Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (35 page)
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Authors: Samantha Power
BOOK: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
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Rwandan government officials were contemptuous of his viewpoint. They were trying to manage the social and economic consequences of the extermination of 800,000 people and were tired of hearing about the plight of Hutu refugees in Zaire. “What is this nonsense about refugees?” Kagame said on the two-year anniversary of the genocide. “This is their home and they should return. I was a refugee myself for over 30 years and nobody made a fuss about it. Personally, I think this question of refugees is being overplayed at the expense of all our other problems. We no longer talk about orphans, widows, victims. We’re only talking about refugees, refugees, refugees. . . . If the refugees say ‘we’re not returning,’ that stops being my problem. It is their problem.”
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But Kagame knew the refugees were in fact his problem because the Hutu
génocidaires
in the camps in Zaire were still determined to exterminate Tutsi and retake power in Rwanda. In a visit to Washington, Kagame informed Clinton administration officials that if UNHCR did not dismantle its camps in Zaire, his forces would do so. He later recalled, “I delivered a veiled warning: The failure of the international community to take action would mean Rwanda would take action.” Kagame, who had studied at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was pleased by the U.S. reaction.“Their response was really no response,” he said.
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génocidaires
in the camps in Zaire were still determined to exterminate Tutsi and retake power in Rwanda. In a visit to Washington, Kagame informed Clinton administration officials that if UNHCR did not dismantle its camps in Zaire, his forces would do so. He later recalled, “I delivered a veiled warning: The failure of the international community to take action would mean Rwanda would take action.” Kagame, who had studied at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was pleased by the U.S. reaction.“Their response was really no response,” he said.
26
In offering his recommendations to Ogata,Vieira de Mello knew all the options were bad. He was acutely conscious of the damage the crisis was doing to the standing of the United Nations locally and internationally.“UNHCR’s passivity,” he wrote in his trip report, “is untenable and is exposing the office to criticism and cheap accusations.” UNHCR could take the small steps he proposed, but what was really needed to resolve the situation were large steps by the governments of Rwanda and Zaire and concerted involvement by the major powers, who were claiming credit for generously supplying humanitarian aid but who were allowing the crisis to fester and deteriorate. “The prevailing
status quo
is not tenable without potentially disastrous consequences for the Office,” he concluded. “Unless UNHCR displays vision and sustained action, it is likely to become increasingly part of the problem and unable to preempt or effectively respond to looming ominous threats, over which it is losing any control.”
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status quo
is not tenable without potentially disastrous consequences for the Office,” he concluded. “Unless UNHCR displays vision and sustained action, it is likely to become increasingly part of the problem and unable to preempt or effectively respond to looming ominous threats, over which it is losing any control.”
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Ogata was pleased that Vieira de Mello’s trip to the region had finally caused him to apply himself to finding a way out for UNHCR. It had only been when he toured the camps that the costs of the catastrophe—to the refugees and to the UN—fully registered with him. He paid his second visit to Zaire later in the summer and found UNHCR staff even more frustrated and helpless. On this trip he stopped in Rwanda. A few hours after arriving in Kigali he told Nakamitsu, “People don’t know how to smile here.” Only two and a half years after the slaughter of 1994, it was the gloomiest place he had ever visited. His formal meetings were unpleasant. The Rwandan chairman for refugee return, Ephraim Kabaija, railed against the UN for first doing nothing about the genocide and then for feeding war criminals in the camps across the border. The Rwandan president delivered a two-hour harangue on Belgium’s responsibility for the genocide. Leaving the meeting, Vieira de Mello muttered to Nakamitsu, “That’s the problem with Africans: They blame everything on colonialism.” Every official he met with echoed Kagame’s warning that Rwanda would not tolerate the existence of the camps for much longer. Vieira de Mello warned Ogata that the Rwandans were on the verge of invading Zaire.
He blocked out half a day to spend with his old friend Omar Bakhet, who had left UNHCR and was running the UN Development Program office in Rwanda, helping build a new legal system. Bakhet brought him to a church in Nyamata, where ten thousand Rwandans had been butchered on April 8, 1994. The Hutu
génocidaires
had sprayed the inside of the church with machine-gun fire, lobbed in grenades, and then used machetes to finish off any survivors.Vieira de Mello wandered around the church interior, which contained row upon row of shelves lined with skulls, and examined its bullet holes and shrapnel marks. He looked up at a sculpture of the Virgin Mary. Her serene visage smiled down upon him, but the wall beside her was still stained in blood.
génocidaires
had sprayed the inside of the church with machine-gun fire, lobbed in grenades, and then used machetes to finish off any survivors.Vieira de Mello wandered around the church interior, which contained row upon row of shelves lined with skulls, and examined its bullet holes and shrapnel marks. He looked up at a sculpture of the Virgin Mary. Her serene visage smiled down upon him, but the wall beside her was still stained in blood.
