4. SEEN FROM AFAR

Soon after my return home I had a premonition that by November Kivu Province would be unsuitable territory for a granny-trek. Even during my visit there were, as I have recorded, ‘noises off’ … Then, five days after I left Bukavu, a convoy bringing food to the Goma camps was ambushed near the Gisenyi border-crossing and thirteen Zaireans were killed. Next day a thousand Zairean Tutsi (from communities settled in Kivu for generations) assembled at Mokoto monastery in the Masisi region and were attacked by Hutu militia. Many – the number is of course disputed – were killed.

On 19 May Le Monde reported that in Northern Kivu local tribes (the Hunde, Nyanga and Nande) had formed their own militia in response to what they saw, naturally enough, as a ‘foreign invasion’. They were observed fighting with the Hutu militia in the Rutshiro region along the border with Rwanda – the are I had been planning to trek through, entering from Uganda.

At the end of June, Ron Redmond of the UNHCR admitted that ‘Rwandan extremists have been involved in the ethnic cleansing of Tutsi in the Masisi region’. When he went on to complain that ‘The UNHCR has this year received less than half the funds needed for the refugees’ I thought – ‘Jolly good thing too!’ Then he announced ‘a search for some new options. We are considering re-locating 1.7 million refugees further into the interior of Zaire where they might be able to grow food and be at least partially self-sufficient.’ But why, I wondered, did Mr Redmond expect the tribes of the interior to be more welcoming than the Hunde, Nyanga and Nande when 1.7 million Hutu began to cultivate their land?

During September, Rachel, Andrew and Rose were home on leave. On 26 September we noted but refused to seem concerned by a statement from the US State Department: ‘The United States deplores the recent exchange of fire between Zairean and Rwandan armed forces along their common border near Bukavu and calls upon both parties to defuse the situation. The United States also condemns the persecution of the Banyamulenge who live in the area around Bukavu.’

Andrew returned to Bukavu a week ahead of Rachel and Rose; they had to wait in London for some infant booster inoculation that could only be given on a certain date. That was a providential delay. Only days before they were to have departed from Heathrow, Laurent Kibila’s troops (then known as the Banyamulenge) invaded Kivu Province at Uvira, some forty-eight miles from Bukavu on the northern shore of Lake Tanganyika. Rachel stiffened her upper lip and admitted that she had been wondering, since 26 September, if the RAR unit would ever again be able to relax happily on the patio facing Rwanda.

I stayed on with Rachel and Rose in their London flat. Daily we bought all the newspapers and avidly read their confused reports about what was happening – might be happening – could happen … Nightly we listened to the World Service which on the whole made more sense. Regularly we received UN press briefings on the situation. Every few days Andrew – gallantly risking bankruptcy – used his satellite ’phone briefly, to reassure Rachel. Meanwhile Rose scampered ebulliently around the flat not giving a damn whether Daddy was dead or alive. From the age of ten months and three weeks she had been not merely toddling but walking briskly.

On 22 October all fifty-eight ex-pat aid workers were flown out of Uvira having endured quite an ordeal. Twice the Banyamulenge had prevented their departure by the simple expedient of forcing hundreds of locals to sit on the airstrip. Now the UNHCR was tending towards panic. Within the previous few days about 220,000 refugees had fled from the camps around Uvira, leaving them empty. Some were hiding in banana groves on the nearby hills, most were on the way to Bukavu where 10,000 had already arrived and were squatting on the outskirts. Simultaneously, 194,000 had begun to trek south from the Goma camps. (All UNHCR figures to be taken with a few grains of salt.) These mass movements were prompted by hunger as well as fear; for weeks it had been virtually impossible to get food supplies into Kivu Province.

On 25 October Chris McGreal reported in The Guardian:

Tutsi fighters were bearing down on the panic-stricken city of Bukavu last night as government troops continued to flee from a powerful week-long offensive. The rapid advance of the Banyamulenge raised the spectre of conflict consuming the whole of Eastern Zaire as Kinshasa threw in more troops and accused Rwanda of invading … Tutsi fighters have taken at least three towns in recent days and are reported to be within ten miles of Bukavu. Zaire’s army said it was bringing in heavy weapons to defend the city. Planeloads of troops have already arrived.

