She gave birth in the middle of the night. By morning, one of the twins had died. The other, weighing less than 2 pounds, was so fragile that her skin could not be washed with water. In the midst of all the killings, the couple buried the dead child, mourning her short life in a way that countless children thrown into rivers or bashed with machetes and clubs would never be acknowledged.
They stayed at the hospital for nearly 3 weeks until the RPF took over Gisenyi, and then they fled to Goma. Privilege allowed them to find a hotel outside the massive refugee camps, at least for a few weeks until they'd spent the last of their money. With cholera killing thousands every day, Liliane was terrified to bring her baby to the camp, but she ultimately had no choice. She and Julien waited nearly 10 months before naming her Valerie and also giving her a Kinyarwanda name meaning Pearl, because there was nothing more valuable to them.
For 2 years, they remained in the refugee camps. It was bearable for Liliane because a village system emerged nearly overnight, with schools and clinics and even makeshift streets to give a sense of order and community. Family was close by, and she had managed to bring her photographs when she and Julien rushed from Kigali. "I looked at them over and over, remembering that life could be different."
Still, the Interahamwe ruled the camps with terror and brutality. "Right behind us were four small houses where a group of young men lived. They were maybe 16 to 25 years old. All had been in the army and none were married. It kept us living constantly in fear that something terrible could happen again."
In November 1996 Liliane's family joined more than a million people returning to Rwanda in a quiet, orderly procession. Most were terrified about what might happen to them next-what awaited them in a place they no longer knew. The refugees carried everything they owned in suitcases and baskets. They were a million ordinary people caught up in a genocide, penniless, walking for weeks, sometimes months, to return to a country where they were not wanted. Tens of thousands never made it back, including Liliane's mother.
On the first day, Liliane walked nearly 20 hours, with just water and sugar to sustain her, her 7-year-old son, and her 2-year-old daughter. She persisted by focusing obsessively on their house in Kigali, praying that it would still be there when they returned. She and Julien had bought it 6 months before the genocide and had already repaid a third of their debt. The house represented home and stability-everything.
Once in Kigali, she headed directly to her house, not knowing what she would find. Before reaching it, she encountered a friend who told her to turn back: "There's a soldier from Uganda living there. They are killing people who try to get their houses back. Just wait."
She could think of nowhere else to go. Without food or drink or stopping for the night, she turned with her children and retraced her steps all the way back to Gisenyi, about a 4-hour drive away. Though it wasn't home, Julien could find a job there in the hospital where he'd worked before-and there they had a better chance of finding another house.
Obsessed with getting her house back, Liliane stayed only a few months in Gisenyi before deciding to return to her home in Kigali, despite the grave risk she believed she was taking. But Liliane had titleproof of ownership-and President Kagame had promised that titled housing would be returned. She would bet her life on this.
RETURNING TO KIGALI CAME with a big price tag in the beginning: Liliane and the children had no choice but to move into a slum. Julien would remain in Gisenyi for the time being. The poor condition of Liliane's temporary quarters finally pushed her to find the courage to approach the soldier living in her old house. She walked slowly to the familiar house, knocked on the gate, and found herself standing in front of an imposing soldier dressed in fatigues. She took a deep breath, tried not to think about the women who'd been hacked to death, and told him her story.
He listened.
He refused to leave but agreed to pay her rent-not enough to cover their mortgage payments, but it was a start. She thanked him and then went home to thank God.
Nothing happened: The soldier never paid a franc, nor did he leave.
More visits, more negotiations; nothing changed. Liliane and Julien reached a point where they could no longer afford the mortgage on their home while also renting one in the slum. She began visiting the soldier weekly, each time asking him to leave.
One morning, she arrived to an empty house. The soldier had disappeared, taking everything that wasn't nailed down-every piece of furniture, every curtain, every picture on the wall. The stench in the empty, filthy house was nearly unbearable, but 5 years after leaving it, it was hers again.
A year after I first saw Liliane in the slum, I returned to visit her in the house she and Julien had so cherished. The house was by now light and airy and had three bedrooms-one for her and Julien, another for the children, and a third for her sister and her sister's child. Liliane had turned a fourth bedroom into a chapel to honor the deal made with God. The room contained an altar, a Bible, and several cushions to protect the family's knees while they performed their nightly prayers of thanks.
As it turned out, the soldier who had squatted in her house moved nearby, and Liliane's children would sometimes play with his. "There is no reason to hold anger against another person," she told me. "Too many of us have died over small conflicts. It is time to heal. I have my home now and I am grateful. Why should I bear a grudge?"
As she told me her story, she emphasized that refugee camps equalized everyone because of the terrible conditions in which they all lived. "There is so much to do in this country," she said. "So much healing, so much rebuilding"
In their own ways, women like Honorata and Liliane demonstrate daily an endurance and a capacity to dream that could change the shape of the world if only the world would open its arms to them.
