderate officers, headed by Rusatira and Gatsinzi, had signed it. I sent the declaration on to Kagame with a covering note stating that accepting their return to Rwanda would be a significant act of reconciliation that would help the cause of international recognition of the new government. But I got no substantive response. Kagame, and those around him—figures such
as Pasteur Bizimungu, the
RPF
's hardnosed political negotiator—still had no time for these officers.

Meanwhile, the ebb and flow of contingents was picking up momentum. On July 9, we held a small farewell ceremony at the airport for the Tunisians. Earlier in the mission I had given this stalwart contingent the large
UN
flag we had raised in Kinihara on November 1, 1993, to mark the official start of the mission. The Tunisians were the only troops on the ground when we boldly took over the monitoring of the demilitarized zone and the flag had stayed with them as they fulfilled all the dangerous duties I had assigned them. On the tarmac in front of the gaping hold of a Hercules, we saluted each other and shook hands for the last time. At their request, I signed the flag. I'm told it still flies today in a garrison somewhere in Tunisia.