We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

by Philip Gourevitch

  While I was still on the phone, the doctor’s wife, Genny, a handsome woman with an easy manner, came home from taking her kids to school. She offered me a cup of coffee—“From Rwanda,” she said proudly. We sat on huge leather couches beside a gigantic television in an alcove of the kitchen, with a view over a patio, a barbecue pavilion, and, on the far shore of a tiled swimming pool, a patch of garden. The distant voices of the Rwandan maid and a Mexican nanny echoed off the marble floors and lofty ceilings of further rooms, and Genny said, “With my father-in-law, we were the last ones to hear anything. He was in Zaire, he was in Zambia, a refugee, and an old man—more than seventy years old. His one great wish was retirement and old age in Rwanda. Then he comes here and suddenly they say he killed people. You know Rwandans. Rwandans go crazy with jealousy. Rwandans don’t like if you are rich or in good health.”

  Genny’s own father was a Hutu who had been involved in politics and was killed by rivals in 1973. Her mother was a Tutsi who was saved by chance on the brink of being killed in 1994, and who still lived in Rwanda. “We mixed people don’t hate Tutsi or Hutu,” Genny said. This was an inaccurate generalization—many people of mixed parentage had killed as Hutus, or been killed as Tutsis—but Genny had been living in exile, and she explained, “Most Rwandans who are here in America like my husband have been here so long that they all take positions according to their families. If they say your brother killed, then you take his side.” She did not seem to have her own mind entirely made up about her father-in-law, the pastor. She said, “This is a man who can’t stand to see blood even when you kill a chicken. But anything is possible.”

  Just before noon, Dr. Ntaki called with a new plan: we would lunch at the Laredo Country Club. Then the family lawyer, Lazaro Gorza-Gongora, showed up. He was dapper and mild-mannered and very direct. He said that he wasn’t prepared to let the pastor speak to me. “The accusations are outrageous, monstrous, and completely destructive,” he said with disarming tranquillity. “People say whatever they want, and an old man’s last years are in jeopardy.”

  Dr. Ntaki was a round, loquacious man with strikingly bulging eyes. He wore a malachite-faced Rolex watch and a white dress shirt with a boldly hand-stitched collar. As he drove Gorza-Gongora and me to the country club in a Chevrolet Suburban that had been customized to feel like a living room, complete with a television set, he spoke with great interest about Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s preparations for open-heart surgery. Dr. Ntaki himself presided over the intravenous drips of open-heart patients, and he shared his wife’s view that any charges against his father were the product of typical Rwandan class envy and spite. “They see us as rich and well educated,” he said. “They can’t take it.” He told me that his family owned a spread of five hundred acres in Kibuye—kingly proportions in Rwanda—with coffee and banana plantations, many cattle, “and all those good Rwandan things.” He said, “Here’s a father with three sons who are doctors and two other children who work in international finance. This is in a country that didn’t have a single person with a bachelor’s degree in 1960. Of course everyone resents him and wants to destroy him.”

  We ate overlooking the golf course. Dr. Ntaki held forth on Rwandan politics. He didn’t use the word “genocide”; he spoke of “chaos, chaos, chaos,” with every man for himself just trying to save his own skin. And Tutsis had started it, he said, by killing the President. I reminded him that there was no evidence linking Tutsis to the assassination; that, in fact, the genocide had been meticulously planned by the Hutu extremists who set it in motion within an hour of the President’s death. Dr. Ntaki ignored me. “If President Kennedy had been assassinated in this country by a black man,” he said, “the American population would have most certainly killed all the blacks.”

  Gorza-Gongora watched me writing this absurd statement in my notebook and broke his silence. “You say ‘extermination,’ you say ‘systematic,’ you say ‘genocide,’” he said to me. “That’s just a theory, and I think you’ve come all the way to Laredo to hold up my client as a clever proof of this theory.”

  No, I said, I had come because a man of God was accused of having ordained the murder of half his flock, co-religionists, simply because they had been born as something called Tutsi.

  “What’s the evidence?” Gorza-Gongora said. “Eyewitnesses?” He chuckled. “Anybody can say they saw anything.”

  Dr. Ntaki went further; he detected a conspiracy: “The witnesses are all government tools. If they don’t say what the new government wants, they’ll be killed.”

