Shake Hands With the Devil (31 page)

In the second week of February, my intelligence officers managed to recruit an informer from inside the Interahamwe who added details to Jean-Pierre's original revelations on arms caches and militia training. The informer told us that the
MRND
was behind a series of grenade attacks that had been carried out against Tutsi families, moderate businesses, Kigali Sector headquarters and Major Kamenzi. We also had gotten a report on February 7 from
UNOMUR
that several reliable sources from the
NRA
“had intimated to
UNOMUR
officers that resumption [of hostilities] between the
RPF
and the
RGF
could start this week, as a result of [the] stalled swearing-in” of the
BBTG
. Then we received information that death squads were being formed with the intention of assassinating both Lando Ndasingwa and Joseph Kavaruganda, the president of the constitutional court. When
UNAMIR
warned both men of these threats, neither of them was surprised, as they usually knew
more than we did about the serious threats against their lives. The informant indicated that the masterminds behind the death squads were the brothers-in-law of President Habyarimana. Although we had no way of confirming the information, I was certain that there was more than a grain of truth in it—it was common knowledge among diplomats, moderate politicians, the
NGO
s and expatriates. I thought it was imperative to show in some way that
UNAMIR
was aware of the Machiavellian plots and was determined to shut them down, but how was I going to do it?

Since my last restricted code cable from Annan, I had kept pressing the
DPKO
on the issue. On February 15, I received support for deterrent operations from a totally unexpected source. Dr. Kabia passed on to me a code cable from New York, asking us to help the
UN
respond to a letter that the secretary-general had received from Willy Claes, the Belgian foreign minister. As a result of Luc Marchal's persuasive discussions with the authorities in Brussels, Claes was endorsing my call for deterrent operations, warning that if
UNAMIR
did not take a more assertive role, the political impasse could lead to “an irreversible explosion of violence.” Finally, I had somebody on my side who might be able to persuade New York to give me greater leeway.

I quickly drafted a response to address Claes's concerns, adding public security measures to my existing plan for arms recovery operations, and walked it over to Booh-Booh's office. The
SRSG
seemed open to my suggestions, though I found out much later that he had sent my proposal to Annan's office but had not included it in his reply to Claes. Instead, Booh-Booh downplayed the information we had gathered on the distribution of weapons and training of recruits for the militias to Claes and emphasized in the strongest terms the strict limitations on the mission.

Two days later the triumvirate in New York, advised by Hedi Annabi, sent a code cable responding to my revised arms recovery and public security plans and again shot them down. The response stressed that “
UNAMIR
cannot and probably does not have the capacity to take over the maintenance of law and order, in or outside Kigali. Public security and the maintenance of law and order is the responsibility of the authorities. It must also remain their responsibility, as is
the case in all other peace-keeping operations.” I remember sitting at my desk, reading this reply as a particularly violent gust of wind whistled its way through the corridors at the Amahoro, rattling windows and slamming doors.

As the month wore on, I became even more concerned about the condition of my force. The armoured personnel carriers I had requested months ago had arrived from the
UN
mission in Mozambique on January 30. I had requested twenty. Only five of the eight
APC
s that actually arrived were in working order. They came with no mechanics qualified to operate them, no spare parts, no tools, and operating manuals in Russian. A hundred more vehicles, principally
SUV
s from the closing of the Cambodia mission, had been shipped to Dar es Salaam, where they had been vandalized while they were sitting in port; the Tanzanians would not let me send
UNAMIR
troops to guard them, and the
UN
had no capacity to provide security. The
UN
signed a transport contract with the lowest bidder, who hired inexperienced civilian drivers to convoy these vehicles over a thousand kilometres of African dirt roads to Kigali, and on the trip, about ten of the vehicles were lost. By the time the convoy arrived, just under thirty vehicles were functional, though they were missing everything from windshield wipers to seats, and many of them had been stripped of their radios. We could not find the spare parts or expertise in Rwanda to repair them.

