Interventions (7 page)

In our analysis at the time, UNAMIR seemed to exhibit none of the risks that had caused the disaster in Somalia and the continuing problems in Bosnia. A three-year civil war had ceased and a full peace deal had been agreed to. Unlike in recent controversial operations, the force would not be deploying to an environment where there was no peace to keep. The peacekeeping operation was part of the Arusha Accords and so would exist with the full consent of the parties to the conflict. Furthermore, the operation was deployed as a Chapter VI mission, without any powers or agenda for peace enforcement. Finally, the operation was launched under the explicit provision that its existence and continuation was entirely dependent upon the ongoing commitment of the RPF and the Habyarimana-led government to the Arusha Accords. Any collapse in the agreement would mean the termination of the operation—and this was seen as a sensible caveat that would protect the mission from any messy entanglements in a civil war, as was then causing the problems in Somalia and Bosnia.

We were aware of a history of ethnic violence in Rwanda, and the fact that there had been major ethnic killings in neighboring Burundi, too, but we did not translate this into any serious fear for a collapse in Rwanda. Unlike in Burundi, the parties had accepted a UN role in sustaining a peace agreement. From a traditional peacekeeping operations perspective, Rwanda seemed much safer ground for involvement than other missions of that time.

We were not alone in our optimism. The international development community had been engaged for years in Rwanda, and right up to March 1994, reports were still being written by leading development organizations that praised Rwanda as an unusual success story. But the international community had a thin appreciation of Rwanda's society and history and the forces at play there. As one CIA officer later admitted, when he was assigned to Rwanda in 1990, his first task was to locate the country on a map. At DPKO, we certainly had no genuine, deep expertise on the country. Handed to us by the Security Council were over a dozen operations that we now had to manage worldwide with a tiny DPKO staff. A limited knowledge of the countries in which our operations were taking place had simply become a necessary way of life at DPKO.

Even for the tightly limited tasks of UNAMIR, mandated to conduct traditional peacekeeping and oversee only a cease-fire, the deployment got off to a bad start. By late December 1993, the capabilities of the force were totally inadequate. A report from UNAMIR on December 30 outlined its severe deficiencies. No country had been willing to supply a self-contained, 800-man infantry battalion, which had been considered essential for securing the Kigali area. Instead, they had to use two smaller infantry battalions, one from Belgium, consisting of 398 men, and one from Bangladesh, which was supposed to consist of 370 men of which only 266 had arrived. The lack of any armored personnel carriers or helicopters also meant, the report stressed, the “absence of this deterrent capability and the lack of a mobile reserve force not only for Kigali, but also for the demilitarized zone, which was forecast as a critical requirement in the Secretary-General's report.” Among an extensive list of other problems with the force, the report stated that engineers and logisticians were being reassigned as infantry due to the severe shortfall in the number of troops.

UNAMIR was meant to receive twenty-two armored personnel carriers and eight helicopters to enable some flexibility in its response capability. But no country was willing to provide any helicopters, and only eight armored personnel carriers could eventually be sourced for the force, which were cannibalized from the UN mission in Mozambique. The vehicles finally arrived but they were dilapidated, and only five were serviceable; some of these often broke down and had to be towed by the remaining armored personnel carriers. Such humiliating exhibitions of the force's lack of capacity often occurred in Kigali and in full view of Rwandan government forces. Years later, Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda and leader of the RPF, would tell me that it was clear to him at the time that Dallaire did not have the necessary means to carry out his mission, and that he did not even trust Daillaire's ability to protect him when he made official visits to the UN field headquarters.

It was in this context—less than two weeks after the damning December UNAMIR report on the military incapacity of the operation—that we received the January 11, 1994, cable from Dallaire informing us of the tense situation on the ground and his plan to raid an arms cache. My deputy, Iqbal Riza, received it and sent the response to the SRSG in Rwanda, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, as was the proper chain of communication, telling him to curtail any plan to raid. It stated that we could not agree to his planned raid, stressing the overriding consideration being “the need to avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated repercussions.”

Our greatest fear at that moment, given the precarious position of UN peacekeeping at the time, was for another military disaster to befall a peacekeeping operation leading to significant casualties. In Dallaire's cabled request to raid, we saw the ingredients of a disaster akin to the failed raid on Aidid in Mogadishu three months earlier—but with a force that was a thousand times weaker in military capabilities and entirely isolated from any possibility of reinforcement. In Dallaire's plan there lay the potential for a scenario that, for the peacekeeping force, could have proved even worse than the events in Somalia. In a remote country surrounded by two armies made up of tens of thousands of potentially hostile and well-armed soldiers, with no contingency for the deployment of additional, robust fighting troops or any standby force, I believed such a raid would set them up for a confrontation they would not be able to deal with. It could have led to not just a few dozen peacekeepers exposed, as had happened in Somalia, but hundreds, perhaps even the entire force of 2,165.

What is more, in the post-Somalia international climate, there was no appetite in the international community for taking even the slightest risks with the lives of peacekeepers, certainly not in the United States. A small-scale encounter with only a few casualties would have set off a withdrawal by the Security Council and the collapse of yet another peacekeeping mission, perhaps triggering the collapse of the entire peace process.

With the information we had then, it was impossible to countenance the raid. Later, in April, when ten Belgian troops were captured, as predicted by Dallaire's informant, Dallaire at that time was in a car on the way to meet leading members of the government's armed forces. He passed a compound where he saw two of the Belgian peacekeeping troops being held and beaten. This was the first he knew of their capture, and he realized then, he would explain later, that he could do nothing to save them other than engage in negotiations. “At that moment I was already saying: ‘I just can't get those guys out of there. I just don't have the forces,'” he would recount. He considered a rescue option irresponsible due to the risk to his other troops, and it was this same overriding consideration that dictated our response to his January 11 request.

