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

by Philip Gourevitch

  “We ran over,” Odette told me. “Jean-Baptiste said, ‘See, I’m just a Hutu fleeing the RPF,’ and we threw all our money and everything we had at them. As they divided it up, we ran away, back toward the village where we’d left the jeep. Then another group of interahamwe came and spotted my sister. While we were running, they were calling from hill to hill, ‘There’s a deputy with them, you’ve got to get her.’ My sister was older than me and heavier, and we were very tired. We drank from a bottle of fruit syrup, and it gave us strength, but my sister was panting. She had a little pistol with her and Jean-Baptiste was running fast with the kids, and I said, ‘Wait, Jean-Baptiste, if we’re going to die we should die together.’ Then a group of interahamwe pounced on us, and they put grenades to our necks. That was when I heard the shots. I never could look. I never saw my sister’s corpse. They shot her with her own pistol.”

  Odette was speaking quickly and she kept right on going: “Oh, I forgot to say that during the crisis before April, Jean-Baptiste had bought two Chinese grenades very cheaply here in the market. I didn’t like it. I was always afraid they’d blow up.” But the grenades had come in handy. When the interahamwe had caught the children, and again when they caught the whole family and Vénantie was shot, Jean-Baptiste brandished the grenades, telling the killers they would die along with his family. “So they didn’t kill us,” Odette said. “Instead, they took us to the village for interrogation, and the mayor, whom we knew, brought some rice and made it look like we were prisoners to protect us.”

  By then it was late in the afternoon, and it began to rain—the sort of blinding, deafening, open-spigot rain that dumps over Rwanda on April afternoons—and Jean-Baptiste led the family through it in a crouching run to their jeep. Interahamwe mobbed the car. Jean-Baptiste drove through them and headed for Kigali. He drove fast, stopping for nothing, and twelve hours after leaving their house the family returned to it. That night, they listened to Radio Muhabura, the RPF station, where the names of Tutsis who had been reported killed were read each day on the air. Partway through the roll call of the dead, they heard their own names.

  THOMAS KAMILINDI HAD remained locked in his house for a week. He worked his phone, collecting news from around the country and filing reports for a French radio service. Then, on April 12, he got a call from Radio Rwanda saying that Eliezer Niyitigeka wanted to see him. Niyitigeka, a former radio colleague, had just been appointed Minister of Information in the Hutu Power government, replacing an oppositionist who had been killed. Thomas walked to the station, which was near his house, and Niyitigeka told him that he had to come back to work. Thomas reminded him that he’d quit as a matter of conscience, and the minister said, “OK, Thomas, let the soldiers decide.” Thomas hedged: he wouldn’t take a job under threat but would wait for an official letter of employment. Niyitigeka agreed, and Thomas returned home to learn from his wife, Jacqueline, that, while he was gone, two soldiers from the Presidential Guard had appeared, carrying a list with his name on it.

  Thomas wasn’t surprised to learn that he was on an assassins’ list. At Radio Rwanda, he had refused to speak the language of Hutu Power and had led two strikes; he was a member of the Social Democratic Party, which had ties to the RPF, and he was from the south, from Butare. Considering these factors, Thomas was determined to seek a safer refuge than his home. The next morning, three soldiers came to his door. He invited them to have a seat, but the leader of the contingent said, “We don’t sit when we’re working.” The soldier said, “Come with us.” Thomas said he wasn’t budging until he knew where he was going. “You come with us or your family will have trouble,” the soldier said.

  Thomas left with the soldiers and walked up the hill, past the deserted American Embassy and along the Boulevard de la Révolution. At the corner, in front of the Soras Insurance Building, across from the Ministry of Defense, a knot of soldiers stood around a newly erected bunker. The soldiers scolded Thomas for describing their activities in his reports to the international media. He was ordered to sit on the street. When he refused, the soldiers beat him. They beat him hard and slapped him repeatedly, shouting insults and questions. Then someone kicked him in the stomach, and he sat down. “OK, Thomas,” one of the men said. “Write a letter to your wife and say what you like, because you’re going to die.”