Bakhet next brought him to the Don Bosco school, which UN peacekeepers from Belgium had used as a base in 1994. Some two thousand desperate Rwandan Tutsi had huddled with the blue helmets until April 11, 1994, when the Belgian UN commander at the school had been ordered to withdraw his forces.With the
génocidaires
outside the school drinking banana beer, brandishing their machetes, and chanting “Hutu power,” the Rwandan Tutsi inside had thrown themselves at the feet of the Belgians, begging them not to abandon the school. But the UN soldiers had shooed the helpless Tutsi away, even firing over their heads so as to ensure that they did not block the passage of UN vehicles. As soon as the Belgian peacekeepers departed, the militia had entered, butchering all those Rwandans who had made the mistake of seeking shelter beneath the UN flag.Vieira de Mello had already thought a great deal about the UN failure to protect Bosnian civilians in Srebrenica, but henceforth he described the Rwanda massacre as the gravest single act of betrayal ever committed by the United Nations.
génocidaires
outside the school drinking banana beer, brandishing their machetes, and chanting “Hutu power,” the Rwandan Tutsi inside had thrown themselves at the feet of the Belgians, begging them not to abandon the school. But the UN soldiers had shooed the helpless Tutsi away, even firing over their heads so as to ensure that they did not block the passage of UN vehicles. As soon as the Belgian peacekeepers departed, the militia had entered, butchering all those Rwandans who had made the mistake of seeking shelter beneath the UN flag.Vieira de Mello had already thought a great deal about the UN failure to protect Bosnian civilians in Srebrenica, but henceforth he described the Rwanda massacre as the gravest single act of betrayal ever committed by the United Nations.
In the car ride back to Kigali,Vieira de Mello stared out the window, lost in his own thoughts. When the car reached the Hotel Mille Collines, he disembarked quietly and retired to his room. By the next day he had returned to his garrulous self, but he was focused on the future. “I just feel this thing is about to blow open,” he told Bakhet.The tension in the air was similar to that he had felt in Lebanon before the Israeli invasion in 1982.
A month later, Kagame’s forces invaded Zaire in order to close the camps and eliminate the Hutu threat once and for all. “People who want to continue exterminating others have got to be resisted,” the Rwandan vice president said.
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His soldiers teamed up with an unheralded fifty-six-year-old former Marxist warlord named Laurent-Désiré Kabila and his newly formed Zairean rebel movement, which aspired to overthrow Zairean president Mobutu. Kabila’s rebels and Kagame’s regular Rwandan army forces launched a combined assault on the southernmost Hutu refugee camps along Zaire’s border with Rwanda. Some 220,000 refugees from the camps, along with some 30,000 local Zaireans, took flight. Under fire, Ogata’s contingent of Zairean soldiers proved a mixed bag. Some helped to evacuate UNHCR’s international staff, but many simply joined Mobutu’s defense against the joint Zairean rebel-Rwandan attack. Some of these units were even reported to have used UNHCR planes to transport war matériel into battle against Kabila’s rebels.
29
28
His soldiers teamed up with an unheralded fifty-six-year-old former Marxist warlord named Laurent-Désiré Kabila and his newly formed Zairean rebel movement, which aspired to overthrow Zairean president Mobutu. Kabila’s rebels and Kagame’s regular Rwandan army forces launched a combined assault on the southernmost Hutu refugee camps along Zaire’s border with Rwanda. Some 220,000 refugees from the camps, along with some 30,000 local Zaireans, took flight. Under fire, Ogata’s contingent of Zairean soldiers proved a mixed bag. Some helped to evacuate UNHCR’s international staff, but many simply joined Mobutu’s defense against the joint Zairean rebel-Rwandan attack. Some of these units were even reported to have used UNHCR planes to transport war matériel into battle against Kabila’s rebels.
29
At the sight of the Kabila-Rwandan attackers, most of the frantic Hutu refugees fled northward away from Rwanda, toward the UN camps in Bukavu. But Bukavu was next on the attackers’ target list. On October 25 the UNHCR representative there telephoned Ogata in Geneva and passed the telephone to the local archbishop, Monsignor Christophe Munzihirwa, who begged Ogata to secure international military intervention to save the people in the camp from the joint rebel-Rwandan assault. Four days later Bukavu fell and UNHCR and other aid organizations suspended operations. Amid the slaughter that ensued, the attacking forces murdered Archbishop Munzihirwa.
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Many of the 1994
génocidaires
were undoubtedly killed in the offensive. But testimonies of survivors revealed that thousands of Hutu civilians also likely died. One Hutu refugee told Amnesty International that when five Zairean rebels entered a church compound where Hutu were hiding, one of the foreign priests in charge went to speak to the gunmen. The Hutu survivor remembered:
génocidaires
were undoubtedly killed in the offensive. But testimonies of survivors revealed that thousands of Hutu civilians also likely died. One Hutu refugee told Amnesty International that when five Zairean rebels entered a church compound where Hutu were hiding, one of the foreign priests in charge went to speak to the gunmen. The Hutu survivor remembered:
[The priest] then called one of us, Pascal Murwirano, a 22-year-old Rwandese, to help, as he did not speak Kinyarwanda.The conversation went like this:
“Are you from Rwanda?”
