Eyewitness

by Garrie Hutchinson

  On the 20th of August, as Ilya’s father sat reading Obshaya Gazeta (Common Newspaper), which journalists from newspapers banned by the GKChP had decided to print and distribute themselves, the phone rang. It was Ilya’s friend Nikolai, who wanted to go to the city for a look at the protest. Radio Echo was again broadcasting news of the pockets of resistance around the city, which were growing by the hour as fears heightened that the parliament would soon be stormed. Ilya’s father told his son to stay home, urging him to obey the curfew the GKChP had imposed. But the two young men went to the city nonetheless, Ilya reluctantly.

  As they emerged from the metro tunnel near the parliament, they were swept up by a huge crowd of people. This was no small protest! So they found themselves a safe spot and watched for about an hour.

  A few metres away from where they sat there was a sudden roar of protest. At one of the many underpasses near the bridge over the Moscow River, just near the parliament, people were screaming and shouting. The two young men went to investigate.

  Tanks were trying to drive through the underpass tunnel only to be stopped by a barricade of trolleybuses which the resisters had commandeered and brought to the area.

  Ilya weaved his way through the protesters and came face to face with a line of tanks rumbling towards him, their tread throwing up black smoke, their noise in the echoing tunnel thunderous. He jumped to safety onto the pavement.

  I was walking over the underpass when I heard the commotion. I zigzagged through a thick crowd of people who had jammed the footpath and roadway leading down into the tunnel. I could see the trolleybuses and behind them soldiers bobbing up through the hatches on their tanks, but I couldn’t see exactly what was happening. Next to me a woman with a carry-bag full of hard-boiled eggs to feed the resisters grabbed my arm and started weeping. ‘They’re going to mow us down,’ she was saying through her tears. ‘Our sons are going to kill us!’

  The stand-off in the tunnel lasted no more than five minutes. Enough time for some of the commanders to give up and leave their tanks standing empty and idle. One of those who had surrendered brushed past me, a bottle of Coke in his hand. The crowd was urging the soldiers who stayed in their vehicles to get down and join the protest. I could hear them screaming at the soldiers.

  But deep in the tunnel, one tank had refused to give up. It was still rumbling. It surged ahead and was pounding the trolleybuses in its way. Three men jumped aboard as the tank violently rammed back and forth. Its manhole cover flew open, and 23-year-old Dima Komar jumped inside. A few seconds later his body was slumped over the hatch. The soldiers inside had shot him in fear. The other two men tried to drag Dima’s body off but the tank again violently jerked forward and one of them was thrown off. Vladimir Usov, 38 years old, was crushed beneath its tread.

  Panic turned to fury. ‘Murderers, murderers,’ I could hear people bellowing. But still I could see nothing. I could only hear gunshots. The lady with the eggs clung to me as hard as I clung to her.

  Five soldiers jumped out of the tank and ran for cover, firing pistol shots randomly into the air.

  Only the tank commander remained. Caught between his trapped tank and the wrath of the Russians he’d been ordered to crush, he too began firing his pistol as he prepared to run through the crowd. One of his bullets went astray and Ilya Krichevsky became the third victim of the GKChP’s attempt to turn back the clock.

  *

  I ran from the tunnel opening back towards the parliament hoping to find my friends in the masses. But I couldn’t. I was terrified and on the verge of hyperventilation. There was a thick crowd of people lining the road above the underpass – shocked, angry, disappointed, frightened, defeated. Some wept. Others swore. A vehicle was trying to drive a wedge through them and from where I stood it sounded ominous. I heard the panic in people’s voices. An old man muttered: ‘Ne mozhet byt’ [‘It couldn’t possibly be!’] But it wasn’t a tank. It was a car carrying Eduard Shevardnadze, who’d been sent out by Boris Yeltsin to investigate when word reached the president that blood was being spilled.

  I pushed through the crowd towards Shevardnadze, almost losing my tape recorder, which was being dragged back by the people who were crushing against me. Shevardnadze sat in the back seat of the car, the window open, his tired eyes with black bags beneath them full of pity and sadness.

