Philip Gourevitch - We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“Really,” Odette said, “it was UNAMIR that tricked us into staying. We saw all these blue helmets, and we talked with Dallaire”—Major General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian in command of the UN force. “We thought even if Hutus start to attack us the three thousand men of UNAMIR. should be enough. Dallaire gave us his phone number and his radio number, and said, ‘If anything happens you call me immediately.’ So we trusted them.”

One night in January of 1994, just after she returned to Kigali from Burundi, Odette was driving two visiting cousins back to their hotel when her car was suddenly surrounded by a swarm of shouting interahamwe. She hit the accelerator, and the interahamwe threw two grenades. The explosion blew out all the windows, showering Odette and her passengers with glass, and it took them a few minutes to realize that they were unhurt. “I called Dallaire,” she said, “but nobody came from UNAMIR. I realized then that these people would never protect us.”

DISTRUST OF UNAMIR was the one thing which Hutu Power and those it wanted dead shared as deeply as their distrust of one another. And with good reason. In the months following the , signing of the Arusha Accords, Rwandans had watched UN peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Somalia being humiliated by impotence and defeat. On October 3, 1993, five weeks before UNAMIR arrived in Kigali, eighteen American Rangers serving alongside the UN force in Somalia were killed, and television images of their bodies being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu were beamed around the world. UNAMIR had a much more limited mandate than the Somalian mission: it was prohibited from using force except in self-defense, and even for that it was poorly equipped.

On January 11, 1994, when the issue of Kangura warning UNAMIR to “consider its danger” was fresh off the press, Major General Dallaire sent an urgent fax to the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at UN headquarters in New York. The fax, headed “Request for Protection for Informant,” explained that Dallaire had developed a remarkable intelligence source from within the highest echelons of the interahamwe and that he needed help in guaranteeing the man’s security. The informant, Dallaire wrote, was a former member of the President’s security staff, who was getting paid nearly a thousand dollars a month by the army chief of staff and the president of the MRND to serve as a “top level” interahamwe trainer. A few days earlier, Dallaire’s informant had been in charge of coordinating forty-eight plainclothes commandos, an MRND minister, and several local government officials in a plot to kill opposition leaders and Belgian soldiers during a ceremony at the parliament. “They hoped to provoke the RPF… and provoke a civil war,” the fax said. “Deputies were to be assassinated upon entry or exit from parliament. Belgian troops”—the mainstay of the UNAMIR force—“were to be provoked and if Belgian soldiers resorted to force a number of them were to be killed and thus guarantee Belgian withdrawal from Rwanda.” That plan had been aborted—for the moment—but Dallaire’s informant told him that more than forty interahamwe cells of forty men each were “scattered” around Kigali, after being trained by the Rwandan army in “discipline, weapons, explosives, close combat, and tactics.” The fax continued:

• Since UNAMIR mandate [the informant] has been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali. He suspects it is for their extermination. Example he gave is that in twenty minutes his personnel could kill up to a thousand Tutsis.

• Informant states he disagrees with anti-Tutsi extermination. He supports opposition to RPF but cannot support killing of innocent persons. He also stated that he believes the President does not have full control over all elements of his old Party/Faction.

• Informant is prepared to provide location of major weapons cache with at least a hundred thirty-five weapons…. He was ready to go to the arms cache tonight—if we gave him the following guarantee. He requests that he and his family (his wife and four children) be placed under our protection.

This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that General Dallaire would learn that Kigali—designated a “weapons-free zone” in the Arusha Accords—was a Hutu Power arms bazaar. It was hardly a secret: grenades and Kalashnikov assault rifles were openly displayed and affordably priced in the central city market; planes carrying French, or French-sponsored, arms shipments kept arriving; the government was importing machetes from China in numbers that far exceeded the demand for agricultural use; and many of these weapons were being handed around free to people with no known military function—idle young men in zany interahamwe getups, housewives, office workers—at a time when Rwanda was officially at peace for the first time in three years. But Dallaire’s fax offered a far more precise blueprint of what was to come than any other document that has emerged from the time known as “Before.” Everything his informant told him came true three months later, and it was clearly Dallaire’s judgment at the time that his source should be taken very seriously. He announced his intention to raid an arms cache within thirty-six hours, and wrote, “It is recommended the informant be granted protection and evacuated out of Rwanda.”

Dallaire labeled his fax “most immediate,” and signed off in French: “Peux ce que veux. Allons’y” (“Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Let’s go”). The response from New York was: Let’s not. The chief of UN peacekeeping at the time was Kofi Annan, the Ghanaian who would become Secretary-General. Annan’s deputy, Iqbal Riza, replied to Dallaire the same day, rejecting the “operation contemplated” in his fax—and the extension of protection to the informant—as “beyond the mandate entrusted to UNAMIR.” Instead, Dallaire was instructed to share his information with President Habyarimana, and tell him that the activities of the interahamwe “represent a clear threat to the peace process” and a “clear violation” of the “Kigali weapons-secure area.” Never mind that Dallaire’s informant had explicitly described the plans to exterminate Tutsis and assassinate Belgians as emanating from Habyarimana’s court: the mandate said that peace-treaty violations should be reported to the President, and New York advised Dallaire, “You should assume that he”—Habyarimana—“is not aware of these activities, but insist that he must immediately look into the situation.”

Dallaire was also told to share his information with the ambassadors to Rwanda from Belgium, France, and the United States, but no effort was made at peacekeeping headquarters to alert the United Nations Secretariat or the Security Council of the startling news that an “extermination” was reportedly being planned in Rwanda. Still, in May of 1994, when the extermination of Tutsis was at its peak in Rwanda, Kofi Annan told a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., that UN peacekeepers “have the right to defend themselves, and we define self-defense in a manner that includes preemptive military action to remove those armed elements who are preventing you from doing your work. And yet our commanders in the field, whether in Somalia or Bosnia, have been very reticent about using force.” In the light of Dallaire’s fax, Annan’s failure to mention Rwanda was striking.

“I was responsible,” Iqbal Riza, who wrote the response to Dallaire, later told me, adding, “This is not to say that Mr. Annan was oblivious of what was going on.” The correspondence, he said, was on Annan’s desk within forty-eight hours, and copies would also have been passed on to the office of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was then the Secretary-General. But, according to one of Boutros-Ghali’s closest aides, the Secretariat was unaware of it at the time. “It’s astonishing—an amazing document,” the aide said, when I read him Dallaire’s fax over the phone. “This is all at a level of drama that I don’t remember experiencing except once or twice in the last five years at the UN. It’s just incredible that a fax like that could come in and not be noticed.” In fact, Boutros-Ghali did eventually become aware of the fax, but he made light of it, after the genocide, remarking, “Such situations and alarming reports from the field, though considered with the utmost seriousness by United Nations officials, are not uncommon within the context of peacekeeping operations.”