Shake Hands With the Devil (21 page)

By that time, it was late afternoon, and Brent wanted to get himself and the rest of his party off the mountain before it got dark. He turned to the relatives and asked for their help to carry the bodies down. Eyes wide with fear, they shook their heads, refusing to touch the
dead children. Brent had to leave the bodies behind, assuming that the relatives would not touch them out of a reverence for their spirits or for some other religious reason. He later found out that the families thought the bodies had been booby-trapped, and preferred that someone else touch them first.

At the base of the mountain, Brent and his party were met by a large government patrol; the
RGF
soldiers had coloured ropes tied around their waists and carried large fighting knives in addition to other weapons. Brent briefed the commanding officer on what had been found, and said a
UNAMIR
patrol would return the next day to collect the children's bodies and return them to their families. Unprompted, the commander repeated the charge that the
RPF
had perpetrated a massacre. But Brent could still not figure out why the
RPF
would do such a thing. There was no tactical advantage in crossing forty to sixty kilometres of gruelling terrain into the Hutu heartland to commit such a brutal crime. Brent and his party took their leave and headed to the hospital in Ruhengeri to see the little girl who had survived the raid.

She couldn't have been more than six years old and was in a deep coma, shaking from severe brain damage. A few weeks earlier, back in Canada, Brent had been with his wife when she had given birth to their third child; now he was standing by a young Rwandan girl's bed, saying a prayer for her and puzzling over what he had seen and heard that day. He couldn't shake the feeling that there was something very odd about the crime scene. Why would the
RPF
leave behind a telltale glove? They were not known for stupidity. Was it possible that others had committed the crime in order to blame it on the
RPF
? Brent remembered the ropes dangling from the waists of the
RGF
soldiers, and their large fighting knives. He wondered if blows from the hilts of those knives could have caused the deep wounds he had seen on the children's heads. Brent was hoping that the girl would wake up and that she might be able to tell him what really happened; he stationed a guard by her bedside with instructions to inform him of any change in her condition. But the little girl never regained consciousness, and she died the next day. Brent returned to Kigali, troubled by what he had witnessed and frustrated by his inability to take the investigation further.

I was as stuck as I had been with the earlier killings, but I was determined to get to the bottom of this murder of children. I invited the
RGF
and the
RPF
to join
UNAMIR
in a joint commission of inquiry to determine who had committed the crimes. The
RPF
immediately named two lawyers to the inquiry. The
RGF
hesitated, saying they had to study the matter. Despite repeated pressure from me, months passed before the
RGF
finally appointed their commissioners, which left all of us chasing a cold trail. While the children's deaths became more fuel for the extremist propaganda machine, even
RTLM
had to recognize that we had invited both parties to participate equally in the investigation, and did not attack me personally. If we kept our wits about us and acted quickly, we could sometimes gain the initiative and counteract the damage being done.

To my surprise and chagrin, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh turned out to be a proper gentleman who kept diplomatic working hours. He was not involved in helping me deal with the fallout of the massacres and the propaganda wars they were provoking. He was rarely in his office before ten, took a full two-hour lunch and left the office before five. He made it clear that he was not to be tracked down and disturbed on the weekends unless there was a dire emergency. He seemed to bring nothing new to the table in the way of expertise on Rwanda, knowledge of the conflict, familiarity with the Arusha accords, or skill at identifying and dealing with the political intrigues of the nation. He was not inclined to take the lead on the international political effort, even though the enormous power invested in him and his mandate by the
UN
Security Council made him the logical person to do so. While he met with the President, Prime Minister Agathe and the
RPF
within a few days of arriving in Kigali, the meetings were more in the nature of courtesy calls than discussions of real significance. Habyarimana unburdened himself to the
SRSG
, clearly more comfortable in this francophone African's presence than he had ever been with me. The session under the Cinzano umbrellas on the president's patio was cordial, with Habyarimana candidly revealing his distrust of the
RPF
; his perception that the
MRND
was the target of intrigue and unfair dealing; and his sense of injustice over the fact that the only political party that existed in Rwanda before the
Arusha accords did not seem to carry more weight in the proceedings. Booh-Booh asked no questions and made no promises, just told the President that he could be counted upon.

When it came to the
RPF
, it didn't help that Booh-Booh's English was minimal. At their first encounter with him in Mulindi, the
RPF
representatives pressed him to outline a program for pushing beyond the political impasses and getting them into their quarters in Kigali. Booh-Booh had no strategy to give them, and the
RPF
were not impressed.

I was rarely asked to accompany him or brief him, and he never offered to debrief for me after major political working sessions. He generally kept his own counsel or shared his thoughts with his close political advisers, who were all francophone Africans who also played things close to the vest. His grip on his political staff was unshakeable. After Dr. Kabia was appointed
UNAMIR
's chief of staff, he discreetly kept me in the loop as to what my head of mission was—or wasn't—up to.

The last of the Belgian forces arrived in the first week of December, bringing with them the final member of my personal staff, my military driver, Master Corporal Philippe Troute, who joined the ménage at my house. Troute had originally been a light-armoured soldier, but with the downsizing of
NATO
forces at the end of the Cold War, he had been transferred, somewhat reluctantly I think, to the para-commandos. He was an excellent driver, a solid, mature soldier with heavily tattooed arms and a stare that could freeze steam. He was a Walloon who prided himself on speaking only French, never Flemish, and he could not speak any English. He had never been away from home for longer than three weeks and was nervous about how his wife and child would handle the separation.

