by Mark Austin
It turned out Jim was working on logistics for the Canadian Red Cross. But he was trained as a child psychologist, which he’d realized was going to come in useful in the coming weeks and months. He told me he had just spent the day in a place called Ntarama. ‘I have never seen anything like it,’ he said. There were bodies all over the place, mutilated bodies, skeletons and skulls. And the church was attacked. Can you believe they attacked people in a church?’
‘What did you see at the church?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t go, I was just told about it. Why would I want to go and see that?’
I made a mental note of the place name, and thought that perhaps we should go the following morning. Jim told me he had spent the day at a makeshift hospital near Ntarama where he’d found several children. Most of them were badly injured, he told me, and all of them were terribly traumatized. ‘They had the expressionless, vacant look of children who had seen horrific things. I can’t help but think these youngsters will be scarred physically for a very long time, and mentally forever.’
He had another bourbon and changed the subject. I had a beer. Soon afterwards, I said goodnight to Jim and went to bed. I knew where we were heading in the morning, and so I identified Ntarama on my map and drifted off to sleep full of foreboding. At first light, we headed south.
My cameraman Andy Rex is a bull of a man and a former soldier in the Rhodesian Army. He had done and seen most things in television news. Little fazed him, and certainly not the sight of dead bodies. On the journey he was his usual talkative, mickey-taking self. He was a great exponent of the art of black humour, a common trait among newspeople. It is a diversion from the reality of what confronts us, pure and simple.
Forty-five minutes later, as we neared Ntarama, we saw people walking in the opposite direction carrying their belongings or pushing wheelbarrows or bicycles laden with household goods. First a few, then more and more – clusters of people making their way wearily, silently down the road, away from the place we were heading. We saw one woman carrying huge bundles of firewood, another weighed down with water containers. Two other women were carrying tables on their heads. Some sat at the roadside, exhausted and resting or breastfeeding babies.
It turned out these were Tutsi families who had somehow survived the killing, and now, a few days later, with the RPF in control, they felt it was safe to emerge from their hiding places and head to Kigali. Or anywhere they could find sanctuary. Anywhere that wasn’t Ntarama.
They had been in hiding for weeks.
Our driver, Frank, eventually stopped to ask the way to the church. The man he spoke to recoiled when asked. He was shaking and muttering as he pointed to a track, on the right, about three hundred yards up ahead. We drove slowly towards the track, turned right, and climbed up a gentle slope into a forested area. We came across two boys wheeling bicycles. Frank and I got out of the car to speak to them. They answered his questions in low, faltering voices. They spoke in the local indigenous language, Kinyarwanda. They spoke slowly… a few words at a time. There were long gaps. One of the boys, his name was Habimana, was trying to say something but it was not coming out, it was barely audible muttering. In the end, our driver sat him down and asked him to say everything again. I said I wanted to get moving; the church was, after all, now in view, just a few hundred yards away. But Frank gestured to me to be quiet, and he edged closer to Habimana. Frank listened intently and I became impatient. Eventually, Frank stood up.
‘What is he saying?’ I asked.
‘He says he has lost almost everyone in his family… his mother and brother and two cousins are dead inside the church. His father disappeared when they all took sanctuary in the church and he has not seen him since,’ said Frank.
We walked to the car and drove up to the church. The first thing that occurred to me was how plain the church was. A rectangular brick building with a corrugated tin roof. If we hadn’t been told it was a church, we wouldn’t have known it was one. The second thing that hit us was the smell. The pungent, sickening sweetness of it was overpowering. I will never forget it.
I retched several times before we had even reached the building. I used the tucked-in part of my shirt to cover my nose and I tried to stop breathing. I couldn’t handle it. I noticed Andy had a small towel with which he covered his nose as he approached the doors of the church. They were locked shut. We found an arched window at one end of the church building. I looked through it and saw wooden pews scattered haphazardly across the church. They were covered in brightly coloured cloth, like shawls and dresses, and my first instinct was that the bodies had been removed or there were not that many. But as Andy filmed, he saw the bodies, decapitated heads and severed limbs. Most were decomposing rapidly. Some were already skeletons and skulls.
