Either they would pull out as soon as they could
-- even before the sixty-day limit to their mandate --
or they would be cast in the role of protectors of the perpetrators
of one of the most severe genocides in history.
FRANCE PROTECTS PERPETRATORS
A French officer who'd been a long-time military adviser to the Rwandese Government Forces
was in charge of the southwest region of the Humanitarian Protection Zone.
He publicly announced that he was not in Rwanda to disarm the RGF or militias
and that if the Rwandese Patriotic Front made any attempt to come near the HPZ line
he would use all the means at his disposal to fight and defeat them.
continued from FRENCH HUMANITARIAN ARMY AID
"Shake Hands with the Devil"
by General Romeo Dallaire
excerpts from page 452-509
...My team and I took off [after visiting French army base in Goma] at about 1500 for Entebbe, where we overnighted beside Lake Victoria, not far from the presidential palace that used to belong to the British governor general. The next morning, Canada Day [July 1] back home, I inspected the movement control and liaison teams at the airport...
We got back to the Amahoro that afternoon just in time for Canada day celebrations: frivolity in the middle of hell....
That same day in New York, the Security Council passed Resolution 935, which requested that the secretary-general establish a committee of experts to investigate "possible" acts of genocide in Rwanda. The world could still not bring itself to call this slaughter by its proper name. RTLM [Hutu's Hate Radio] wasted no time in denouncing the resolution. In its view, the Rwandan Supreme Court was both competent and impartial enough to handle the task. The station relentlessly pumped out lies to all Hutus able to find batteries for their radios. Even a month later, amid the horrors of the refugee and displaced persons camps that I would visit in Zaire, I saw people with small portable radios at their ears, listening to this vile propaganda. The radio remained the voice of authority, and many could not detach themselves from it. Because of its accusations against Hutu extremists, Medecins Sans Frontieres joined white men with moustaches and Canadians in general on RTLM's hate list, having been prounouced pro-Tutsi; as a result I ordered more security around the King Faisal Hospital where James Orbinski (the head of the Medecins San Frontieres team and a Canadian) and his team were working.
As predicted, the creation of the HPZ [Turquoise French Army Humanitarian Protected Zone] lured masses of displaced people out of central Rwanda and into the French zone. This was the terrible downside to Operation Turquoise. Having made public pronouncements about their desire to protect Rwandans from genocide, the French were caught by their own rhetoric and the glare of an active international media presence, and now had to organize the feeding and care of them. Realizing the news potential in the HPZ [Humanitarian Protected Zone], many of the journalists who had been with me for weeks moved on to Goma or Cyangugu.
Still, we were guardedly optimistic in Kigali because of the arrival of some more UNAMIR 2 [Humanitarian Mission] troops was finally imminent....My plan was to send troops out soon after they got to Rwanda to the most likely points of contact between the French [Army] and the RPF [Tutsi Army]. I tried not to think too much about the irony of having to devote forces intended to serve the cause of peace in Rwanda to preventing confrontation between one of the belligerents [Tutsi Army RPF] and another UN-mandated force [French Army Operation Turquoise]. This stands as one of the crueller twists of cosmic irony foisted on the long-suffering Rwandans.
The only way I saw to avoid a total slide into absurdity was to effect a relief-in-place of French forces by UNAMIR 2 as my troops became available. The trap the French had rushed into would inevitably begin to close. Either they would pull out as soon as they could -- even before the sixty-day limit to their mandate -- or they would be cast in the role of protectors of the perpetrators of one of the most severe genocides in history. Given the large numbers of terrified displaced people who were moving into the HPZ [French Army Humanitarian Protection Zone], and the difficulties the RPF [Tutsi Army] would almost certainly have in controlling victorious troops who knew all too well the dimensions and horrors of the genocide, it had become absolutely critical to get UNAMIR 2 [UN Humanitarian] troops into the ground in the HPZ [Humanitarian Protection Zone] well before the French forces left. I emphasized to my staff that a relief-in-place of the French could not be delayed. But it would be a delicate and dangerous task: the Rwandans who had fled to the French zone, mostly Hutu, did not have as much faith in our ability to hold off the RPF [Tutsi Army] as they had in that of the [French] Turquoise [Army] forces. Their minds had been filled with lies about UNAMIR's collaboration with the enemy [Tutsi Army], and they themselves knew the level of their own complicity in the deaths of their neighbours.
