Nkurikiye’s battalion was one of the first Rwandan Patriotic Front forces ordered to fight its way to Kigali, to support the six hundred RPF soldiers, VIPs, and prospective government ministers who had traveled to Kigali for the peace talks and were trapped in the parliament building. If the battalion reached the capital, it would be tasked with protecting them, then trying to put an end to the killing. “We marched for five days,” Nkurikiye remembers, “mostly at night to elude Hutu forces. And on the fifth day we came under heavy fire, fighting through the streets of Kigali, where we saw some terrible things. And those of us that survived established a perimeter around the parliament building and my hospital.”
Nkurikiye told his story over several days. In short bursts. Like single magazines emptied all at once from an automatic weapon. His voice was emotionless as I asked him to reload and recount events he’d spent fifteen years trying to forget.
“As more of our RPF troops arrived, our mission was to go out each night and fight from one island of security to another, trying to join them together. We were able to secure a perimeter that included the hospital, the soccer stadium, and the parliament and then link them with a corridor to the north, so we could hand off people and supplies,” Nkurikiye says.
Radio announcers urged the mobs armed with machetes on, advising them to strike their victims “at the level of the ear,” to inflict maximum carnage. They broadcast the locations of churches, medical clinics, schools, and government buildings—supposedly safe havens—where the people they called inyenzi, or “cockroaches,” were hiding.
“While the international community abandoned us, and talked and talked for months about whether the genocide was an internal matter, just a natural outgrowth of ancient tribal feuds, and the French led the argument against military intervention, we listened to the radio all day long and our soldiers fought through ambushes and roadblocks and raced the militia to these locations. We pulled two hundred and fifty people out of St. Paul’s Church, whose priest had abandoned his congregation and told the murderers where they were. We sent squads out every day and brought the distressed and the wounded we found back through our perimeter.” Eventually, Nkurikiye says, more than eight thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus found sanctuary on the hospital’s grounds.
There was no room for them in the wards.
Nkurikiye oversaw the triage and treatment of the wounded. “The first injuries I encountered were something you can’t believe,” Nkurikiye says. “A young woman with a spear still thrust through her abdomen. People who had been clubbed by masu, sticks studded with nails. Children whose arms and legs had been hacked off with—” He stopped himself. “You know, you can only be surprised for so long. Every day for three months I saw and tried to treat every kind of injury a gun, a blade, or a blunt object can inflict on a human body. But I don’t want to talk any more about that. I’d rather discuss how we can heal my country.”
Nkurikiye and the RPF forces managed to hold their positions and save the lives of more than one hundred thousand people, who waited out the hundred days within their perimeter, until Kigali fell to RPF forces on July 4 and the bulk of the génocidaires’ fighting force was driven west, to refugee camps across the country’s borders.
There is no questioning the bravery of Paul Rusesabagina, who sheltered more than twelve hundred potential genocide victims at the hotel he managed and became the hero of a Hollywood film. But listening to Nkurikiye’s story, I wondered why the bravery of John Nkurikiye, Charles Kayonga, and their brothers in the RPF, many of whom died during the process of saving one hundred thousand lives, is scarcely known outside Rwanda. Perhaps the country inspires selective blindness. It certainly does among too many of its current citizens, who have no choice but to live alongside the men and women who murdered their families.
When we returned to King Faisal Hospital the second morning, I saw through new eyes the building that had saved so many. It had been renamed after the leader of Nkurikiye’s rebel force, Paul Kagame, had become president and had appealed for help in rebuilding his nation. In 1995 the Saudi government had paid to renovate the three-story concrete facility, which had been hit by bullets, rocket-propelled grenades, and a tsunami of human suffering.
Dr. Nkurikiye had no time to talk about history. He was making it. While the hospital had been undergoing renovation, he, too, had received an upgrade, completing an ophthalmic residency in South Africa. Now he had to inspect postoperative patients who’d received the first corneal transplants he’d ever attempted in Rwanda, and for the first time since we’d arrived, he was visibly nervous.
