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

by Philip Gourevitch

  A few days after the RPF’s overnight occupation of Ruhengeri, in January of 1991, Habyarimana’s FAR faked an attack on one of its own military camps in the northwest. The RPF was blamed and, in retaliation, a local mayor organized massacres of the Bagogwe, a quasi-nomadic Tutsi subgroup that subsisted in extreme poverty; scores were killed, and the mayor had them buried deep in his own yard. More massacres followed; by the end of March hundreds of Tutsis in the northwest had been slaughtered.

  “We were really terrorized in that period,” Odette recalled. “We thought we were going to be massacred.” In 1989, when she was fired from the hospital, Odette had been furious at the speed with which people she had trusted as friends turned away from her. A year later, she looked back on that time as the good old days. Like many Rwandan Tutsis, Odette first reacted to the war with indignation toward the refugee rebels for placing those who had stayed in the country in jeopardy. “We always thought those on the outside were well settled and better off,” she told me. “We had come to see our situation here as normal. I used to tell my exiled cousins, ‘Why come back? Stay there, you’re much better off,’ and they said, ‘Odette, even you have adopted the discourse of Habyarimana.’ The RPF had to make us aware that they suffered, living in exile, and we started to realize that we hadn’t thought of these exiles for all this time. Ninety-nine percent of the Tutsis had no idea that the RPF would attack. But we began to discuss it, and realized these were our brothers coming and that the Hutus we’d lived with didn’t regard us as equals. They rejected us.”

  When Odette and her husband, Jean-Baptiste, visited the wives of imprisoned Tutsis, Jean-Baptiste got a call from the Secretary-General of Intelligence, whom he considered a good friend. The intelligence chief’s friendly advice was: “If you want to die, keep going to those people.”

  For those in jail, like Bonaventure Nyibizi, a staffer at the Kigali mission of the United States Agency for International Development, the expectation of death was even greater. “They were killing prisoners every night, and on October 26, I was going to be killed,” he told me. “But I had cigarettes. The guy came and said, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ and I gave him a cigarette, so he said, ‘Well, we’re killing people for nothing and I’m not going to kill you tonight.’ People were dying every day from torture. They were taken out, and when they came back, they were beaten, bayoneted, and they were dying. I slept with dead people several nights. I think the initial plan was to kill everybody in prison, but the Red Cross started registering people, so it became difficult. The regime wanted to keep a good international image.”

  One of Bonaventure’s best friends in prison was a businessman named Froduald Karamira. Bonaventure and Karamira both came from Gitarama, in the south, and both were Tutsi by birth. But early in life, Karamira had acquired Hutu identity papers, and he had benefited accordingly; in 1973, when Bonaventure was expelled from school because he was Tutsi, Karamira, who attended the same seminary, was left unmolested. “But the Habyarimana government didn’t like the Hutus from Gitarama, and Karamira was rich, so they arrested him,” Bonaventure explained. “He was a very nice person in prison, always trying to help people out, buying cigarettes, a place to sleep, blankets. When he got out of prison before me, my wife was pregnant with our first child, and he went straightaway to visit her. After March of 1991, when the government released all of us from prison, I saw him several times. He used to come to my house, or my office. And then one night”—Bonaventure snapped his fingers—“he changed completely. We couldn’t talk anymore because I am Tutsi. This happened with so many people. They changed so quickly that you would say, ‘Is this the same person?’”

  In the summer of 1991, the much anticipated multiparty order had begun in Rwanda. Such a leap from totalitarianism to a political free market will be tumultuous even when it is undertaken by sincerely well-intentioned leaders, and in Rwanda the political opening was contrived in conspicuously bad faith. Most of the dozen parties that suddenly began scrapping for attention and influence were simply puppets of Habyarimana’s MRND, created by the President and the akazu to sow confusion and make a mockery of the pluralist enterprise. Only one of the genuine opposition parties had a significant Tutsi membership; the rest were divided between committed reformers and Hutu extremists who swiftly transformed the “democratic debate” into a wedge that further polarized the divided citizenry by presenting Rwandan politics as a simple question of Hutu self-defense. It was us against them—all of us against all of them: anybody who dared to suggest an alternative view was one of them and could prepare for the consequences. And it was Froduald Karamira, the convert to Hutuness, who gave this tidy proposition, and the cacophony of ideological discourse that crackled behind it, the enthusiastic name of Hutu Power.

