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

by Philip Gourevitch

  Close to a thousand Tutsis were camped around the monastery at the time. According to Father Victor Bourdeau, a French monk who had lived at Mokoto for seventeen years, a Hutu mob assembled around the camp on the evening of Wednesday, May 8. Shots were fired in the air, and hundreds of Tutsis took refuge inside the church. On Friday, the monastery received warning that a major attack was planned. There was no safe way to move the Tutsis out, but most of the monks were evacuated; Father Victor was one of six who stayed until Sunday, May 12. That morning, Hutu fighters forced their way into the church, dragged some Tutsis outside, and executed them with machetes. “There was nothing to be done,” Father Victor said. He and his fellow monks fled on a tractor.

  When I met the Mokoto monks nine days later, they were displaced people themselves, living in temporary quarters in Goma. Father Victor, a tall, slender man with the anxious look of an ascetic, sat in his khaki cassock on a cot in a small stuffy room. “Everybody in the village was an accomplice, by silence or by looting, and it is impossible to divide the responsibility,” he said. “It’s like in Rwanda—one can’t say all of them are guilty, but to sort it out is impossible.” Father Victor had been in Kigali on April 7, 1994, the day after Habyarimana’s assassination, and he told me, “It was exactly the same scenario.”

  MOKOTO’S ISOLATION WAS such that it took three days for news of the monastery massacre to reach Kigali, where I was staying at the time. The story fit the pattern of recent events. In the preceding month and a half, at least ten thousand Tutsis had been chased out of North Kivu and forced to take refuge in Rwanda. The Rwandan government had accused Zaire of complicity in their expulsion, since its troops had often trucked Tutsis to the border, then confiscated or ripped up their Zairean citizenship papers. Zairean officials responded by invoking a much disputed and never enforced nationality law, passed in 1981 in violation of Zaire’s own constitution and a host of international legal conventions, that stripped Zaireans of Rwandan ancestry of their citizenship, rendering them stateless. “These refugees from North Kivu are Zaireans,” General Kagame’s adviser, Claude Dusaidi, told me. “We ask for our citizens to return from the camps, and they send us theirs. They must take them back and give us ours.”

  As reports of the Mokoto massacre began to circulate in Kigali, similar expressions of outrage greeted me at every Rwandan government office I visited. If Zaire had it in for ancestral Rwandans, I was asked, why were Zairean Tutsis being singled out while Zairean and Rwandan Hutus killed them with impunity? “It’s really a genocide going on again,” Dusaidi said, “but supported by Zaire against its own citizens.” I was repeatedly reminded that Zaire’s President, Mobutu Sese Seko, had backed Habyarimana’s fight against the RPF, facilitated arms shipments to Rwanda during the genocide, provided bases for the French forces of Opération Turquoise, and abetted the resurgent Hutu Power forces in the border camps. A UN investigative team had just published a report showing that the infamous Colonel Bagasora of the ex-FAR traveled under Zairean military papers to the Seychelles to purchase weaponry and munitions. In the first half of 1996, as the war in North Kivu grew fiercer, attacks against Rwanda by the Hutu Power forces in Zaire had also intensified and infiltrators killed hundreds of genocide survivors in an effort that the organization African Rights described as “killing the evidence.” So it particularly galled Rwandan officials that the international community kept pouring money into Zaire by way of the camps, but did nothing to hold Mobutu accountable for the actions of his genocidal guests.

  Mobutu was the longest-ruling despot in Africa. His ascent to power, between 1960 and 1965, had been accomplished with the careful assistance of the CIA and various bands of white mercenaries through the violent suppression of the popularly elected Congolese national movement, and his endurance was due, in large measure, to his genius for turning the misery of his neighbors to his own advantage. During the Cold War, the United States and its allies propped him up as a bulwark against Communist forces in central Africa. Then the wall came down in Berlin, and Mobutu was no longer of use. Promoting democracy was the new dispensation, and when Mobutu failed to produce anything but a violent parody of multiparty reforms, his erstwhile Western patrons cut him loose. His immense country—the size of Western Europe or the United States east of the Mississippi—was loaded with cobalt, diamonds, gold, and uranium, and he was rumored to be one of the wealthiest men in the world. But by the end of 1993, as his unpaid army ran riot, murdering, looting, and raping its way through the land, Zaire was enduring ten thousand percent inflation, and Mobutu, ostracized, and unable to get a visa to the United States or Europe, appeared headed for ruin. Then the Rwandan genocide put him back in the spotlight—this time as the man who had to be dealt with if you wanted to deal with the refugees.