I could not look for long. I turned away and walked quickly towards a wooded area where I thought I was going to be sick. I wasn’t. But then I noticed more bodies in the forest. A child here, a woman’s body – or rather a clothed skeleton – lying face down in the dirt there. I shouted to Andy. But he was filming now through a hole in the brickwork presumably caused by the Hutu gang attacking the church. Andy noticed burn marks inside the church, and we saw rusting grenades on the floor. Andy came over to where I was and filmed more of the scene. More mutilated bodies. More ghastliness. I had never seen anything like it. Nor had Andy. Not much renders him speechless, but this did. We walked back to the car without saying a word.
Frank told us that a local he had found wandering around said there was a makeshift hospital where some of those who survived had been taken. We drove slowly and silently. The hospital had been set up in a building belonging to the local prefecture. We went inside, and the first person I met was a Belgian professor of medicine, Alain Verhaagen, who was working for a Dutch charity. He spoke excellent English, welcomed us and our camera, and took us into a treatment room where patients, mainly children, lay – some with terrible injuries.
It dawned on me that this was the place Jim, my Canadian child psychologist friend, had told me about. Alain said he knew him and he was needed here in the coming weeks. For now, he told me, they needed antibiotics and bandages and equipment to clean out wounds. Although the area was in the hands of the RPF and Tutsi soldiers were protecting the hospital, some attacks were continuing in the area.
He showed us one child, maybe no more than six years old, a huge machete wound in his head. It was like a melon with a slice removed. It was difficult to believe someone could do this to a six-year-old. But someone had. Just as someone had hacked the arm off another child, the foot off another, and four fingers off the hand of a baby. Why that? What would it achieve? It was all so utterly sickening and mindless.
I thought most of what we would film would probably be too harrowing to be shown on TV. Andy knew that, and shot it in such a way that the viewer would be spared the true horror of what we were witnessing. It annoyed me that we had to do that. If ever the world needed to be confronted with the reality of an awful event, surely this was it. But better to censor it in the filming or the edit and get it shown than to send in a piece with all the gruesome truth which would then be dropped.
Alain was clear about what he thought was happening. ‘I am convinced they wanted to wipe out the children. They wanted to kill off a generation of Tutsis. So many were slaughtered. And they were easy prey because they didn’t know how to run or hide. They just clung to their parents and were clubbed or hacked to death with them.’
He pointed to the hand of the baby with the missing fingers.
‘But sometimes, as you see, the children survived with terrible injuries. Maybe they just did it to destroy the people. They do it so that children grow up with terrible injury. They want the Tutsis to be dead or broken, shattered people, and this is how they think they can do that.’
He introduced us to a group of children, most of whom had bandages around their heads. A twelve-year-old girl told Frank how she had spent seven days staying absolutely still und
er a pile of corpses, including the bodies of her parents and sister. It defied belief, but was almost certainly true.
There were many such stories emerging of how people had survived. A nurse at the hospital told us that she had been in the church when the massacre happened. ‘They came with grenades and machetes,’ she said, ‘so I just ran out of the church and kept running. I knew I had left my family behind. But I ran and ran until I reached the papyrus trees and the marshland, and I just stayed there for five weeks.
‘We kept taking it in turns to go out for food, whatever we could get. But most of the time we just hid in the reeds and the marshes. They never came for us. One woman gave birth in the swamp.’
We had filmed more than enough for a substantial piece on News at Ten. So we made our way back to Kigali. It was a quiet journey. It wasn’t a case of coming to terms with what we had seen. That was not going to happen. Not for a while, if ever. What we had witnessed were the consequences of acts that were beyond evil, and in a way also beyond any rational explanation.