The fighting was still intense in the city [Kigali]....Despite our warnings to stay inside a reporter went out on his balcony at the Meridien hotel to watch the explosions and the arc of tracer bullets in the night and got shot in the leg (our second, and last, media casualty). He had been foolish, but even being cautious was inadequate protection at times....
We were solving problems from dawn to dusk and long into each night....We were supposed to reach a troop strength of about 2,800 by late July, just in time to implement my aggressive plan to relieve the French forces in the HPZ [Humanitarian Protection Zone] and subsequently open the zone to the RPF [Tutsi Army] in phases.
Lafourcade [Commander French Army] soon sent me a memo confirming his (and his government's) interpretation of our discussions. He wrote that he had no mandate to disarm the RGF [Hutu Army], though he would prevent it from taking action in the humanitarian zone. His memo stated that Turquoise [French Army] was not going to disarm the militias and the RGF [Hutu Army] in the HPZ [Humanitarian Protection Zone] unless they posed a threat to the people his force was protecting. As a result, the extremists would be able to move about freely in the zone, safe from any interference from the French, and also safe from retribution from or clashes with the RPF [Tutsi Army]. Before we took over, I would have to persuade Lafourcade to disarm the whole bunch or our task would be risky to say the least. While the RGF [Hutu Army] and the militias were unlikely to shoot at the French, they might be tempted to shoot at us.
Lavourcade's description of the demarcation line between him and the RPF [Tutsi Army] was still slightly to the east of the one I'd presented to him in Goma, but was far less ambitious than the one France had originally proposed to the Security Council. When Kagame received his copy, he made it clear that he already had troops to the west of Lafourcade's line and certainly wasn't rolling them back. I had to intervene, and what a day that was. I lost track of the number of meetings and faxes and phone calls but by the end of it, we had an agreed-upon zone that didn't include Ruhengeri or Butare or Gitarama or even a whisper about Kigali. We also had a working plan with Turquoise....
Of course, both Kagame and the French had to test the line, and two major incidents nearly blew into open combat between the new belligerents [French Army vs Tutsi Army], as I took to calling them.
First, the RPF [Tutsi Army] ambushed a French convoy that was returning from Butare with a couple of expatriates and a large number of orphans. The transfer had been approved, but a local RPF commander let the convoy through a couple of barriers and then fired on them. The French fired back. Luckily no one was injured, and that mess was sorted out within hours.
The second event was far more damaging to Turquoise's [French Army's] semblance of neutrality. A French officer named Colonel Thibault, who had been a long-time military adviser to the RGF [Hutu Army], was in charge of the southwest region of the HPZ. Thibault publicly announced that he was not in Rwanda to disarm the RGF [Hutu Army] or the [Hutu] militias and that if the RPF [Tutsi Army] made any attempt to come near the HPZ line, he would use all the means at his disposal to fight and defeat them. This kind of talk was exactly what the extremists wanted to hear from the French. It also made superb copy for the voracious media. RTLM [Hutu's Hate Radio] put the colonel's posturing to immediate use. Lafourcade had to rein Thibault in and, to his credit, he did, publicly rebuking his subordinate commander. He clarified Turquoise's [French Army's] position in an unequivocal media statement: "We will not permit any exactations in the HPZ against anybody and we will refuse the intrusion of any armed elements." He sent a letter to Kagame through me explaining the situation, and Kagame received it with usual skepticism. The question did remain: Which man best expressed Turquoise's underlying sympathies, Lafourcade or Thibault?
This was a political question that the new SRSG [Special Representative of Secretary General Boutros-Ghali] Shaharyar Khan, would have to deal with; he was due to arrive in Kigali on July 4. Khan had a reputation as a well-respected crisis manager; Maurice assured me he was competent and well-briefed, a hard worker who had put in serious time in such complicated places as Afghanistan. I looked forward to handing over the political and administrative functioning of the mission to him.