CHAPTER 11
THE COST OF SILENCE
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
-MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
f Honorata's story is one of rebirth, then Agnes's is one of a soul's weakening, a dive into darkness. Agnes was groomed to be a leader from the time she was a young university student studying law. For most of her life, she worked on issues of social justice, first as a judge and then as one of the first women on the African continent to serve in her country's parliament. Just months prior to the genocide, she was working to form a political party with moderate views, one that would have been inclusive of all ethnic groups. But somehow, she ended her career as a high-profile prisoner charged with crimes of genocide.
I wanted to understand her story. I had known her and worked with her on issues of social justice. She had been a woman of enormous potential, a pioneer in the women's movement, a role model for African women. Though I'd questioned her integrity while she was at Duterimbere, it was inexplicable to me that Agnes could end up a leader of such a cruel and murderous regime. If she could become part of a killing machine, then the capacity for evil was more common than uncommon. I'd read Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, but I'd never imagined I might actually know someone who could help lead a systematic effort to destroy an entire ethnic group.
I visited Agnes twice after the genocide, both times in Kigali's massive Central Prison. Built in 1930 by Belgian colonialists, the prison is a red brick fortress with a green metal door located at the edge of the city, about 100 yards away from the main road, at the top of a hillside. With its red, red brick, it resembles an old factory from the Industrial Revolution.
If you walk far enough down the road in front of the prison, you can see green fields sloping downward to a verdant valley, rolling gently, then soaring upward into soft hills and a glorious sweep of sky, suggesting a sense of freedom and possibility. Originally built for 2,000 inmates, the Central Prison held more than four times its capacity 5 years after the genocide: 7,800 men and 600 women. There were few toilets, and the prisoners were fed only one soupy meal a day. I was told the men too
k turns sleeping, as there was insufficient room for everyone to lie down at once. Both men and women had been sleeping this way for up to 5 years at that time.
I arrived at the prison on a Friday-visiting day. Thousands of people, mostly women and children, had come from throughout the city and neighboring areas, some walking 5 or 6 hours, carrying baskets of food for their loved ones in the prison. The visitors were required to wait in the yard outside until they were permitted to see the prisoners, who depended on this food for their survival. The enormous toll all the preparation and travel took on the visitors was evident in their tired, weathered faces. The women wore colorful dresses and often carried babies on their backs, but waited motionlessly, staring with vacant eyes. Some sat quietly on the cracked dirt and nursed their children. Others murmured quietly among themselves.
This mass of women separated from the men inside represented one of the most severe social dislocations in the country. Every Friday more than 150,000 women and children brought food to approximately 120,000 prisoners in various Rwandan prisons. The women whose husbands served years in those prisons were like widows themselves in many ways, struggling to raise a family with no one to help them generate income or cultivate the fields. This loss of productivity in a country already devastated by war was staggering.
On the day of my visit, all of us waiting were kept at a distance of about 100 feet from the empty prison yard by a makeshift barrier, a thick rope tied to two poles. Three guards dressed in blue escorted two pinkclad male prisoners, one wearing green high-top sneakers and a red beret; the other, in yellow flip-flops, carrying three shiny new machetes wrapped in plastic. The five men laughed like old friends.
One of the guards approached me and took me to the director's office, then led me farther, to a small room with a single window covered by a pink curtain. I stood there alone, waiting and looking across the yard at a huge green door, wondering what lay on the other side.
Ten minutes later, Agnes emerged.
Though her head was shaved, she looked like a young girl, not the powerful former minister of justice of the genocide regime. She'd been an inmate for 3 years, 2 of them in confinement, and was wearing the standard prison uniform-a clean pink cotton short-sleeved dress with buttons down the front. I watched her walk toward me, swinging her arms and moving her head from side to side, seeming more little girl than woman. Freckled cheeks and soft brown eyes made her appear even more childlike, less capable of cruelty.
Of all the women at Duterimbere, I had known Agnes least of all and never fully trusted her. This day was no different.
"Jacqueline!" she exclaimed when she saw me, "I was just thinking of you!"
She held my shoulders and planted an exaggerated kiss on each cheek. "I didn't know you were coming," she said as if we were longtime neighbors reunited by a chance meeting. "Thank you for visiting me. You've been on my mind!"
I couldn't imagine how it would be me she was thinking about, and my own discomfort made my stomach turn. Though she still had not been tried by a jury of her peers, she'd been sworn in as minister of justice at the beginning of the genocide when the Hutu Power government had just begun forming. It was said by many that Agnes had made vitriolic and incendiary speeches, urging men to kill Tutsis and inciting women to encourage their husbands to work harder in their murderous and barbaric acts.
I feared her. I feared even coming too close to her essence. I worried that some of it might rub off on me. I had read that she had shouted out to a mob at one rally, urging, "When you begin extermination, no one, nothing, must be forgiven. But here, you have merely contented yourselves with killing a few old women." Was this the same person who just 5 years earlier had urged women to go forward with enthusiasm and build a better Rwanda together?
Many individuals believe that if women ruled the world, we'd finally have a chance at peace. While that may be true, Agnes stood as a reminder that power corrupts on an equal-opportunity basis. Agnes loved the trappings of power, and when all was said and done, she'd traded integrity and whatever good she'd built for glitter and gold.