  “I don’t know exactly what happened,” Bonaventure told me. “People say that Habyarimana paid him tens of millions to change, and he did become the head of ElectroGaz”—the national utility company. “All I know is that he became one of the most important extremists, and that is not the way he was before. So much was changing so suddenly, and still it was hard to see—hard to believe—how much it was changing.”

  ONE DAY IN January of 1992, soldiers visited Bonaventure’s home in Kigali, while he and his wife were out. “They broke the doors,” Bonaventure said. “They took everything, they tied up the house staff, and I had a son who was nine months old—they left grenades with him. He was there playing with a grenade in the living room, for three hours. Then somebody passed by and noticed, and fortunately my son was not killed.”

  So it went—an attack here, a massacre there—as the increasingly well-organized Hutu extremists stockpiled weapons, and Hutu youth militias were recruited and trained for “civil defense.” First among these militias was the interahamwe—“those who attack together”—which had its genesis in soccer fan clubs sponsored by leaders of the MRND and the akazu. The economic collapse of the late 1980s had left tens of thousands of young men without any prospect of a job, wasting in idleness and its attendant resentments, and ripe for recruitment. The interahamwe, and the various copycat groups that were eventually subsumed into it, promoted genocide as a carnival romp. Hutu Power youth leaders, jetting around on motorbikes and sporting pop hairstyles, dark glasses, and flamboyantly colored pajama suits and robes, preached ethnic solidarity and civil defense to increasingly packed rallies, where alcohol usually flowed freely, giant banners splashed with hagiographic portraits of Habyarimana flapped in the breeze, and paramilitary drills were conducted like the latest hot dance moves. The President and his wife often turned out to be cheered at these spectacles, while in private the members of the interahamwe were organized into small neighborhood bands, drew up lists of Tutsis, and went on retreats to practice burning houses, tossing grenades, and hacking dummies up with machetes.

  Play first turned to work for the interahamwe in early March of 1992, when the state-owned Radio Rwanda announced the “discovery” of a Tutsi plan to massacre Hutus. This was pure misinformation, but in preemptive “self-defense” militia members and villagers in the Bugesera region, south of Kigali, slaughtered three hundred Tutsis in three days. Similar killings occurred at the same time in Gisenyi, and in August, shortly after Habyarimana—under intense pressure from international donors—signed a cease-fires with the RPF, Tutsis were massacred in Kibuye. That October, the cease-fire was expanded to embrace plans for a new, transitional government that would include the RPF; one week later, Habyarimana delivered a speech dismissing the truce as “nothing but a scrap of paper.”

  Still, the foreign-aid money poured into Habyarimana’s coffers, and weapons kept arriving—from France, from Egypt, from apartheid South Africa. Occasionally, when donors expressed concern about the killings of Tutsis, there were arrests, but releases followed swiftly; nobody was brought to trial, much less prosecuted for the massacres. To soothe foreign nerves, the government portrayed the killings as “spontaneous” and “popular” acts of “anger” or “s
elf-protection.” The villagers knew better: massacres were invariably preceded by political “consciousnessraising” meetings at which local leaders, usually with a higher officer of the provincial or national government at their side, described Tutsis as devils—horns, hoofs, tails, and all—and gave the order to kill them, according to the old revolutionary lingo, as a “work” assignment. The local authorities consistently profited from massacres, seizing slain Tutsis’ land and possessions, and sometimes enjoying promotions if they showed special enthusiasm, and the civilian killers, too, were usually rewarded with petty spoils.