By first light on July 4, reports started to come in that the RGF [Hutu Army] had withdrawn from Kigali and made a clean break toward the west. (From the evidence we later found in and around their defensive positions, it looked like they had run out of ammunition). By morning prayers, the battle for Kigali was over and the city was unusually quiet.
We would devote most of the day to receiving the new SRSG. Khan flew to Entebbe and then on to the Rwandan border by helicopter. Dressed in a blue UN bullet-proof vest and surrounded by an impressive number of UNMOs and UN vehicles, he carried on to Kigali by road. He arrived around 1800 and was greeted by a Ghanaian honour guard at the stadium, while the roughly ten thousand persons still behind protective razor wire looked on with curious eyes. From our first handshake, he struck me as a leader to be relied upon. He did not blanch at the sight of his office-cum-bedroom in the Force HQ [at Amahoro Stadium], and he greeted everyone he met with warmth and sincerity. Over the coming weeks he dined with us on the usual terrible German rations, and experienced our ongoing privations and rationing. Khan was a man of ideas and initiative who rapidly put his imprint on the political team...
July 5 was the start of a new phase in the civil war and genocide. Kagame wanted to meet me as soon as possible, but I spent a good part of the morning briefing the SRSG and then taking him on an orientation tour of our sites in Kigali....
Kagame had moved his command post into a cottage inside Camp Kanombe, and after winning Kigali was trying his best to be magnanimous. He told me he now fully supported the total deployment of UNAMIR 2 to help move the French out of the HPZ; he promised that the airport would be opened in a few days; and he was ready to announce a unilateral ceasefire. If the RGF [Tutsi Army] didn't accept the ceasefire, Kagame vowed to push the fight to the Zaire border.
He informed me that he and his political advisers would soon be setting up a broad-based government founded on the Arusha framework -- with some modifications, of course. No one who had had any part in the genocide would be included, and despite the fact that the RPF was calling for a ceasefire, it would not enter into negotiations with the interim government [genocidal Hutu government]. The country, as he saw it, was now divided in three: the RPF [Tutsi Army] zone; the Turquoise [French Army] humanitarian zone, which UNAMIR 2 needed to monitor and then take over in order to evict the French as soon as possible; and in the northwest, the relatively small RGF [Hutu Army] zone, which he would have no scruples about attacking if the former regime's forces didn't lay down their weapons. There we had it, the victor's map.
I asked Kagame to wait until he could meet the new SRSG [Special Representative of Secretary General Boutros-Ghali] before going public with his plans so that UNAMIR could have time to react to the new circumstances, and he agreed.
I can only dream of what Shaharyar Khan might have done for Rwanda if he had been the one who had led the mission from the start. He had the valuable leadership trait of being able to anticipate. Two days into his mandate, he already understood that the most crucial issue facing us was the need for action in order to bring the refugees home. When he had his first meeting with Kagame, at the damaged VIP lounge of the airport on the morning of July 6 he quickly grasped the implications of the RPF's position -- we had to get to the interim government [genocidal Hutu government] and Bizimungu [Hutu Army Chief of Staff] as soon as possible because it was up to us to persuade them they should agree to the ceasefire....
Khan managed to set up his first meetings in Goma and Gisenyi for the next day, and took off with Tiko and a mixture of civilian staff and UNMOs by road to Kabale and then by helicopter to Zaire....
Lafourcade met Khan at the airport and gave him a short briefing on Turquoise [French Army]. A French escort accompanied Khan and his team across the border to the Meridian Hotel in Gisenyi, where they met with the interim government's [genocidal Hutu government] minister of foreign affairs, Jerome Bicamumpaka, whose job was clearly to size up this new player. To be effective, Khan had to persuade both sides of his complete neutrality. Over the next few days, he met the other major figures of the interim government [genocidal Hutu government] in Gisenyi, as well as Bizimungu, the head of the RGF [Hutu Army]. (The Gendarmerie's [Hutu Police] chief of staff, Ndindiliyimana, was nowhere to be found, and I was never to see him again.). The ministers were calling their flight to Gisenyi a strategic withdrawal rather than a rout, and while they ultimately agreed to the ceasefire, I suspected they were brokering deals with the local Zairean authorities (possibly even colluding with sympathetic senior French officers inside the camps) in order to retain their weapons and political structure, thus setting up to come back into Rwanda in force within a couple of years and start the war all over again.
