AS THE RPF entered Butare and Kigali in early July, more than a million Hutus took to their heels, following their leaders to the west. What moved them was the fear that the RPF would treat them as Hutu Power had treated its “enemies.” That fear has often been described as fear of reprisal, but for those in the crowd who had indeed helped exterminate Tutsis, the fear should properly be called fear of justice or at least of punishment. Of course, to fear justice one must first believe that one has done wrong. To the génocidaires, the prospect of an imminent RPF victory proved that they were the victims, and Hutu Power’s propaganda engines tried to make the most of that feeling.
“The fifty thousand bodies that can be found in Lake Victoria, which threaten Lake Victoria with pollution—they come from massacres which only the RPF could have committed,” declared the RTLM announcer Georges Ruggiu, in a typical broadcast on June 30. Ruggiu, a white, Italian-born Belgian citizen, who had found his calling in life as a Hutu Power misinformation propagandist, went on to suggest, absurdly, that only five thousand people could still be found alive in the RPF zone. The next morning, July 1, was Rwanda’s independence day, and Ruggiu wished his listeners “a good national holiday, even if it is probably a holiday where they must still work and fight.” Instead, hundreds of thousands of Ruggiu’s listeners were fleeing. RTLM itself was forced to shut down for a few days while it moved its studio northwest from Kigali. Broadcasts like Ruggiu’s had done a good job of convincing even those without blood on their hands that staying behind was not an option. But flight was often blind—a function of family ties, or mass panic, rather than of reason or individual choice. In many cases, whole communities were herded onto the road and marched along by force of arms, with their mayors and deputy mayors at the front of the pack, and soldiers and interahamwe at the rear, hustling them onward.
Those who fled south entered the Zone Turquoise, while to the north a million and a half people flooded toward Gisenyi and the border with Goma, Zaire. As they went, they grabbed every bit of portable property they could lay hands on and every wheeled vehicle that still rolled to carry themselves and their cargo. What they could not take with them, the Hutu Power mobs systematically looted and laid to waste: government offices, factories, schools, electrical pylons, homes, shops, tea and coffee plantations. They tore away roofing and ripped out windows, slashed water lines and ate or carted off all they could that was edible.
Thousands of children were abandoned along the route of flight, lost in the shuffle, and often deliberately left behind, and who will claim to know why—out of some fantasy that it was safer for the children? or because the parents could move more swiftly unburdened? out of shame or out of shamelessness? Priests led whole congregations into the unknown. Army battalions rolled through the crowd, and businessmen and bureaucrats drove their cars heaped with their household wares, their wives and cousins, their children and grandmothers—and their radios, of course, tuned to RTLM. When tension gripped the crowd, stampedes occurred, and people were crushed to death by the dozens.
The frontline troops of the RPF followed the mob into the Hutu Power heartland of the northwest, securing control of the country from the routed government forces. On July 12, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross pronounced that a million people had been killed in the genocide. On July 13, the rebels captured Ruhengeri, Habyarimana’s old home base, and during the two days that followed an estimated half million Hutus crossed the border into Goma. On July 15, the United States withdrew diplomatic recognition from Rwanda’s Hutu Power government and shut down its Washington embassy. On July 16, the Hutu Power President and most of his cabinet fled into the Zone Turquoise. France had promised to arrest them, but on July 17 they moved on with the entourage of Colonel Bagasora to Zaire, where the influx of Rwandans was now said to be a million strong. At the same time, in Kigali, the RPF declared that it would form a new national government, guided by the power-sharing principles of the Arusha Accords and without regard for ethnicity. On July 18, following an intensive artillery battle, the RPF captured Gisenyi and began securing the northwestern border with Zaire. On July 19, the new government—a coalition between the RPF and surviving members of the anti-Hutu Power opposition parties—was sworn in at Kigali, and in New York the UN ambassador of the ousted genocidal regime was forced to give up his seat on the Security Council. Thereafter, Rwanda’s national army would be known as the Rwandese Patriotic Army, the exiled Forces Armées Rwandaises would be known as the ex-FAR, and the RPF would be the name only of the former rebel movement’s political structure, which formed the backbone of the new regime. On July 20, the ex-FAR and interahamwe began raiding emergency shipments of relief food and supplies that were being airlifted into Zaire for the refugees. That same day, in Goma, the first cases of cholera were reported in the teeming new camps. And with that the genocide began to be old news.
THE WORLD THAT had “stood around with its hands in its pockets,” as General Kagame put it, during the extermination of Tutsis, responded to the mass flight of Hutus into Zaire with passionate intensity. Goma in the late summer of 1994 presented one of the most bewildering human spectacles of the century, and the suffering on display there made for what cameramen unabashedly call “great TV.”
