Shake Hands With the Devil

A few days ago, I finished reading Romeo Dallaire's Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. This comes on the heels of having read Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families also about the genocide in Rwanda during 1994. Although about the same topic, they approach it in different ways. Gourevitch is a journalist who visited Rwanda after the genocide and collected stories of what transpired. Dallaire was a Canadian general who was the Force Commander of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Rwanda and was on the ground during the genocide. And, although their explanations of the genocide intersect, Gourevitch is concerned with how people imagine one another and how these perceptions led to the atrocities; Dallaire, on the other hand, looks more at the international community and how nations played realpolitik games. Sort of like comparing The Longest Day to The Big Red One.

Shake Hands With the Devil is a rather thick tome but it was a swift read. It was, in all honesty, one of the most intense reads I've had in a while. (The last being the opening of Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies describing the events happening inside the White House on 9/11.) We Wish to Inform You… is a reflection while Dallaire wrote almost a day-by-day account. The first couple chapters are about Dallaire himself. He describes his parents and his childhood followed by a brief look back at his military career prior to being deployed to Rwanda. Although I knew next to nothing about Canada when I began reading, I was hardly surprised to hear about the discrimination he faced both in society and in the military by virtue of being a francophone. While his trials & tribulations pale when contrasted to the fate of the Rwandans, it does serve as a gentle reminder that perhaps some of the same general cultural attitudes prevail in his homeland just as they did across the Atlantic.

Dallaire was leading what is known as a Chapter 6 mission. He and the other U.N. peacekeepers were to don their blue helmets and help the signatories to the Arusha Peace Agreement of August 1993 form a new government in Rwanda and protect civilians when necessary. The peacekeepers were to maintain strict neutrality and fire only when fired upon themselves. Dallaire first went to Rwanda shortly after the peace agreement was signed to size-up the situation. The UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda) would return in October with Dallaire as Force Commander. The situation was understandably tense and complicated. There were several factions competing for a spot at the table. There was President Juvenal Habyarimana; Agathe Uwilinggiyimana and Faustin Twagiramungu were the heads of the interim government; Paul Kagame was the leader of the RPF – Rwandan Patriotic Front – who fought against the Habyarimana government; Colonel Théoneste Bagosora – a Hutu extremist who was Minister of Defense for the RGF or Rwandese Government Forces; and there were yet others in Habyarimana's party, the MRND (Mouvement révolutionnaire national pour le développement), such as Augustin Bizimana, another Minister of Defense. It was difficult to keep up with all these figureheads and the subterfuges of their respective groups but, after 500+ pages, I knew who was who by repetition.

On the other hand, U.N. protocols and the day-to-day workings of a U.N. peacekeeping mission are just as labyrinthine. I figured such a mission would be a headache to coordinate but Dallaire pulls no punches in describing just what a massive logistics problem it is to get together even such a comparatively small venture such as the one he led. (The contrast between the conniving of the Rwandan leaders and the massive bureaucracy of the U.N. is sadly laughable.) Dallaire led a force of Ghanaian, Bangladeshi, and Belgian soldiers plus military advisors from various other countries. They were stationed in Rwanda's Capital, Kigali. While he led the military side of things, the head of the political/diplomatic side was Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, a Cameroonian diplomat. He was also the overall leader of the peacekeeping mission. There are tons of characters to be had amongst the mission's members. Per Hallqvist was the chief administration officer and, if the book is any indication, he was a glorified supply clerk; Colonel Isoa "Tiko" Tikoka, a military observer from Fiji who never once abandoned the civilians under his care; shit, I could go on and on but that would be pointless.

The crash of Habyarimana's plane and the beginning of the genocide doesn't occur until nearly halfway through the book. Until this point, the book is half jockeying for position on the part of the various Rwandan groups and half comedy of errors on the part of the U.N. Dallaire had to contend with the leaders of political factions whose leaders, when he met them, were usually hiding something. In addition, he had to contend with the absurd such as when a plane landed at the Kigali airport full of arms.

Later that day, one of the [military observer] teams at the airport searched an unscheduled flight of a DC8 cargo plane into Kigali and found the aircraft to be loaded with tons of artillery and mortar ammunitions. The paperwork on the plane – registration, ownership, insurance, manifest – mentioned companies in France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Egypt, and Ghana. Most of the nations on the list had troops in UNAMIR.

One of things that amazed me was just how much paperwork Dallaire and his team had to create. It seemed like half of the time he spent there was used up writing and/or helping author reports for the U.N. folks in New York. It's even more amazing considering the fights he had to put up in order to get office supplies. When you think of U.N. peacekeeping missions, you don't tend to think about office supplies, do you? Hallqvist was rather ineffective as supply guy. Not only did he struggle to get needed supplies, but when they arrived, he was not always the best allocator of resources. When SUVs arrived, Hallqvist seemed to give preference to civilians. Some of them wasted precious fuel going sight-seeing in the Volcano National Park. Troops arrived to find no kitchens, no food, and no housing. The Bangladeshi troops arrived with nothing but the clothes on their backs and weapons despite being told to come equipped with more. The Belgian troops arrived well-equipped but demanded that they be quartered in buildings instead of tents. Why? Well, it wasn't a practical reason but instead because of national pride.

The book moves along at a brisk pace because Dallaire himself was constantly going someplace. When he wasn't putting out a fire here or there, he was meeting with the political leaders to arrange meetings, push for compromise, and to simply jumpstart the process of putting a government together for Rwanda. But it was difficult to get these people to listen. It was also difficult to get the U.N. to listen.