  In retrospect, the massacres of the early 1990s can be seen as dress rehearsals for what proponents of Hutuness themselves called the “final solution” in 1994. Yet there was nothing inevitable about the horror. With the advent of multipartyism, the President had been compelled by popular pressure to make substantial concessions to reform-minded oppositionists, and it required a dogged uphill effort for Habyarimana’s extremist entourage to prevent Rwanda from slipping toward moderation. Violence was the key to that effort. The interahamwe was bankrolled and supervised by a consortium of akazu leaders, who also ran their own death squads, with names like the Zero Network and the Bullets group. Madame Habyarimana’s three brothers, along with a bevy of colonels and leaders of the northwestern business mafia, were founding members of these outfits, which first rolled into action alongside the interahamwe during the Bugesera massacre in March of 1992. But the most crucial innovation at Bugesera was the use of the national radio to prepare the ground for slaughter, and the ratcheting up of the suggestive message of us against them to the categorically compelling kill or be killed.

  Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building. A vigorous totalitarian order requires that the people be invested in the leaders’ scheme, and while genocide may be the most perverse and ambitious means to this end, it is also the most comprehensive. In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history. And strange as it may sound, the ideology—or what Rwandans call “the logic”—of genocide was promoted as a way not to create suffering but to alleviate it. The specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual—always an annoyance to totality—ceases to exist.

  The mass of participants in the practice massacres of the early 1990s may have taken little pleasure in obediently murdering their neighbors. Still, few refused, and assertive resistance was extremely rare. Killing Tutsis was a political tradition in postcolonia Rwanda; it brought people together.

  IT HAS BECOME a commonplace in the past fifty years to say that the industrialized killing of the Holocaust calls into question the notion of human progress, since art and science can lead straight through the famous gate—stamped with the words “Work Makes You Free”—to Auschwitz. Without all that technology, the argument goes, the Germans couldn’t have killed all those Jews. Yet it was the Germans, not the machinery, who did the killing. Rwanda’s Hutu Power leaders understood this perfectly. If you could swing the people who would swing the machetes, technological underdevelopment was no obstacle to genocide. The people were the weapon, and that meant everybody: the entire Hutu population had to kill the entire Tutsi population. In addition to ensuring obvious numerical advantages, this arrangement eliminated any questions of accountability which might arise. If everybody is implicated, then implication becomes meaningless. Implication in what? A Hutu who thought there was anything to be implicated in would have to be an accomplice of the enemy.

  “We the people are obliged to take responsibility ourselves and wipe out this scum,” explained Leon Mugesera, in November of 1992, during the same speech in which he urged Hutus to return the Tutsis to Ethiopia by way of the Nyabarongo River. Mugesera was a doctor, a vice president of the MRND, and a close friend and adviser of Habyarimana. His voice was the voice of power, and most Rwandans can still quote from his famous speech quite accurately; members of the interahamwe often recited favorite phrases as they went forth to kill. The law, Mugesera claimed, mandated death to “accomplices” of the “cockroaches,” and he asked, “What are we waiting for to execute the sentence?” Members of opposition parties, he said, “have no right to live among us,” and as a leader of “the Party” he invoked his duty to spread the alarm and to instruct the people to “defend themselves.” As for the “cockroaches” themselves, he wondered, “What are we waiting for to decimate these families?” He called on those who had prospered under Habyarimana to “finance operations to eliminate these people.” He spoke of 1959, saying it had been a terrible mistake to allow Tutsis to survive. “Destroy them,” he said. “No matter what you do, do not let them get away,” and he said, “Remember that the person whose life you save will certainly not save yours.” He finished with the words “Drive them out. Long live President Habyarimana.”