Rachel chewed her nails and said nothing. Neither of us slept well. And in Bukavu Andrew didn’t sleep at all because – as we learned much later – he spent that night, and the next, under tables and beds with Pascal’s family while shells fell all around them. One of his office askaris was killed on the second night. Then he was air-lifted out to Nairobi with all the other ex-pats. (All except the resident missionaries who are differently motivated and rarely leave ‘their people’.)

Suddenly Bukavu was in the news – a place most people had never heard of before. For a few days it got first mention of R4 news bulletins; front page headlines, half-page photographs and sketch-plans of the area showing the refugees’ routes as they stampeded every which way. The swift advance of the Banyamulenge was not really so astonishing given the support they received from the Kivu folk and the degeneracy of the Zairean troops who mostly ran away, looting and raping as they went, before the Banyamulenge arrived. The most serious fighting took place, soon after the capture of Bukavu, around Goma. We deduced that was Banyamulenge versus Hutu militia but by then all journalists had been banished from the province so there was nobody around to confirm our deduction.

Quite apart from Andrew-anxiety, that was a stressful time. Human nature being as it is, we became more emotionally involved than if all this suffering had been happening in some unfamiliar region. Rachel’s flat is blissfully TV-free but the newspaper photographs were harrowing enough to inspire nightmares.

On 28 October Zaire suspended all commercial flights to Kivu Province. Next day Bukavu was heavily shelled, an RPA commando openly crossed the border from Cyangugu and remnants of the Zairean army looted NGO offices, beat up their local staffs and ‘requisitioned’ their vehicles – in which they then deserted the battlefield. That evening the Jesuit Archbishop of Bukavu, Christophe Munzi Hirwa, was murdered in an ambush not far from No. 19. A few days previously he had written to the UN Mission in Bukavu absurdly accusing Rwanda of using the Banyamulenge ‘to seize power in Zaire’.

International reactions to events in Eastern Zaire came to verge on the hysterical. One headline proclaimed ‘Catastrophe Could Reshape a Continent’ and come commentators even wrote frenziedly about ‘global destabilization’. Soon representatives of the UN, EU, OAU, accompanied or followed by senior politicians, military men and NGO Directors, were rushing around in circles – from New York to Arusha to Geneva to Kinshasa to Brussels to Nairobi to Stuttgart to Kigali and back again. There was much talk about sending in a UN military intervention force and we ground our teeth when the Canadian leader of this as yet theoretical force emphasised that its objective would be ‘strictly humanitarian, it would be politically and militarily neutral’. This international community’s dithering and squabbling about the force’s ‘mandate’ would have been comic were it not a repeat performance of their 1994 ??????? inaction which ad such tragic results.

When we thought Andrew was safe in Nairobi, the Irish Times disillusioned us; it quoted him reporting on how things were looking in the interior of Zaire which he had been frying over, very low, in some tiny plane.

During those trying times, Rose was the cheering factor. I became fascinated by the one-sided verbal communication already possible; toddlers seem to acquire a considerable vocabulary long before they can use it. When I handed Rose an empty beer-can and said, ‘Please put it in the bin’ she trotted off to the kitchen, down four steps, and put it in the bin. When Rachel said, ‘Please being a nappy’ she trotted into her room and returned with a nappy. Is this why many toddlers go through a stroppy phase? To be able to understand so much but express nothing in words must be extremely frustrating.

When Kabila publicized his plan to ‘overthrow the regime in Kinshasa and all it stand for’ most commentators scoffed – then we were puzzled by his declaring a three-week unilateral cease-fire on 3 November.