  Still, Dr. Ntaki said that despite his lawyer’s counsel, his father was concerned for his honor and wished to speak to me.

  “The pastor thinks silence looks like guilt,” Gorza-Gongora said. “Silence is peace.”

  Leaving the country club, I asked Dr. Ntaki if he ever had doubts about his father’s innocence. He said, “Of course, but—” and, after a second, “Do you have a father? I will defend him with everything I have.”

  PASTOR ELIZAPHAN NTAKIRUTIMANA was a man of stern composure. He sat in a wing chair in the doctor’s parlor, clutching a manila folder in his lap, and wearing a gray cap over his gray hair, a gray shirt, black suspenders, black pants, black square-toed shoes, and squarish wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke in Kinyarwanda, the language of his country, and his son translated. He said, “They are saying I killed people. Eight thousand people.” The number was about four times higher than any I had previously heard. The pastor’s voice was full of angry disbelief. “It is all one hundred percent pure lies. I did not kill any people. I never told anybody to kill any people. I could not do such things.”

  When the “chaos” began in Kigali, the pastor explained, he didn’t think it would reach Mugonero, and when Tutsis began going to the hospital, he claimed he had to ask them why. After about a week, he said, there were so many refugees that “things started turning a little weird.” So the pastor and his son Gerard held a meeting to address the question “What are we going to do?” But at that moment two policemen showed up to guard the hospital, and he said, “We didn’t have the meeting, because they had done it without our asking.”

  Then, on Saturday, April 16, at seven in the morning, the two policemen from the hospital came to Pastor Ntakirutimana’s house. “They gave me letters from the Tutsi pastors there,” he said. “One was addressed to me, another to the mayor. I read mine. The letter they gave me said, ‘You understand they are plotting, they are trying to kill us, can you go to the mayor and ask him to protect us?” Ntakirutimana read this, then went to the mayor, Charles Sikubwabo. “I told him what my message from the Tutsi pastors said, and gave him his letter. The mayor told me, ‘Pastor, there’s no government. I have no power. I can do nothing.’

  “I was surprised,” Ntakirutimana went on. “I returned to Mugonero, and I told the policemen to go with a message to the pastors to tell them, ‘Nothing can be done, and the mayor, too, said he can do nothing.’” Then Pastor Ntakirutimana took his wife and some others who “wanted to hide” and drove out of town—to Gishyita, which is where Mayor Sikubwabo lived, and where many of the injured refugees at Mugonero had received their wounds. “Gishyita,” he explained, “had killed its people already, so there was peace.”

  Pastor Ntakirutimana said that he hadn’t returned to Mugonero until April 27. “Everybody was buried,” he told me, “I never saw anything.” After that, he said, “I never went anywhere. I stayed at my office. Only, one day I went to Rwamatamu because I heard that pastors had also died there, and I wanted to see if I could find even a kid of theirs to save. But I found nothing to save. They were Tutsis.”

  The pastor made himself out as a great patron of Tutsis. He said he had given them jobs and shelter, and promoted them within the Adventist hierarchy. He lifted his chin and said, “As long as I live, in my whole life, there is nobody I tried to help more than Tutsis.” He could not understand how Tutsis could be so ungrateful as to make accusations against him. “It looks as if there
is no justice anymore,” he said.

  The name Ntakirutimana means “nothing is greater than God,” and the pastor told me, “I think I’m closer to God than I have ever been in my life.” He said, “When I see what happened in Rwanda, I’m very sad about it because politics is bad. A lot of people died.” He didn’t sound sad; he sounded tired, harassed, indignant. “Hatred is the result of sin, and when Jesus Christ comes, he’s the only one who’s going to take it away,” he said, and once more, he added, “Everything was chaos.”

  “They say you organized it,” I reminded him.

  He said, “Never, never, never, never.”

  I asked him whether he remembered the precise language of the letter addressed to him by the seven Tutsi pastors who were killed at Mugonero. He opened the folder in his lap. “Here,” he said, and held out the handwritten original and a translation. His daughter-in-law, Genny, took the documents to make me copies on the fax machine. Dr. Ntaki wanted a drink, and fetched a bottle of scotch. The lawyer, Gorza-Gongora, told me, “I was always against this meeting with you.” Genny brought me the letter. It was dated April 15, 1994.