Despite all I'd read about her involvement, I also knew that together we had worked to create an institution. My motives for visiting Agnes were mixed. I wanted, at least, to offer her kindness, though I was unsure what that really meant. I wanted to understand her, even if I had no desire to befriend her.
While I was still running the Next Generation Leadership program at the Rockefeller Foundation, I once convinced a South African freedom fighter that we should visit one of the generals who had overseen the country's security forces. The general was promoting the concept of a separate state for Afrikaners in South Africa. Though initially unwilling, the freedom fighter finally agreed to meet the general, but with the caveat that we could cut the meeting short if he became too uncomfortable. The meeting ultimately lasted nearly 2 hours, during which the two men found they shared a love of poetry. Afterward, the freedom fighter and I discussed the general's warmth and lack of self-doubt.
"He was only himself and didn't pretend to be anyone else," my friend mused. "Not like some of the white liberals I know who always say what they believe to be politically correct. At least I know who I'm dealing with here."
Though I no longer knew who I was dealing with when it came to Agnes, perhaps I could learn something from her.
We filled the first awkward minutes of the visit with small talk. How is your family? Did you ever marry? Always the first questions I was asked.
After much reflection, I had brought her a small box of chocolates. She tasted a morsel and beamed, looking like a blissful little girl again. I wondered what hell lived inside her head, what tortures she had created for herself. Externally, I saw nothing.
As she spoke, Agnes fingered the beads of a wooden rosary. I shared with her how much I'd loved the rosary when I was a little girl, though I hadn't held one for many, many years. Agnes had been trained by nuns whose belief in her had played a great role in her academic and career success. She had been one of the first girls in her school to attend university and had been one of Rwanda's first female judges and parliamentarians.
"Having someone believe in you makes all the difference," she told me.
I turned the conversation to Agnes's life in prison and to the general situation in Rwanda, and she plunged into a 20-minute rant. Her youthful face disappeared, transforming itself into a twisted mask of anger. She spoke through lips pressed tightly together, showing neat rows of perfect teeth, with eyes opened so wide you could see the whites surrounding her irises. I said little as she seethed about false accusations and the tragedy of the war, all the while rubbing the beads of her rosary.
According to Agnes, the RPF, the Tutsi-led army that had defeated the genocidaires, were to blame for having assassinated the president. On April 6, 1994, someone had shot down a plane carrying both the president of Rwanda and the president of Burundi, killing them instantly and igniting the genocide. No one discovered who actually did it.
"The RPF did atrocious things," she told me, "but the world sees this as only one-sided." She sucked in her breath. "Jacqueline, you will never understand what really happened because you are from the West. In Rwanda, we know each other. We know how things work. Both sides were killing. If you counted, you would find many more Hutus dead than Tutsis. I know people who were killed by the RPF all over the country in the first few weeks of April. Now it is convenient that the world has vilified the Hutus, so the Tutsis take no blame."
She likened the Tutsis to Jews-hungry for power. "The Jews lost millions and hold out those losses to the world, so they always have power. It will be the same with the other side here. The Tutsis have so much power now, and the world will be behind them for a long time. It could have been in their interest to see so many killed. That is why we need to discover who assassinated the president to determine on whom to lay the blame for this terrible war. You know, those who thirst for power will do incredible things."
I asked her w
hat she remembered most about the work we'd done together.
"Personally, the thing that impressed me the most was the women, who learned they could do something more than they were used to doing. Before, the women would go to the fields, then wait all day to see what their husbands would bring home. When they learned that they, too, could work to bring home even more income than their husbands, they were eager to try. That interested me.
"They came to Duterimbere in big numbers," she recalled.
She reminded me of how hard we'd worked together. "Personally," she began again, "I had to combine the work with political responsibilities. We went to meetings that ended at 10:00 p.m. But we didn't complain. We didn't expect a salary from anyone or even reimbursements for expenses."
It was true that Agnes had worked as hard as any of the women toward building Duterimbere, though I didn't remind her that we essentially had asked her to leave because of her petty corruption.
She continued: "Duterimbere was founded by women who had been lucky to attend school, who had degrees, who had jobs, who wanted to do something for their sisters who hadn't been as lucky. We wanted to help women who weren't able to go to school. The country was getting poorer and poorer. There were more and more female heads of household who had to care for their families. Something had to be done to help them help themselves. In the beginning, that was our strength."
Without warning, a deafening cacophony interrupted her words. The women waiting outside to see their family members were finally allowed into the prison. First, at least 300 prisoners, all clad in pink, emerged in the yard, seating themselves on bright green benches, squeezed tightly one next to another, each holding a dark green plastic bag. A shrill whistle from the guard catalyzed the still-life market outside into wild action: 300 women and scores of children galumphed across the yard, their bags and buckets causing them to sway to and fro until they plunked down on the benches in front of the men. For 3 minutes, maybe 4, they threw fragments of information back and forth as loudly as possible. They were not allowed to touch each other. The din was unbelievable.
The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World Page 22