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

by Philip Gourevitch

  But why should survivors be asked to live next door to killers—or even, as happened in Girumuhatse’s house, under the same roof? Why put off confronting the problem? To keep things calm, General Kagame told me. “You don’t necessarily just go for everyone you might think you should go for,” he said. “Maybe you create an atmosphere where things are stabilized first, then you go for those you must go for. Others you can even ignore for the sake of gradually leading a kind of peaceful coexistence.” Kagame recognized that this was asking a lot of his people; and, following the return, there were numerous reports of soldiers rescuing alleged killers from angry mobs and placing them in “protective custody.” It would not be easy to balance the demands for justice and the desire for order, Kagame told me. “In between these two intentions there are prcblems, there are the feelings of people.”

  AS SOON AS Girumuhatse told me he was a killer, he stopped sweating. His breath came more easily. His eyes even looked clearer, and he seemed eager to keep talking. A storm had blown in, dumping rain, so we moved into my jeep, which was parked right where Girumuhatse’s roadblock had stood during the genocide. As we settled in, he announced that one reason he had been under pressure during the genocide was that he had been told to kill his wife, a Tutsi.

  “I was able to save my wife because I was the leader,” he said, adding that he had feared for his own life, too. “I had to do it or I’d be killed,” he said. “So I feel a bit innocent. Killing didn’t come from my heart. If it was really my wish to kill, I couldn’t now come back.” Girumuhatse’s voice was unnervingly cozy beneath the thrum of the rain. Did he feel at least a bit guilty? He remained unmoved when he told me, “I knew many of the people that I ordered killed.” I asked how many deaths he had ordered. He was slow in answering. “I know of six people who were killed before my eyes by my orders.”

  “Did you never kill with your own hands?”

  “It’s possible I did,” Girumuhatse said. “Because if I didn’t they’d have killed my wife.”

  “Possible?” I said. “Or true?”

  Bosco, the translator, said, “You know what he means,” and didn’t translate the question.

  Girumuhatse reiterated his wish to explain everything to the authorities. As he understood it, he was being allowed to recover his property and his health—“and then they will call me.” He wasn’t afraid. If he told all, he believed, he would get “a limited punishment.” He said, “The authorities understand that many just followed orders.”

  Girumuhatse had the government’s policy almost right. Three months earlier, after nearly a year of debate, Rwanda’s parliament had adopted a special genocide law, which categorized responsibility for the crime according to the perpetrator’s position in the criminal hierarchy, and offered sentence reductions for lower-level criminals who confessed. Although all murderers were liable to the death penalty under Rwanda’s standard penal code, the genocide law reserved execution only for the elites defined in Category One: “Planners, organizers, instigators, supervisors, and leaders … at the national, prefectural, communal, sector, or cell level,” as well as “notorious murderers who, by virtue of the zeal or excessive malice with which they committed atrocities, distinguished themselves” and perpetrators of “acts of sexual torture.” For the vast remainder of rank-and-file killers and their accomplices—the followers—the maximum penalty of life imprisonment could be whittled down, with a valid confession and guilty plea, to as little as seven years. Penalties for nonlethal assault and property crimes were comparably reducible.

  Girumuhatse had absorbed the spirit of the new law. “If it can end that way, and after being punished I can return to my home and recover my life, I would accept that,” he told me. “If this vengeance can end in this country and wrongdoers can be punished, that would be best.” What he didn’t seem to grasp was that his leadership position during the genocide placed him firmly in Category One, where the death penalty could not be staved off with a confession.

  Even as Girumuhatse prepared to tell all, he laid the blame for his crimes on the former mayor of Taba, Jean Paul Akayesu, who was remembered as a famously avid hunter of Tutsis and who had installed Girumuhatse as the roadblock leader. In 1995, Akayesu was arrested in Zambia, and in 1997 he was brought to trial for genocide before the International Tribunal for Rwanda, where, after countless delays in the proceedings, a verdict was expected in the summer of 1998. In court, Akayesu himself blamed his political superiors for any killings of innocent Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

  The genocide “was like a dream,” Girumuhatse told me. “It came from the regime like a nightmare.” Now, it seemed, he had not so much waked up as entered a new dream, in which his confession and his pat enthusiasm for Rwanda’s reform—“The new regime is quite good. There are no dead. We were surprised by the welcome. There is a new order”—did not require any fundamental change of politics or heart. He remained a middleman, aspiring to be a model citizen and to reap the rewards. When the authorities said kill, he killed, and when the authorities said confess, he confessed.