  Once again, Western leaders turned to Mobutu as a power broker in regional affairs; emissaries of the United States, the European Union, and the UN Secretariat shuttled in and out of Gbadolite, the vast jungle palace where Mobutu held court and where Habyarimana was entombed. France, ever eager to bail out Hutu Power, broke ranks with the rest of what in Cold War parlance used to be called “the free world,” and unilaterally restored aid to Zaire—which meant, of course, to Mobutu, who shoveled the money directly into his Swiss bank accounts. “That genocide,” a European diplomat told me, “was a gift from God for Mobutu.” The Rwandan officials I spoke with believed that Mobutu, by tolerating and even encouraging the creation of a highly militarized Hutuland in Zaire, was seeking to ensure that this gift would keep giving.

  “If anybody thinks Mobutu can continue to fool people, I don’t think it’s going to take very long to show people that we’re not fools,” Colonel Karemera, Rwanda’s Minister of Health, warned. The last battalions of UNAMIR had finally withdrawn from Rwanda in April of 1996, and one month later it seemed that the war everyone had been waiting for was getting underway. “Zaire is just provoking and provoking,” Claude Dusaidi told me at the Ministry of Defense. “If Zaire wants to expel its citizens and give them to us, let Zaire give them with their land.” I heard this line so often from officials in Kigali that I asked Dusaidi, who was famously blunt, if Rwanda was preparing to invade Zaire. “We have enough problems,” he said. “We don’t have to go beyond our borders to get frustrated. But if we wanted North Kivu, we would go take it.”

  FOLLOWING THE MASSACRE at the Mokoto monastery, hundreds of Tutsi survivors managed to flee and take refuge in a nearby Zairean village. I wanted to know what was to become of them there. On my way to the border, I stopped at a camp in northwestern Rwanda where thousands of Zairean Tutsis recently expelled from North Kivu were being held. I spoke to about a dozen men, who said that when the Hutu Power attacks began early in 1996, Zaire had sent troops. The Tutsis had expected that the troops would defend them, that Zaire would protect its own people. Instead, most of the soldiers had joined in robbing them, and then forcing them across the border. “They made us pay them for transport to the frontier,” said a man, whose outfit—a pair of heavy-duty cross-country ski boots and an Icelandic sweater—testified to his sudden dependence on handouts.

  The Tutsi refugees from Zaire were convinced that Mobutu was behind their troubles. “He’s a very strong man,” said a refugee who had been a Zairean civil servant for decades. “He’s been there thirty years, and every time he has domestic opposition he allows a civil conflict, then puts it down, and says, ‘Voilà, peace.’” The refugees also believed that Mobutu could restore order if he chose to. After all, his full, self-given name, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, has been translated as “the all-powerful warrior who, by his endurance and will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake,” and also as “the cock who leaves no hen alone.” Nobody seemed to doubt that everything that happened in his realm was his doing, by dint of his actions or inactions, and that the end result would be just what he intended.

  But Mobutu didn’t want outsiders to see the work in progress. When I arrived at t
he border, I learned that Zaire was not admitting journalists. “They want to camouflage the total disorder,” said a Rwandan mechanic, returning from a day trip to Goma. “That country is finished. Businesses are pulling out.” But the border guards didn’t know me, and the customs men who grabbed my bag never even looked in it: what they wanted was ransom, a little drinking money, and three dollars sufficed.

  Zaire, as a state, had long been considered a phantom construct. Its very name, which Mobutu had conjured up as part of a program of “authenticity,” was a bit of make-believe: “Zaire” was an antique Portuguese bastardization of a local word for river. And Mobutu, who liked to appear on television in clips that showed him walking among the clouds in his trademark leopard-skin hat and dark glasses, had gone further, claiming the Adamic power of renaming all of his subjects—or, at least, requiring them to abandon their Christian names and take up African ones. In pursuit of the “authentic” he also nationalized all foreign businesses, put in place a constitution granting himself absolute power, prescribed a national dress code (neckties and suits were outlawed in favor of a snappily modified Mao shirt known as an abacos—short for à bas les costumes, “down with suits”); he replaced crucifixes with his portrait, struck Christmas from the holiday calendar, and purged every vestige of political opposition. “We are resorting to this authenticity,” he once said, “in order to rediscover our soul which colonization had almost erased from our memories and which we are seeking in the tradition of our ancestors.”