  Our dear leader, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana,

  How are you! We wish you to be strong in all these problems we are facing. We wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. We therefore request you to intervene on our behalf and talk with the Mayor. We believe that, with the help of God who entrusted you the leadership of this flock, which is going to be destroyed, your intervention will be highly appreciated, the same way as the Jews were saved by Esther.

  We give honor to you.

  The letter was signed by Pastors Ezekiel Semugeshi, Isaka Rucondo, Seth Rwanyabuto, Eliezer Seromba, Seth Sebihe, Jerome Gakwaya, and Ezekias Zigirinshuti.

  Dr. Ntaki walked me out to my car. In the driveway, he stopped and said, “If my father committed crimes, even though I am his son, I say he should be prosecuted. But I don’t believe any of it.”

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after we met, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana was in his car, driving south on Interstate 35 toward Mexico. To the FBI agents who were tailing him, his driving appeared erratic—he would speed up, slow down, change lanes, and again accelerate abruptly. A few miles from the border, they pulled him over and took him into custody. The arrest went almost entirely unnoticed in the American press. A few days later, in the Ivory Coast, the pastor’s son Dr. Gerard was also arrested, and he was quickly transferred to the UN tribunal. But the pastor had a United States green card and the rights that came with it, and he retained Ramsey Clark, a former Attorney General, who specialized in defending politically repugnant cases, to fight his extradition. Clark argued, speciously, that it would be unconstitutional for the United States to surrender the pastor—or anybody else—to the tribunal, and Judge Marcel Notzon, who presided over the case in federal district court, agreed. On December 17, 1997, after fourteen months in a Laredo jail, Pastor Ntakirutimana was released unconditionally, and he remained a free man for nine weeks before FBI agents arrested him a second time, pending an appeal of Judge Notzon’s decision.

  When I heard that Pastor Ntakirutimana had been returned to his family in time for Christmas, I went back through my notes from Mugonero. I had forgotten that after my meetings with survivors, my translator, Arcene, asked me to go with him to the hospital chapel, where there had been a lot of killing; he wanted to pay homage to the dead, who were buried nearby in mass graves. We stood in silence in the empty chapel with its cement pews. On the floor below the altar sat four memorial coffins, draped in white sheets, painted with black crosses. “The people who did this,” Arcene said, “didn’t understand the idea of a country. What is a country? What is a human being? They had no understanding.”

  Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.

  —RALPH ELLISON

  Invisible Man

  4

  IN THE FAMOUS story, the older brother, Cain, was a cultivator, and Abel, the younger, was a herdsman. They made their offerings to God—Cain from his crops, Abel from his herds. Abel’s portion won God’s regard; Cain’s did not. So Cain killed Abel.

  Rwanda, in the beginning, was settled by cave-dwelling pygmies whose descendants today are called the Twa people, a marginalized and disenfranchised group that counts for less than one percent of the population. Hutus and Tutsis came later, but their origins and the order of their immigrations are not accurately known. While convention holds that Hutus are a Bantu people who settled Rwanda first, coming from the south and west, and that Tutsis are a Nilotic people who migrated from the north and east, these theories draw more on legend than on documentable fact. With time, Hutus and Tutsis spoke the same language, followed the same religion, intermarried, and lived intermingled, without territorial distinctions, on the same hills, sharing the same social and political culture in small chiefdoms. The chiefs were called Mwamis, and some of them were Hutus, some Tutsis; Hutus and Tutsis fought together in the Mwamis’ armies; through marriage and clientage, Hutus could become hereditary Tutsis, and Tutsis could become hereditary Hutus. Because of all this mixing, ethnographers and historians have lately come to agree that Hutus and Tutsis cannot properly be called distinct ethnic groups.

  Still, the names Hutu and Tutsi stuck. They had meaning, and though there is no general agreement about what word best describes that meaning—“classes,” “castes,” and “ranks” are favorites—the source of the distinction is undisputed: Hutus were cultivators and Tutsis were herdsmen. This was the original inequality: cattle are a more valuable asset than produce, and although some Hutus owned cows while some Tutsis tilled the soil, the word Tutsi became synonymous with a political and economic elite. The stratification is believed to have been accelerated after 1860, when the Mwami Kigeri Rwabugiri, a Tutsi, ascended to the Rwandan throne and initiated a series of military and political campaigns that expanded and consolidated his dominion over a territory nearly the size of the present Republic.

