I said these things, and Alexandre said, “I totally disagree. I experienced Kibeho as a movie. It was unreal. Only afterward, looking at my photographs—then it became real.”
When the first wave of shooting began, Alexandre had been at Zambatt, and he said: “I remember there were thousands of people crushing into the parking area. Thousands and thousands of people. I was up on the roof, watching. And I saw this one woman, a fat woman. In thousands and thousands and thousands of people, this one fat woman was the only thing I saw. I didn’t see anyone else. They were just thousands. And this fat woman, pressing along with the crowd—while I watched she was like a person drowning.” Alexandre brought his hands together, making them collapse inward and sink, and he appeared to shrink within his own frame. “One second she was standing, one second she was falling in the people, and I watched this happening. She disappeared. That was when I wanted only to take photographs. That fat woman, one fat woman, when you say the word Kibeho, she is all I really remember. That will be my one real image of Kibeho forever, that fat woman drowning in thousands and thousands of people. I remember she wore a yellow chemise.”
I never saw Alexandre’s photographs, but I told him that his description of that moment, and of his own passage from a sense of unreality during the events to the reality of his pictures, was more disturbing, more vivid, and more informative than anything I believed the photographs themselves could tell. In some ways it was quieter; the moment of shock was less concentrated, but it also involved one more and took one along with it.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you anything if I wasn’t looking.”
“You see and you don’t see,” Annick said. “Mostly you just do things. The pictures come later. When they were crushing on the gate at Zambatt, we were crushing back on it so it didn’t fall, and people started throwing babies over. You just catch them. You do things you’d never want to see a picture of.”
“Like walking over the bodies,” Alexandre said. “I feel very bad about that. It was very unreal and very insane, this decision to walk on dead people. I don’t know. I don’t know what was right or wrong, or if I feel guilty, but I feel bad. It was necessary. It was the only way to get through.”
“We had to pull the live ones out,” Annick said. She and Alexandre had collected hundreds of lost and orphaned children from the body piles, and from every crevice where a small person could hide: from the wheel wells of trucks, from under the hoods.
“I don’t know why but I didn’t care about the people killed by a bullet. I didn’t give a fuck about them,” Alexandre said. “They were dead, and the people wounded by bullets, they meant nothing to me. It was the people who were crushed.”
“Bullets and machetes are supposed to kill,” Annick said. “The people who got crushed were just killed by other people, like them, vulnerable, trying to live.”
“I got a doctor,” Alexandre went on, “I said, ‘They just look like they’re sleeping, I don’t know how to tell if they’re dead.’ He went through and checked twenty or thirty people, and he said, ‘They’re dead. They’re all dead.’ But when I had to walk on them, I felt I might wake them.”
“They were like all the luggage,” Annick said. I was able to picture that: Kibeho was a ghost town, piled deep with the abandoned belongings of displaced persons, smelling of death—and atop the hill, the charred cathedral that had become a crematorium during the genocide. “When we walked on the luggage,” Annick said, “there were probably people underneath. You can’t feel guilty, because it’s useless, and you walked on them to save lives.”
“Walking on them was about being alive,” Alexandre said. “After a while it was just about getting on with life. The dead are dead. There’s nothing you can do. Even with the living, what could we do? We gave them water. It was our only medicine. It was like a miracle. You’d see the face of a boy, fallen and death-like in the crowd, and you drop a few drops of water on him and he is like —aahhh!” Alexandre’s face expanded and he rose a bit in his seat, like a sped-up film of a flower blossoming. “Then you turn around,” he said. “And the next minute everyone we gave water to was dead.”
“Yah,” Annick said.
“Bodies,” Alexandre said.
“That guy with the spear in his throat,” Annick said. “I just left him. And at one time I was laughing and laughing. I couldn’t stop laughing. I was with the wounded, blood everywhere, and a shoulder hanging off from a grenade, or a mouth split open with a machete, and I was just laughing. Me!” she said. “I used to faint with injections, and here I was sewing machete wounds. All I could think was, Do I wrap the bandage this way?”—she whirled a hand in a horizontal orbit—“Or this way?”—vertically.
“Sunday when we drove away, there were people all over the road, bodies, and wounded,” Alexandre said. “In a normal time, for people in much less bad shape, you would stop and do anything. We didn’t stop. We just left them. I feel very bad about that. I don’t know if it’s guilt, but it’s a very bad feeling.”
“Yah,” Annick said. “That was bad, eh? We just drove. It was too many people.”
“Too many people,” Alexandre said. Tears had welled from his eyes, and his nose was running, streaking his lip. He said, “I don’t know how my mind works. I just don’t know. When people are dead, you expect to see more people dead. I remember in 1973 in Athens, we had cars making a blockade, and the tanks came and crushed the cars. I was eleven or twelve and I saw the people. They’re dead, and I expected more and more to see dead people. It becomes normal. We have so many films to see death with bullets, but this is real death, the crushing. At Kibeho, in the second attack, they were just shooting like hell. Shooting like you can’t imagine. The RPA was just shooting and shooting, they didn’t even look where. I was standing out there, it was raining, and all I could think was I want to get out of the rain. I didn’t even think of the shooting, and it was shooting like hell. To get out of the rain—that was all I wanted.”