During the following week the Rwandan government chose ten NGOs, out of the 200 or so then competing in Rwanda, and authorised them to provide food and medical care in the Banyamulenge-held areas of Kivu near the Rwandan border. Thus were the refugees encouraged to overcome two fears: of Kibila’s mainly Tutsi troops returning and of returning home. At a meeting in Kigali on 9 November, between Rwandan government officials and the chosen NGOs, the Rwandans made it plain that they then had only one thing on their minds: the return home of the dispersed and disorganised refugees before a ‘neutral’ UN force enabled the ex-FAR and Interahamwe to recover their human shield with the setting up of new camps. When EU political and humanitarian representatives invited themselves to attend this meeting they were refused admission, despite their indignantly pointing out that the EU provides most of the region’s relief and development money. A Rwandan explained bluntly that repeated EU demands for a UN military intervention disqualified the Europeans from participating in the new Rwandan plan.

Because Mobutu fully supported the Hutu militia, Kinshasa rejected Kigali’s home-grown solution to one of Rwanda’s major problems. Therefore no UN agency accompanied those ten courageous NGOs across the border into sovereign Zairean territory. The UN diplomatic niceties usually seem more important than human lives. However, on 13 November Dr Boutros-Ghali created a precedent by sanctioning the movement of UN agencies into Zaire in defiance of the government. It seemed some furniture was being shifted behind the scenes of the international community.

Happily, Andrew was back in Nairobi (evacuated again) by 10 November, in time to ring a rather forlorn Rachel on Rose’s first birthday. Most of the displaced aid workers from Kivu were stuck in Nairobi for weeks, living in expensive hotels and occasionally attending futile meetings called by the UNHCR. No NGO would risk their staff being absent should some unexpected media-attracting development arise – as one did, in mid-November, by which time I was at home in Ireland.

The government’s plan had worked and suddenly most refugees were moving in the right direction. Journalists who for weeks had been dwelling on the pitiable plight of the starving fleeing hordes now marvelled at the stamina of those 700,000 (or so) returnees as they sturdily trekked home carrying their possessions. In the Irish Times Mark Brennor reported from Gisenyi: ‘Aid workers had waited in dread for this day, fearing that they would be faced with diseased emaciated people. Word of the scale of the movement had spread on their radio network during the morning. Several hundred raced to the scene and what they saw was extraordinarily uplifting. People looked well and said they were happy to be coming home. It was like a miracle, a peaceful return of healthy refugees …’

On 19 November ‘confidential’ documents were found in a broken-down bus near on of ex-FAR’s abandoned Goma bases. These revealed that a British company, trading as Mil-Tec Corporation, had supplied the genocidal government with £3.3 million worth of mortar bombs, grenades, rifles and bullets between April and July 1994. The shipment went to Goma via Albania and Israel, with Zairean end-user certificates, and began on 17 April – ten days after the start of the slaughtering. According to British officials, these shipments broke no British law (though some broke the UN 17 May embargo) because they did not travel through British territory. A recent letter from Mil-Tec to the exiled ex-Minister of Defence requested the payment of debts totalling US$1,962,375 and included invoices and bills for air-freight. It concluded, ‘We have supplied your ministry for more than five years … You will realise that we have gone out of our way to assist your ministry in times of need.’ It soothes me to think of Mil-Tec losing US$1,962,375.

On 27 November the UN’s press briefing contained an uncommonly meaty exchange when Sylvana Foa, who then spoke daily to the world press on behalf of the Secretary General, was challenged by a few journalists. One asked if it were true that on 11 January 1994 ‘central elements had been left out of the briefing to the Security Council? Specifically was the Council alerted to the possibility of a plan for systematic killing in Rwanda?’