Dallaire's cable also warned of a potential trap. Even if it had not, we would seriously have considered this possibility. There were always parties with an interest in manipulating peacekeeping forces. The supply of false information was a common feature of missions to conflict zones. There was a delicate balance in the Arusha peace process, and this intelligence had come out of the blue from an isolated source. There was the real risk that it could have been planted by elements from either side precisely to trigger the offensive action envisaged by Dallaire and so set a course of events that would restart the war.

Furthermore, if we had agreed with the plan to raid, it would have had to have gone to the secretary-general and the Security Council to be authorized. All cable traffic from force commanders was automatically copied to over a dozen people, both among senior staff in DPKO and the secretary-general's office. Given its contents, the cable certainly caused a stir in DPKO and in the office of the secretary-general, but there was no dissent to our response. The reason for this was clear to all: there was no appetite whatsoever in the Security Council to even consider the use of force in a peacekeeping mission—as it had been made clear to us repeatedly in the weeks and months earlier.

The atmosphere in the Security Council was grim, and its attitude regarding any initiatives from the Secretariat, whom the United States was publicly blaming for recent failures in Somalia, was skeptical at best. Any recommendations contrary to the attitudes of the Security Council were met with a mix of derision and anger at that time. In one instance, for example, Maurice Baril, the senior military advisor at DPKO, in a rare opportunity for anyone other than Gharekhan to meet the Security Council, joined me to brief the Council with a military analysis of the plan to set up “safe areas” in Bosnia, which he explained were subject to severe deficiencies under current conditions. Maurice said he felt as if he was being “skinned alive” by U.S. ambassador Albright and UK ambassador David Hannay for implying that he might know better than the Council's members about the conditions necessary for a successful peacekeeping operation. The attitude was very much one of “who do you think you are to come here and lecture us?” and they made sure they punished Maurice verbally for it.

Within these constraints, we sent our response to Dallaire's request. But we still took his warning seriously. In our cable we instructed him to implement an alternative, diplomatic course of action that seemed to have the best chance of preempting any plan to carry out a massacre in Kigali. To add further pressure on President Habyarimana, we also said to Dallaire:

on the assumption that you are convinced that the information provided by the informant is absolutely reliable . . . you should advise the President that, if any violence occurs in Kigali, you would have to immediately bring to the attention of the Security Council the information you have received on the activities of the militia, undertake investigations to determine who is responsible and make appropriate recommendations to the Security Council.

Our tactic here was to try to create the impression that the president was on notice from powerful forces in the world—from the most militarily active foreign nations on the ground in Rwanda to the UN itself—that could bring serious repercussions upon him if he was complicit in any violence.

On the day after we sent our cable, on January 12, 1994, the UN special representative Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh and General Dallaire met with the ambassadors of those three countries as instructed by us, in response to which the ambassadors said they would inform their capitals and coordinate strategy. There was the later claim that members of the Security Council were unaware of the warning conveyed by Dallaire's informant. Given that permanent Council members, particularly the United States and France, had far more advanced and established intelligence-gathering capabilities in Rwanda than UNAMIR, this could not have been true.

On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying President Habyarimana of Rwanda and President Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi was shot down while carrying its passengers from negotiations in Tanzania, just as it was nearing its destination at Kigali Airport. All passengers were killed. Immediately following this, violence initiated by government Hutu forces erupted in Kigali. The day after the assassinations, ten Belgian paratroopers who were part of UNAMIR and assigned to protect the prime minister of Rwanda were captured by government troops. Radioing for instructions from their commander, Colonel Luc Marchal, they were told to lay down their weapons and not engage in combat. The prime minister was then murdered, and soon after the ten Belgian paratroopers were killed and their bodies mutilated.

Our fears from January were now being confirmed—troop contributors looked likely to withdraw, with the mission set to collapse, and there were now massacres occurring in Kigali. But over the coming days, reports came in of something Dallaire had not warned us about. The violence and massacres were clearly spreading beyond the capital. Civilians were being killed in the open by government troops, militia groups, and bands of civilians under the direction of local commanders and state officials, mostly with agricultural tools, and at a rate and intensity none of us had ever heard of before.

A senior Rwandan official later said of the plan to kill the Belgian peacekeepers that “we watch CNN too, you know.” He was referring to the lesson that they had garnered from Somalia the year before: that the death of just a few foreign peacekeepers would be enough to end the appetite for intervention and allow them to get on with their murderous plans. They were right. Five days after the grisly killing of its soldiers, the Belgian government announced that it would withdraw its troops—the core fighting capability of UNAMIR—from Rwanda immediately.

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T
he first instructions to come from the Security Council on April 8 were for UNAMIR to do everything it could to facilitate an agreement that would reestablish a cease-fire. On the ground, meanwhile, the UNAMIR force was in no way equipped to intervene in any meaningful way without seriously jeopardizing the lives of all its troops. On April 15, Dallaire said to a
New York Times
journalist: “We have been sitting now eight or nine days in our trenches. The question is how long do you sit there or attempt to get it settled? Ours is not a peace enforcement mission . . . If we don't see any light at the end of the tunnel, if we see another three weeks of being cooped up watching them pound each other then we have to seriously assess the risk of keeping these soldiers here.” Dallaire took full responsibility for protecting his troops and did his duty for them. But when the time came to draw down and leave Rwanda, as he was expected to do, he himself decided to stay. He remained for a further three months, and very much in harm's way, with a tiny contingent of Ghanaian and Tunisian peacekeepers to save what Rwandan civilians they could.