  ‘Eduard Amvrosievich – they say people were just killed near the tunnel!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered, ‘but if they’ve killed people, they’ll be our martyrs.’ He paused. ‘They will have single-handedly buried the Communist Party forever.’

  When I escaped the crowds, I looked down at my tape recorder and the end of the microphone cord was crushed. It had been pulled from its socket during the mayhem near the tunnel and I hadn’t recorded a thing.

  Ntarama Church, Rwanda

  Cameron Forbes

  Cameron Forbes has reported wars and civil wars in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Rwanda. He became immersed in the issues of independence, separatism, colonialism and civil war and was twice in Bougainville during that sad conflict. He made several trips to southern Africa, for apartheid’s end-game and the independence of Namibia.

  Forbes says:

  I was fascinated by Africa, but for the Australian media management, the whole of the continent north of Johannesburg was very low priority. When the first indications were emerging of the Rwandan genocide, World Vision offered a ticket. I accepted with thanks, made contact with the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front pointman in Brussels and in early June found myself in a four-wheel drive on a rough mountain – heading for hell.

  Cameron Forbes is author of Hellfire: The Story of Australia, Japan and the Prisoners of War (2005).

  *

  The stained-glass window of Ntarama church breaks bright sunlight into rose and gold and heavenly blue, a dapple of colours playing gently over the gloom of a Rwandan hell. Over bodies piled on the floor and on the pews, hundreds and hundreds of them, men, women, children and babies, torn and twisted and shattered, dying in their individual agony but melting into one another now.

  It is easier to look at the skulls than at the faces where flesh remains. The skulls are mute; the faces scream with terror. The people came here for sanctuary and they were slaughtered.

  There is a narrow, winding track to the isolated church, through neat rows of coffee trees laden with berries blushing pink which shows harvesting time is near. Then there is a signpost to the carnage, the mouldering body of a woman on the left verge. Then there is a grove of trees, full of butterflies. Then there is the devil’s playground.

  Here these people have heard Mass, taken the sacraments, turned to one another to make the sign of peace, married, baptised their children, taken solace in time of death at the words of the requiem.

  These were a devout people who worked the fields and lived a simple life, with the church at the centre of it. On Sundays and holy days there begged forgiveness for their sins and prayed to the Virgin Mary and the Lamb of God … Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.

  Imagine the fever and fervour of prayer this day as the soldiers with rifles and men with machetes ringed the church. There was no mercy here and no deliverance from evil. The grenades were thrown through the doors, the assault rifles fired and fired and fired through openings broken in the bricks.

  The dying spilt out, the living were hacked as they ran. Here’s a child’s skull, cracked by a blow; here’s the skeleton of a baby, so neatly chopped in half; here’s a severed left arm, the bones bare except for skin dried like a wrinkled glove on the hand.

  Imagine grasping a machete, slashing into flesh, slicing into bone, slashing until your clothes are soaked with blood and your arm is heavy with killing and even the beheading of a small child is hard work.

  The truth is there is nothing to prepare you for Rwanda unless it is the worst nightmare, or memory of the mountains of skulls in the Cambodian killing fields, or those old, scratchy, black-and-white ne
wsreels of stick bodies being tossed into cavernous graves at Auschwitz.

  In Rwanda the dead are many – certainly hundreds of thousands, and perhaps more than a million out of a population of 7.5 million, most of them from the Tutsi ethnic minority.

  Among the living are tiny victims, mutilated in body and mind, and the people who did these things to them are the interahamwe, uneducated peasants, the unemployed of the flotsam of years of war, recruited from the Hutu majority by the government, armed with machetes, filled with atavistic fear and hatred and reported to have been paid $US3.50 a day, riches for a Rwandan.

  Ntarama church, in Nyamata province, is not the heart of darkness in Rwanda. The whole country is infected; the whole country – its fields, villages, towns, swamps and rivers – is a graveyard.

  We began this, our third journey into one of the most brutal of civil wars, at Mulundi, headquarters of the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front, a hilltop complex of buildings in what had been a tea plantation. Without R.P.F. permission and without an R.P.F. minder it is impossible to move. There are frequent roadblocks, some guarded by boy soldiers who look small against their AK-47s.