Tabin joined him at the slit lamp as they studied twenty-seven-year-old Theresa Murakatete, the first woman Nkurikiye had operated on the previous day. “Centration is excellent. Wound edges excellent. This looks perfect,” Tabin said as they moved on to Nkurikiye’s second patient. Nkurikiye couldn’t bring himself to look as Tabin bent to examine Yvonne Uwamungu, the woman whose cornea, he feared, he’d stitched on inside out.
“John,” Tabin said, “you’ll be happy to know that this woman’s eye looks much clearer today. Congratulations, my friend. This is an excellent transplant!”
The director of the hospital’s Department of Ophthalmology grinned with relief. “I’m not unhappy,” he said.
With the remaining corneas quickly losing their viability, Tabin and Nkurikiye worked straight through until evening. “You know,” Tabin said to me as he settled back on his own surgical stool, “the cornea really is a remarkable tissue. There’s nothing else like it in the body. The really fascinating thing is its composition. It’s made up of five thin layers, and they’re very difficult to work with. If I can dissect one or two layers and graft on a new cornea, there’s almost no way the body will reject it. But if I remove all five layers, then the odds of rejection skyrocket. With this woman on my table, whose chart says she’s rejected a cornea before, I’m going to try to do a very, very fine dissection.”
Tabin was soon walled off within his own world. Nkurikiye came over between patients to watch.
“How’s the dissection coming?” I asked after an uncharacteristic fifteen minutes of silence from Tabin.
“Very, very well!” both surgeons answered, in stereo.
By 8:00 P.M., only one patient remained, and I asked Nkurikiye how he’d chosen from a long list of people waiting for the limited supply of tissue. “Those who are struggling or have stopped work or study are the first priority,” he said. “My last patient was crying in the ward for three hours because she was at the end of the line and I’d told her the chance was only fifty-fifty. If I had damaged one of the corneas, she would have been heartbroken. But fortunately I didn’t do so badly today, and I was able to complete her transplant.”
They had exhausted the supply of fresh corneas, and Tabin decided to attempt a final transplant with the two corneas preserved in glycerin. For safety’s sake he needed both—one for the first attempt at surgery, the other as a backup in case of complications.
“These may be a neat solution for remote areas, because they last for months, but it’s much harder to work with them,” Tabin told me. “Imagine the difference between sewing through a piece of cloth and a plastic Frisbee and you have an idea of what it’s like to suture a preserved cornea. If I pull this off, I’m going to write about it and follow up on the results. I bet it would be one of the first successful glycerin transplants in Africa.”
The patient’s name was Francis Kiiza, and I was glad he couldn’t hear Tabin discuss his surgery’s degree of difficulty; he was in another room, receiving his injections. Kiiza was thirty-four, with a wife and three children. He’d been waiting years for a donated cornea, he told me while Tabin paused to allow his anesthesia to take effect. “I am a teacher of maths,” he said, “at one of Rwanda’s best schools, Sonrise High, which is supported by the Anglican churches of Little Rock, in Arkansas. Maybe you have visited them?”
I told him I hadn’t.
“Ah,” he said. �
��A pity. Such righteous people. Well, as you can imagine, I have to make a lot of marks each day in my profession. So many papers to correct. And I have to write extensively on the chalkboard. In recent years, I’ve had to stand so close to the board that my nose was essentially touching it. In addition, I could no longer see my students well enough to supervise them, so I’ve had to quit working, temporarily, while my wife attempts to support us.”
I asked how he had known to come to Nkurikiye’s hospital.
