And Thank You For Watching

by Mark Austin

  But they were also desperate and wanted to know what we had in the back of the car. They would peer through the windows at us, and try to stop the car and open the doors. Things grew tense. Some men in uniform started banging on the side of our vehicle, gesturing for us to stop. It was nerve-racking and intimidating. Drive too slowly and they would try to get into the vehicle. Drive too fast and you could easily kill or seriously injure someone, and that could spark a riot from which we would be lucky to emerge alive.

  It took forever to drive out of the place, but we eventually made it back to our hotel – or what passed for a hotel – in Goma town. My room smelled of stale smoke, there were stains all over the carpet, and the sheets on the single bed seemed to be coated in a damp, sticky film. But at least I had a bed and a roof over my head, and we had food and bottled water. That evening, over what he insisted was a donkey burger, my cameraman Eugene Campbell made the point that we should be careful what we put in the car for the following day’s trip out to the camps. We knew we had to go again; it was now a massive international news story. And he was right.

  Normally we would carry supplies we had brought with us – cases of bottled water, canned tuna, cereal bars and bananas – knowing we would be out for the whole day with no access to provisions. But there were a number of issues that Eugene raised. How could we carry that stuff without it being seen by the refugees? How could we eat or drink anything in front of them without sparking a riot? And how would we avoid getting the vehicle itself stolen? They had seen us filming earlier that day, and they’d seen the 4 x 4 and all our equipment. We would be ripe for the picking. In the event, we decided to take one bottle of water each and stash some cereal bars in the glove compartment of the vehicle.

  We left at around 7.30 a.m. and headed towards the same area we had been the previous day. Thousands of people were already on the road, streaming towards what were now becoming large makeshift camps. Also on the road were two white Land Cruisers bearing the logo of the International Red Cross. I have to admit we were pleased to see them. We dropped in behind them and drove into the camp area together. We parked up on the edge of the expanse of volcanic rock that was now impossible to see for the sheer number of people. We estimated about a hundred thousand more people had arrived since we had left. The numbers were staggering… and still no food or tents or bottled water in sight.

  From one of the Land Cruisers emerged Nina Winquist, a young, blonde, effervescent Swede who looked around, sighed heavily and threw up her hands in despair.

  ‘We have set up a temporary hospital over there,’ she said. ‘And food aid is on its way, but the numbers, the numbers… this is already a catastrophe on a huge scale.’

  She was, of course, right. We made our way towards a white tent in the distance. It was easy to spot because there were no other tents there except for the one belonging to Médecins Sans Frontières.

  At the Red Cross tent, Eugene immediately began filming. Desperately sick patients lay inside and outside the tent. And everywhere were children. Some on drips, and many, many more waiting for them. Among them, a Red Cross nurse from Britain, Sally Brown, was doing the best she could but was clearly overwhelmed.

  ‘This one will die, that one will die, this one might pull through, but most of them won’t,’ she told us. Everywhere Eugene pointed the camera was a picture of utter despair and misery.

  In the corner of the tent, a woman was dying before our eyes. You could just tell. The noise of her breathing, suddenly guttural and impaired, was accompanied by jerky movements. Sally could do nothing, she had to concentrate on those who could be saved. All she could do was lift from the woman’s arms the young boy who was clinging to her through her death throes. The boy himself was very unwell, suffering chronic diarrhoea and dysentery. He can’t have been more than two years old. Two years old. I don’t know why, but for some reason I took him from Sally’s arms into mine. He was no weight at all. And – again for no particular reason – I thought of home and my own son, who was about to turn two years old. There was Jack, secure in a loving home with everything he could possibly need, in a reasonably safe country. And there was this lad, who had just seen his mum die in a tent pitched on a wasteland of volcanic dust, where there was precious little food, water or help.

  ‘His dad died in Rwanda,’ said Sally. We filmed him – what else could we do? A Rwandan orphan, the first of many. The first of thousands. He made it onto News at Ten that night. A day later, he died. Perhaps it was for the best. That is obviously a terrible thing to say. But it is how I felt in that place on that day.

  We left the tent and set up the camera outside to interview Nina. While we waited for her, I felt something tugging at the bottom of my trousers. I looked down, and a middle-aged man was trying to haul himself across the ground towards the tent. I lent down to help him, and as I did so he simply rolled over and died. Eugene and I looked at each other. ‘This really is hell on earth,’ I said.

  ‘He was probably a machete man,’ said Eugene. ‘I bet he killed plenty in Rwanda.’ Eugene was almost certainly right. The scary truth was that there were probably thousands of murderers in the sprawling camps all around us.

  It was a question I put to Nina in the interview we eventually got around to. Should they be caring for people who took part in a genocide?

  She had no hesitation. ‘When a person is in need of help, you don’t make moral judgements about whether to give them help or not,’ she said.

  We had our story. It was desperate, again. What a wretched place, what a wretched world… and what a wretched job I did. That’s what I thought as I drove back to the hotel. Was to film these people the best I could do? Really? Shouldn’t we be helping them survive? Shouldn’t we be helping the Red Cross? I mean, really… Film them? Is that it?