The RPF [Tutsi Army] was certainly aware of the use to which its foes could put the refugee camps in Zaire and the Turquoise HPZ [Humanitarian Protection Zone]. On July 8, Frank Kamenzi asked if I would consider forwarding a letter from a new group, "les forces democratiques de changement," to the president of the Security Council. Though I didn't recognize the names of the signatories, the group was composed of moderate political leaders who claimed to represent the MDR, the PSD, the PDC and the PL parties. The letter expressed vehement opposition to the HPZ, which they described as a protection zone and escape route for criminals....
The RPF [Tutsi Army] stuck rigorously to their position that they would not deal with any people who had played a role, no matter how reluctantly, in the command structure of the old regime....
As the RPF [Tutsi Army] had moved in, Kigali had been nearly abandoned, save for the militia-populated communes in the poorest suburbs of the city. Now increasing numbers of displaced persons were starting to enter the city. Some were coming home but others seemed to be squatters....
July 12 began with a major political statement from the RPF [Tutsi Army], the "Declaration of the RPF for the Installation of the Formal Institutions of Government."....
Luc confirmed that, in all areas inside the HPZ [Humanitarian Protection Zone], the RGF [Hutu Army] were still moving about with their weapons. In only one of the three sub-zones of the HPZ were the militia unarmed. In another, they wore special bandanas and were assisting the French to maintain order. There were still roadblocks all over the place, generally manned by the Gendarmerie [Hutu Police]. The best estimate was that there were over two million people in the zone, two thirds of them internally displaced persons; of those, about 800,000 were already on the west side of the forest, though still a good distance away from Cyangugu. Tutsis were being held in large numbers in at least three sites. The French had three light battalions in the zone and were patrolling vigorously day and night.
I was to meet with General Bizimungu [Hutu Army Chief of Staff] in Goma at 1100 on the morning of July 16. I also wanted to touch base with the provincial governors of Goma and Bukavu districts to find out for myself what they planned to do about the refugees, and especially with the Rwandan [Hutu] military and militia in their midst. I was met at the airport by Lafourcade, who asked me to be discreet about how the meeting with Bizimungu had been arranged -- it might not look so good that the RGF [Hutu Army] chief was inside the French military camp....
After Gisenyi fell on July 17, RPF [Tutsi Army] artillery rounds began to land on the outskirts of Goma principally along the escape routes among the foothills of the volcanoes...
Ironically, the unilateral ceasefire -- another name for total RPF [Tutsi Army] victory -- was announced the next day, though there were no crowds cheering the peace in the streets of Kigali. I don't think anyone of us except the humanitarian gang felt much relief....They were happy that at last they would be able to deal with only one overall authority to coordinate emergency relief, and that the rebuilding of the nation's judicial, financial, medical, policing and government infrastructure could begin in earnest. And the atmosphere in the HQ eased a little. The fighting and the killing were officially over, but the exact nature of the horrors that were soon to afflict the Goma camps and the displaced people in the HPZ were waiting just around the corner.
On July 19, Khan and I set off to attend the official swearing-in of the new Broad-Based Government of National Unity at the CND....So I watched as the ceremonial necessities were undertaken with solemn decorum. Rwanda's new president, Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu who had been tortured by the Habyarimana regime, was sworn in, followed by the rest of the eighteen-member cabinet. Khan and I didn't understand a word, as all the speeches were in Kinyarwanda, but Bizimungu looked almost regal. Then Paul Kagame took his oath as vice-president and minister of defence, followed by two more Hutus: Faustin as prime minister and Colonel Alexis Kanyarengwe as vice-prime minister....