Both Luc and I wanted to increase our firepower, particularly at the airport. I requested ammunition, some heavier weapons, mortars and the like—none ever came. The Belgians had used up a lot of ammunition in training exercises and never replaced it, since the
UN
and the Belgians could never agree on who would pay. The
UN
or Belgium should have resupplied me and quibbled about the cost later.

Though I had requested a further forty-eight unarmed observers in December in order to deal with the confirmed reports of recruiting in the Burundian refugee camps by both the
RPF
and the
RGF
, the
SRSG
had not supported my request, and I had not received them. As it stood, I had only six unarmed military observer teams available to search the camps; they could do little beyond verifying the reports. As well, the
ceasefire along the demilitarized zone was increasingly fragile. On February 11, there had been a major violation about thirty kilometres northeast of Byumba at a place where
RGF
and
RPF
forces were stationed on either side of a river. Apparently, an
RGF
soldier had opened fire on a group of
RPF
troops collecting water. In the short firefight that followed, three
RGF
soldiers were killed and another five injured, and a number of civilians caught in the crossfire were wounded, and one of them killed. Colonel Tikoka produced a new deployment plan in order to reinforce the demilitarized zone, but the moves he suggested would come at the expense of the other sectors.

When I addressed these needs with General Baril, he told me that I shouldn't make such major requests on an ad hoc basis. Instead I should include these needs for consideration in the six-month mission report due in March. This meant that even if the increases were approved, I wouldn't see any new troops before the summer.

On February 17, General Uytterhoeven, the Belgian army's inspector general, and Colonel Jean-Pierre Roman, the Para-Commando Brigade commander, arrived in Kigali for a four-day visit. I was very happy to see these gentlemen. I needed to talk with the Belgian higher command and straighten out some problems I was having with their contingent. We had been told that in March, the
UN
intended to replace the battalion of para-commandos in Kigali with an ad hoc battalion put together from Belgian para-commandos and Austrian soldiers. I was determined to nip any such move in the bud, as it would destroy any nascent cohesion within the force at a time when our military tasks were becoming even more demanding.

With the full support of Luc Marchal, I broached the serious deficiencies in leadership, discipline and training of the Belgian battalion. Even after I had spoken to the Belgian leadership specifically about the change of attitude required to successfully conduct a chapter-six mission, the battalion did not change its approach. Belgian soldiers were often frustrated by the patient negotiations required of peacekeepers on a mission such as ours, where building a relationship of trust and cooperation with the local population was just as important as setting up
roadblocks to check for smuggled weapons. They saw themselves as the
crème de la crème
, as vastly superior soldiers to their
UNAMIR
colleagues. They seemed to view the mission as a sort of Club Med assignment where their recreational and vacation needs were to be met and where any training they undertook was designed to help them meet the paratrooper evaluation they would face when they returned to Belgium. This serious deficiency in leadership, coupled with disciplinary problems and the lack of mission-specific training, created conflicts between the mission, the
RGF
and the general population.

There had been dozens of incidents of disciplinary infractions. The Belgians were constantly being caught out of bounds in nightclubs that had been restricted for their own safety. They drank on patrol and got into barroom brawls, seeming to take their cue from the French troops who went dancing and drinking at Kigali Nights, the local hot spot, with their personal weapons. One night, several drunken Belgian soldiers completely trashed the lobby of the Mille Collines, which was Kigali society's favourite watering hole. The Belgians often refused to salute or pay proper respect to officers of other contingents, especially officers of colour. There were Belgian soldiers who went absent without leave into Zaire and got up to heaven knows what until they were detained by the authorities. In one of the more serious incidents, in order to celebrate Belgian Airborne Day, the battalion commander, Leroy, held a party for the unit at the Meridien hotel, to which
VIP
s were invited. In the spirit of the occasion, the pilots of the Belgians' Hercules aircraft, which were parked at the airport for medical evacuation purposes, decided to buzz the hotel. While making a low pass over the Meridien, the plane overflew the
CND
complex, prompting an immediate reaction from the vigilant
RPF
battalion. After being cooped up for nearly two months, they were a little paranoid, and scrambled to the roof where they opened fire on the aircraft. In this case, as in many others, the culprits were formally charged by Luc Marchal and sent home to face punishment.