  A jeep drove up, and the soldiers in it got out and kicked Thomas some more. Then he was given pen and paper, and he wrote, “Listen, Jacqueline, they’re going to kill me. I don’t know why. They say I’m an accomplice of the RPF. That’s why I’m going to die, and here’s my testament.” Thomas wrote his will, and handed it over.

  One of the soldiers said, “OK, let’s finish this,” and stood back, readying his rifle.

  “I didn’t look,” Thomas recalled, when he told me of his ordeal. “I really believed they would shoot me. Then another vehicle came up, and suddenly I saw a major with a foot up on the armored car, and he said, ‘Thomas?’ When he called me I came out of a sort of dream. I said, ‘They’re doing me in.’ He told them to stop, and he told a sergeant to take me home.”

  Thomas is spry, compact, and bright-eyed. His face and hands are as expressive as his speech. He is a radio man, a raconteur, and however bleak his tale, the telling gave him pleasure. After all, he and his family were still alive. His was what passed for a happy story in Rwanda. Still, I had the impression, with him more than with others, that as he told it he was seeing the events he described afresh; that as he stared into the past the outcome was not yet obvious, and that when he looked at me, with his clear eyes a touch hazy, he was still seeing the scenes he described, perhaps even hoping to understand them. For the story made no sense: the major who had spared his life may have recognized Thomas, but to Thomas the major was a stranger. Later, he learned his name: Major Turkunkiko. What was Thomas to Major Turkunkiko that he should have been allowed to live? It wasn’t unusual for one or two people to survive large massacres. When you “clear the bush,” a few weeds always escape the blade—a man told me that his niece was macheted, then stoned, then dumped in a latrine, only to get up each time and stagger away—but Thomas had been deliberately reprieved, and he could not say why. He shot me a look of comic astonishment—eyebrows high, forehead furrowed, a quirky smile working his mouth—to say that his survival was far more mysterious than his peril had been.

  Thomas told me that he had been trained as a Boy Scout “to look at danger, and study it, but not to be afraid,” and I was struck that each of his encounters with Hutu Power had followed a pattern: when the minister ordered him back to work, when the soldiers came for him, and when they told him to sit on the street, Thomas always refused before complying. The killers were accustomed to encountering fear, and Thomas had always acted as if there must be some misunderstanding for anyone to feel the need to threaten him.

  Such subtleties should have been irrelevant. An accomplice was an accomplice; there could be no exceptions, and efficiency was essential. During the genocide, the work of the killers was not regarded as a crime in Rwanda; it was effectively the law of the land, and every citizen was responsible for its administration. That way, if a person who should be killed was let go by one party he could expect to be caught and killed by somebody else.

  I met with Thomas on a soft summer evening in Kigali—the hour of sudden equatorial dusk when flocks of crows and lone buzzards reel, screaming, between the trees and the rooftops. Walking back to my hotel, I passed the corner where Thomas had expected to be killed. The Soras Insurance Building’s plate-glass portico was a tattered web of bullet holes.

  “If I don’t kill that rat he’ll die,” says Clov in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. But those who commit genocide have chosen to make nature their enemy, not their ally.

  ON THE MORNING of April 12, at the same time that the Presidential Guard first came for Thomas at his house, Bonaventure Nyibizi learned that his family was to be killed that afternoon. They had been hiding in and around his house, spending some nights crouch
ed in ditches. Many of their neighbors had been killed, and he told me, “I remember that already on April 10 there was a communique on the radio from the provincial administration calling all the drivers with big trucks, because only four days after the genocide started there were such a lot of dead people here that it was necessary to bring the trucks.”

  Bonaventure did not doubt that his family’s luck had run out at home. “So we decided that instead of being killed by a machete, we’d choose to be killed by a grenade or by being shot,” he said. “We took my car and drove outside my compound. We were able to make it up to the church of Sainte Famille. It was at most half a mile, and it was very difficult to drive because there were a lot of roadblocks. But we drove there, and on April 15 they came for us. They killed about a hundred fifty people in Sainte Famille that day, and they were looking for me all the time.”

