Shake Hands With the Devil (47 page)

At the church, they came to a halt and dismounted. Pazik and a Bangladeshi soldier went to the rectory to find the Polish
MILOB
s, while Brent and Stec confronted the first evidence of wholesale massacre. Across the street from the mission, an entire alleyway was littered with the bodies of women and children near a hastily abandoned school. As Brent and Stefan were standing there trying to take in the number of bodies, a truck full of armed men roared by. Brent and Stefan decided to head for the church. Stefan went inside while Brent stood by the door to cover him and to keep the
APC
in sight. They confronted a scene of unbelievable horror—the first such scene
UNAMIR
witnessed—evidence of the genocide, though we didn't yet know to call it that. In the aisles and on the pews were the bodies of hundreds of men, women and children. At least fifteen of them were still alive but in a terrible state. The priests were applying first aid to the survivors. A baby cried as it tried to feed on the breast of its dead mother, a sight Brent has never forgotten. Pazik found the two Polish
MILOB
s, who were in a state of grief and shock, hardly able to relate what had happened. The night before, they said, the
RGF
had cordoned off the area, and then the Gendarmerie had gone door to door checking identity cards. All Tutsi
men, women and children were rounded up and moved to the church. Their screams had alerted the priests and the
MILOB
s, who had come running. The priests and officers were seized at the church doors and slammed up against the wall with rifle barrels at their throats. They were forced to watch at gunpoint as the gendarmes collected the adults' identity cards and burned them. Then the gendarmes welcomed in a large number of civilian militiamen with machetes and handed over the victims to their killers.

Methodically and with much bravado and laughter, the militia moved from bench to bench, hacking with machetes. Some people died immediately, while others with terrible wounds begged for their lives or the lives of their children. No one was spared. A pregnant woman was disembowelled and her fetus severed. Women suffered horrible mutilation. Men were struck on the head and died immediately or lingered in agony. Children begged for their lives and received the same treatment as their parents. Genitalia were a favourite target, the victims left to bleed to death. There was no mercy, no hesitation and no compassion. The priests and the
MILOB
s, guns at their throats, tears in their eyes, and the screams of the dying in their ears, pleaded with the gendarmes for the victims. The gendarmes' reply was to use the rifle barrels to lift the priests' and
MILOB
s' heads so that they could better witness the horror.

Killing with machetes is hard work, and sometime in the night the murderers became fatigued with their gruesome task and left the church, probably headed for some sleep before they moved on to the next location. The priests and
MILOB
s did what they could for the few survivors, who moaned or crawled from underneath the corpses that had sheltered them.

Both of the
MILOB
s were overwhelmed by emotion as they recounted the night's events. One fell completely silent while the other admitted that though he had served in places, such as Iraq and Cambodia, this was it, he was going home. The men needed to get out of there, to get back to the security of headquarters and regain their equilibrium, and they urged the priests to join them. But the fathers refused, saying they had to stay with the wounded, who were too many to carry in the
APC
. Brent and the others gave the priests a radio and a charged battery, what
water they had and a small first aid kit, and promised to report the incident and mount a rescue mission. They warned the priests that since it was already mid-afternoon, it was unlikely that a large armed escort with ambulances or heavy transport could be mounted and then negotiate the dozens of roadblocks before nightfall, but the priests were confident they could hide overnight, as the militia and gendarmes had surely finished with them.

Feeling like deserters, the
UNAMIR
group returned to Force
HQ
, and the Polish
MILOB
s were put to bed. Kigali Sector was directed to conduct a rescue mission, but as Brent had suspected, it couldn't comply until the next day—dozens of missions were already underway. Early the next morning, the priests called on the radio and reported that the militia had returned during the night. Our
APC
had been spotted at the church, and the killers had returned to destroy the evidence of the massacre. They had killed the wounded and removed and burned the bodies.