  Mugesera had spoken in the name of the law, but it happened that the Minister of Justice at the time was a man named Stanislas Mbonampeka, who saw things differently. Mbonampeka was a man of parts: he was a well-to-do Hutu from the northwest, the owner of a half share in a toilet paper factory, and he was also an oppositionist, a lawyer and human rights advocate in the top ranks of the Liberal Party, the only opposition party with a sizable Tutsi membership. Mbonampeka studied Mugesera’s speech and issued an arrest warrant against him for inciting hatred. Of course, Mugesera didn’t go to jail—he went to the army for protection, then emigrated to Canada—and Mbonampeka was soon dismissed as Justice Minister. Mbonampeka saw which way the wind was blowing. By early 1993, all of Rwanda’s newborn opposition parties had split into two factions—Power and anti-Power—and Mbonampeka went with Power. Before long, he could be heard on Radio Rwanda, warning the RPF: “Stop fighting this war if you do not want your supporters living inside Rwanda to be exterminated.”

  In the summer of 1995, I found Mbonampeka living in a drab little room at the Protestant Guest House in Goma, Zaire, about a mile from the Rwandan border. “In a war,” he told me, “you can’t be neutral. If you’re not for your country, are you not for its attackers?” Mbonampeka was a large man with a calm and steady demeanor. He wore gold wire-rimmed spectacles, neatly pressed trousers, and a pink-and-white-striped shirt, and he had the absurd title of Minister of Justice in the Rwandan government in exile—a self-appointed body culled largely from officers of the regime that had presided over the genocide. Mbonampeka was not in that government in 1994, but he had operated informally as its agent, pleading the Hutu Power cause both at home and in Europe, and he regarded this as a normal career development.

  “I said Mugesera must be arrested because he sets people against each other, which is illegal, and I also said that if the RPF continued to fight we must have civil defense,” Mbonampeka told me. “These positions are consistent. In both cases I was for the defense of my country.” And he added, “Personally, I don’t believe in the genocide. This was not a conventional war. The enemies were everywhere. The Tutsis were not killed as Tutsis, only as sympathizers of the RPF.”

  I wondered if it had been difficult to distinguish the Tutsis with RPF sympathies from the rest. Mbonampeka said it wasn’t. “There was no difference between the ethnic and the political,” he told me. “Ninety-nine percent of Tutsis were pro-RPF.”

  Even senile grandmothers and infants? Even the fetuses ripped from the wombs of Tutsis, after radio announcers had reminded listeners to take special care to disembowel pregnant victims?

  “Think about it,” Mbonampeka said. “Let’s say the Germans attack France, so France defends itself against Germany. They understand that all Germans are the enemy. The Germans kill women and children, so you do, too.”

  By regarding the genocide, even as he de
nied its existence, as an extension of the war between the RPF and the Habyarimana regime, Mbonampeka seemed to be arguing that the systematic state-sponsored extermination of an entire people is a provokable crime—the fault of the victims as well as the perpetrators. But although the genocide coincided with the war, its organization and implementation were quite distinct from the war effort. In fact, the mobilization for the final extermination campaign swung into full gear only when Hutu Power was confronted by the threat of peace.

  ON AUGUST 4, 1993, at a conference center in Arusha, Tanzania, President Habyarimana signed a peace agreement with the RPF, officially bringing the war to an end. The so-called Arusha Accords ensured a right of return for Rwanda’s refugee diaspora, promised the integration of the two warring armies into a single national defense force, and established a blueprint for a Broad-Based Transitional Government, composed of representatives of all the national political parties, including the RPF. Habyarimana would remain President, pending elections, but his powers would be basically ceremonial. And, crucially, throughout the peace-implementation period a United Nations peacekeeping force would be deployed in Rwanda.

  The RPF had never really expected to win its war on the battlefield; its objective had been to force a political settlement, and at Arusha it appeared to have done that. “You use war when there is no other means, and Arusha opened a means to come and struggle politically,” Tito Ruteremara, one of the RPF leaders who negotiated the Accords, told me. “With Arusha we could go inside Rwanda, and if we had good ideas and a very nice organization, we’d make it. If we failed, it meant that our ideas were no good. The struggle wasn’t ethnic, it was political, and Habyarimana feared us because we were strong. He had never wanted peace, because he saw that we could be politically successful.”