After the family was evacuated from the Hotel des Milles Collines, Jean-Baptiste had gone to work with an RPF medical unit helping survivors, and Odette had taken their three children to Nairobi, vowing never to return to Rwanda. Then she received news that some of her nephews and nieces had survived. “As soon as I heard that, I knew I had to come back,” she said. “We began to find them and to take them in, but it’s very difficult to satisfy all their needs. One of them—a four-year-old—weighed just seventeen pounds when he was found.” Once she told me, “We were in the car, Jean-Baptiste and I, and our three children, and one of the kids said, ‘I’m so happy just to be all five of us together again.’ We said, ‘Aren’t you happy to live with your cousins?’ But they didn’t say anything.”
Odette looked over at her children in the pool of the Cercle Sportif. When she turned back to me, she said, “This life after a genocide is really a terrible life.” The fluidity and urgency with which she had told the story of her earlier ordeals had given way to a hopscotch, free-associating rhythm as she described life in the aftermath. “When I was still in Nairobi, saying I’d never come back, there was a group of young Rwandan fifty-niners who’d gone to visit Rwanda for the first time,” she said. “They got back to Nairobi and said how beautiful and wonderful it all was, and the only problem in Rwanda was the survivors who want to tell you all their stories forever. That really got to me.”
She said, “The trauma comes back much more as time passes—this year more than last. So how can I look forward to next year? We take refuge a bit in our work, but many people become very depressed. I’m afraid it gets worse. I dream more of my sisters and cry through my dreams.”
Odette had one nephew who survived the genocide in Kinunu, on the hill where she was born in Gisenyi. She had visited him only once, to help bury the dead, who were numerous, and she did not want to go back. “All the Hutus there watched us come, and some wanted to hug me,” she said. “I cried out, ‘Don’t touch me. Where did you put everyone?’ One was married to a cousin of mine. I said, ‘Where’s Thérèse?’ He said, ‘I couldn’t do anything.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘It wasn’t me who did it.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to know you.’ Now whenever the Hutus there see a car coming to my nephew’s, they all hide. People will say I’m an extremist because I can’t accept or tolerate the people who killed my family. So if they’re afraid once in their lives—I was afraid since I was three years old—let them know how it feels.”
She said it was hard to make new friends among the returnees. “They came with all their things. They can laugh, have a party. Among us it’s always tales of genocide, and they don’t like to hear about it. If they see I’m married to a Hutu, that I have some old Hutu friends, they don’t understand. Really, everyone lives for himself now.”
She said, “I was talking to my youngest, Patrick. I said, ‘What are you thinking about?’ He said, ‘Those two guys who came with machetes. It comes back all the time.’ The children don’t go out—you have to push them—they like to stay home. They think about it a lot. My little Patrick, he goes alone into a room, and he looks under the bed for interahamwe. My daughter Arriane was in a very good boarding school in Nairobi, and one night she sat up reliving everything, and she cried. At midnight the dorm monitor came by and they spent nearly the whole night together. Arriane told her what had happened, and the monitor was amazed. She’d had no idea. And this was a Kenyan. Nobody really knows. Nobody wants to know.”
Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. “Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it’s written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.”
ONE DAY IN Kigali, I ran into Edmond Mrugamba, a man I had come to know around town, and he invited me to join him for a visit to the latrine into which his sister and her family had been thrown during the genocide. He had mentioned the story before. I remembered that he made a sound—tcha, tcha, tcha—and chopped his hand in the air to describe his sister’s killing.