  But there is no reliable record of the precolonial state. Rwandans had no alphabet; their tradition was oral, therefore malleable; and because their society is fiercely hierarchical the stories they tell of their past tend to be dictated by those who hold power, either through the state or in opposition to it. Of course, at the core of Rwanda’s historical debates lie competing ideas about the relationship between Hutus and Tutsis, so it is a frustration that the precolonial roots of that relationship are largely unknowable. As the political thinker Mahmood Mamdani has observed: “That much of what passed as historical fact in academic circles has to be considered as tentative—if not outright fictional—is becoming clear as post-genocidal sobriety compels a growing number of historians to take seriously the political uses to which their writings have been put, and their readers to question the certainty with which many a claim has been advanced.”

  So Rwandan history is dangerous. Like all of history, it is a record of successive struggles for power, and to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality—even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood. Yet some facts, and some understandings, remain unchallenged. For instance, Rwabugiri was the heir to a dynasty that claimed to trace its lineage to the late fourteenth century. Five hundred years is a very long life for any regime, at any time, anywhere. Even if we consider the real possibility that the rememberers of the royal house were exaggerating, or marking time differently than we do, and that Rwabugiri’s kingdom was only a few centuries old—that’s still a ripe age, and such endurance requires organization.

  By the time Rwabugiri came along, the Rwandan state, having expanded gradually from a single hilltop chieftaincy, administered much of what is now southern and central Rwanda through a rigorous, multilayered hierarchy of military, political, and civil chiefs and governors, subchiefs, and deputy governors, subsubchiefs, and deputy deputy governors. Priests, tax
collectors, clan leaders, and army recruiters all had their place in the order that bound every hill in the kingdom in fealty to the Mwami. Court intrigues among the Mwami’s sprawling entourage were as elaborate and treacherous as any Shakespeare sketched, with the additional complications of official polygamy, and a prize of immense power for the queen mother.

  The Mwami himself was revered as a divinity, absolute and infallible. He was regarded as the personal embodiment of Rwanda, and as Rwabugiri extended his domain, he increasingly configured the world of his subjects in his own image. Tutsis were favored for top political and military offices, and through their public identification with the state, they generally enjoyed greater financial power as well. The regime was essentially feudal: Tutsis were aristocrats; Hutus were vassals. Yet status and identity continued to be determined by many other factors as well—clan, region, clientage, military prowess, even individual industry—and the lines between Hutu and Tutsi remained porous. In fact, in some areas of modern-day Rwanda that Mwami Rwabugiri failed to conquer, these categories had no local significance. Apparently, Hutu and Tutsi identities took definition only in relationship to state power; as they did, the two groups inevitably developed their own distinctive cultures—their own set of ideas about themselves and one another—according to their respective domains. Those ideas were largely framed as opposing negatives: a Hutu was what a Tutsi was not, and vice versa. But in the absence of the sort of hard-and-fast taboos that often mark the boundaries between ethnic or tribal groups, Rwandans who sought to make the most of these distinctions were compelled to amplify minute and imprecise field marks, like the prevalence of milk in one’s diet, and, especially, physical traits.

  Within the jumble of Rwandan characteristics, the question of appearances is particularly touchy, as it has often come to mean life or death. But nobody can dispute the physical archetypes: for Hutus, stocky and round-faced, dark-skinned, flat-nosed, thicklipped, and square-jawed; for Tutsis, lanky and long-faced, not so dark-skinned, narrow-nosed, thin-lipped, and narrow-chinned. Nature presents countless exceptions. (“You can’t tell us apart,” Laurent Nkongoli, the portly vice president of the National Assembly, told me. “We can’t tell us apart. I was on a bus in the north once and because I was in the north, where they”—Hutus —“were, and because I ate corn, which they eat, they said, ‘He’s one of us.’ But I’m a Tutsi from Butare in the south.”) Still, when the Europeans arrived in Rwanda at the end of the nineteenth century, they formed a picture of a stately race of warrior kings, surrounded by herds of long-horned cattle and a subordinate race of short, dark peasants, hoeing tubers and picking bananas. The white men assumed that this was the tradition of the place, and they thought it a natural arrangement.