In early January, Dallaire was told of an informant in the MRND party. The man, whom they nicknamed Jean-Pierre, described how he was training the interhamwe or gangs of Hutu extremist youth. He was giving them military training and was ordered to have them draw up lists of Tutsis in their communities. Jean-Pierre ordered them to wait for the call. In addition to machetes and spears, they also had caches of AK-47s. These gangs had been taunting and trying to provoke the Belgian soldiers. The thinking was that, if they could get the Belgians to shoot, this would justify attacking them. And any casualties on the part of the Belgians would get them to withdraw all of their troops – the best trained of the lot - from Rwanda. Jean-Pierre demonstrated his authenticity and Dallaire relayed this info to his superiors at the U.N. along with his desire to seek out the arms caches. The reply from Kofi Annan, the Undersecretary-General at the time, scolded Dallaire for even thinking about raiding the weapons caches and for him to report the intelligence he had gained to President Habyarimana. It was Habyarimana's people who were training the gangs so what was the point of informing him? As the spring lumbered on, the Rwandan media spewed invective after invective against the Tutsis, the political parties could not compromise or come to any kind of agreement, and there were small numbers of civilians being killed. Then on April 6th, President Habyarimana's plane was shot down and the genocide began.

For a long time I completely wiped the death masks of raped an sexually mutilated girls and women from my mind as if what had been done to them was the last thing that would send me over the edge.

But if you looked, you could see the evidence, even in the whitened skeletons. The legs bent and apart. A broken bottle, a rough branch, even a knife between them. Where the bodies were fresh, we saw what must have been semen pooled on and near the dead women and girls. There was always a lot of blood. Some male corpses had their genitals cut off, but many women and young girls had their breasts chopped off and their genitals crudely cut apart. They died in a position of total vulnerability, flat on their backs with their legs bent and knees wide apart. It was the expressions on their dead faces that assaulted me the most, a frieze of shock, pain, and humiliation.

I don't want to litter this entry with descriptions of the genocide. I included a few in my post about Gourevitch's book already and the 300 or so pages that Dallaire gives to the 100 days of slaughter isn't a gorefest. To be sure, there's plenty of that, but it's mostly an account of his quotidian routine in the face of hell. The peacekeepers were eating dreadfully old canned food from Germany; certain members fell victim to malaria; and there was a shitload of running around. Dallaire, when not eating food on the verge of spoiling or finding that he couldn't sleep, was constantly shuffling off to talk with the Rwandan political leaders urging them to get to the table and talk as well as to call off their militias who were decimating the Tutsi population and killing moderate Hutus as well. In addition, he pleaded with the U.N. to supply him and to send more forces to regain a peace. The major countries of the world hemmed & hawed, unwilling to repeat the events of Somalia. The United States and France were particularly good at stalling further action. The military observers were out in the countryside, well, observing events and reporting back to Dallaire. As thousands upon thousands of innocents were being killed, Dallaire and the peacekeepers were able to grab a dozen people here or a hundred there and bring them under U.N. protection. Military observers also positioned themselves with groups of civilians attempting to hide from their would-be killers. In one instance, a couple observers were in a church when Hutu extremists barged in. At gunpoint, the observers were forced to watch the people huddled in the church for safety hacked apart with machetes. There was also a story involving an injured observer being rushed to a hospital in Kigali from outside the city. As the ambulance is barreling along the road, it gets a flat tire out in the middle of no man's land. I cringed reading how the guys got out of the cab and changed the tire in record time as they knew that they were helpless and could be attacked any second.

If you were to take out the gruesome parts from the book, you'd be left with a text that is about a small group of people desperate to help others running into bureaucratic nightmares. Imagine Brazil taking place in Africa. Check this part out where Dallaire takes apart Clinton's lie:

The last set of surprises: the U.S. "has taken a leading role in efforts to protect the Rwandan people and ensure humanitarian assistance...[It has] provided $9 million in relief, flown about 100 Defense Department missions…strongly supported an expanding UNAMIR, air-lifting 50 armored personnel carriers to Kampala..[and is] equipping the UN's Ghanaian peacekeeping battalion."

Clinton's fibbing dumbfounded me. The DPKO was still fighting with the Pentagon for military cargo planes to move matériel. The Pentagon had actually refused to equip the Ghanaians as they felt the bill was too high and that Ghana was trying to gouge them. And who exactly got the $9 million?

Dallaire received dozens of requests from the U.N. to conduct search and rescue missions – for white people. Countries would ask that they find tourists, diplomats, priests, etc. and ensure that they were sent home safe & sound. These same countries turned their backs on the colored people of Rwanda.

The book is filled with countless stories and I cannot even begin to scratch the surface. There are stories of the horrors of civil war & genocide; stories of bureaucratic nightmares; the odd hopeful tale; and the minutiae of sitting around in the dark trying to sleep, measuring craters to determine the ordinance used and from what direction it came, etc. Gourevitch looked at the genocide and the big picture while Dallaire describes being on the ground in the shitstorm.

By July of 1994, Dallaire had lost it – shell shock or post-traumatic stress disorder or whatever you call it. He was shipped home. But he struggled with his memories until reaching his nadir a few years later. He eventually got treatment and was finally able to write his book. I hope Dallaire doesn't go on the Net much because I wouldn't want him to find my mess of a blog post about his fantastic book. I urge folks to read it. Yeah, it's blatant depressing and frustrating, but it is extremely engaging and insightful. Your heart will stop at certain points when your incredulity fails.