From the start, the RPF leadership was made up of Hutus as well as Tutsis, including defectors from Habyarimana’s inner circles, but its military core was always overwhelmingly Tutsi. “Of course,” Tito Ruteremara said. “Tutsis were the refugees. But the struggle was against the politics in Rwanda, not against the Hutus. We made that understood. We told people the truth—about the dictator, about our politics of liberation and unity with debate—so we grew strong. Inside Rwanda, they were recruiting by force and coercion. For us it was everyone volunteering. Even the old women went to work on plantations to get some money. Even if you were a sick man who could only afford to say a small prayer—that was good.”
The Ugandan who had watched in puzzlement as Rwandans drew family trees and raised funds had a friend whose husband was Rwandan. “The morning of October 1, 1990, this woman’s husband said to her, ’This is going to be a very important day in history.’ He wouldn’t say more, just ‘Mark my words.’ She and her husband were very close, but it wasn’t until she heard on the news that night that Fred Rwigyema had gone over to Rwanda taking his people that she knew what he was talking about.”
Museveni responded to the RPF’s invasion of Rwanda by ordering the Ugandan army to seal the border and block the mass desertion of Rwandans, who were stealing every bit of equipment they could grab. He also contacted Habyarimana to urge negotiations. “We tried to bring peace,” Museveni told me. “But Habyarimana was not willing. He was busy mobilizing Belgium, mobilizing France. Then he started accusing me of starting it all. So then we left the thing to run its course.” Tito Ruteremara laughed when he recalled those first days of the war. “Habyarimana was a very stupid man,” he said. “When he blamed Museveni, he saved us. Now, instead of stopping us from crossing into Rwanda, Museveni closed the border from the other side—so we couldn’t turn back. So Habyarimana actually forced us to keep fighting him, even when we might have felt like we were losing.”
KAGAME FOLLOWED THE initial reports of the RPF invasion from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was enrolled as an Ugandan in an officer training course. On the second day of the war, Fred Rwigyema was killed. A story went around that he was assassinated by two of his officers, who were, in turn, court-martialed and executed. Later, the RPF took to saying that Rwigyema was killed by enemy fire, and that the two officers were killed in an enemy ambush. However that may be, within ten days of Rwigyema’s death Kagame quit his course in Kansas and flew back to Africa, where he deserted his Ugandan commission and replaced his murdered friend as the RPF field commander. He was a few days shy of his thirty-third birthday.
I once asked if he liked fighting. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I was very annoyed. I was very angry. I will still fight if I have reason to. I will always fight. I have no problem with that.” He was certainly good at it. Military men regard the army he forged from the ragtag remnants of Rwigyema’s original band, and the campaign he ran in 1994, as a work of plain genius. That he had pulled it off with an arsenal composed merely of mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and, primarily, what one American arms specialist described to me as “piece of shit” secondhand Kalashnikovs, has only added to the legend.
“The problem isn’t the equipment,” Kagame told me. “The problem is always the man behind it. Does he understand why he is fighting?” In his view, determined and well-disciplined fighters, motivated by coherent ideas of political improvement, can always best the soldiers of a corrupt regime that stands for nothing but its own power. The RPF treated the army as a sort of field university. Throughout the war, officers and their troops were kept sharp not only by military drill but also by a steady program of political seminars; individuals were encouraged to think and speak for themselves, to discuss and debate the party line even as they were also taught to serve it. “We have tried to encourage collective responsibility,” Kagame explained. “In all my capacities, in the RPF, in the government, in the army, my primary responsibility is to help develop people who can take responsibility indiscriminately.”
In tandem with political discipline, the RPF earned a reputation for strict physical discipline during its years as a guerrilla force. Across much of Africa, a soldier’s uniform and gun had long been regarded—and are still seen—as little more than a license to engage in banditry. During the four years of fighting in Rwanda, marriage and even courtship were forbidden to RPF cadres; thievery was punished with the lash, and officers and soldiers guilty of crimes like murder and rape were liable to be executed. “I don’t see the good in preserving you after you have so offended others,” General Kagame told me. “And people respected it. It brought sanity and discipline. You don’t allow armed people freedom to do what they want. If you are equipped to use force, you must use it rationally. If you are given a chance to use it irrationally you can be a very big danger to society. There’s no question about it. Your objective is to protect society.”
At the end of the war, in July of 1994, even many international aid workers regarded the RPF with awe and spoke with stirring conviction of the righteousness of its cause and conduct. The RPF had hardly gone to war for humanitarian reasons, but it had effectively been the only force on earth to live up to the requirements of the 1948 Genocide Convention. That RPF elements had carried out reprisal killings against alleged génocidaires, and committed atrocities against Hutu civilians, was not in dispute; in 1994, Amnesty International reported that between April and August “hundreds—possibly thousands—of unarmed civilians and captured armed opponents” had been killed by RPF troops. But what most vividly impressed observers in the waning days of the genocide was the overall restraint of this rebel army, even as its soldiers were finding their ancestral villages, and their own families, annihilated.