  Mobutu’s principle, then, was a double negative: to erase the corrupt memory that had erased the genuine national memory, and thus to restore that original chain of memory. The idea was romantic, nostalgic, and fundamentally incoherent. The place Mobutu called Zaire had never been a nation before the rapacious King Leopold II, King of the Belgians, drew its map, and the very word “authenticity”—an import from the French existentialism that had been the vogue during Mobutu’s youth—was blatantly at odds with his professed Africanism. One is reminded of Pol Pot, who returned to Cambodia after studying in Paris, changed his country’s name to Kampuchea, chucked out the calendar, proclaimed “Year Zero,” and slaughtered a million or more of his countrymen to eradicate Western influences.

  Mobutu, to magnify his own grandeur, systematically reduced Zaire to rot, and—despite the defiantly determined spirit of the great mass of Zaireans, who went on procreating, schooling, praying, trading, and debating with some eloquence their prospects for political emancipation—an alarming number of Western commentators took cynical solace in the conviction that this state of affairs was about as authentic as Africa gets. Leave the natives to their own devices, the thinking went, and—Voilà!—Zaire. It was almost as if we wanted Zaire to be the Heart of Darkness; perhaps the notion suited our understanding of the natural order of nations.

  Of course, Mobutu was never more than a capricious puppet of his Western patrons, and ultimately even the idea of authenticity was abandoned to decay, as he shed any pretext of ideology in favor of absolute gangsterism. Zaireans—who used to be obliged to gather and chant Mobutist slogans like “It is better to die of hunger than to be rich and a slave to colonialism!”—watched Mobutu grow richer while they grew hungrier. With time, some even dared to modify Mobutu’s pet mantra about the “Three Z’s”—Zaire the country, Zaire the river, and Zaire the currency —by privately adding a fourth Z: Zaire the Zero.

  All that remained of the state were the chief, his cronies, and his troops—a vampire elite, presiding over nearly a million square miles of decay. The so-called eleventh commandment of Mobutism was “Débrouillez-vous”—“Fend for yourselves”—and for at least a generation it had been the only absolute law of the land. Foreign visitors to Zaire were forever marveling that the place managed to survive at all. How did the center hold? A better question might have been whether there was a center. Having allowed his country to unravel, Mobutu liked to pretend that he alone kept it together, and as the war in North Kivu began to heat up, what worried many Zaireans and foreign diplomats even more than Zaire under Mobutu was the thought of Zaire after Mobutu.

  “Tribal war and disaster,” my cabdriver said as we tooled into Goma, traveling in the oncoming lane of a divided boulevard because it was the side with shallower potholes. “In the end we’ll all pay for it.” A tour of the humanitarian agencies produced no better news. A convoy of three trucks belonging to CARE had been shot up the week before by machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades on the road near one of the UN camps. Thirteen Zaireans had been killed, and I found several Western aid workers with lakefront houses checking on the condition of their inflatable Zodiac boats, in case—or in hope—of an evacuation.

  Everyone had stories of fighting in the hills, but little concrete information. At UNHCR headquarters, I found the repatriation officer sitting before a spanking clean desk. “Forget repatriation,” he told me; he was applying for a new post.

  ONE WEEK AFTER the killings at Mokoto, I drove into the combat zone of North Kivu. The road ran west from Goma across the lava field, skirting the giant Mugunga refugee camp, where about a hundred and fifty thousand Rwandans lived in a sea of shanties draped with UN-issue blue plastic sheeting. A few miles on lay Lac Vert, the ex-FAR headquarters. The paved road ended in the town of Sake, a derelict settlement crammed with about thirty thousand people of the Hunde tribe, who had been chased out of the hills by Hutu fighters. Hundes, like Hutus, were mostly subsistence farmers, and the two groups’ rivalry was entirely economic and political. “Morphologically, we are the same,” one Zairean Hutu observed, employing the vocabulary of European “race science” to assert that there was no ethnic animus in the Hutu-Hunde conflict.