I met with Vice-President Kagame in his walled bungalow at Camp Kanombe the next afternoon to discuss the pressing issues that faced his newly-won country. He agreed to all my UNAMIR 2 deployments and to the force structure I envisioned, though both he and I recognized it would be tricky to achieve my tasks when the pace of UN deployment was still so slow. I also suggested that we move some of our forces into the Gisenyi area in order both to secure transient camps inside Rwanda for returnees and to be ready to go into Goma to help out. On stopping the outflow of displaced persons, Kagame agreed that there should be a major aid effort inside Rwanda, which could act as a magnet to draw people back into the country. He raised the idea of sending some of the new government ministers into the HPZ to start explaining to the populace what was going to happen and to encourage them not to flee to Bukavu.
He needed our help to repair the airport in order to persuade a commercial airline to start regular flights into Kigali. He wanted normalcy as fast as he could get it. He asked us to make every effort to meet the planned July 31 date for entry of formed units into the HPZ, and was adamant that the French leave by August 22; he wanted us to work with the French to set up the bureaucratic infrastructure in the HPZ before the handover in order to avoid creating a vacuum of civil authority. He wanted Canada to provide a technical mission to help reconstruct his army because of our reputation for being able to accomplish such tasks and the fact that our forces were bilingual. He had yet another delicate job he wanted me to undertake: could I persuade Turquoise [French Army] and the Zairean government to return all the heavy weapons and vehicles they had let into Zaire? I could hold onto them until things stabilized, he said, but he wanted them back. In the hands of his enemies they were a constant threat to Rwandan security. (That did not happen before I left).
In that two-hour meeting over soft drinks in his bungalow, we built a program for the next two to three months at least. All I needed was my troops and the promised resources. I reinforced with Kagame that I was receiving reports that starvation and disease were beginning to cut a swath through the refugee camps. There was not a moment to waste.
After the installation of the new government, we were in a race against time, which was nothing new to me because UNAMIR had always been running to catch up to the situation on the ground. The French were making noises about seeking the authority to stay past August 22. As the RPF caught wind of those noises, they began to up the pressure on UNAMIR to replace the French and get them out of Rwanda. Our logistics situation was still erratic: we periodically ran out of water or food or fuel, and we never seemed to have enough working vehicles, radios or equipment to do anything the way it should be done. In many areas, we were regressing, not progressing.
The situation in Goma was truly desperate. As the media converged to cover the refugee influx, world public opinion began to pressure governments to act. The NGOs, broken free from UNREO [Rwanda Emergency Office] now that camps were overflowing in Zaire, cast co-operation and coordination aside, followed the cameras to Goma and began what can only be described as over-aid. Meanwhile, a hundred kilometeres to the south, almost as many people still inside Rwanda were under-aided and there was little to no media coverage of that situation. Nothing we could say was able to shift any of the attention south.
New York still waffled on providing my minimum requirements. Except for national reconnaisance parties, UNAMIR 2 had still not deployed sixty days after mandate approval and thirty days past the deployment date. I got tired of asking where my troops were....
In Goma, on July 21, the United States began a massive and magnificent airlift of humanitarian aid that amazed any who saw it. Within three days of the presidential order authorizing the aid, the first U.S. planes were landing. In order to hasten food distribution, the Americans even tried bombarding areas with large loads of aid using low-flying transport aircraft, though they called a quick halt to this initiative as too many people on the ground were wounded by these enormous bundles of food....
The cholera epidemic now raging in Goma continued to be a bigger draw on the world's compassion than the starving displaced persons in the HPZ or the survivors trying to stitch back together a civil society in Kigali. I found myself in the disgusting position of mentally comparing magnitudews of horror: how could the world allow 3,000 deaths a day in Goma to overshadow the effects of the genocide inside Rwanda and let the toll on the 1.7 million people inside the HPZ go on unnoticed? (In the end, as I suspected, the cholera epidemic, which would kill about 40,000, did pale in comparison)....
Radio Rwanda, now in the hands of the new government, was broadcasting to the refugees in Goma, telling them to come back. Its announcers quoted a letter, dated July 19, from Boutros Boutros-Ghali that promised that the big UN agenices would assist the homeless and the have-nots. Boutros-Ghali also announced that he was calling for a UN inter-agency appeal for victims of the crisis in Rwanda, and that the head of the DHA [Department of Humanitarian Affairs], Peter Hansen, would chair a conference on August 2 in Geneva to bring about a coordinated response from all donors. But first Hansen would have to head to Rwanda to do his personal assessment on the ground.... He and Khan visited the president and other members of the new government, and then toured the camps in Goma and Bukavu (but not the displaced persons camps inside the HPZ).