“At first I was sure the Lord would lead me to a solution,” Kiiza said. “My wife helped me research corneal transplants on the Internet, and I was referred to hospitals in India who said they could manage the job. But that would have cost three thousand American dollars, which I was in no position, as a teacher, to pay. So I fasted and I prayed. Finally I simply gave up and surrendered. But then a friend of mine, who is a doctor of bones at this hospital, told me, ‘I have good news for you. American doctors are coming with corneas. Do what you can, Francis, to avail yourselves of their services!’ ”
When Tabin examined his work through a slit lamp two days later, he pronounced Kiiza’s surgery an unqualified success. We were due to leave the next morning to hold a surgical camp in the countryside, near the U.N. Millennium Village of Mayange, and I asked Tabin if Kiiza was in condition to travel, since I wanted to hire him as my interpreter. Tabin said his graft was secure, so I availed myself of Francis’s memorable facility with English. He sat beside me during our drive. He was large, solidly built, and wore a matching two-piece tan safari suit. Our convoy traveled south through the countryside, through a rolling ocher-and-green landscape of family vegetable plots and small stone farmhouses built atop rounded hills that reminded me of Tuscany, if I didn’t look too closely. “It’s beautiful here,” I said.
“I’ll have to rely on your judgment,” Francis said. “I can see that we are crossing what appears to be a river, and I’m able to see some flashes of vegetation, but nothing more.”
“Dr. Tabin told me it will be two or three weeks until your new cornea is working well.”
Kiiza held up the business card Tabin had given him, pressed it close to the wraparound sunglasses we’d bought him to protect his eyes, and scanned the small print with some difficulty.
“Doc … tor … Geoff … rey … Ta … bin,” he sounded out, tasting Tabin’s name for implications. “Tell me, what was this doctor paid to perform my surgery?”
“Nothing. He volunteers his time to work in Africa and Asia.”
“Mmmm,” Kiiza said, a low growl that I came to recognize as an expression of his deepest sense of approval. “In the hands of such a man, my hopes increase accordingly.”
We coasted downhill, past of grove of glossy banana trees, then through a coffee plantation, the dense bushes planted in hard-to-discern rows that played tricks with my eyes, appearing first random and then regularly spaced. In a ditch along the roadside, a crew of workers in pink shorts and shirts were picking up scraps of trash in a landscape so peacefully bucolic it was hard to believe that anything horrible had happened here only a few years earlier.
Nkurikiye leaned back toward me from the front seat. “Here,” he said, as we crossed another bridge over a lazy brown river. “You asked me if I’d ever been wounded. Only once, and it wasn’t much. But it happened right here. We were chasing the génocidaires across this bridge, and they fired their light French artillery, trying to slow us with one-hundred-and-twenty-millimeter shells. I took shrapnel in both legs, had to leave my unit and get treatment in Kigali for two weeks.”
The Nyamata District Hospital was a modest collection of low brick buildings, with covered walkways connecting them to shelter patients from the sun. The facility had been built, in part, by USAID, and the center of healing stood in contrast to a former Catholic church nearby, where twenty-five hundred of the parishioners who’d come seeking safety had been slaughtered. The church had been left in its ravaged condition and converted into a memorial, like so many of Rwanda’s houses of worship.
The hospital was at the center of a group of small villages largely populated by genocide survivors and returning refugees. Several hundred patients were waiting for us as we unpacked, and, as in Ethiopia, I was struck by how many of them were children. Chansi had arrived early to organize the operating room and patient flow, and everything was in perfect readiness for the doctors to begin surgery. Tabin wanted to calibrate the keratometers, instruments that measure the curvature of a patient’s eyes and calculate what power lenses the patient will need. He asked Nkurikiye to sit in front of one of the devices, so he could drip a mild numbing agent onto his eye and test the machines by measuring him. Tabin picked up the wrong bottle and squeezed a drop of dilating solution in Nkurikiye’s right eye. “Oh, shit!” he shouted, realizing his mistake.
Within moments, Nkurikiye’s right pupil was comically enlarged, and he could only see out of his left. “It figures,” Nkurikiye said, taking the potential crisis in stride. “I often have to give four or five drops to my patients. But with a single drop I’m perfectly dilated.”
“How long does it last?” I asked.
“About five hours,” he said. “But I don’t have that long with so many waiting. I’ve done over four thousand cataract surgeries with two eyes. Now we’ll see what I can do with one.”