“Yes.”
“Are you Hutu?”
“Yes.”
“When did you leave Rwanda?”
“1994.”
“Take off your clothes.”
Pascal crossed himself. I remember it so well. He unbuttoned the first button of his shirt and before he could unbutton the second one, he was shot. He took one bullet in the heart, four in the stomach and one in the head.
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The battle lines were drawn. On one side were Mobutu’s Zairean government forces and armed Rwandan Hutu refugees, mostly
génocidaires,
while on the other were the Kabila-led Zairean rebels and the mainly Tutsi Rwandan army forces. A UNHCR spokesperson in Geneva warned of “a humanitarian catastrophe of greater dimensions than the one in 1994.”
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génocidaires,
while on the other were the Kabila-led Zairean rebels and the mainly Tutsi Rwandan army forces. A UNHCR spokesperson in Geneva warned of “a humanitarian catastrophe of greater dimensions than the one in 1994.”
32
With tens of thousands of Hutu refugees now fleeing westward into the Zairean jungle, Ogata and Vieira de Mello no longer had any ambivalence about where the refugees belonged. Civilians would undoubtedly be safer in Rwanda than trapped between warring armies in Zaire. He telephoned Lionel Rosenblatt, with whom he had helped organize the resettlement of the Montagnards from Cambodia. He now begged Rosenblatt, who ran Refugees International, a leading advocacy group in Washington, to alert the Clinton administration to the fact that the Hutu were moving away from food and shelter. “The west means death!” Vieira de Mello exclaimed. If Hutu families headed west into the deep jungle with the militants, they would be pursued and killed, or they would die of starvation or disease. Aid workers and diplomats had to find a way to persuade the refugees at long last to head back to their former homes in Rwanda.
On October 30, as another bloody crisis engulfed the region and the Western media descended again on Rwanda and Zaire, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali appointed as his special political envoy to the region Raymond Chrétien, Canada’s ambassador to the United States.
33
A week later, in another boon to Vieira de Mello’s résumé, Boutros-Ghali named him humanitarian coordinator, answering not to Ogata but to the Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA), a newly created division at UN Headquarters in New York. Improbably, he would once again answer to Yasushi Akashi, who, despite his mediocre performances in Cambodia and Bosnia, had been promoted to run DHA, once again out of deference to Japan, the UN’s second-largest donor. Chrétien and Vieira de Mello were meant to coordinate their efforts, with Chrétien managing the political negotiations and Vieira de Mello relegated to the humanitarian.
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A week later, in another boon to Vieira de Mello’s résumé, Boutros-Ghali named him humanitarian coordinator, answering not to Ogata but to the Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA), a newly created division at UN Headquarters in New York. Improbably, he would once again answer to Yasushi Akashi, who, despite his mediocre performances in Cambodia and Bosnia, had been promoted to run DHA, once again out of deference to Japan, the UN’s second-largest donor. Chrétien and Vieira de Mello were meant to coordinate their efforts, with Chrétien managing the political negotiations and Vieira de Mello relegated to the humanitarian.
Vieira de Mello immediately made his way to Kinshasa, Zaire. On November 7 he was told that Chrétien, his political counterpart, was already en route to the region. Chrétien would arrive in Kigali the following morning for his first meetings with the Rwandan authorities. Vieira de Mello knew that political envoys tended to view humanitarians as expendable “grocery deliverers” who would play no important role in high-stakes political talks. Already Chrétien had stopped to see Mobutu in France, where the Zairean president was receiving cancer treatment. Vieira de Mello did not want Chrétien to hold any further high-level meetings without him. But when he telephoned the UNHCR office in Kinshasa, he was told that no commercial or UN flight would be able to fly him a thousand miles from Kinshasa to Kigali in time to greet Chrétien. If he was to make it, he would have to charter a private jet to fly him to an airport in Entebbe, Uganda, where he could then catch a regular UN flight to Kigali. He reflexively accepted, and when he and his UNHCR colleague Chefike Desalegn arrived at the Kinshasa airport, he gasped at the sight of the jet on the runway. “Chefike,” he exclaimed, delighted, “it’s Mobutu’s personal Learjet!” Seated on the plane, he shouted up to his colleague: “Tell them to take their time getting to Entebbe. If they make a few laps, we can get a full night’s sleep!” The two men reached Kigali several hours ahead of Chrétien.
Months later, when Vieira de Mello returned to Geneva, he was informed that the three-hour charter leg had cost UNHCR $50,000. In 1998 the
Financial Times
would publish an exposé on UN corruption, making Vieira de Mello’s extravagance a prime example of the organization’s excesses.
34
This would be the first such charge ever lodged against him, but while he worried that the UN’s critics would use it to tarnish his entire career, the scandal did not stick.
Financial Times
would publish an exposé on UN corruption, making Vieira de Mello’s extravagance a prime example of the organization’s excesses.
34
This would be the first such charge ever lodged against him, but while he worried that the UN’s critics would use it to tarnish his entire career, the scandal did not stick.
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