  Our minder this time is Ernest Mwenerukungo, tall and thin even by Tutsi standards, and bespectacled. I reach out to shake his hand, and stop. He is holding a grenade. He nurses it as we buck along the high, gravel roads. Sometimes he flicks the pin ring. I think he sleeps with his grenade.

  By now the drive has become familiar but still the ghosts in the emptiness press in on all sides and the smell of death often fills the car. Conversation is spasmodic.

  Before the civil war started five years ago, Ernest lectured in physics at the university. ‘It is good we wish to go to the hospital at Gahini,’ he says. Gahini is a mission settlement about an hour’s drive to the east of the capital, Kigali. His mother is there. His father and most of his brothers and sisters are dead. The interahamwe chopped the foot from one sister who survived.

  Gahini hospital is a graceful, whitewashed building in neat grounds but like all hospitals in Rwanda it does not have sufficient drugs, drips, dressings, blood or even food. Like the morgue that is Ntarama church, it holds the darkest of mirrors up to the world.

  Walk in sadness and disbelief. A human being hacked off nine-year- old Oswald Mwizerwo’s leg and partly severed his arm. A human being slashed 13-year-old Olivie Munyengango’s head and tried to cut off both her feet. And it was a human being who stood over one-yearold Uwinbabazi and brought the machete down on her back. Her body is twisted now, and some day someone will have to tell her that all her family are dead.

  I asked Dr Annie Faure, of Médecins Sans Frontières, if any of the children were Hutu. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t care. They tried to kill all the good people, Tutsi and Hutu, all those who were opposed to the government. This is just like Nazism.’

  ‘They’ are the interahamwe. Surely they must be gaunt men with eyes that are vacant, eyes that are, well different – eyes of the beast. But they are ordinary. You could picture them out in the fields using a hoe to turn over the rich, black earth, sowing the seed and harvesting the grain for bread or beer. With a machete.

  There are 12 of them at Gahini, captives of the R.P.F. They show no sign of ill-treatment, they show no sign of remorse and they look considerably better fed than the Rwandans in orphanages, hospitals, in refugee camps or, occasionally, in files along the roads.

  Mbumba is 19. He is from Gitarama, now the stronghold of the government that created him. He travelled to the junction town of Kibungo looking for a job and was enrolled in the interahamwe. He would have been told how the Tutsi overlords dominated his people down the centuries, oppressed them and stole their wealth, turning them into landless peasants.

  The politics of Rwanda are complex, with both Tutsi and Hutu elites competing for power and both Tutsi and Hutu suffering under Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana. The president was assassinated, evidently by Hutu hardliners fearing he would make a deal with the rebel Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front. The army and the interahamwe were unleashing in a killing frenzy.

  Mbumba is clearly a simple man. He knew nothing about the machinations of power but he had used a machete since childhood. He took it, and in the common pattern, went to a neighbouring commune. There, he told me (with Ernest interpreting), he killed two Tutsis, a young man and an old man. I asked him how he felt. ‘Secure,’ he said, misunderstanding the question and thinking I want to know if he felt safe from revenge.

  ‘About the killing,’ I asked. He shrugged. Should he be punished? No, he said. It was the first time he had killed. But why? His superiors would have killed him if he hadn’t, he said. He was following orders. Habyarimama, 20 years old, admitted to killing one man. He was following orders. Sixty-year-old Kagandi did not kill anyone. He only chased people from the houses for a mob, including his two sons, to kill. He was following orders.

  Following orders: the litany of the weak and wicked down the ages.

  Ernest talked quietly to the interahamwe for a few more minutes, then we drove towards Kigali, past beautiful Lake Muhazi.

  Ernest turned and said: ‘One of them helped kill my brother.’ His brother, Joseph Gatare, was a Catholic priest. Interahamwe had sliced his nose – ‘he had a long one like mine,’ Ernest said – tried to force him to eat it, then shot him, together with another priest.

  Didn’t he want to throw his grenade among them? I asked. No, he said. He took comfort that the interahamwe had been caught and would face justice. But to kill the killers would mean killing most of Rwanda.