By this point Lafourcade's support troops [French Army], stationed principally at the Goma airport, were totally overwhelmed, even paralyzed by the scenes [of hundreds of bodies littering the roads...and a pile of bodies in front of the hospital at least twenty feet high...]. Lafourcade [French Army] had come into the country heavy with combat assets and light on the tools of humanitarian relief. Frozen in its tracks by the spread of cholera and by the knowledge of health risks its troops would be exposed to due to the high infection rate of HIV/AIDS among Rwandans, Turquoise remained limited....
UNAMIR 2 was still engaged in a scramble for resources and equipment....What really began to wear us down was the constant raising and then dashing of hopes...watching the world support Turquoise [the French Army]....
Reality struck again at morning prayers with a report from our liaison officer in Goma. Some refugees trickling back into Rwanda in order to escape the hellhole of their disease-infested camps had been attacked by extremists [genocidal Hutu ex-government]. A few were killed but most were mutilated and returned to the camps to serve as examples -- the favoured punishment was using a machete to chop the Achilles tendon, which prevented the victim from walking. The news sent me spinning into a tirade against every nation and body who could have assisted us in preventing this, most especially Turquoise [French Army]. My ranting was beyond the bounds of decorum, and rendered my own staff and the French liaison officers noticeably ill at ease....
As August began -- the fifth month of this grotesque exercise in human destruction and paralysis -- we got a report from Goma that Lafourcade was moving troops out of the HPZ faster than we had planned for. The French were now having clashes with the Interahamwe as well as struggling with all the humanitarian challenges, and things were still tense between them and the RPF [Tutsi Army]. At the same time the prime minister of France announced that the peacekeeprs of Turquoise should stay on even after we had taken over all of the HPZ. Who was calling the shots?
The French prime minister's visit to Goma and Rwanda on July 31 had been an ill-timed comedy of errors. He had invited both Pasteur Bizimungu and me to come see him in Cyangugu at such short notice and with such a lack of respect for the new political reality of Rwanda that neither of us felt in the least compelled to accept. Bernard Kouchner, who was now a deputy of the European Union, had been in and out of Kigali recently and had gone public to criticise his homeland's [France's] heavyhanded disdain for the new Rwandan government....
The original U.S. assessment for UNAMIR 1, which the Americans commmitted to pay to the UN but never did, would have been no more than $30 million. The cost of UNAMIR 2 would have been only slightly more. By deciding to support the refugee camps in Goma, the U.S. paid ten times that amount -- $300 million -- over the following two years. If we reduce to the petty grounds of cost effectiveness the entire argument over whether the U.S. should have supported the United Nations in Rwanda, the United States government could have saved a lot of money by backing UNAMIR, and 800,000 lives...
I informed Maurice [Baril] on the night of August 3 that I needed to be relieved of my command sooner than planned....
I was invited to have lunch with Kagame on August 18 in his new home in Kigali where he was living with his wife and children. It was a bit more formal than we had been used to, the conversation was light, and the menu actually included meat. All in all, it was a pleasant two hours. Kagame wished me well and thanked me very kindly. He said that he hoped I would return to Rwanda someday.
I do hope to return to Rwanda very soon, after I have finished my duties as the UNAMIR force commander by testifying for the prosecution at the International Tribunal on the Rwandan Genocide in Arusha, Tanzania, in the spring of 2004. The place where the Arusha Peace Agreement was signed -- the very same building in fact -- is now the place where the tribunal meets to deliver justice to the extremists who destroyed the agreement....
I left Africa on August 20, 1994, nearly a year to the day from when I had first arrived in Rwanda, full of hopes for a mission that would secure lasting peace for a country that once had been a tiny paradise on earth.
6. AMAHORO CELEBRATIONS PRELUDE and 7. RWANDA LIBERATION DAY 2006
Jackie Jura
~ an independent researcher monitoring local, national and international events ~
email: orwelltoday@gmail.com
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