Goma sits on the northern shore of Lake Kivu at the base of a range of towering volcanoes, and north and west of town a vast and inhospitable plain of hardened black lava covered by rough and scraggly bush stretches for miles. The rock is jagged and sharp, lacerating even to the toughened soles of habitually barefoot Rwandan peasants, and yet it is a crumbly rock, and everything that comes near it is quickly coated in a coal-like dust. It was on this bed of brimstone that the Rwandan hordes settled down in six camps more populous than any city in the region—a hundred twenty thousand here, a hundred fifty thousand there, two hundred thousand down the road—and all at once they began dying like flies. More than thirty thousand died in the three or four weeks before the cholera epidemic was contained. A man would be staggering along the road, and then he’d sit, and while the cameras rolled, he would crumple up, tip over, and be gone. And not just men but women and little children—simply because they’d had a sip of water in which somebody had pissed, or shat, or dumped a body. The dead were rolled up in straw mats and deposited along the roadside for collection: mile after mile of neatly bundled bodies. Bulldozers had to be brought in to dig mass graves and plow the bodies under. Picture it: a million people, shifting through the smoke of cooking fires on a vast black field, and behind them—it so happened—the huge dark cone of the Nyaragongo volcano had come to life, burbling with flame that made the night sky red and smoke that further clouded the day.
This scene was broadcast to the world around the clock, and it came across in one of two ways. In the sloppy version, you heard, or read, that there had been a genocide, and then you heard and saw, or read, that a million refugees had wound up in this nearly perfect scene of hell on earth, and you thought genocide plus refugees equals refugees from genocide, and your heart was wrenched. Or else you got the story straight—these were people who had killed or who had been terrified into following the killers into exile—and you heard, or read, or could not but infer, that this nearly perfect scene of hell on earth was some sort of divine retribution, that the cholera was like a biblical plague, that the horror had been equalized, and it was all much more than you could stomach, never mind comprehend, and your heart was wrenched. By this process of compression and imagination, the imponderable sprawl of febrile humanity at Goma blotted out the memory of the graveyard at its back, and an epidemic that came out of bad water and killed tens of thousands eclipsed a genocide that had come out of a hundred years of insane identity politics and resulted in nearly a million murders.
“If it bleeds, it leads,” the old newsroom saw has it, and in Rwanda the blood was beginning to dry. The story was in Goma, and it was no longer just a sad, confusing, ugly African story. It was our story, too—the whole world was there to sav
e the Africans from their sad, confusing, ugly story. Planes churned in and out of the Goma airfield twenty-four hours a day, bringing plastic sheeting to build refugee tents, bringing food by the ton, bringing well-digging equipment, medical supplies, fleets of white four-wheel-drive Land Cruisers, office equipment, lime to bury the dead, and nurses, doctors, logisticians, social workers, security officers, and press officers—in the largest, most rapid, and most expensive deployment by the international humanitarian-aid industry in the twentieth century. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees led the charge, and behind it came an array of more than a hundred relief agencies frantic to get in on the astonishingly dramatic—and yes, lucrative—action. Almost overnight, Goma became the capital of a new, semiautonomous archipelago of refugee camps, organized with ever-increasing efficiency under the pale blue flag of the UNHCR. Beneath that flag, however, the UN had little control.
Zairean troops had claimed to be disarming Rwandans as they came over the border, and great piles of machetes and guns did accumulate beside the immigration shacks, but sitting in a car, amid the torrent of humanity sweeping through Goma, an American military officer telephoned Washington and dictated a list of the astonishing array of artillery, armor, and light weaponry that was being carried past him by the ex-FAR. Presided over by this largely intact army, and by the interahamwe, the camps were rapidly organized into perfect replicas of the Hutu Power state—same community groupings, same leaders, same rigid hierarchy, same propaganda, same violence. In this regime, the humanitarians were treated rather like the service staff at a seedy mafia-occupied hotel: they were there to provide—food, medicine, housewares, an aura of respectability; if at times they were pandered to, it was only because they were being set up to be cheated; if they needed to be browbeaten, a mob quickly surrounded them; and if they were essentially the dupes of their criminal guests, they were not unwitting about it and, with time, their service effectively made them accessories to the Hutu Power syndicate.
None of this was especially subtle or secretive. By late August, when the French finally withdrew from the Zone Turquoise, another half million Hutus—including many Hutu Power loyalists—had moved on to Burundi or, through Bukavu, Zaire, to a network of camps that stretched along the south end of Lake Kivu. Although Goma still had the roughest camps, the ex-FAR and interahamwe quickly established a presence wherever the UN set up a refuge. International humanitarian law forbids the establishment of refugee camps within fifty miles of the inhabitants’ home country, but all of the camps for Rwandans were closer to home than that, and most lay just a few miles from the Rwandan border in Tanzania, Burundi, and Zaire. Nearly a third of Rwanda’s Hutu population was in these camps. Of course, that meant that two-thirds—more than four million people—had chosen to stay in Rwanda, and the cholera and general horror of Goma inspired a number of refugees to reflect that they might have been better off if they, too, had stayed behind. But those who spoke of returning were often denounced as RPF accomplices, and some were killed by the camp militias. After all, if all the innocent refugees left, only the guilty would remain, and Hutu Power’s monopoly on international pity might be shaken.