Ms Foa did not reply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Instead she recalled ‘a story now familiar to everyone. On 11 January 1994 General Romeo Dallaire, UNAMIR head in Kigali, sent a cable to Maurice Baril saying basically that an informant in Kigali – someone he felt comfortable with, but with whom others did not feel so comfortable – had told him that plans to commit genocide against Tutsis were being formulated and arms caches were being hidden everywhere by the Interahamwe. The Secretary General then asked General Dallaire and his Special Representative, Jacques Booh-Booh, to go and immediately brief the ambassadors of the US, Belgium and France on the informant’s story. He had also instructed him to go immediately to the President of Rwanda and inform him that what the informant reported would, of course, be in major violation of the Arusha Accords and that the international community hoped he would take some action. They had also gone to the Prime Minister of Rwanda with the same message. The next day, at a regular briefing to the Security Council, the concerns of UNAMIR over the possibility of increased violence had been presented. Evidently, the word “genocide” had not been used in the briefing. But let’s get real here. The cable could not be passed around because it named names and General Dallaire was very concerned about the informant’s life. This was just one person telling us something and some people were comfortable with that person and some were not. The discussion about the cable was whether to go public with it or work to try and stop whatever was happening before it happened. If the UN had gone public at that time, if it really believed that cable – and some did and some did not – would it then spark the Interahamwe into immediate action to do their dirty work? These dilemmas the UN routinely faces. Yes, we had an informant. Yes, this informant used the word “genocide”. Yes, this informant told us about arms caches. But were we positive this informant was right? No. Did we try to do it through diplomacy? Did we ask the three major players in the area – the Americans, the French and the Belgians – to help us with this? Yes.’

Another journalist said she ‘understood General Dallaire had asked the Secretary General’s permission to check out the arms caches but permission was denied on the grounds that the UN did not have a mandate to that effect. At that point could the Security Council not have reviewed the mandate if the Secretary General had requested it to do so?

Ms Foa replied that ‘The Department of Peace-keeping operations had cabled the Special Representative authorizing UNAMIR to respond positively to requests from the authorities, on a case-by-case basis, for assistance in recover of the illegal arms. But we have to have a request. This was not a Chapter VII operation. This was a Chapter VI operation. As correspondents know, the UN’s hands are tied in such matters.’

When it was suggested that 800,000 lives might have been saved by more immediate action Ms Foa recalled ‘the mood of the time. The UNAMIR force, organized two months earlier, had been authorized up to two battalions but only one had been sent. By the end of December 1993 the Council was already looking at a possible reduction of the operation. We did not know what was going to happen. No one – no one – did enough to stop this. But it sure is a lot easier to Mondaymorning quarterback what we should have done almost three years ago with the knowledge we have today than with the very scant knowledge we had then.’

Asked who had opposed publishing the cable, Ms Foa said, ‘There was no one person in opposition or in favour. The information simply was not firm. We have to tread warily. We went as far as we thought we could. We went to three governments with extensive intelligence capacities … We told them we were going to the President and Prime Minister of Rwanda with this information.’

What Ms Foa’s smooth fast talking revealed was the UN’s unwillingness to find out what was really going on in pre-genocide Rwanda. The ‘scant knowledge’ need not have been scant; General Dallaire’s cable was not the only warning of the imminent catastrophe. It was unnecessary to seek help from ‘three governments with extensive intelligence capacities’. By January 1994 there existed a mass of public circumstantial evidence – in print and on tape – that genocide was being planned. Between 1991 and 1993 nine periodicals, with incitement to extreme anti-Tutsi violence as their specialization, were regularly published. Had the UN made it their business to have these translated even they might have felt obliged to heed that cable from the man to whom they had given responsibility for seeing Rwanda safely through the interim period before elections happened as agreed it Arusha. They could also have considered the statements by the International Committee of Lawyers, and numerous human rights organisations, after the publication of the Ten Hutu Commandments – which created an international uproar – in Kangura in December 1990. This twice-monthly journal, described by Gérard Prunier as ‘the spearhead of the ideology of Hutu fundamentalism’, was defended in Paris in April ’91 by President Habyarimana – in the name of ‘freedom of the press’. The founder of Kangura, Hassan Ngeze, was the chief organizer of the Tutsi massacres in Bugesera in March ’92.