  Beyond Sake, a dirt road rose sharply through the dense vegetation of the rain-soaked volcanic massif. We soon came to a clearing, and my driver gave me the name of a village. But there was no village, only plots of land where a village once stood, some charred beams, bits of smashed crockery, and sometimes a few bright flowers in a row that implied a human hand. We drove for an hour without seeing anyone—past the sacked homes of Hundes and the abandoned homes of Hutus, many of whom were said to have taken refuge with the Rwandans in the camps. Masisi was known as the breadbasket of Zaire, a zone so fertile, so temperate, and so moist that some crops would yield four harvests a year. Now the devastation appeared complete, except for occasional carefully tilled fields of vegetables, their greenery iridescent beneath low dark clouds that sporadically dumped a few minutes of bright rain.

  Along steep, rutted switchbacks, the irregular hills tilted at obscure angles, opening at times into deep ravines with tumbling cataracts, then closing in with a forest of eucalyptus. It was a landscape well worth fighting for, but I couldn’t understand the endless procession of desolated villages. When you expel people and conquer territory, don’t you occupy it? Weren’t these hills supposed to be packed with Hutus? Or was the land just being prepared for the day when the money ran out in the camps? When at last we came to a village with a few people—Hutus and Zairean soldiers—my driver didn’t think it advisable to stop and ask what their long-term strategy was.

  At the top of the escarpment the forests fell back and the vast alpine pastures of Tutsi herdsmen opened out, rolling over the domes of the hills and folding into the valleys. But there weren’t any Tutsis, and there weren’t any cattle. After four hours on the deserted road, we had covered about fifty miles and reached Kitchanga, a village where the Tutsis who fled from the Mokoto monastery had found temporary refuge. A large crowd stood outside a shack to buy pieces of a freshly butchered cow. The cow had also come from Mokoto—“rescued,” villagers said, from the monastery’s dairy; there was suddenly so much beef in town that ten dollars could buy almost thirty pounds of it.

  But ten dollars wasn’t enough to buy a Tutsi his life: the going rate for transport to the border was between twelve and fifteen dollars. Eight hundred of the Tutsis who had been attacked at Mokoto were now packed into a sodden and st
eaming thatch schoolhouse in Kitchanga, and they were too poor to pay for their own “ethnic cleansing.”

  A FEW DAYS before I arrived in Kitchanga, a relief team from Doctors Without Borders had driven up to the Mokoto monastery and found the road blocked by two charred, naked corpses; the hands, feet, and genitals had been cut off, the chests had been opened, and the hearts had been removed. The relief workers counted ten corpses and smelled many more; they estimated the dead to number at least a hundred. While they were at the monastery, some wounded Tutsis came out of the bush where they had been hiding. One was a naked boy who had contrived to cover only the back of his neck. When he let the covering fall away, they saw that his head had been cut almost halfway off, exposing his spine and a patch of cranium. A doctor had sewed the boy back together, and I saw him walking tentatively around an emergency field hospital at Kitchanga.

  A barefoot man in a tattered raincoat and shorts at the village school, who identified himself as “the captain of the Mokoto refugees,” said that many of the attackers had come from the UN camps. It was easy to identify them, he said, because “they spoke excellent Kinyarwanda and were well dressed,” while “we Zaireans are hill people, and feel more at home in Swahili.” He explained that some of his people had been able to flee when “the attackers, seeing others pillage, forgot killing to steal, and only came back later.” The Mokoto survivors had straggled into Kitchanga empty-handed, and a few old men were wrapped only in blankets because their attackers had stripped them naked, intending to kill them. No one could count on being so lucky again. The captain told me that the Hutu Power militias at Mokoto had chanted, “Kill, kill, kill,” and “This is how we fled our country.” Unlike the Zairean Tutsi refugees I had met in Rwanda, who said their only hope was to return to Zaire, the captain of the Mokoto Tutsis had given up. When he told me, “We want to go home,” he meant Rwanda. “We have no nationality here,” he said.