My fellow correspondent Fergal Keane, of the BBC, wrote of Rwanda that it ‘frequently rendered me inarticulate’. There is no shame in that. I had never struggled for words to accompany our pictures before, and have never done so since. But Rwanda was different. How many times can you use the word ‘evil’? Find me replacements, find me anything that would do.
It was a desperate piece to edit. Looking at the footage from the church in particular, it was difficult to see how much we could actually broadcast. But Andy had shot it cleverly, so that enough material was available to give the viewer a sense of what had happened there. Still, it was hard to compute that such horrific violence could befall people who had sought sanctuary in a church.
Rwanda was supposed to be one of the most Catholic countries in Africa. Something like 60 per cent of the people believed in the teaching and dictates of the Holy See. So churches were all over the place, dominating the countryside as they once did in medieval Europe. But the sanctity of God’s houses offered no protection; it was not respected by those bent on delivering death. The story of the Rwandan genocide is, in part, written in blood on the walls and the floors of churches and chapels across the land.
The genocide had started while the attention of the world’s media was firmly focused on the tumultuous but ultimately historic events in South Africa. I was in Johannesburg when I first heard vague reports of the president of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, being killed in a plane crash in Kigali. I don’t mind admitting that I took little notice, and had no idea at all about the likely fallout.
Even when reports started filtering through about massacres across the country, it didn’t compel news desks to shift resources from South Africa to Rwanda. After all, outbursts of violence and bloodletting in central Africa were nothing new. Soon, however, pictures started emerging of the slaughter. Distant shots of machete-wielding gangs attacking people in the street, and bodies just left lying by the roadside.
Gradually, it was becoming clear that this was not just another eruption of ancient tribal hatreds in which both sides – Hutu and Tutsi – were suffering terrible losses. All too late it was dawning on politicians and diplomats that this was the calculated and organized mass murder of an entire population.
And so the world started to take an interest, and reporters started trying to find a safe way to get in and cover the massacres. It was not easy, and those who did make it in, including my ITN colleague James Mates, were forced to hole up with the small and largely ineffective United Nations force that was hunkered down in Kigali. It was too dangerous to go out. The massacres intensified and the word ‘genocide’ began to be heard.
The real truth about the extent of the organization only emerged later. This was far more sinister and far more planned than anyone had imagined. It was meticulously masterminded by a group of educated Hutu extremists who formed their own militia – the Interahamwe – and who feared that plans for power-sharing with the minority Tutsis would have disastrous consequences for the Hutus.
They drew up a plan to brainwash the ill-educated peasants who made up a large part of the Hutu population, and produced a set of orders that encouraged the slaughter of Tutsis in their communes and villages.
It was chilling how efficiently it was all coordinated; all done, remember, before the Internet or social media or even mobile phones were in common use. The word was spread instead by state radio, which broadcasted vile edicts and little else, day after day. Hutu-owned newspapers and magazines were also recruited to spout hatred and propaganda and promote violence against the Tutsis.
But the most virulently anti-Tutsi outlet in Rwanda at that time was the private radio station Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines. It was established almost a year before the genocide, and immediately opposed any peace talks between the government of President Juvénal Habyarimana and the Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. After the president’s plane was shot down, it began calling for a campaign of killing to wipe out the inyenzi or ‘cockroaches’. It even broadcast lists of specific people to be killed, and gave instructions as to where the people were hiding.
It stayed on air for weeks during the killing, and even when we arrived in June, when much of the violence was over, it was still broadcasting stuff like this:
Today is Sunday, 19th June 1994, and it’s 4.22 p.m. Kigali time in the studios of RTLM. Notice to all cockroaches listening now: Rwanda belongs to those who really defend it. And you, cockroaches, are not real Rwandans. Everybody is up in arms to defeat cockroaches. From our military officers, the young people, adults, men and women. So you understand, cockroaches, you have no way out.