The UN could also have acquired scores of Radio Milles Collines cassettes. This ‘private’ radio station, in Gérard Prunier’s words ‘a main orchestrator of the genocide’, was set up in April ’93 and reached every corner of Rwanda. None of its fifty founding shareholders belonged to the Habyarimana ‘inner circle’, the Akazu – then the source of all power in the country. Its staff was high-powered, no mere mob of fringe fanatics. Ferdinand Nahimna, whose brain-child it was, became its Director. A distinguished historian from Ruhengeri, he had studied in Canada and France and his 1986 thesis – Le Rwanda, émergence d’un Etat – was published by: ‘Harmattan, Paris, in 1993. In his acknowledgements he thanked ‘my friend Jean-Claude Habyarimana’ – the President’s son. RMC was allowed to use Radio Rwanda’s network of transmitters free of charge and its studios, opposite the Presidential palace, were connected to the palace generators during power-cuts. Moreover, RMC’s chief technician was sent to Germany to buy the very latest electronic equipment – a stark measure of the distance between Rwanda’s slaughterings and ‘primitive tribal warfare’.

Given these public and prolonged preparations for genocide by the Akazu and its henchmen, why did the UN Department of Peace-keeping Operations cable M. Booh-Booh ‘authorizing UNAMIR to respond positively to requests from authorities, on a case-by-case basis, for assistance in the recover of the illegal arms’? This grotesque reaction to General Dallaire’s cable highlights the incompetence of those senior officials who sit at their desks in New York making decisions – often momentous decisions – in total ignorance of the nature of the problems for which they are responsible. Contentedly they go through their ritual dance of the bureaucrats: the Department of Peace-keeping Operations cables authorisation to the Secretary General’s Special Representative in Rwanda who conveys it to the Commanding Officer of the UN troops – and don’t forget, the request must come from the authorities and it must be on a case-by-case basis … All this mumbo-jumbo while those same authorities were arming the peasantry in preparation for genocide – to be committed under the noses of UNAMIR, with the foreknowledge of their helpless General. And no less lunatic was the notion that the French (one of the ‘three governments with extensive intelligence capacities’) would help the UN to sort out things Rwandan. It was plain to be seen – plain then, not just with hindsight – that President Mitterand’s government gave unqualified support to the Habyarimana regime.

Resolute UN action in January 1994 would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Mass killing was being planned on the basis of its not being defined as ‘genocide’. The outside world was to be confused with talk of ‘civil war’ while the Tutsi and ‘moderate’ Hutu were being systematically slaughtered. The organizers were confident of getting away with this precisely because the UN had turned its back on Rwandan realities.

On 14 December Dr Boutros-Ghali was replaced by Mr Kofi Annan from Ghana, the US government’s choice. Simultaneously it was announced that the proposed 10,000-strong multinational force would not after all be deployed in Eastern Zaire. The Guardian reported that ‘The scheme was crippled by procrastination and uncertainty about what it could hope to achieve in the face of increasing opposition from the Rwandan government and the Banyamulenge’.

At the beginning of December Andrew briefly revisited Bukavu and reported that all seemed calm though many residents (not including the loyal Paul) had fled to the hills to escape the fighting. In a way, he said, the tension was less than during my visit – partly because the refugees had gone home, partly because the Banyamulenge had freed Kivu from those lawless and predatory Zairean soldiers.

In January 1997 Andrew’s NGO promoted him. In this new job he would have to spend three months annually in Angola (at intervals) while Rachel and Rose remained in London. I sympathized with Rachel, who has always longed to travel in Angola, but such are the constrictions of motherhood. Well I remember them, having spent Rachel’s first five years confined to Europe.

By then Nyanya’s sights were again fixed on Kivu Province. No, not fixed – in the circumstances that would have been unrealistic – but my plan was: fly to Nairobi on 15 January, bus to Kabale near the Uganda-Rwanda border, then onwards by foot to Kigali and points west. How far west? Time would tell. Sitting in darkest Ireland (dark in January at 4.00p.m.) it was impossible to gauge what the situation might be in Cyangugu. But with luck I could cross into Bukavu – and perhaps trek on into those unforgettable mountains? At least I could check on Budgie’s welfare. Only to Rachel and Andrew was it possible to admit how much it mattered to me. In the middle of major humanitarian/military/ political crises rational people do not fret about cats. But for a month Budgie had shared my sleeping-bag and I had endured his fleas, so our relationship became seriously meaningful, the bonds enduring …