We were standing on a shaded terrace where the patients had lined up on benches. The old clutched their canes, teenagers squinted at me with what degree of vision I couldn’t tell, and mothers in flowered cotton-print head wraps held babies with ghostly white cataracts, tied to their backs with colorful cloth slings. I felt a ripple of tension pass through the crowd, and several people began speaking in low voices. A group of nine men and women wearing bright pink shirts and shorts, trailed by a guard with an M16, arrived and looked for a place to sit. It was a hot day, and there was plenty of room on the shaded benches, but they moved to the middle of a lawn between buildings and took seats on the grass, fully exposed to the sun.
“Do you know who they are?” Nkurikiye asked me. “Those people are convicted genocide killers. They’ve been brought here from prison. So we can cure them.” Nkurikiye spoke in the flat, emotionless voice he’d used when recounting the events of his one hundred days, and if he thought it was improper for them to be treated along with the rest of his patients, he gave no indication.
Looking at the prisoners, watching them avoid making eye contact with the rest of the patients, I asked the question I’d been reluctant to put to Nkurikiye since I’d met him: “Did you lose any family members during the genocide?”
“At least eighteen,” he said, “perhaps more,” and walked inside to scrub in.
It’s difficult to say, with precision, how many Rwandans perished in the genocide. Many of the dead have never been accounted for. A practice common among Hutu militias was to simply throw young children down wells, rather than waste ammunition or the energy it took to swing a machete. Mass graves are still being unearthed. Gang rapes of Tutsi women were organized so that they were purposefully violated by HIV-positive men, their victims gradually adding to the total death count, year after year. Most chroniclers of the carnage, like Human Rights Watch, the U.N., and the Rwandan government, put the number between eight hundred thousand and a million, or approximately one-tenth of the entire population.
No organized effort at extermination had ever killed so many people in such a short period of time—not the Nazis, not the Khmer Rouge. Paul Kagame’s government struggled to find a mechanism capable of producing reconciliation, of delivering justice to the victims and punishment to the perpetrators. With so many Rwandans implicated in the murders, no standard legal system could suffice. Kagame championed the creation of the gacaca, a type of village court modeled on the traditional Rwandan tribunal that settled disputes over land or livestock. Every village in Rwanda held gacaca proceedings, where survivors identified the murderers among them and killers were encouraged to confess their crimes. Ordinary
killers who confessed to being swept up in mob violence were often released without punishment or received short jail terms. Those identified as leaders of the militias or as particularly enthusiastic and prolific murderers were sentenced to longer terms in prison and ordered to wear pink clothing to emphasize their shame.
Philip Gourevitch, whose We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families paints a devastating portrait of a country coming to terms with its temporary insanity, interviewed Kagame about the gacaca for a piece in The New Yorker more than a decade after the massacre. “Not the victims, not the perpetrators, nobody will tell you he is happy with the gacaca,” Kagame told Gourevitch. That’s how, the president said, he knew the system was fair. “Gacaca,” Kagame said, “gives us something to build on.”
With Kiiza translating, I spoke with the patients waiting for surgery. He put them at ease, telling them he’d been blind himself a few days earlier and had been cured by the doctors on the other side of the swinging doors they would soon pass through. Sezikeye Athanase said proudly that he was eighty-four and still strong enough to have walked to Nyamata from his home, three hours away. He’d dressed up for his surgery in a baggy suit jacket and a broad-brimmed hat that would have shaded his eyes from the sun, if that had been necessary. Like many of the patients I spoke with, I noticed that he divided his life into the time “before” and the time “after,” without ever saying the word “genocide.”
“Before, I also had some problems with my eyes, but doctors were able to repair them, and I could see reasonably well,” he told me. During the first chaotic days of the genocide, he and his wife had been separated from their children. They lost four—three boys and a girl. “I don’t know what happened to them,” he said. “I only heard they’d been taken away to Congo, where they were killed. After, when I found out, my eyes stopped working almost immediately, as if they didn’t want to see anymore.”
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