  BETWEEN VISITS TO Taba, I talked to an aid worker in Kigali who had just returned from western Tanzania, where close to five hundred thousand Rwandan Hutus still remained in refugee camps. (A month later, in mid-December of 1996, Tanzania closed the camps and repatriated the Rwandans, bringing the total number of returnees to nearly a million and a half in six months.) During his visit to the camps, the aid worker had heard that children there had a game of making clay figures and placing them in the road to be run over by passing vehicles. The clay figures represented Tutsis, and each time one was crushed the children cheered, because they believed they had just caused a Tutsi to die in Rwanda. The aid worker told me this story as a sort of parable. It make him wonder whether it wasn’t Rwanda’s inevitable destiny to endure another round of mass butchery.

  That possibility was all too obvious. Rwanda’s government since the genocide had staked its credibility on proving that systematic murder between Hutus and Tutsis was avoidable. The mass return from the camps, which the government presented as a triumph, was the great test of that claim. Yet Kagame, as always, regarded the victory as incomplete. “Yes, people have come back,” he said. “That’s one problem solved, and it has created another problem, which we also have to solve.” He then proceeded to name a lot of problems—housing, justice, the economy, education, the demobilization of thousands of ex-FAR soldiers returning from exile, and, above all, “this issue of ethnicity.”

  A few months earlier, shortly before the fighting began in South Kivu, Kagame had told me two stories about men in his army. One soldier, he said, had recently written a letter, “telling me how he was left alone in his family, and how he knew that some people killed his family during the genocide, and how he has chosen not to hold anybody else responsible for that. Instead, he has decided to take his own life because he doesn’t see what his life means anymore.” The letter was found after the soldier’s suicide. As Kagame understood it, “he had somebody in mind to kill but instead of doing that he decided to kill himself.” The second story was about an officer who killed three people and wounded two in a bar. Some soldiers were about to kill him for his crimes, but he said, “Let me tell you what the problem is and then you can kill me.” So the soldiers arrested the officer, and he explained, “I’ve been seeing killers who’ve been allowed to live and just roam around and nobody takes action against them. Well, I decided I cannot take any more of that, so I killed them. Now, go ahead and do whatever you want with me.”

  Kagame said, “Imagine what is going on in the mind of that person. I don’t know. He could have gone to a market and shot a hundred people. He could have killed anybody—such a person who does not even fear being killed. It means there’s some level of insanity that has been created.” He said, “People think this is a matter that we should have got over and forgotten, and—no, no, no, no, we are dealing with human beings here.”

  I heard many such stories, of the tempt
ations of revenge, the release of revenge, the dissatisfactions of revenge. Obviously, many survivors did not share Kagame’s view that it was possible to rehabilitate a human being who had followed the logic of the genocide. So after the return from Zaire, I asked him whether he still believed that killers could be successfully reintegrated into society. “I think you can’t give up on that—on such a person,” he said. “They can learn. I’m sure that every individual, somewhere in his plans, wants some peace, wants to progress in some way, even if he is an ordinary peasant. So if we can present the past to them and say, ‘This was the past that caused all these problems for you, and this is the way to avoid that,’ I think it changes their minds quite a bit. And I think some people can even benefit from being forgiven, being given another chance.”

  Kagame also said, “We have no alternative.”