  The Catholic cathedral of Sainte Famille, an immensity of brick, stands right off one of Kigali’s main arteries, a few hundred yards downhill from the Hotel des Mille Collines. Because of its prominence, and its consequent visibility to the few international observers who were still circulating in Kigali, Sainte Famille was one of half a dozen places in the city—and fewer than a dozen in all of Rwanda—where Tutsis who sought refuge in 1994 were never exterminated en masse. Instead, the killing in such places was incremental, and for those who were spared the terror was constant. Sainte Famille was initially protected by policemen, but, as usual, their resistance to the neighborhood interahamwe and to the soldiers who came hunting for Tutsis quickly collapsed. In the beginning, the killers who staked out the church contented themselves with attacking new refugees as they arrived. The massacre on April 15 was the first massive incursion into Sainte Famille, and it was quite carefully organized by the interahamwe and the Presidential Guard.

  Only males were killed on that day, picked out individually from the throng of several thousand in the church and its outbuildings. The killers had lists, and many of them were neighbors of the victims and could recognize them on sight. A young man who had worked for Bonaventure as a domestic was killed. “But I was lucky,” Bonaventure said. “I went inside a small room with my family, and just as I went in and closed the door, Sainte Famille filled with military and militia and police. They started asking for me, but fortunately they did not break down the door where I was. I stayed there with the kids and my wife. There were about twenty people altogether in that small, small place.” Bonaventure had a three-month-old daughter with him, and he said, “Keeping her quiet was the hardest.”

  I asked him what the priests had done when the killing began. “Nothing,” he said. “One of them was good, but he was threatened himself, so he went into hiding on April 13, and the other one in charge was very comfortable with the militia. This is the famous Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka. He was very close to the military and the militia, and he was going around with them. He was not actually denouncing anybody at first, but he would do nothing for the people.”

  After the massacre, a junior priest, named Paulin, did help to install Bonaventure in a safer hiding place—the back office of a church garage—where he stayed, alone with a friend, from April 15 until June 20. “He was a Hutu, this priest, but he was kind,” Bonaventure said. “Sometimes he would open the door so that our wives could bring us water or food. Rumors went around that I had been killed, so all I had to do was stay hidden.”

  WALKING HOME FROM his aborted execution, Thomas Kamilindi was told by the sergeant who escorted him that he was still condemned to die. “They’re going to kill you today if you don’t leave,” the sergeant said. Thomas had no idea where to go. He wrote a new will, and gave it to his wife, saying, “I’m leaving, I don’t know where, maybe someday this paper can help you.”

  When he stepped outside again, it was raining. He began walking, and wound up at the radio station. “I was afraid,” he said, “because the radio was practically a military camp.” But nobody seemed to mind him there. “I watched television until the evening. I called my wife, and told her I was at the radio, and I spent the night under a table on a mat. I had nothing to eat, but I slept well.” Thomas could not imagine how he would have survived if he were a Tutsi. In the morning, he told the editor-in-chief of the radio that he had nearly been killed. “Do the morning news, and perhaps they’ll think you’re with us,” the editor said.

  “So I did the six-thirty a.m. broadcast,” Thomas told me, “but I couldn’t go on like that.” He called around to various embassies, and found that they had all been evacuated. Then he tried the Hotel des Mille Collines: “The guy at the reception recognized my voice, and said, ‘Thomas! You’re still alive. That’s incredible. We thought you were dead.’ He said, ‘If you can get here, you might be OK.’” It was forbidden to go around in a vehicle without escort or papers, so Thomas persuaded a soldier to drive him. He arrived at the hotel without money, but he was given a room. “If people came, we said we’d worry about money later,” a hotel staffer told me. That night as Thomas settled in, his phone rang. It was an army major, Augustin Cyiza, who was also staying in the hotel. Cyiza was sympathetic to the refugees—he eventually deserted the FAR to join the RPF—but Thomas didn’t know that at the time. He went to Cyiza’s room assuming that he would be killed, or at least arrested. Instead the two men drank beer and talked late into the night, and the next day Cyiza went out and returned with Thomas’s wife and daughter.