“You shouldn’t feel badly,” Annick said. “We saved a lot of lives. Sometimes it was useless, there was nothing we could do.”
“You know,” Alexandre said, “the RPA—they were taking the wounded and throwing them in the pit latrines. They were alive. You know that?”
“Yah,” Annick said. “That was bad.”
“I don’t want to be judged,” Alexandre said. “I don’t want you to judge me.”
He got up to go to the toilet, and Annick said, “I’m worried about Alexandre.”
“How about you?” I asked.
“They tell me go to a psychiatrist,” she said. “The Human Rights mission. They say I have post-traumatic stress. What will they give me? Prozac? It’s stupid. I don’t want drugs. I’m not the one with the problem in Kibeho.”
LATER, WHEN I did visit Nyarubuye and found myself treading among and on the dead, I remembered my evening with Annick and Alexandre. “You don’t know how to think about it,” Alexandre had said, when he returned to the table, “who is right and who is wrong, who is good and bad, because the people in that camp were many of them guilty of genocide.”
But how do we think about genocide? “I’ll tell you how,” the American officer with his Jack Daniel’s and Coke at the Kigali bar told me. “It’s the passenger pigeon. Have you ever seen a passenger pigeon? No, and you never will. That’s it. Extinction. You will never see a passenger pigeon.” Sergeant Francis, the RPA officer who showed me around at Nyarubuye, understood. “The people who did this,” he said, “thought that whatever happened, nobody would know. It didn’t matter, because they would kill everybody, and there would be nothing to see.”
I kept looking, then, out of defiance. Ninety-five percent of the species of animals and plants that have graced the planet since life began are said to be extinct. So much for providence in the fall of a sparrow. Perhaps even extinction has lost its shock. I saw several hundred dead at Nyarubuye, and the world seemed full of dead. You couldn’t walk for all t
he dead in the grass. Then you hear the numbers—eight hundred thousand, one million. The mind balks.
For Alexandre, all of Kibeho had come down to one fat woman in a yellow blouse drowned by the thousands and thousands of others. “After the first death there is no other,” wrote Dylan Thomas, in his World War II poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” Or, as Stalin, who presided over the murders of at least ten million people, calculated it: “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” The more the dead pile up, the more the killers become the focus, the dead only of interest as evidence. Yet turn the tables, and it’s clear that there is greater cause for celebration when two lives are saved instead of one. Both Annick and Alexandre said they had stopped counting the dead after a while, although counting was in their job description and tending to the wounded was not.
Still, we imagine it’s a greater crime to kill ten than one, or ten thousand than one thousand. Is it? Thou shalt not kill, says the commandment. No number is specified. The death toll may grow, and with it our horror, but the crime doesn’t grow proportionally. When a man kills four people, he isn’t charged with one count of killing four, but with four counts of killing one and one and one and one. He doesn’t get one bigger sentence, but four compounded sentences, and if there’s a death penalty, you can take his life just once.
Nobody knows how many people were killed at Nyarubuye. Some say a thousand, and some say many more: fifteen hundred, two thousand, three thousand. Big differences. But body counts aren’t the point in a genocide, a crime for which, at the time of my first visit to Rwanda, nobody on earth had ever been brought to trial, much less convicted. What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime. No wonder it’s so difficult to picture. To do so you must accept the principle of the exterminator, and see not people but a people.
At Nyarubuye, tiny skulls of children were scattered here and there, and from a nearby schoolyard the voices of their former classmates at recess carried into the church. Inside the nave, empty and grand, where a dark powder of dried blood marked one’s footprints, a single, representative corpse was left on the floor before the altar. He appeared to be crawling toward the confession booth. His feet had been chopped off, and his hands had been chopped off. This was a favorite torture for Tutsis during the genocide; the idea was to cut the tall people “down to size,” and crowds would gather to taunt, laugh, and cheer as the victim writhed to death. The bones emerged from the dead man’s cuffs like twigs, and he still had a square tuft of hair peeling from his skull, and a perfectly formed, weather-shrunken and weather-greened ear.
“Look at his feet and his hands,” said Sergeant Francis. “How he must have suffered.”
But what of his suffering? The young man in the car wreck had suffered, albeit for an instant, and the people at Kibeho had suffered. What does suffering have to do with genocide, when the idea itself is the crime?
THREE DAYS AFTER the shooting ended at Kibeho, Rwanda’s new President, Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu of the RPF, visited the rubble of the camp, paid his respects to a row of bodies that had been laid out for his viewing, and held a press conference, at which he announced that the official body count from the closing operation was three hundred and thirty-four. This absurdly low number suggested a cover-up, and only made the international outcry over the government’s handling of the camp closing louder. With an especially vigorous nudge from France, the European Union suspended its already limited aid program for Rwanda, and kept it suspended even after an Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Events at Kibeho urged foreign donors to continue to support and work with the new RPF-led regime.