Edmond drove a Mercedes, one of the few that remained in Rwanda, and he was wearing a faded denim shirt and jeans and black cowboy boots. He used to work for a German development program in Kigali, and his wife was German; she remained in Berlin with their children after the genocide. As we drove in the direction of the airport, Edmond told me that he was a well-traveled man, and that after many trips in East Africa and Europe, he had always felt that Rwandans were the nicest, most decent people in the world. But now he couldn’t recover that feeling. In 1990, after the first RPF attack, he had been threatened because he was Tutsi; he had gone into exile and had only returned after the new government was installed. Edmond was in his late thirties; his father had been a cattle keeper in Kigali. His oldest brother was killed in the massacres of 1963. “And I don’t speak of my uncles killed in fifty-nine and sixty-one,” he said, “my grandmother burned in the house, my maternal uncle, a nurse, chopped into many pieces. There were many others who were killed, and others luckily went to Uganda.” Edmond himself had lived for eleven years in Burundi before returning under Habyarimana and finding work with the Germans. He showed me a snapshot of himself in full camouflage uniform and floppy khaki bush hat. In 1993, he left Germany for Uganda and outfitted himself to join the RPF—“then my appendix burst, and I had to have an operation.”
Edmond spoke quietly, with great intensity, and his bearded face was expressive in a subtle, wincing way. Despite his ordeals, he told me, he had never imagined the depth of the ugliness, the meanness—“the disease,” he said—that had afflicted Rwanda, and he could not understand how it could have been so well masked. He said, “An animal will kill, but never to completely annihilate a race, a whole collectivity. What does this make us in this world?”
Edmond returned from exile because he had found it intolerable to be living in a strange land thinking that he might be of use in Rwanda. Now he lived alone in a small, dark house with a young boy, a nephew who had been orphaned in the genocide. “And I ask myself sometimes, Is my presence here really of any significance?” he said. “To build a new Rwanda. I dream all the time. I dream of theories of this history of violence. I dream of finding an end to it.”
Near the outskirts of Kigali, we turned onto a red-dirt track that narrowed and descended between high reed fences surrounding modest homes. A blue metal gate leading to his dead sister’s house stood open. The yard was crackly dry bush strewn with rubble. A family of squatters—Tutsis just returned from Burundi—sat in the living room playing Scrabble. Edmond ignored them. He led me around the side of the house to a stand of dried-out banana plants. There were two holes in the ground, about a foot apart and three feet in diameter—neat, deep, machine-dug wells. Edmond grabbed hold of a bush, leaned out over the holes, and said, “You can see the tibias.” I did as he did, and saw the bones.
“Fourteen meters deep,” Edmond said. He told me that his brother-in-law had been a fanatically religious man, and on April 12, 1994, when he was stopped by interahamwe at a roadblock down the street and forced to lead them back to his house, he had persuaded the killers to let him pray. Edmond’s brother-in-law had prayed for half an hour. Then he told the militiamen that he didn’t want his family dismembered, so they invited him to throw his children down the latrine wells alive, and he did. Then Edmond’s sister and his brother-in-law were thrown in on top.
Edmond took his camera out of a plastic bag and took some pictures of the holes in the ground. “People come to Rwanda and talk of reconciliation,” he said. “It’s offensive. Imagine talking to Jews of reconciliation in 1946. Maybe in a long time, but it’s a private matter.” The squatters had come out of the house. They stood together at a short distance, and when they grasped Edmond’s story they began sniffling.
On the way back to town, I asked Edmond if he knew the people living in his sister’s house. “No,” he said. “When I see people who live in a place
that isn’t theirs, when there are survivors all around who have lost their homes, I know they’re miserable people. I want nothing to do with them. All I can think about is the people I’ve lost.” He reminded me that one of his brothers had been killed as well as his sister and her family. Then he told me that he knew who his brother’s killer was, and that he sometimes saw the man around Kigali.
“I’d like to talk to him,” Edmond said. “I want him to explain to me what this thing was, how he could do this thing. My surviving sister said, ‘Let’s denounce him.’ I saw what was happening—a wave of arrests all at once—and I said, ‘What good is prison, if he doesn’t feel what I feel? Let him live in fear.’ When the time is right, I want to make him understand that I’m not asking for his arrest, but for him to live forever with what he has done. I’m asking for him to think about it for the rest of his life. It’s a kind of psychological torture.”