It’s our good luck that cockroaches are so few in this country. These people are a dirty race. We have to exterminate them. We must get rid of them. This is the only solution.
These cockroaches, where did they all go? Surely we have exterminated them. Let us sing; let us rejoice, friends. Cockroaches have been exterminated. Let us rejoice, friends. God is never wrong.
Like pretty much everything else in Rwanda at the time, it was sickening. I felt it was astonishing that months into the genocide no one could take the station off the air or jam the broadcasts. It wasn’t until Tutsi forces advanced through the country in late ’94 and the people behind Radio Milles Collines fled to what was then Zaire that the broadcasts were stopped.
There is no doubt they played a key role in the genocide, and nearly ten years later the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda jailed two of the senior figures behind the radio station, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza and Ferdinand Nahimana.
Barayagwiza, who was chairman of the station in 1994, was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for charges including conspiracy to commit genocide. He died in prison in Cotonou, Benin, after developing Hepatitis C. His family complained that he was denied adequate treatment while he was being held. My heart bleeds for him.
I mentioned that the people behind Radio Milles Collines fled first to Zaire. Hundreds of thousands of other Hutus, whether complicit in the genocide or not, did the same. The final edict to the people by the butchers running the radio station in Kigali was to either get out and follow the leaders into exile or face death at the hands of the army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Hundreds of thousands of Hutus ignored promises of reconciliation from the RPF and fled across the border. But they were swapping the killing fields of Rwanda for chaos and a looming humanitarian disaster in Zaire.
The problem was that the mass exodus seemed to catch the aid agencies by surprise. Many of the refugees ended up making camp as best they could on a vast expanse of volcanic rock near a place called Goma. There was little food or water and no sanitation.
Within weeks it was a proper crisis, and we made our way to Goma at the end of July ’94. By the time we arrived, cholera and dysentery had begun striking down the refugees. It was difficult to resist the thought that this was, in some way, some sort of divine retribution playing out here.
The people who had carried out the killing were now faced with death themselves. It was a desperate, pitiful scene. Starving families, with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, were trying to survive in the dust by the roadside or alongside piles of excrement in the sweltering, barren fields of red-hot rock. Andy looked at me. ‘They’re going to die here in their thousands,’ he said. ‘And they will die quickly, particularly the kids.’
He was right. They did start dying. Hundreds a day, right in front of us. I have been to places where you see people about to die, and I have been to places, many of them, where people are already dead. But never before or since have I been in a place as people were dying. We would literally be filming a child in its mother’s arms when it would take its last breath. We would film young children looking acutely sick, we would include them in that night’s report, only to hear the following morning that they had passed away.
As evening drew in on our first day there, I remember driving along the road to the hotel where we were fortunate enough to have rooms. On one side were people walking – new arrivals carrying pathetically few possessions and wondering by now what on earth they had fled to. If this was sanctuary… the hell of Rwanda may be preferable, they must have been thinking. And on the other side of the road, in the dust, body after body after body. Some newly left there, wrapped in sheeting. Others uncovered, bloated and beginning to smell. Who, I wondered, would collect these bodies? And what would happen if they were simply left there in the baking sun?
No one did collect them. They remained where they lay, and every day the body count rose. People moved among the dead as if they were not there. The roads were thronged with people. Women were lighting fires to cook whatever food they had, the smell wafting across the landscape, concealing the stench of the bodies. Young men held radios to their ears, hoping for the latest news from inside their country. Everywhere, too, were Hutu government soldiers, many still carrying AK-47s. They were demobilized but their weapons still gave them a power in the rapidly expanding camps, which they increasingly used to benefit themselves and satisfy their needs, whether that be water, food or women. Over the coming months, the aid agencies that would eventually arrive documented many cases of sexual assault and rape. As we drove away that first day, there was an air of menace about the place. The men, particularly the soldiers, didn’t like being filmed and they certainly didn’t trust us.