The Kibeho Commission was convened at the initiative of that regime, in an effort to signal that the bloody camp closing was not simply business as usual in Rwanda, and it was composed of diplomats, criminologists, jurists, and military and forensic specialists from eight countries, the UN, and the OAU, as well as a Rwandan cabinet minister. In their final report, the commissioners managed to annoy everybody involved at Kibeho—the government, the UN and the humanitarian community, and the génocidaires—by distributing blame for the catastrophe fairly evenly among all three parties.
In October of 1994, a similar Commission of Experts, set up by the UN Security Council to investigate the slaughter that had followed Habyarimana’s assassination, had found that while “both sides to the armed conflict perpetrated crimes against humanity in Rwanda,” the “concerted, planned, systematic and methodical” acts of “mass extermination perpetrated by Hutu elements against the Tutsi group” in Rwanda “constitute genocide,” and that no evidence had been found “to indicate that Tutsi elements perpetrated acts committed with intent to destroy the Hutu ethnic group as such.” That report marked the first time since the General Assembly passed the Genocide Convention in 1948 that the UN had identified an instance of the crime. So it was striking that the Kibeho Commission’s report concluded: “The tragedy of Kibeho neither resulted from a planned action by Rwandan authorities to kill a certain group of people, nor was it an accident that could not have been prevented.”
The message was clear: the Commission considered the continued existence of the Kibeho camp “an important obstacle to the country’s efforts to recover from the devastating effects of last year’s genocide,” and found that both RPA personnel and “elements among the IDPs” had subjected people in the camp to “arbitrary deprivation of life and serious bodily harm.” If this seems strangely antiseptic language for hacking unarmed children with machetes or shooting them in the back, bear in mind that human rights organizations often describe the entire Rwandan genocide as a single “major human rights violation,” which is exactly the same term these organizations use for the death penalty in the United States. The Commission noted that the RPA was a guerrilla army, inept at crowd control and police work, and in its recommendations it urged the government to develop its capacities for a humane and disciplined response to “situations of social tension and emergency.” It also found that the international humanitarian agencies, riven by political conflicts, had proved incapable of closing Kibeho peacefully, and urged them to get their own houses in order. Finally, the Commission called on the government to conduct an “investigation of individual responsibilities within its armed forces,” but it said nothing about holding the génocidaires among the IDPs to account for their crimes at Kibeho.
AROUND THE TIME that the Kibeho Commission released its report, two RPA officers who had been in command during the camp closing were arrested, and about a year later they were tried before a military court. The verdict was a telling indication of how the new regime understood its predicament. The officers were cleared of any responsibility for having presided over, or allowed, a massacre, but they were found guilty of having failed to use the military means at their disposal to protect civilians in danger, which was, of course, precisely the charge the RPF had made against UNAMIR, and the international community as a whole, during the genocide in 1994.
But from whom should the RPA have protected the IDPs if not from itself? The answer implicit in the Kibeho verdict was that the primary danger had been created by the génocidaires in the midst of the camp and by the international humanitarian organizations that had been content to let them stay there. In other words, the RPA judged itself to have taken the side of the Hutu masses against the Hutu Power leaders who had caused them so much anguish. The court was asking that the killings at Kibeho be thought of as the Norwegian nurse had suggested when I lay on the hospital floor in Butare—not as a measure of the new order, but as the ugly endgame of the old order.
Mark Frohardt, a veteran of “international emergency response” missions in Chad, Sudan, and Somalia, and the deputy chief of the UN’s Human Rights mission in Rwanda, reached a strikingly similar conclusion: “I have no intention of trying to
justify the manner in which Kibeho was closed,” Frohardt said at the end of two and a half years in Rwanda. “But I do believe that it is important to understand that the inability of the relief organizations to coordinate a successful operation set the stage for the tragedy that followed. Once the army saw that the efforts of relief agencies to move people out of the camps were ineffective, they knew they were the only institution, or force, in the country capable of closing the camps.” And, he went on, “the principal reason that we failed to empty the camps and that the RPA operation turned into a disaster was … the inability to separate out those who were involved in the genocide, those who are guilty of crimes against humanity, from those who are innocent and who were not involved.”
Frohardt was speaking as a human rights and relief worker to an audience composed primarily of fellow professionals in Washington, and he saw that community’s failure at Kibeho as symptomatic of a more profound failure of its collective human and political imagination. “I have never worked in a postconflict society in which recent events, recent history, had such an unrelenting influence on the current situation,” he said. “Nor have I ever worked in a country where humanitarian and development organizations were so resistant to incorporating the cause and consequence of these events into their analysis of the current situation.” In late 1994, just six months after the genocide, Frohardt recalled, “relief workers in Rwanda were often heard making statements such as ‘Yes, the genocide happened, but it’s time to get over it and move on,’ or ‘Enough has been said about the genocide, let’s get on with rebuilding the country.’”
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