  It is a thought I have wrangled with in many parts of the world and on many occasions. I think the best answer I have is that if our pictures and my words are seen and heard around the world, then maybe money and help will follow. It is an argument that usually eases my conscience, but somehow it didn’t then. Not in Rwanda or Goma. I think that such was the horror we witnessed in both places that the usual journalistic instinct to get the story out there withered away when confronted with what we were seeing. You may have thought that the reporter’s instinct would be all the more acute with a big story, but with Rwanda it wasn’t. One moment I just wanted to remove it from my mind, to edit it out. The next, I wrestled with whether, as human beings, we should be doing more to aid them.

  The brilliant writer and Africa specialist, Richard Dowden, began one of his reports from Rwanda like this: ‘I do not want to tell you what I saw today…’ That is how I sometimes felt, reporting from Rwanda and Goma.

  Andy, and later Eugene, kept me on course. They kept telling me it was big and it was important and to strike now because the usual ‘disaster fatigue’ would soon set in back home. A day later, I began to think they were right when I got a call from the foreign desk in London asking if we could do a piece on the plight of the Rwandan gorilla… I managed to delay that for a week or so, but it was instructive in how some people felt about the story and the constant harrowing pictures of African suffering.

  I wondered what the viewers made of it. Were they as horrified as us? Would they watch or turn away? Would they be asking: ‘Why are you showing me all this?’

  More to the point, I wondered what my wife would feel seeing the pictures. How would she feel about me witnessing it all first-hand? And then I remembered that as a trauma doctor in South Africa she was seeing appalling things every day and having to treat dreadful injuries inflicted by man on man.

  I have watched many a politician fly into the scenes of humanitarian disasters, say a few pious words, look suitably shaken, and depart making promises and pledging help. But never have I seen any politician look as genuinely horrified as Lynda Chalker, the minister for overseas aid, when she visited the Rwandan refugees in Goma. She arrived by car, surrounded by
desperate refugees who had no idea who she was. When she got out, she saw our cameras and said how awful it all was. She then saw a truck coming towards us along the road. ‘But it is good to see aid coming in,’ she said. ‘We need more trucks like this.’

  I noticed then that the driver and his colleague in the passenger seat both wore face masks. I realized it was not full of food, but full of corpses. And as it passed we all saw how full it was. The bodies were piled to the roof of the truck. Two or three guys, also in face masks, were standing on the open trailer door, clinging to the back of the lorry. They were off to the most recently dug mass grave, and soon they would be back for more.

  Baroness Chalker lifted a white handkerchief to her face to smother the smell. It wasn’t just the bodies in the truck; many others lay wrapped by the roadside within yards of where we stood. We were used to it by now, and would walk past bodies and barely notice them. But she wasn’t. She was traumatized by what she was seeing. She looked pale and drawn, and I thought at one point she was going to be sick. I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  ‘This is much worse, much more ferocious than anything I have experienced,’ she told me. The minster was taken to a medical aid tent, where a nurse was giving a young woman a drink from a cup. Next to her lay a young boy holding a small cuddly toy. ‘How is he?’ asked Mrs Chalker. ‘Doing very well,’ came the reply. ‘He was found alive in among the bodies at a mass grave.’ We filmed him, and he became known as the boy who came back from the dead. There weren’t many of those in Goma.

  Baroness Chalker, clearly shaken, returned to her car, drove to her plane and headed out of Africa.

  The truth is that Britain, America and the rest of the world failed Rwanda. It was a grotesque betrayal of a country and its people.

  The Rwandan Patriotic Front, under Paul Kagame, now rules Rwanda with an authoritarian hand. The genocide was his excuse for some draconian laws and behaviour by the government, but I guess when you’ve been through what that place has been through, it is understandable.

  Twenty years after the genocide, I went back to Rwanda to see how the country was progressing. I decided to return to the church at Ntarama, and what I found was largely representative of the way the country is dealing with the genocide.

  The church has not been demolished; on the contrary, it has been refurbished. However, it is no longer a church but rather a memorial to mass murder – a physical commemoration of the events of 1994 and those who died. There are tall gates at the entrance, and a large white sign with the words EGLISE NTARAMA in black, and underneath, in red: SITE DU GENOCIDE: ± 5000 PERSONS.

  I walked up to the building, which hadn’t changed much on the outside. It remained a brick construction but was now covered by a large metal awning to protect it from the weather. Inside was what can only be described as a macabre but incredibly poignant scene. When you enter the main door, immediately on your right are four large shelves running the width of the building. On the bottom shelf are bones; leg bones, arm bones, all sorts of bones. And on the shelves above are skulls… hundreds of them, neatly arranged in rows and all facing you, mainly adult-size but there are several that belonged to children. On closer inspection, some are cracked, others caved in. It’s a startling reminder of the numbers who died, and also of the violent way they met their death. I did not expect it. It was shocking and difficult to look at.