  That night we stayed in a house in Kigali with the R.P.F., sharing a meal of rice and beans and sitting on the veranda by candlelight, listening to the roar and rumble of the battle. On the hill just behind us was a rebel battery. The blast of outgoing fire didn’t interrupt birds singing their way towards sleep. Across the valley red flared and seconds later the first of the government Katushya rockets landed. The last exploded about 200 metres from the house.

  In the morning we asked Ernest’s superior, Patrick Kayiranga, if we could visit Kubgayi, a town just overrun by the R.P.F. It was still too dangerous, he said. Mines were still being cleared.

  I had heard that World Vision had been asked by the R.P.F. to rush medicine and drugs to a place called Nyamata. Could we go there? Yes, Ernest said. There was a hospital there, and a church with bodies, found only six days before by the R.P.F.

  For the media in Rwanda, the visiting of churches with bodies is a priority, especially as it is virtually impossible to get to the front-lines. Two days earlier a group of us had clustered around an R.P.F. major. There had been a report that a massacre site had just been found near the Tanzanian border, with 3000 bodies.

  Could we go there? we asked. The bodies had probably been buried, the major said.

  It’s a pity about the visuals, a television cameraman said.

  It’s a pity they had to die, the major said.

  But this is not being ghoulish. This is Rwanda. This is what the government, whose radio station continues to broadcast calls for genocide – ‘the graves are only half-full’ – has done. It must be recorded. And even if it is, some so-called historian in the future might well argue that it never happened.

  So we drove towards Nyamata. We turned west on a rutted, gravel road at the town of Kibungo where Tutsi homes had been destroyed by retreating government troops. Ernest pointed to a freshly bulldozed area. It was the mass grave in which his brother and others of his family are buried.

  We came to the Kagere River, which flows into Lake Victoria – and mercifully flows fast. We stopped on the bridge for three minutes. The half-torso of a child floated underneath, then the body of a man. We could see another coming round the bend. Some are carried underwater, to surface 100 kilometres along the shores of the lake.

  God knows how many bodies rock in the water or moulder in the fields. There are likely to be more churches like Ntarama, desecrated by mass death. Certainly the wide sw
amp down the hill from Ntarama church is foul with the dead.

  As we started on the road back to Kigali from the church, we met Safari Neegigumoa. His mother, father and five of his brothers and sisters are part of the decaying horror in the church. He and one brother, Muhozi, escaped the spray of the bullets and the sweep of the machetes, hurdling the dying to reach the swamp.

  For two weeks they stayed there, waist-deep in water while people died from weakness to bob around them and while the soldiers fired in rocket-propelled grenades and while the interahamwe waited with machetes for those who were flushed out.

  I asked Safari how he would feel living among Hutu again. He didn’t know. He just didn’t know.

  And, of course, it is too early to talk about peace and co-existence and forgiveness in Rwanda. The fighting goes on. The living are haunted by the dead and by the fears of further massacres.

  As we leave Nyamata, a horde of young men rush across the road. They are carrying long sticks with loops of twine. What are they doing? I ask Ernest. They are recruits, survivors from the swamp, training.

  Tutsis have not been blameless in Rwanda’s bloody history. There have been past massacres of Hutus. All the soldiers I met seemed astonishingly disciplined and understandably dedicated, but perhaps some are guilty of some present horrors and perhaps some are taking revenge when they can.

  But in this war they have been fighting for the very survival of their people, and I got the impression that they would all fight to the death.

  Ntarama church sears the soul of the outsider; imagine the fire it lights in the hearts of the Tutsis.

  Hijacked

  Garrie Hutchinson

  Garrie Hutchinson found himself hijacked while travelling in the Middle East for the book An Australian Odyssey: From Giza to Gallipoli (1997). He has also published Not Going to Vietnam: Journeys through Two Wars (1999), and has researched and photographed extensively in France, the Middle East (including a peaceful stay in Libya) and Papua New Guinea for Pilgrimage: A Traveller’s Guide to Australia’s Battlefields (2006).