Edmond had thought of himself as a Rwandan—he had identified with his people—but after the genocide he lost that mooring. Now, to prove himself his brother’s keeper, he wanted to fix his brother’s killer with the mark of Cain. I couldn’t help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city—and, although we don’t like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children.
16
ONE OF THE few things that the fleeing Hutu Power vandals left in ready-to-use condition was Rwanda’s central prison system, thirteen red-brick fortifications, built to house a total of twelve thousand inmates. During the genocide, the gates were opened so that convicts could be put to work, killing and collecting corpses, but the jails didn’t stay vacant for long. By April of 1995, a year after the killings, at least thirty-three thousand men, women, and children had been arrested for alleged participation in genocide. At the end of that year, the number had climbed to sixty thousand. Some prisons were expanded, new ones were built, and hundreds of smaller community lockups were crammed to overflowing, but the space could not keep up with the demand. By the end of 1997, at least a hundred twenty-five thousand Hutus accused of crimes during the genocide were incarcerated in Rwanda.
A few soldiers usually stood around the periphery of Rwanda’s prisons, but there were no guards on the inside. Prisoners and soldiers both considered themselves safer this way. But the government’s fear of sending soldiers into the prisons did not extend to foreign visitors, and I was always permitted to bring a camera. This puzzled me. Rwanda’s prisons had not elicited favorable press. They were widely viewed as a human rights catastrophe.
Although the tightly packed inmates were all accused of terrible violence, they were generally calm and orderly; fights among them were said to be rare, and killings unheard of. They greeted visitors amiably, often with smiles and with hands extended for a shake. At the women’s prison in Kigali, I found three hundred forty women lying around on the floor, barely clad in the stuffy heat of a few cramped cells and corridors; babies crawled underfoot, and two inmate nuns in crisp white habits said mass in a corner. At Butare prison, old men stood in a downpour with bits of plastic over their heads while young boys, scrunched together in a small cell, sang a chorus of “Alouette.” In the men’s block of Kigali prison, I was conducted past acrobatic and choral groups, a Scout troop, and three men reading Tintin by the captain of the prisoners and his adjutant, who wielded a short baton to clear a path through the tangled ranks of prisoners. The captain kept calling out, “Here’s a journalist from the United States,” and the huddled men, squatting at our feet, clapped mechanically and made little bowing motions. It occurred to me that this was the famous mob mentality of blind obedience to authority which was often described in attempts to explain the genocide.
Rwanda’s conventional hierarchies had reconstituted themselves behind the prison walls; “intellectuals,” civil servants, professionals, clerics, and merchants had the least uncomfortable cells, while the mass of peasants and laborers made do outdoors, crouching in the bony folds of their neighbors’ limbs in unroofed courtyards, and referred all questions to their leaders. Why did they put up with it? Why didn’t they riot? Why were attempted escapes so rare in Rwanda, when the guard system was so weak? A rampaging mob of five thousand prisoners could have easily overrun the walls of Kigali’s central prison and severely destabilized the capital, sparking a major crisis for the government they despised, even a general uprising if there was support for it. Nobody could entirely explain the passivity in the prisons; the best guess was that, having been assured that they would be slaughtered by the RPF, and finding themselves instead receiving regular visits from friendly international relief workers, reporters, and diplomats, the prisoners were simply astonished to be alive and did not care to push their luck.
Between my visits to the prisons, I stopped by to see General Kagame in his office at the Ministry of Defense. I was wondering why the government exposed itself to bad press about the prisons, and how he interpreted the prisoners’ apparent calm acceptance of their horrible conditions. Kagame answered my question with a question of his own: “If a million people died here, who killed them?”
“A lot of people,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Have you found many that admit they participated?”
