Matthias Hamann’s Blog

I am currently reading the book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by now-retired Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire of the Canadian Forces. It chronicles the fateful months of Dallaire’s tour as Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) in 1993-1994, during which he witnessed the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in just 100 days, typically by using machetes and rifles. Most of the dead were Tutsi, who died by the hands of Hutu militias (the notorious Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi). The genocide began when Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down above Kigali airport on April 6, 1994. General Dallaire, who was put in charge of a United Nations peacekeeping force during this 1994 genocide, called for 5,000 soldiers to permit orderly elections and the return of the refugees. The soldiers were never supplied and the killing began.

UNAMIR was hampered from the outset by resistance from numerous members of the United Nations Security Council from becoming deeply involved first in the Arusha process and then the genocide. Only the former colonial power Belgium, which had originally introduced passports containing the owner’s ethnic background (Twa, Hutu or Tutsi) in 1933/34, asked for a strong UNAMIR mandate, but after the murder of the ten Belgian peacekeepers protecting the Prime Minister in early April, Belgium pulled out of the peacekeeping mission.

The UN and its member states appeared largely detached from the realities on the ground. In the midst of the crisis, Dallaire was instructed to focus UNAMIR on only evacuating foreign nationals from Rwanda. The change in orders led Belgian peacekeepers to abandon a technical school filled with 2,000 refugees, while Hutu militants waited outside, drinking beer and chanting “Hutu Power.” After the Belgians left, the militants entered the school and massacred those inside, including hundreds of children. Four days later the Security Council voted to reduce UNAMIR from its authorized strength of 2,500 personnel to 260 men.

Following the withdrawal of the Belgian forces, Lt. General Roméo Dallaire consolidated his contingent of Canadian, Ghanaian, and Dutch soldiers in urban areas and focused on providing areas of “safe control”. His actions directly saved the lives of 20,000 Tutsis. The administrative head of UNAMIR, former Cameroonian foreign minister Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, has been criticized for downplaying the significance of Dallaire’s reports and for holding close ties to the Hutu militant elite.

As the United Nations Operation in Somalia II (UNOSOM II), which is well-known for the Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993, portrayed in the movie Black Hawk Down (2001), led to news footage of dead US troops being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the US government was reluctant to involve itself in the “local conflict” in Rwanda and refused to label the killings as “genocide”, a decision which then-President Bill Clinton later came to regret in a Frontline television interview. In the interview Clinton stated that he believes if he had sent 5,000 U.S. peacekeepers, more than 500,000 lives could have been saved.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) battalion of Tutsi rebels stationed in Kigali under the Arusha Accords came under attack immediately after the shooting down of the president’s plane. The battalion fought its way out of Kigali and joined up with RPF units in the north. The resulting civil war raged concurrently with the genocide for two months. The victory of the RPF rebels and overthrow of the Hutu regime ended the genocide in July 1994, 100 days after it started.

Approximately two million Hutus, participants in the genocide, and the bystanders, with anticipation of Tutsi retaliation, fled from Rwanda, to Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, and for the most part Zaire. Thousands of them died in epidemics of diseases common to the squalor of refugee camps, such as cholera and dysentery. The United States staged the Operation Support Hope airlift from July to September 1994 to stabilize the situation in the camps. After the victory of the RPF, the size of UNAMIR (henceforth called UNAMIR 2) was increased to its full strength, remaining in Rwanda until March 8, 1996.

There is an outstanding Canadian documentary film called Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire (2004), which lets audiences revisit the siege of Rwanda through the eyes of General Dallaire and describes his attempts to prevent hell on earth. Thankfully, someone uploaded it to YouTube (click here to open the complete playlist):

Warning: This video contains disturbing footage from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994.

[Sources: Wikipedia, Shake Hands with the Devil (book and documentary film), et cetera.]