Shake Hands With the Devil (58 page)

On the way back to the Force
HQ
, I felt that I had shaken hands with the devil. We had actually exchanged pleasantries. I had given him an opportunity to take pride in his disgusting work. I felt guilty of evil deeds myself since I had actually negotiated with him. My stomach was ripping me apart about whether I had done the right thing. I would only know when the first transfer happened.

The Sainte Famille church is a reference point on the Kigali skyline. The compound surrounding it is large, open and on a slope halfway up one of the hills in the city core. For artillery and mortar observers, it is an ideal target—impossible to miss if you're trying to hit it and easy to avoid if you're not. After I got back from my sickening encounter with the Interahamwe leaders, I had been trying to deal with the deluge of paperwork at my desk, already badly missing Brent and his ability to triage my workload. I had left my radio on as I worked, monitoring the force radio net, and at about 1645 I heard a call go out for medical support at Sainte Famille, as mortar rounds had fallen in the protected site at the compound.

It took almost half an hour to get there. The scene was chaos. Several thousand panicked people were either trying to seek refuge in the school and chapel, cowering against the walls or trying to get away from the area, even though that would likely mean falling into the
hands of the militias. I could see the blue berets of the
UNMO
s in the thick of things, surrounded by the dead and the dying. Civilians, some obviously from the Red Cross, were working on the dozens upon dozens of casualties. As I got out of my vehicle, I was swamped by hysterical men and women demanding answers, comfort, rescue. I ended up having to push and fight my way through them to meet with my
UNMO
s. Breaking out of the mob, I approached the sites where the bombs impacted. Severed limbs and heads, children ripped in two, the wounded turning their bewildered eyes toward you at the moment at which you can actually see the life expire from them, the smell of burnt explosives mixed with burning blood and flesh. And amid the carnage, a glimpse of dignity in the face of an elder resigned to his approaching and inevitable death. The
MILOB
s and Red Cross staff were working feverishly. Covered in blood, the
MILOB
chief told me that one of his team was finishing the calculations on the crater analysis in order to determine where the bombs were fired from. He had taken his measurements among the bodies and gore in the shell holes.

Meanwhile, some of the informal civilian leaders were having some success in calming parts of the crowd, and I waded over to talk to as many people as I could. They could not understand why I did not have more soldiers to protect them. They appreciated the mobile patrols that checked in on them during the day, and the fact that some of my unarmed men stayed with them at night, but that simply was not enough. Squeezed in by hundreds of frightened people, I remember trying to explain to one group all the reasons why my troops were unable to fight to protect them. Puzzled at the complexity of my answer, they pressed me to sort it out. What could be so complicated? They were under fire and I was their only hope.

At prayers the next morning, it was confirmed that we finally had a team that could visit the presidential crash site, and an agreement in place allowing an international investigation. Thus commenced a process that to my knowledge has never brought a definitive answer to the mystery of who shot down that plane and why.

The report on the Sainte Famille bombing was in: over 120 casualties with 13 dead, 61 evacuated to the Red Cross field hospital and 15
to the King Faisal. I couldn't help thinking, “Too bad this slaughter was not in a market in Yugoslavia—maybe somebody outside Rwanda would have cared.” As it happened, the Rwandan genocide was having a hard time knocking the South African elections and American figure skater Tonya Harding's criminal troubles off the front pages. The crater analysis indicated that the mortars were eighty-one-millimetre projectiles and they had been fired from the
RPF
positions. I would see Kagame tomorrow and formally expose this to him for action and, in the daily sitrep to New York, lay the atrocity at the
RPF
's doorstep.

Finally my request to be interviewed by
RTLM
came through, and I drove to the Diplomates around noon. Despite an attempt by the
RPF
to shut down the station by shellfire a few days earlier, it was back on the air, more virulent than ever, and we suspected it had a mobile capability.