A reporter who was sent into Goma directly from Bosnia told me that he knew what Hutu Power was and that he looked up at the volcano and prayed, “God, if that thing erupts right now, and buries the killers, I will believe that you are just and I will go to church again every day of my life.” Many humanitarian-aid workers told me they had similarly anguished thoughts, but that didn’t stop most of them from settling in. It bothered them that the camp leaders might be war criminals, not refugees in any conventional sense of the word, but fugitives. It was unpleasant to hear those leaders say that the refugees would never return except as they had come, en masse, and that when they went back they would finish the job they had started with the Tutsis. And it was really disturbing that within weeks of their arrival, even before the cholera had been brought entirely under control, armed bands from the camps began waging a guerrilla war of bloody cross-border raids on Rwanda. Some humanitarian agencies found the extreme politicization and militarization of the camps so distasteful that in November 1994 they pulled out of Goma. But others eagerly filled the empty places.
In the first months after the genocide, there was much discussion at the UN of assembling an international force to disarm the militants in the camps and to separate out the political and criminal elements from the subject masses. For months on end, one high-level international diplomat after another issued alarming statements about violence among the refugees in Zaire, warning that Hutu Power planned a massive invasion of Rwanda and calling for a force to bring order to the camps. But although all the major powers were paying heavily to keep the camps running, when the Secretary-General asked for volunteers for such a force, not a single country was willing to provide troops.
The border camps turned the Rwandan crisis into a regional crisis. It remained, as it had always been, a political crisis, but the so-called international community preferred to treat it as a humanitarian crisis, as if the woe had appeared without any human rhyme or reason, like a flood or an earthquake. In fact, the Rwandan catastrophe was widely understood as a kind of natural disaster—Hutus and Tutsis simply doing what their natures dictated, and killing each other. If so many people had fled in such horrible circumstances, the thinking went, they must have been fleeing something even more horrible. So the génocidaires scored another extraordinary public-relations victory through the deft manipulation of mass anguish, and—of all things—an appeal to the world’s conscience.
IN SEPTEMBER OF 1997, shortly before Secretary-General Kofi Annan muzzled him against testifying before the Belgian Senate, General Dallaire, formerly of UNAMIR, went on Canadian television and said of his tour in Rwanda: “I’m fully responsible for the decisions of the ten Belgian soldiers dying, of others dying, of several of my soldiers being injured and falling sick because we ran out of medical supplies, of fifty-six Red Cross people being killed, of two million people becoming displaced and refugees, and about a million Rwandans being killed—because the mission failed, and I consider myself intimately involved with that responsibility.”
Dallaire refused to “pass the buck” to the UN system. Instead he passed it on to the member states of the Security Council and of the General Assembly. If, in the face of genocide, governments fear placing their soldiers at risk, he said, “then don’t send soldiers, send Boy Scouts”—which is basically what the world did in the refugee camps. Dallaire was in uniform as he faced the camera; his graying hair was closely cropped; he held his square jaw firmly outthrust; his chest was dappled with decorations. But he spoke with some agitation, and his carefully measured phrases did nothing to mask his sense of injury or his fury.
He said: “I haven’t even started my real mourning of the apathy and the absolute detachment of the international community, and particularly of the Western world, from the plight of Rwandans. Because, fundamentally, to be very candid and soldierly, who the hell cared about Rwanda? I mean, face it. Essentially, how many people really still remember the genocide in Rwanda? We know the genocide of the Second World War because the whole outfit was involved. But who really is involved in the Rwandan genocide? Who comprehends that more people were killed, injured, and displaced in three and a half months in Rwanda than in the whole of the Yugoslavian campaign in which we poured sixty thousand troops and the whole of the Western world was there, and we’re pouring billions in there, still trying to solve the problem. How much is really being done to solve the Rwandan problem? Who is grieving for Rwanda and really living it and living with the consequences? I mean, there are hundreds of Rwandans whom I knew personally whom I found slaughtered with their families complete—and bodies up to here—villages totally wiped out … and we made all that information available daily and the international community kept watching.”
The utopian premise of the Genocide Convention had been that a moral imperative to prevent eff
orts to exterminate whole peoples should be the overriding interest animating the action of an international community of autonomous states. This is a radical notion, fundamentally at odds, as so much of the internationalist experiment has proven to be, with the principle of sovereignty. States have never acted for purely disinterested humanitarian reasons; the novel idea was that the protection of humanity was in every state’s interest, and it was well understood in the aftermath of World War II that action against genocide would require a willingness to use force and to risk the lives of one’s own. The belief was that the price to the world of such a risk would not be as great as the price of inaction. But whose world were the drafters of the Genocide Convention—and the refugee conventions, which soon followed—thinking of?
I first traveled to Rwanda via Brussels on May 8, 1995. The European papers were full of commemorative articles marking the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day. The Herald Tribune had reprinted its entire front page from May 8, 1945, and the articles impressed me with their fighting spirit: smash the Germans, conquer, then bring justice, then reconstruct. The European Wall Street Journal carried news of a poll which found that, fifty years after the fact, sixty-five percent of Germans believed that it was a good thing their country had been defeated. And I wondered: Can we imagine such an outcome for any of the wars of today?
Rwanda had presented the world with the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler’s war against the Jews, and the world sent blankets, beans, and bandages to camps controlled by the killers, apparently hoping that everybody would behave nicely in the future.
The West’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.
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