I hadn’t. In the early days after the genocide, it had been easy for visitors to find perpetrators, in the jails and the refugee camps and also on the streets of Rwanda, who admitted to taking part in the killings, and even boasted about it. Yet by the time I began visiting Rwanda, the criminals had recognized that confession was a tactical error. In the prisons and the border camps, I couldn’t find anyone who would even agree that there had been a genocide. There had been a civil war and, yes, some massacres, but nobody acknowledged seeing anything. Every one of the scores of prisoners I spoke with claimed to have been arbitrarily and unjustly arrested, and of course, in any given case it was entirely possible. But many prisoners also told me they were confident that their “brothers” in the UN border camps would soon come to liberate them.
I once heard Kagame say that he suspected as many as a million people had particpated directly or indirectly in the genocide. His adviser, Claude Dusaidi, who liked to make extreme pronouncements, put the number at three million, which amounted to proclaiming every other Rwandan Hutu guilty. Such claims—impossible to prove or to disprove—struck many Rwandans and foreign observers as acts of intimidation, carefully calculated to place all Hutus under a cloud of suspicion; and this perception was only hardened when a UN-sponsored effort to honor those Hutus, like Paul Rusesabagina, who had protected Tutsis during the genocide was scuttled by infighting among Rwandan cabinet ministers. But Dusaidi insisted that Rwanda’s outrageously packed prisons did not reflect the outrageousness of the crime that had been visited on the country. “Sometimes one person could kill six people, and sometimes three people could kill one person,” Dusaidi said. “Pick any single film of the genocide, and just watch how they kill people. You’ll find a group killing a person. So there are many more killers still walking the streets than we have in prison. The number in prison is a dot.”
Of course, the fact that guilty people remained free didn’t mean that those in prison were the right people. I asked Kagame if it bothered him that a good many innocent people might be in jail and that the experience might harden them into oppositionists. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a problem. But that was the way to deal with the situation. If we had lost these people through revenge, that would have been an even bigger problem for us. I would rather address the problem of putting them in prison, because that is the best way to do it for the process of justice, and simply because I don’t want them out there, because people would actually kill them.”
IN JULY OF 1995, Rwanda’s National Commission of Triage—a sporadically functioning body charged with identifying prisoners against whom the accusations of genocide were insubstantial—ordered the release of Placide Koloni from the prison at Gitarama. Koloni had held the office of deputy governor befor
e, during, and—until his arrest—after the genocide. This was normal; the majority of provincial and communal officials who had not fled Rwanda, or been jailed as génocidaires, had retained their posts. Koloni had spent five months as a prisoner, and upon his release he returned to his office. Three days later, on the night of July 27, a sentry at a UN military observers’ post staffed by Malian blue-helmets saw some men enter Koloni’s home. A scream was heard, and the house exploded in flames. The blue-helmets watched as the fire burned through the night. Shortly after dawn, they entered the house and found that Koloni, his wife, their two daughters, and a domestic had been killed.
A week later, a Hutu deputy governor in Gikongoro, to the west of Gitarama, and a Catholic priest in Kamonyi parish, not far from Kigali, were shot dead. An edgy mood settled over Rwanda, not because the death toll was especially high, but because the victims were prominent civic leaders. In mid-August, the government was shaken when the Prime Minister, Faustin Twagiramungu, and the Minister of the Interior, Seth Sendashonga, quit in protest over the persistent insecurity in the provinces, for which they blamed the RPA. Both men were Hutus—Twagiramungu, a leader of the anti-Hutu Power opposition under Habyarimana ; Sendashonga, a prominent member of the RPF—and both went into exile.
General Kagame, who never tired of reciting the number of RPA soldiers—four hundred, seven hundred; I lost count after a thousand—who had been thrown in military jails for killings and indiscipline, liked to point out that soldiers were not the only Rwandans frustrated to the point of criminality in the aftermath of the genocide and that Rwanda even has apolitical criminals. “But given the situation you have here,” he said, “ordinary crimes are not going to be looked at as ordinary crimes.” His distinction offered little comfort to frightened Hutus. “When we see how Koloni was killed, we’d rather be in here than out there,” a detainee told me at Gitarama prison, which was known as Rwanda’s worst prison in the summer of 1995.
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