  DRIVING BACK TO Taba a few days after we met Girumuhatse, Bosco asked me if I’d heard about the girl who’d been burnt alive in Kigali, recently. I hadn’t, so he told me. There was a girl—a woman, really—about Bosco’s age, an acquaintance of his. She was at a disco, and a guy came on to her. She turned him down. He said she’d be sorry. She laughed. He persisted. She told him to go away, to quit bothering her; she said he was crazy. He went away, then came back with a jug of petrol and a match. Four people were killed. The rejected suitor himself wound up hospitalized with burns. When he was asked why he killed four people, he said it was nothing to him after what he’d done in 1994—he could kill as many as he liked.

  Bosco was surprised that I, a journalist, hadn’t heard this story before. I think I responded rather dully, less as a journalist than as a consumer of American journalism, where the tabloid curiosity of psycho killers who go berserk in public spaces poses only a distant sense of random menace to the public at large—like lightning, drunk drivers, or falling chunks of tall buildings. A great-grandmother of mine was finished off in her ninety-sixth year by a potted geranium plunging from a window ledge, and although it could happen to me, too, I don’t consider it a nearer danger because it happened to her. But Bosco’s story was different. In Rwanda, he was telling me, a person who says, “The genocide made me do it,” leaves everyone in the entire society with a sense of total jeopardy.

  Laurencie Nyirabeza’s granddaughter, Chantalle Mukagasana, told me much the same thing. I had wanted to hear Nyirabeza’s reaction to Girumuhatse’s account of himself, but she was in a quiet mood when I returned to Taba, and Chantalle, a lank thirty-three-year-old who was widowed during the genocide and lost four of her five children—Marie, Marthe, Marianne, and Jonathan—filled the silence. “Even if he confesses, he’s an impostor,” she said of Girumuhatse. “He’s lying if he says he just followed orders.” According to Chantalle, the man was an unreserved Tutsi killer. She said he had overseen the murder of his wife’s parents, “just to have the pleasure of watching them killed,” and when he found his Tutsi wife feeding her brother, Girumuhatse had tried to kill his brother-in-law, too.

  Nyirabeza had accused Girumuhatse of killing ten members of her immediate family. Chantalle held him personally responsible for the massacre of twenty-seven members of her extended household. He had been the leader, she said, and he also partook in the massacre, using a small hoe. Chantalle had escaped with her one-month-old daughter, Alphonsine, on her back, only because on the morning of the killings she had seen Girumuhatse murder a cousin of hers named Oswald with a machete. After that, Chantalle sought refuge at the nearby home of her godmother, a Hutu. While she was there, she heard Girumuhatse come and ask for tea—to give him strength, he said, to kill Chantalle’s father. She also said that her godmother’s son, who was one of Girumuhatse’s accomplices, “went behind the house to sharpen his machete, but his mother forbade him to kill me.” Later, the godmother told Chantalle that her son had killed Chantalle’s mother. And now the godmother and her son had come back from Zaire.

  All the killing Chantalle described had happened within a few days in one small cluster of houses, on the hill that was under Girumuhatse’s command. She laughed when I told her that Girumuhatse said he only saw six people killed on his orders. “Oh, if I could confront him,” she said at one point, but in another moment she said, “Even if I denounced him, what can it change?”

  After the genocide, Chantalle said, “I had to find my own clothes alone, and I had to find my food alone, and now these people return and are given food and humanitarian aid.” It was true; while the international community had spent more than a billion dollars in the camps, devastated Rwanda had gone begging for a few hundred million, and the tens of thousands of survivors, squatting in the ruins, had been systematically ignored. Once, Chantalle told me, someone had handed out hoes to Taba’s survivors. “That’s all,” she said. “Period.”

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to give survivors what they really wanted—their lost world as it was in the time they called “Before.” But did it have to be that those who were most damaged by the genocide remained the most neglected in the aftermath? Bonaventure Nyibizi was especially worried about young survivors becoming extremists themselves. “Let’s say we have a hundred thousand young people who lost their families and have no hope, no future. In a country like this if you tell them, ‘Go and kill your neighbor because he killed your father and your seven brothers and sister,’ they’ll take the machete and do it. Why? Because they’re not looking at the future with optimism. If you say the country must move toward reconciliation, but at the same time it forgets these people, what happens? When they are walking on the street we don’t realize their problems, but perhaps they have seen their mothers being raped, or their sisters being raped. It will require a lot to make sure that these people can come back to society and look at the future and say, ‘Yes, let us try.’”