  And all around me, hanging on the walls and from the ceiling, were the clothes that Andy and I had filmed strewn across the pews two decades before. I walked slowly down the centre of the church, with the restored wooden pews either side of me. And at the other end, where the altar once was, now stood more shelving, made of scaffolding and large sheets of plasterboard. And on them, examples of the weaponry used to carry out the slaughter. Machetes, large knives, pangas and wooden clubs with nails in. It was horrific to behold, and my immediate thought was why would the people here – many of whom belonged to the families of those killed and maimed – want such a reminder of the atrocity on full public view like this?

  Then, in the doorway of the church, stood Immaculate Mukanyaraya, a tall, slim, imposing figure of a woman in her early fifties. With her was her twenty-year-old daughter Zinni. I had arranged to meet them at the memorial, although Immaculate only agreed as long as they didn’t have to stay long and on the proviso that if she didn’t feel up to it on the day, she could simply not turn up. But here they were, stepping nervously, cautiously, into the building they had not entered for twenty years. Immaculate had sought sanctuary in Ntarama church on the night of the killing. So too did her husband, her son, five brothers, four sisters and nine cousins. Only two of them survived. Herself and her son. Or three, counting Zinni, her unborn child.

  ‘We heard the militiamen coming with their machetes and their axes,’ she told me. ‘And when they threw a grenade at the church, I thought we can’t stay here. I swept up the children and we just ran out of the church and into the forest. And then we kept on running.’

  Like many others, they ran down a nearby hillside and hid in the swamp below. She says they stayed there for about a month and it was there that she gave birth to her daughter. They survived due to a couple of men hiding with them who would venture out every few days and come back with food and water. ‘We were terrified, all day, every day,’ she said.

  In the church, twenty years on, she moved slowly and looked around without saying a word to us or to her daughter. For several minutes, she just stood and looked. Then she started looking at the skulls, lifting them and examining them closely. ‘I wonder which one belongs to my husband,’ she said.

  Immaculate told me she was glad the memorial is there, because it is important never to forget what happened. ‘Could you ever forgive?’ I asked her.

  She looked at the shelves and then looked down. And after a minute or so, she said she had already begun to forgive. ‘We have to, or we will never move on.’

  Then she told me that the government had asked her to work on a local project with the wives of the perpetrators of the massacre. They were together twice a week making gift soaps that were sold in the local town.

  And nearby we found an even more extraordinary experiment underway. In a village in the district of Bugesera, an Anglican bishop, John Rucyahana, was trying to realize his dream of reconciliation. When we arrived, we were met at the entrance to the village by a dance troupe singing a welcome song. But this was no ordinary village dance group. The dancers were from families of both perpetrators and victims during the genocide. And side by side in the audience were Thacien and Droselle. He was guilty of her husband’s murder and yet now they live as neighbours. She tells me she forgives him because he confessed his crime and served time in prison.

  The bishop says his ‘reconciliation villages’ dotted around Rwanda are working and helping the country recover. He introduces us to Abdul and Chantelle. Abdul was part of a Hutu militia that slaughtered members of Chantelle’s family, and now they too live in neighbouring homes. I ask Chantelle whether she is happy to live next to Abdul. ‘After the genocide, I could not have lived near anyone who did the killing,’ she told me. ‘But now there are no problems. He takes my cow out to grass, our children play, and we live peacefully.’

  Abdul admitted killing Tutsis and was given a presidential pardon after agreeing to take part in the reconciliation programme.

  Among those I spoke to while I was there, there is a definite will to see the programme succeed, but the truth is you only have to scratch beneath the surface to realize Rwanda remains a country of suspicion and fear. How could it be otherwise?

  President Kagame remains popular within Rwanda but faces criticism from outside, due to the fact that he’s using the legacy of the genocide to impose a Tutsi-dominated authoritarian regime. His retort is to say he will take no lessons on human rights from Western countries who failed to intervene to stop the killing in 1994.

  It seems to me that the best hope for Rwanda lies with the two-thirds of the populati
on who are under twenty-five. In schools they are now encouraged to reject the categorization of Hutu and Tutsi, and instead find common cause in building a new Rwanda.

  Economic empowerment will help too, and over the last few years the economy has been growing by an average of around 8 per cent and a million Rwandans have been lifted out of poverty.

  Despite all that happened to her, Immaculate Mukanyaraya is part of the process. Working in that soap-making cooperative with the wives of convicted killers, she says she can forgive but will never forget. She calls the men who did it ‘animals’, but says remembering the genocide with memorials and ceremonies is the best way to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

  Rwanda is a beautiful country scarred by atrocity, and at its moment of greatest need it was abandoned by the world. The very least it deserves is a future.

  JOURNEYS

  QUITE OFTEN WHEN a big story breaks, the biggest challenge of the whole process is not the writing, interviewing or filming. It is physically getting to where the story is.

  That is the big difference between print journalism and television reporting. If necessary, newspaper reporters can get pretty much everything they need on the phone or by email. They just need the words, and the descriptive stuff from the scene they can often put together from witness accounts. In television, you have to be there. You need to be on the scene, in the midst of it all… and you have to be filmed doing it.