The three
RTLM
staffers were set up in a room in a lower level of the hotel—a white man, George Ruggiu (who claimed to be Italian, but was actually a Belgian), a very aggressive female announcer and a technician. The interview was taped, not live as I had wished, which meant that they would chop it up to use as they liked. I decided to get some value out of the encounter and started asking them questions. What did they think the
RPF
was really up to? With venom, the woman replied, “Divide the country in two, which will not happen. No Tutsis will be secure in their villages. Arusha has been buried by the
RPF
.” I'd heard that illogic before, but what was behind it? I asked about the impact of Habyarimana's assassination and got a surprising answer. As far as these extremists were concerned, Habyarimana had been protecting the Tutsis. He was pro-
RPF
, and they had not wanted him to stay in power. It was as close as I could get to a confession that the extremists wanted to get rid of Habyarimana.

I went a little further and asked them about the massacres. They immediately responded that the
RPF
was responsible for the downing of the plane and starting the war, and the Presidential Guard had merely reacted “to liquidate certain elements who had dabbled in the conspiracy.” Clearly, in their minds this was a pro-Tutsi
RPF
conspiracy. The session ended with them making more accusations against the Belgians, but at least I'd gained some information.

That afternoon I received a letter from the interim government, signed by Bizimungu, agreeing to the transfers from the Mille Collines and the Amahoro. The
UNAMIR
staff led by Henry, with Yaache and two members of his humanitarian action cell, Major Marek Pazik and Major Don MacNeil (a new officer from Canada), were concurrently meeting with the militia and
RGF
staffs to iron out the details for the transfer we had scheduled for the next day: we were going to move some pro-
RPF
people from the Mille Collines to behind the
RPF
lines outside Kigali. It would be a first test of whether the Hutu belligerents were actually on side and in control. There were considerable exchanges of artillery and mortar fire, including medium-calibre rockets, all over Kigali that third day of May. More rounds ended up in Sainte Famille, though this time there were few casualties. Later in the afternoon the hangar area at the airfield received four to five hits. Three Ghanaian soldiers were wounded in the attack and required evacuation, but the Hercules could not get into Kigali because of bad weather, and the wounded would have to wait for a flight at first light.

That wasn't the worst of it. The attempted transfer ran into trouble just outside the Mille Collines and nearly cost the lives of the seventy Tutsi leaders in our trucks. To protect them, Don MacNeil put himself between the threatening militiamen and the trucks and came within inches of being killed, as did most of the Ghanaians attached to his part of the convoy. Over the force radio net I reminded MacNeil that he could use deadly force. He stated that he was going to negotiate them out of harm's way. (For this action MacNeil was awarded a mention-in-dispatch decoration from the Canadian government.) They had to retreat back to the Mille Collines, which as a result was even more insecure because the identities of some of the prominent persons inside were now known to the
RGF
and the militia. I feared that an assault would come that night. The hotel was shelled at sunset, but apart from broken windows and the smashed-up pool area, that was the extent of the damage. I kept my line open all night to Major Moigny, who was stationed there with his half-dozen
UNMOS
and the Tunisians.

The Force
HQ
also came under attack. The shells that landed in our
compound destroyed a few vehicles and smashed several windows in the operations rotunda. The word went out that flak jackets and helmets were
de rigueur
for the next while. I was surprised at the quantity of artillery and mortar ammunition being expended by both sides to little tactical advantage. Not much of the fire seemed to be coordinated with infantry actions. Instead, the belligerents were posturing for better positions in and around the city, the
RGF
reinforcing their positions around Camp Kanombe and the eastern part of the airfield. The
RPF
was manoeuvring around the north. The fighting had intensified in the area between the
HQ
and the airport and we were being hit with peripheral explosions. The platoon sleeping room at the end of the top corridor of the
HQ
, just under the machine-gun position on the roof, was hit by an anti-armour rocket. The five Ghanaian soldiers who hot-bedded there had left the room barely minutes before the impact. A four- to five-foot hole was blown through the rooms, and no one would have survived.

It struck me that I was in the dark regarding the evolving situation in New York. Before morning prayers, I went through the cables that came in during the night and had to stifle white-hot rage when I read a copy of a May 2 letter from Rwanda's permanent representative at the
UN
, stating that his government wanted immediate action to stop the killing and bring the fight to an end for humanitarian reasons, and “offers its full cooperation for the success of the operation, which should be envisaged without delay,
with respect for the principle of the sovereignty and institutions of the Rwandan State
[my emphasis].”