  Beer saved many lives at the Hotel des Mille Collines. Recognizing that the price of drinks could only go up in the embattled city, the caretaker manager Paul Rusesabagina worked through diverse middlemen to keep the hotel cellars well stocked. This trade, by which he also arranged for enough sweet potatoes and rice to keep his guests from starvation, required extensive dealings with the military command, and Paul took advantage of the contacts. “I was using drinks to corrupt people,” he told me, and laughed, because the people he was corrupting were Hutu Power leaders, and what he meant by corrupting them was feeding them liquor so they wouldn’t kill the refugees under his roof. “I gave drinks and sometimes I even gave money,” he said. Major General Augustin Bizimungu, the commander of the FAR, was one of many regular, unsavory visitors to the hotel whom Paul kept well lubricated. “Everybody came,” Paul said. “I had what they wanted. That was not my problem. My problem was that nobody should be taken out of my hotel.”

  Paul is a mild-mannered man, sturdily built and rather ordinary-looking—a bourgeois hotel manager, after all—and that is how he seemed to regard himself as well, as an ordinary person who did nothing extraordinary in refusing to cave in to the insanity that swirled around him. “People became fools. I don’t know why,” he said to me. “I kept telling them, ‘I don’t agree with what you’re doing,’ just as openly as I’m telling you now. I’m a man who’s used to saying no when I have to. That’s all I did—what I felt like doing. Because I never agree with killers. I didn’t agree with them. I refused, and I told them so.” Many Rwandans didn’t agree with the genocide, of course, but many overcame their disagreements and killed, while many more simply saved their own skins. Paul sought to save everybody he could, and if that meant negotiating with everybody who wanted to kill them—so be it.

  Shortly before dawn one morning, Lieutenant Apollinaire Hakizimana from military intelligence walked up to the reception desk, rang Paul in his room, and said, “I want you to get everybody out of this hotel within thirty minutes.” Paul had been asleep, and he woke up negotiating. “I said, ‘Mister, do you know that these people are refugees? What security do you guarantee? Where are they going? How are they going? Who’s taking them?’” Lieutenant Hakizimana said, “Did you hear what I said? We want everybody out, and within half an hour.” Paul said, “I’m still in bed. Give me thirty minutes. I’ll take my shower, and then get everybody out.” Paul quickly sent for several of the refugees he trusted most, who were well connected with the regime—including François Xavier Nsanzuwera, the former Attorney General of Rwanda, a Hutu wh
o had once investigated Hakizimana as a leader of Hutu Power death squads. Together, Paul and his friends began working the phone, calling General Bizimungu, various colonels, and anyone else they could think of who might pull rank on the lieutenant. Before the half hour was out, an army jeep arrived at the hotel with orders for Hakizimana to leave.

  “They got that boy out,” Paul said. Then he paused for a moment in his memories, and his perspective zoomed out, so that I pictured him peering through his window at the Mille Collines as he said, “And what was around us—around the hotel compound? Soldiers, interahamwe—armed with guns, machetes, everything.” Paul seemed determined to register his own proper size. He hadn’t said, “I got that boy out”—he’d said they did—and by showing me the ranks of killers massed at the hotel gate, he was underscoring the point.

  In discussions of us-against-them scenarios of popular violence, the fashion these days is to speak of mass hatred. But while hatred can be animating, it appeals to weakness. The “authors” of the genocide, as Rwandans call them, understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong, it is necessary to appeal to their desire for strength—and the gray force that really drives people is power. Hatred and power are both, in their different ways, passions. The difference is that hatred is purely negative, while power is essentially positive: you surrender to hatred, but you aspire to power. In Rwanda, the orgy of misbegotten power that led to genocide was carried out in the name of Hutuness, and when Paul, a Hutu, set out to defy the killers, he did so by appealing to their passion for power: “they” were the ones who had chosen to take life away and he grasped that that meant they could also choose to extend the gift of retaining it.