The decision to leave the priests and the victims had had disastrous consequences, but such are the decisions that soldiers make in war. Some days you make decisions and people live, other days people die. Those innocent men, women and children were simply Tutsi. That was their crime.

The massacre was not a spontaneous act. It was a well-executed operation involving the army, Gendarmerie, Interahamwe and civil service. The identity card system, introduced during the Belgian colonial period, was an anachronism that would result in the deaths of many innocent people. By the destruction of their cards, and of their records at the local commune office, these human beings were erased from humanity. They simply never existed. Before the genocide ended, hundreds of thousands of others would be erased. The men who organized and perpetrated these crimes knew they were crimes and not acts justified by war, and that they could be held accountable for them. The Interahamwe returned to destroy the evidence. The faceless bureaucrats who fed the names to the militias and destroyed the records also played a part. We were not in a war of victors and vanquished. We were in the middle of a slaughterhouse, though it was weeks before we could call it by its real name.

I got to the airport that day at about 1400, avoiding firefights between the
RPF
and the
RGF
para-commando battalion to the northeast of the airport, less than a kilometre from the Force
HQ
. On the way to meet the French commander, I really had to wonder about what the speed of this effort to evacuate foreign nationals meant about the
UN
commitment to stay in place. Were they getting the foreign civilians out of the way of a future military intervention in the conflict or were they intending to abandon Rwanda?

My conversation with Colonel Poncet was curt, and the French commander showed no interest in co-operating with us. This unhappy exchange was an indication of how the French evacuation task force, Operation Amaryllis, would continue to behave with
UNAMIR
. Poncet said his mission was to evacuate the expatriate community within the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours. We had heard from the
MILOB
s at the airport that the French had already evacuated a number of Rwandans and that twelve members of the presidential family were part of this group, but Poncet insisted to me that he was only here to evacuate expatriates and “white people.” I told him that within two hours there should be a truce in place but that there was no guarantee from the
RGF
that they could observe it. At that Poncet asked to be excused and, without waiting for a response from me, simply turned his back and walked off. I decided then that Luc would handle all future dealings with this rude Frenchman.

Late that afternoon I went to the Meridien to meet with Booh-Booh. The Belgian battalion command post was now set up at the entrance to the hotel, and I stopped to talk with Lieutenant Colonel Dewez, whom I hadn't seen since the murder of his men. I offered him my condolences and commended him for maintaining restraint and discipline in his unit.

In the lobby I was swarmed by hundreds of
UN
civilians and Rwandans wanting information. I addressed them, saying that the Belgian battalion command post had moved into the hotel to provide security. There was food and water in the hotel and they should be rationing it. I told them that some evacuations had started and that my
MILOB
s would continue to assist in co-ordinating lists of people in order
to be prepared for evacuation when it was judged relatively safe. I asked them to be calm, to rest and to stay away from windows and balconies.

The
SRSG
's suite was on the top floor, and since the elevators weren't working, I arrived slightly out of breath. His wing was empty save for him and his staff; he'd asked the hotel manager to clear all civilians from the floor for security reasons. Booh-Booh was seated in a large chair surrounded by political officers, including Mamadou Kane. My welcome wasn't particularly warm. A bullet had come through one of their windows and they were scared. I told them that, for one thing, it wasn't wise to be on the top floor—if they insisted on staying there, they needed to be very cautious near the windows. We discussed the installation of the interim government. Booh-Booh insisted that neither the
UN
nor the international community should recognize this illegitimately established extremist regime, though he agreed with my suggestion that it would be wise to maintain contact with it, if only to find out its intentions. I told him that the
RPF
would only negotiate with the military leaders of the Crisis Committee and that I had encouraged both Ndindiliyimana and Gatsinzi to obtain such a mandate from the new government. Augustin Bizimana, the minister of defence, was due back from Cameroon tomorrow, and he would most likely be their political master once again.