“The RPF guys had this impressive clarity of purpose about them,” James Orbinski, the Canadian doctor who worked in Kigali during the genocide, told me. “They had ideas of right and wrong that were obviously flexible—I mean they were an army—but basically their ideas and actions were a hell of a lot righter than wronger. Armies always have a style. These guys—their uniforms were always ironed, they were clean-shaven, and their boots were shined. You’d see them walking around behind their lines, two guys holding hands, sober, proud to be there. They fought like hell. But when they came into a place, you didn’t see the usual African looting. I remember when Kigali fell, a guy took a radio from a house, and he was immediately taken out and shot.”
A Hutu businessman told me a different story: “They were very organized, very tight, and they looted like hell. True, it wasn’t just every man for himself. It was mostly quite orderly, with a command structure. But what they needed, or wanted, they took, top to bottom. They came to my shop with trucks, and stripped it. I didn’t like it, but at the time I was happy to keep quiet. I considered it more or less a tax for the liberation—at the time.”
HEROES, SAVIORS, HERALDS of a new order. Kagame’s men—and boys (a lot of them weren’t clean-shaven, just too young for a razor)—were all those things in that moment. But their triumph remained shadowed by the genocide, and their victory was far from complete. The enemy hadn’t been defeated; it had just run away. Everywhere one went, inside Rwanda and in the border camps, to RPF leaders and to Hutu Power leaders, to relief workers and to foreign diplomats, in the hills, in cafés, even inside Rwanda’s packed prisons, one heard that there would be another war, and soon. Such talk had begun immediately after the last war, and I heard it almost every day on each of my visits.
It was strange to be waiting for a war, which is what I felt I was doing along with everyone else during much of the time I spent in Rwanda. The more certain you felt it was coming, the more you dreaded it and the more you wished it would hurry up and get itself over with. It began to feel almost like an appointment. The only way it might be avoided was for a no-nonsense, battle-ready international force to overwhelm and disarm the fugutive Hutu Power army and militias in the UN border camps, and that was never going to happen; instead we were pro
tecting them. So one waited, and wondered what the war would be like, and with time it occurred to me that this anxious expectation was a part of it: if the next war was inevitable, then the last war never ended.
In this climate of emergency and suspense, neither at war nor at peace, the RPF set out to lay the foundations of a new Rwandan state, and to create a new national narrative that could simultaneously confront the genocide and offer a way to move on from it. The Rwanda that the RPF had fought to create—with all Rwandans living peacefully inside the country for the first time since independence—was a radical dream. Now, the existence of a rump Hutu Power state in the UN border camps forced that dream to be deferred, and even before Kibeho, Kagame began saying that if the international community would not sort out the génocidaires in Zaire from the general camp population and send the masses home, he would be prepared to do it himself. “We want people back,” he told me, “because it is their right and it is our responsibility to have them back, whether they support us or not.”
In the meantime, all talk of reconciliation and national unity ran up against the fact that the next war would be a war about the genocide. For, while the RPF and the new government required that the genocide be recognized as, in Kagame’s words, “the defining event in Rwandan history,” Hutu Power still sought to make its crime a success by making it indistinguishable from the continuum of Rwandan history.
KAGAME ONCE TOLD me that after signing the Arusha Accords, in the summer of 1993, he had talked about retiring from the hght—“to go to school, or somewhere, and just have a rest.” But, he said, “after a few weeks it turned into a political problem. Some people came from Kigali and said, ‘You know, everybody’s worried. They think when you mentioned getting out you were planning something.’” Kagame laughed, a high, breathy chuckle. “I said, ‘Look, you are really unfair. When I stay in, I’m a problem. When I say I’m getting out, I’m a problem. If I wanted to be a problem, I would actually be a problem. I don’t have to dance around weeping, you see.’” Of course, the peace never lasted long enough for Kagame to relax. “My business was to fight,” he said. “I fought. The war was over. I said, ‘Let’s share power.’ And it was sincere. Had it not been, I would have taken over everything.”
It annoyed Kagame and his RPF colleagues that Rwanda’s new government was routinely described in the international press as his government, and labeled “Tutsi-dominated” or, more pointedly, “minority-dominated.” A moratorium had been imposed on political party activities, but in the spirit of the Arusha Accords the government included many members of the old anti-Hutu Power opposition parties in top posts. What’s more, sixteen of the twenty-two cabinet ministers, including the Prime Minister and the Ministers of Justice and the Interior, were Hutus, while the army, which was quickly doubled in size, to at least forty thousand men, included several thousand former officers and enlisted men from the ranks of Habyarimana’s old army and gendarmerie. As President Pasteur Bizimungu, who was Hutu, told me, to speak of Tutsi domination echoed “the slogans or the way of portraying things of the extremists,” when, for the first time in the hundred years since colonization, “there are authorities in this country, Hutu and Tutsi, who are putting in place policy so that people may share the same fundamental rights and obligations irrespective of their ethnic background—and the extremists don’t feel happy about that.”