The other code cable was a summary of the previous afternoon's deliberations in the Security Council. The play at the table between members left me perplexed. The French were for intervention either by neighbour states, the
OAU
or the
UN
. The United Kingdom said that the Security Council should avoid terms such as “forceful action” and “intervention.” China supported the United Kingdom's position. Russia said the only way forward was to get the
OAU
more involved. New Zealand insisted that the words “forceful action” be retained. The United States proposed that a group from the Security Council go to Rwanda and get the needed information first-hand. Nigeria shot that down because such
a trip would delay any decision by at least a week. All members supported cross-border humanitarian action and an arms embargo. Someone raised the fact that Boutros-Ghali's May 3 letter to the president of the Security Council (as requested in response to the president's report of April 30, which was prepared with lots of information from
UNAMIR
) had “infelicitously” suggested that the Security Council had made the wrong decision about the troop withdrawals. What really stuck in my craw was that now they were wasting time on finger pointing. What were they thinking? Why even think of passing the buck to the
OAU
when its troops had little equipment and no strategic lift?

The Hercules arrived at dawn to pick up the injured Ghanaian soldiers, and I went to the terminal to send them off. As the Hercules was turning back onto the runway, several rocket rounds hit the big hangar that housed the support company. A frantic call came in over the radio to hold the Hercules because another Ghanaian had been seriously injured. I told my aide-de-camp to get the plane to hang on for a few minutes.

The pilots were very uneasy on the ground, as they had already had so many narrow escapes. They kept the engines running and the ramp open as they waited in front of the terminal. A
UN
vehicle bounced across the open fields and then raced toward us. The soldier was brought inside so that the doctor could look at him and stabilize him enough for the trip. The plane had been on the ground for over twenty minutes when a couple more rounds landed across the airfield. I pressed the doctor to get the patient to the plane—Canadian air-evacuation nurses were on board to tend to him, and we simply could not let the other injured soldiers perish with the aircrew in a burning ball of fire. I was moving toward the doors to wave the plane on, leaving the terribly injured Ghanaian behind, when a hodgepodge of medical assistants in white, the doctor and troops ran for the plane with the cut-up soldier on a makeshift stretcher, nearly dropping him twice before they got him on board. The plane was on the runway before the ramp was totally up. All the wounded men pulled through.

I went to the other side of the field to look at the damage. It was obvious that the hangar had been specifically targeted with rocket fire
and that the projectiles had come from the sprawling Camp Kanombe at the end of the airfield. What was Bizimungu trying to prove? Or perhaps more likely, what were Bagosora and the para-commando battalion based at that camp trying to achieve? Did they want us out, and if yes, what was yet to come? Bagosora would know better than I did the state of play at the
UN
, that the Security Council was once again discussing increasing my force. Was he trying to scare us off before the
UN
took the reinforcement decision?

The rest of the day was devoted to routine patrols to the safe sites, assisting the Red Cross in its distribution of some aid, licking our wounds from the transfer fiasco of yesterday, composing letters of protest to all the transgressors and getting up to speed with the
DPKO
about our future. To my great delight, after the second Hercules flight of the day managed to land and take off safely, a very large box was delivered to my office from Quebec City. Beth and the wife of one of the new Canadian officers, Luc Racine, had bought us a few hundred dollars' worth of peanut butter, Cheez Whiz, jams, crackers, chocolate bars, jujubes (my favourite) and other goodies. Then Beth had tracked down a resupply Hercules that was leaving the base in Trenton, Ontario, and after all the expected runarounds, got the box on that plane. It had made its way from home to Kigali without mishap. I spent a few hours distributing the goodies all around. My military wife knew that we would share, so she had tucked a smaller box inside for me—my own personal care package of peanut butter. (The Canadian Army kept its troops rolling on peanut butter.) We savoured every spoonful.