Back at the headquarters, the news wasn't great. Many observer teams were off the radio net and had either become hostages, casualties or had decided to run. We could do nothing for them except ask New York to contact bordering nations to offer asylum. I was also informed that a large U.S. convoy, escorted by
UNAMIR
military observers and
RGF
troops, had left the American ambassador's residence that day and headed south to Burundi. The night before, Brent had received a telephone call from a man who claimed to be a U.S. Marine officer with an American force in Bujumbura, Burundi. He told Brent he was just checking whether he had the right number for my office. We never heard from him again, but we later discovered from a number of sources that about 250 U.S. Marines had been flying into Kigali when they were diverted to Burundi and that they had believed they were being sent to reinforce
UNAMIR
and protect U.S. nationals.

That evening I called New York and described the situation. They
had my reports in hand: along with political assassinations and indiscriminate killings, we now had an example of systematic ethnic killing in the Polish Mission massacre, and twenty thousand Rwandans under our supposed protection. But even though Kigali was crawling with elite foreign forces, no nation was interested in reinforcing us except the Belgians and a few non-aligned Third World states. By now there were five hundred French para-commandos working out of the airport, and a thousand Belgian paras staging in Nairobi. To that I could add the 250 U.S. Marines in Bujumbura. A force of that size, well-trained and well-equipped, could possibly bring an end to the killings. But such an option wasn't even being considered.

As I toured Force
HQ
during the evening, it was obvious that everyone was exhausted but that morale was improbably high. You have to know where your people are morally, mentally and physically, and how much more you can ask of them. That night I was convinced that we could carry on. When I retired to my office, Brent surprised me with a plate of rice and curry he had scrounged from the Bangladeshis, and a promise that Belgian rations were coming the next day. Robert had also conducted a run to our home in Kigali and had grabbed whatever he could, including a change of uniform for me and more toiletries. The final treat was a sink full of hot water, already an unimaginable luxury.

On Sunday, April 10, I awoke to reduced gunfire in the city and the odour of death in the air. I directed the Ghanaians to sweep the area for corpses and to remove them in order to minimize the risk of disease to us and the Rwandans sheltering with us. They found eighty dead people within a few hundred metres of the Force
HQ
, behind a slope in a local slum. They put the bodies into a pile, poured diesel oil onto them and burned them. The terrible smell lingered in the heat. I wondered whether these were the people whose moans I had heard through my window while waiting for the French to land. If so, they had been real moans and not the wind.

I had to control the airport; it was the only way to sustain or eventually reinforce the mission. The French and the Belgians were there now, but they would soon withdraw. The one incentive I could offer
both the
RPF
and the
RGF
was the hope of humanitarian aid, which could only be forwarded if
UNAMIR
secured the entranceway to the nation. That realization was the beginning of the Kigali International Airport Security Agreement. But first I would have to get the parties to actually agree.

I embarked on my daily attempt to meet the political and military leaders, shuttling back and forth between the
RGF
and
RPF
, looking for ways to negotiate. The trip to the heart of Kigali was a road into hell, with thousands and thousands of people on the move, even more checkpoints and even more bodies at those checkpoints. What shocked me was the resignation of the people who stood patiently in line, waiting to be identified as victims.

At the
RGF
headquarters, I was told that Bizimana was now back from Cameroon, so I headed over to the Ministry of Defence to speak with him—another man not so happy to see me. I told him I was here to expedite a truce within a broader ceasefire negotiation. As I had suspected, he told me that the interim government was now in charge of the military and that the Crisis Committee had been disbanded. He felt that by noon the next day the government and the local authorities would bring the situation under control. He told me he was meeting with Jean Kambanda, the newly declared prime minister, in a couple of hours. I asked him to eliminate the roadblocks and told him I wanted the airport to remain open so that humanitarian aid could enter and the expatriates could leave with less risk. Bizimana didn't like the signal sent by the sudden departure of the expatriates but told me that he, too, wanted a ceasefire and a return to the
KWSA
rules.