Kagame, for whom the office of Vice President was specially invented, did not deny that the RPF formed the backbone of the regime, and that as its chief military and political strategist he was the country’s most powerful political figure. “He who controls the army controls all,” Rwandans liked to say, and following the total destruction of the national infrastructure during the genocide this seemed truer than ever. But Kagame imposed institutional checks on his own power—who else could impose them?—and when he said that he could remove those checks, he was only stating the obvious. He may even have been overstating the case, since it was never clear, after the genocide, that he had complete control of the army, but he was trying to explain what it meant that he had chosen not to be an absolute leader in a country that had no experience of anything else. And he said, “I never had any illusions that these political tasks were going to be simple.”
One of the first acts of the new government was to abolish the system of ethnic identity cards, which had served as death tickets for Tutsis during the genocide. But even without identity cards, everybody seemed to know who his neighbors were. In the aftermath of the genocide, the ethnic categories had become more meaningful and more charged than ever before. Rwanda had no police and no working courts; the great majority of its legal professionals had been killed or had themselves become killers, and while suspected génocidaires were arrested by the thousands, many Rwandans preferred to settle their scores privately, without waiting for the state to be established.
So there were killings; nobody knows how many, but you heard stories of new killings every few days. As a rule, the victims were Hutus, and the killers were unidentified. The RPA claimed to have jailed hundreds of indisciplined soldiers, but military secrecy tended to shroud these affairs. And it was a delicate matter when two soldiers were sentenced to death by an RPA tribunal for reprisal killings, and nobody had yet been brought to trial for crimes during the genocide. Still, from their places of exile, Hutu Power leaders greeted the news of reprisal killings in Rwanda with expressions of outrage that often sounded more like gleeful enthusiasm—as if with each Hutu murdered their own crimes were diminished. Hassan Ngeze had decamped to Nairobi and was again publishing Kangura, and he and countless other “refugee” pamphleteers cranked up a relentless campaign, aimed largely at Western diplomats, journalists, and humanitarians, proclaiming more loudly than ever that the RPF was Rwanda’s true genocidal aggressor.
“This gang made a genocide, then they say Hutu-Tutsi, Hutu-Tutsi, and everything is a genocide to them,” Kagame scoffed, adding, “Johannesburg alone has more crime than the whole country of Rwanda. Nairobi has more. I’m saying we have problems. I’m saying things are ugly. But I’m saying, let’s distinguish. If we take everything to be the same, then we are making a mistake.”
The paradox was not lost on Rwanda’s new leaders that the genocide had brought them greater power and at the same time poisoned their prospects for using it as they had promised. “We were compelled to take on a totally new, different situation—something we had not anticipated,” Kagame said. “The twist was so abrupt, and the magnitude of the problems that arose was so immense, that bringing people together and making the country whole became more difficult. You will find that in the army, about a third of the people, maybe slightly more, have lost their families. At the same time the people who are responsible are not being brought to justice effectively. I imagine this undermines one’s initial dedication and discipline. This is natural, absolutely natural, and it has its own consequences.”
A UNICEF study later posited that five out of six children who had been in Rwanda during the slaughter had, at the very least, witnessed bloodshed, and you may assume that adults had not been better sheltered. Imagine what the totality of such devastation means for a society, and it becomes clear that Hutu Power’s crime was much greater than the murder of nearly a million people. Nobody in Rwanda escaped direct physical or psychic damage. The terror was designed to be total and enduring, a legacy to leave Rwandans spinning and disoriented in the slipstream of their memories for a very long time to come, and in that it was successful.
I FELT TEMPTED, at times, to think of Rwanda after the genocide as an impossible country. Kagame never seemed to afford himself the luxury of such a useless notion. “People are not inherently bad,” he told me. “But they can be made bad. And they can be taught to be good.”
He always sounded so soothingly sane, even when he was describing, with characteristic bluntness, the endless discouragements and continued anguish that surely lay ahead. He spoke of all the woes of his tiny trashed country as a set of pro
blems to be solved, and he seemed to relish the challenge. He was a man of rare scope—a man of action with an acute human and political intelligence. It appeared impossible to discover an angle to the history he was born into and was making that he hadn’t already reckoned. And where others saw defeat, he saw opportunity. He was, after all, a revolutionary; for more than fifteen years, his life had consisted of overthrowing dictators and establishing new states in the harshest of circumstances.
Because he was not an ideologue, Kagame was often called a pragmatist. But that suggests an indifference to principle and, with a soldier’s stark habits of mind, he sought to make a principle of being rational. Reason can be ruthless, and Kagame, who had emerged in ruthless times, was convinced that with reason he could bend all that was twisted in Rwanda straighter, that the country and its people truly could be changed—made saner, and so better—and he meant to prove it. The process might be ugly: against those who preferred violence to reason, Kagame was ready to fight, and, unlike most politicians, when he spoke or took action, he aimed to be understood, not to be loved. So he made himself clear, and he could be remarkably persuasive.
We always met in his office at the Ministry of Defense, a big room with translucent curtains drawn over the windows. He would fold his antenna-thin frame onto a big black leather chair, I would sit to his right on a couch, and he would answer my questions for two or three hours at a stretch with a quietly ferocious concentration. And what he said mattered, because Kagame was truly somebody of consequence. He made things happen.
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