Colonel Luc Marchal, who would become the Kigali Sector commander, stepped off the plane on December 4, wearing his blue beret and looking fit and ready for action. He was a senior colonel with extensive African experience, and he had an intimate knowledge of the mission, as he had been the chef de cabinet in the office of the Belgian minister of defence. I was glad to have him in theatre with me, especially since the Belgians were becoming more of a problem than I had bargained for.

Unlike many of his countrymen, Luc carried no colonial baggage. He came to thrive within my ad hoc, multi-ethnic, multilingual force and had a special knack for working with troops from less sophisticated armies. He took a keen interest in Rwanda, building very positive relationships with the local leaders and the ordinary people. In our first meeting, I emphasized that the mission was there to support the ongoing political process and therefore had to follow a strict chapter-six mandate. As soon as the weapons-secure area was negotiated—and Luc's major task as Kigali sector commander would be to maintain it—the
RPF
was going to send an armed battalion to the capital. I had wanted a rapid reaction force to deal with these kinds of challenges, but because Belgium had forbidden its troops to be used in crowd control of any sort, we had to build this force out of troops from Bangladesh. And he was going to help me.

Unfortunately, soon after he arrived, Luc became caught up in a nasty fracas over accommodations for the Belgian troops. I told the Belgian commanding officer that I wanted a significant portion of his contingent to occupy the airport as their garrison and their primary defensive location. In a landlocked country, where the only viable and efficient means in and out of the country is by plane, the airport is the vital ground. But I also needed troops to be a presence in the city to provide the atmosphere of security necessary for keeping the peace process on target as well as to allay the fears of the local population about the presence of an armed unit of the
RPF
in the heart of the city. To do this, I needed the Belgians to be prepared to live out of camp garrisons.

In the guidelines to the troop-contributing nations, I had directed that contingents bring camp stores (tents, stoves, ablution facilities and so on). But LeRoy informed me that not only had they not brought camp stores, they also had no intention of living under canvas. Belgian soldiers would only be accommodated in hard buildings as per national policy. I asked to see the policy and, over the next several weeks, had many discussions with Luc and the Belgian commanders about the issue. In the end, they did show me a national Belgian army policy directive that stated that in Africa, Belgian soldiers would never live under canvas but only in buildings, not necessarily for the sake of
comfort or hygiene but because it was imperative that they maintain a correct presence in front of the Africans.

To add salt to the wound, once the Belgians finally found accommodation that suited them, in buildings scattered all over Kigali, they then wanted the
UN
to pay the rent. Luc was the one to deliver this message. He was caught between me and the operational requirements of
UNAMIR
—he knew it was potentially dangerous to have the Belgians scattered all over the city, which was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt after April 6—and the loyalty he owed his superiors, army policy and his government. We tried hard not to let the skirmishing over lodgings come between us and the mutual respect we soon developed.

My small force was operating at maximum capability. I still had no effective reserve with which to respond to unexpected violent clashes, and we were beginning to pick up the scent of a mysterious third force that seemed to be behind all the killings and assassinations. On December 3, I received a letter signed by a group of senior
RGF
and Gendarmerie officers, which informed me that there were elements close to the president who were out to sabotage the peace process, with potentially devastating consequences. The conspiracy's opening act would be a massacre of Tutsis.

Over the next few months I had several private meetings with Colonel Léonidas Rusatira, the head of the military school and senior member of this group. I wanted to determine the size and clout of this moderate group inside the military and keep a line open to them. I also ensured that the existence of these officers was passed on to Kagame so the
RPF
would realize there were moderates they could potentially work with inside the present security forces. To flush out who or what this force was, I set up a two-man intelligence unit, led by Captain Frank Claeys of Belgium, with the help of a Senegalese captain named Amadou Deme. Claeys was young, smart and self-assured without being arrogant. Born in Africa, he was an experienced para-commando and special forces officer and he was devoted to the mission, as was his equally efficient and multilingual teammate. According to my chapter-six mandate, I was supposed to rely on the goodwill of the ex-belligerent groups for all my information, but as mysterious deaths began to take
on more political overtones, relying strictly on the warring parties for intelligence would have been foolish in the extreme. Because the team was not supposed to exist, I had to cover its expenses from my own pocket, and often Deme and Claeys themselves chipped in with funds.

Soon they were picking up information that suggested that the killings that had taken place on November 17 and 18 had been carried out by para-commandos from Camp Bagogwe, which was a big commando training base for the
RGF
in the northwest. This bit of news, together with information they uncovered about weapons caches in the president's hometown, caused me a number of sleepless nights. Something malicious was definitely afoot. I decided to approach Booh-Booh with my findings and suggest we search and seize the weapons caches. He was alarmed by the idea, saying that to launch such an operation might further jeopardize the political process—since the only targets I was offering were on the government side. I reluctantly obeyed his direction.

On December 7, Dr. James Jonah, the under-secretary general of the department of political affairs, visited Rwanda and held a series of meetings with President Habyarimana. I was not invited but noticed the sudden flurry of activity in Booh-Booh's office. The next day, I got a message from the
SRSG
, saying that he was going to hold a major gathering in Kinihira on December 10 to try to break the political impasse. The meeting was so hastily cobbled together I didn't have time to set up proper escorts or take adequate weapons control measures. Just when I thought things couldn't get any worse, when I got to Kinihira Dr. Kabia told me that there hadn't been time to put together a team to do translation work, and Booh-Booh was hoping he could count on me personally to pitch in and help. Because I had to translate for everyone, I was tied up with the meeting for five hours straight and was unable to keep an eye out for trouble. All of us on the military side were sweating buckets: the number of high-profile people on hand made the meeting an attractive target.