  That effort wasn’t being made. The government had no program for survivors. “Nobody wants to help them,” Kagame’s adviser, Claude Dusaidi, told me. He meant no foreign donors, no aid agencies. “We say, ‘Give us the money, we’ll do it.’ Nobody is interested.” Bonaventure, who was later appointed Minister of Commerce, explained the lack of foreign help as a consequence of Rwanda’s lack of investment opportunities. “You cannot count on the international community unless you’re rich, and we are not,” he said. “We don’t have oil, so it doesn’t matter that we have blood, or that we are human beings.” For his part, Dusaidi had concluded that the international community didn’t want to recognize that the genocide had really taken place. “They wish we would forget it. But the only way we are going to get to forget it is to help the survivors to resume normal life. Then maybe you can establish the process of forgetting.”

  A surprising phrase—“the process of forgetting.” Since the Holocaust, discussions of genocide have become almost inextricably bound up in a discourse about the obligations of memory. But in Rwanda—where Pacifique Kabarisa, who worked for the organization African Rights, told me that many genocide survivors “regret that they weren’t killed”—forgetting was longed for as a symptom of minimal recovery, the capacity to get on with life. “Before this return,” Chantalle told me, “we were beginning to forget, but now it’s as if you had a wound that was healing and then someone came and reopened it.”

  There could be no complete closing of the wound for the generation that suffered it. Instead, while survivors charged that the government should—and could—do more for them, and while foreigners impatient for reconciliation accused the government of using the genocide as an excuse for its shortcomings, Rwanda’s new leaders were asking their countrymen to be stoical. “We cannot bring things to a halt just because we want to emphasize justice and make sure everyone who was involved at every level is held accountable,” Kagame told me. It was essential, he said, to maintain a forward momentum, not “to fall back and say, ‘Well, these Hutus killed, so they must be killed, and these Tutsis were the victims, so they must now get the better of what there is in this situation.’” After a moment, he added, “I think there has got to be some
serious thinking on the question of being rational.”

  Within a few weeks of the mass return from Zaire, the moratorium on arrests was rescinded to allow for the detention of suspects who fit Category One of the genocide law, and the moratorium was soon abandoned altogether. Yet Gerald Gahima, Deputy Minister of Justice, told me that most killers would probably remain at large. In Taba alone, where the return from the camps had been relatively light, the judicial police inspector said that at least sixty Category One suspects had come back. The inspector had Girumuhatse’s name on his list, but he didn’t know much about him. “It’s said he killed people,” he told me, and he read off some names of Girumuhatse’s alleged victims, including the same Oswald whose murder Chantalle said she had witnessed, and one of her uncles whom she’d named.

  Jonathan Nyandwi, one of six hundred and forty genocide prisoners at the community lockup in Taba, was better informed. He used to keep a bar near Girumuhatse’s roadblock, and although he professed at first not to know whether Girumuhatse was a killer, when I mentioned Oswald, he said, “He was my godson,” and “He was killed by one Jean Girumuhatse.” Nyandwi confirmed that Chantalle’s father had met the same fate, but he disputed her claim that Girumuhatse had killed his own wife’s parents. According to him, Girumuhatse had only tried to kill his wife’s brother, Evariste.

  I found Evariste a few days later. He said that his parents had been killed by “accomplices of Girumuhatse” and that he himself had fled during the attack. Later, he had sought refuge with his sister, Girumuhatse’s wife. “The moment I arrived, Girumuhatse cried out and called others,” Evariste recalled. “They took me, stripped me, and began to beat me with sticks, and my sister began crying like a madwoman, saying, ‘You can’t kill my brother like that!’” Girumuhatse, he said, “tried to take me to the roadblock of my neighborhood, so I could be killed in my place. I was totally nude, and they were leading me toward a mass grave to throw me in.” Somehow, Evariste had slipped free, and managed to escape into the night.