It was also brought to Luc's attention, and then to mine, that a few of the Belgian staff officers were fraternizing with Tutsi women.
RTLM
and the scurrilous extremist newspaper
Kangura
had gotten wind of this
and exploited the story fully, accompanying lurid text with obscene cartoons that implied that I, too, was involved in such behaviour. As far as I'm concerned, there is no such thing as consensual sex between soldiers and the local civilian population in a war or conflict zone. The Belgians were also destroying the credibility of
UNAMIR
by giving fodder to the rumours that we were pro-Tutsi. Luc summoned these officers to his office, read them the riot act and confined them and the whole battalion to quarters. A few days later, a couple of the officers had the temerity to come to my office to protest Luc's action. I told them that Luc not only had my full support, but that I would personally write to their chief of staff.

Still, it seemed that no amount of censure and disciplinary action from me or from Luc could correct the rot that was eating away at this contingent. At the beginning of February, one of my Belgian patrols had roughed up Théoneste Bagosora at a checkpoint in Kigali. Bagosora was travelling in a clearly marked military vehicle and had presented his identity papers to the patrol, but the Belgians forced him, his driver and his bodyguard out of the car and proceeded with a humiliating search, all the time pointing their weapons at them. A Belgian officer finally intervened.

The
coup de grâce
came just before General Uytterhoeven and Colonel Roman arrived. A group of Belgian soldiers in civilian dress forced their way into the home of one of the heads of the extremist
CDR
party, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, and assaulted him in front of his family. The
CDR
had close links to
RTLM
, which often carried negative stories about the Belgians. The soldiers badly beat the politician on his own doorstep and, just before they left, one of them aimed a gun at his head and warned him that if he or his party or the local media ever again insulted or threatened Belgium, Belgian expatriates or the Belgian contingent of
UNAMIR
, they would return and kill him. Barayagwiza immediately went public and wiped out any of the hard-won public sympathy we had achieved earlier in the month. I ordered a full investigation to identify and charge the offenders, but a wall of silence descended over the unit, and we never did uncover the culprits.

It was with this thick file of incident reports that I confronted General Uytterhoeven and Colonel Roman. I told them that their
troops were not only a discredit to the Belgian army but were seriously undermining the credibility of the mission. Their pre-deployment training must have been woefully inadequate for them to come into this chapter-six mission with such aggressive and destructive attitudes; worse, despite my clear instruction to their leadership, nothing had changed. I reminded them that through Luc Marchal, I had formally requested a copy of the training program that the Belgian replacement battalion was undergoing for the mission so as to avoid a similar situation with the incoming troops. I knew that by being so brutally frank, I risked damaging the relationship between myself and the Belgian military authorities, but I had no option—the Belgian para-commandos were putting the mission at risk.

Later, Colonel Roman came to my office on his own in an attempt to smooth things over and defend his troops. He thought he should explain to me the idiosyncrasies of airborne forces. They were trained to be very decentralized and inventive, he said, and therefore tended to be a little less responsive to their officer corps than regular infantry troops. They needed to spend time training in order to keep up their high level of efficiency. The undercurrent in all this was that I was overreacting and “boys would be boys”—exactly the outmoded notion I was fighting in the Canadian military. I countered by telling Colonel Roman that his troops spent so much of their time keeping their skills up that they had gone through much of my valuable ammunition, and that his government didn't seem keen to replace these essential stocks, leaving us at risk. I told him what I had told General Uytterhoeven: unless these criticial deficiencies in training, discipline, attitude and leadership were addressed, I was considering the unprecedented step of recommending to New York that the Belgians be pulled from the mission. When I finished, the colonel was white with anger.