But why would any of the major powers have pursued such an insane policy? “To fight off their guilt after the genocide,” Kagame said. “There is a great amount of guilt.”
This was the same conversation in which, at the outset, Kagame told me that Rwanda had had no troops in the Congo, as he had been telling everyone for eight months, and in which he wound up telling me that in fact he had initiated the whole campaign, and his troops had been there all along. The total reversal surprised me more than the information, and I was left to wonder why one of the shrewdest political and military strategists of our times was taking credit for the war at just the moment when he was being heaped with blame for war crimes.
Reviewing the tapes of our conversation, I realized that Kagame’s reasons were clear. He was not denying that many Rwandan Hutus had been killed in the Congo; he told me that when revenge was the motive, such killings should be punished. But he considered the génocidaires responsible for the deaths of those they traveled with. “These are not genuine refugees,” he said. “They’re simply fugitives, people running away from justice after killing people in Rwanda—after killing.” And they were still killing.
The brief period of calm in Rwanda that followed the mass return from the UN camps at the end of 1996 had quickly broken down, and since February the systematic killing of Tutsis had been steadily on the increase. Much of the northwest was in a state of low-level war. The eastern Congo, too, remained in turmoil, and sizable concentrations of Hutu fighters who had refused every chance for repatriation continued to operate across the area. Kagame was especially concerned about the tens of thousands of génocidaires who had fled to the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, and rebel-held areas of Angola.
“Even now, these fellows are crossing our borders, ex-FAR and militias, mixed with maybe some of their family members,” Kagame said. “They are armed with rocket-propelled grenades, with machine guns, they are killing people as they move, and this is nothing to the international community. What is a thing is that Tutsis were killing refugees. There’s something extremely wrong here. This is why I think there’s this terrible guilt on the part of some people, which they are trying to fight off by always painting a picture of Tutsis being on the wrong side and Hutus being victims. But there is no amount of intimidation or distortion that can defeat us on this. It will cause us problems, but we are not going to be defeated.” He sounded angrier than I had ever heard him. “There are a lot of them left,” he said of the génocidaires, “and we will have to keep dealing with that situation for as long as it lasts. We are not really tired of dealing with that at all—it’s they who will get tired, not we.”
A grim prospect, but Kagame was trying to explain why the war in the Congo had happened as it had happened—in order, he said, that Rwanda should not “be rubbed off the surface of the earth.” That was how he saw his choice, and it explained the startling coolness of his speech. But although his voice and his manner were as contained as ever, he was clearly indignant to find his troops accused of destroying what he regarded as an army bent on Rwanda’s annihilation. Kagame’s defiance and his sense of injury added up to an Ahab-like wrath. He didn’t just want the world to see things his way; he seemed to believe that the world owed him an apology for failing to accept his reasoning.
Ideally, he told me, an investigation would be the best way to clear up the story of massacres in the Congo. “But,” he said, “because of this background, which I have already described to you, because of this partisan involvement, because of these politically motivated allegations even at the high levels in the international community, you see here that we are dealing with judges who cannot be judged. And yet they are terribly wrong. This is the bad thing about the whole thing. I have lost faith. You see, the experience of Rwanda since 1994 has left me with no faith in these international organizations. Very little faith.
“In fact,” Kagame went on, “I think we should start accusing these people who actually supported the camps, spent a million dollars per day in these camps, gave support to these groups to rebuild themselves into a force, militarized refugees. When in the end these refugees are caught up in the fighting and they die, I think it has more to do with these people than Rwanda, than Congo, than the Alliance. Why shouldn’t we accuse them? This is the guilt they are trying to fight off. This is something they are trying to deflect.”
It was true that the victory of the pan-African alliance Kagame had put together in the Congo had constituted a defeat for the international community. The major powers and their humanitarian representatives had been pushed out of the way, and, he said, “they are angered, and the guilt is exposed by the defeat.” He said, “they have not determined the outcome, so again this is something they cannot stomach.” He said, “Kabila emerges, alliance emerges, something changes, Mobutu goes: things happen, the region is happy about what is happening, different people have had different ways of supporting the process. And they are left out, and everything takes them by surprise. They are extremely annoyed by that, and they can’t take it like that.”
As Kagame understood it, “The African and the Western worlds are so many worlds apart.” Yet he seemed to recognize that a defeat for the international community could not be translated into a victory for anybody. He had spent his life in central Africa, not fighting against what used to be called the “civilized world,” but fighting to join it. Yet he had concluded that that world was trying to use “the refugee issue” to destroy his progress. “That really is their purpose,” he said. “It’s not so much the human rights concerns, it’s more political. It’s ‘Let’s kill this development, this dangerous development of these Africans trying to do things their own way.’”
22
THE FIRST IN-FLIGHT movie on my second-to-last trip to Rwanda, in February of 1997, was A Time to Kill. It is set in Mississippi, in the atmosphere Faulkner celebrated as “miasmic.” A couple of worthless white-trash rednecks are out drinking and driving. They abduct a young black girl, rape her, torture her, and leave her corpse in a field. They get caught and thrown in jail. The girl’s father doesn’t trust the local judiciary to do adequate justice, so he waits for the men to be brought in chains to the courthouse, steps out of the shadows with a shotgun, and blows them away. He is arrested for first-degree murder and put on trial. His culpability is never in question, but a clever young white lawyer—risking his reputation, his marriage, his life and that of his children—appeals to the jury’s sentiment, and the girl’s father is set free. That was the movie. It was pitched as a tale of racial and social healing. Triumph for the protagonists, and catharsis for the audience, came with the acquittal of the vigilante killer, whose action was understood by a jury of his peers to have achieved a higher degree of justice than he could have expected from the law.
The second in-flight movie was Sleepers. It is set in New York, in the tough midtown neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Four kids play a prank that results in the accidental death of a passerby. They are sent to a reform school, where they are repeatedly gang-raped by the wardens. Then they are released. Years pass. One day, two of the original quartet encounter the warden who had been their chief tormentor in reform school, so they draw their handguns and blow him away. They are arrested. To the viewer, their culpability is never in question. But in court they deny everything; they say they were in church at the time of the murder. This alibi requires the cooperative testimony of a priest, who is also an alumnus of the terrible reform school. The priest is a man of great honesty. Before testifying, he swears on the Bible that he will tell the truth. Then he lies. The men are acquitted and released. It was another tale of the triumph of justice over the law; the priest’s lie was understood to have been an act of service to a higher truth.
Both movies had been quite popular in America—seen by many millions of citizens. Apparently, the questions they raised struck a chord with their audiences: What about you? Can you condemn these vigilante killers after such violations? Can you
grieve for the scum they killed? Might not you do the same? These are fine issues to ponder. Still, I was troubled by the premise the two movies shared: that the law and the courts were so incapable of fairly adjudicating the cases in question that it wasn’t worth bothering with them. Perhaps I was taking my in-flight entertainment too seriously, but I was thinking of Rwanda.
Six weeks earlier, in mid-December of 1996, shortly after the mass return from the border camps, Rwanda had finally begun holding genocide trials. This was a historic event: never before had anybody on earth been brought to court for the extraordinary crime of genocide. Yet the trials received sparse international attention. Even the government seemed reluctant to make much fanfare about them, since the courts were crude and inexperienced and had little prospect of meeting Western standards of due process. At one of the first trials, in the eastern province of Kibungo, a witness with machete scars across his scalp identified the defendant as his attacker. The defendant dismissed the charge as nonsense, saying that if he had struck a man such a blow he would have made sure that his victim did not live to talk about it. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. So it went. Defense counsel was rarely available, and trials rarely lasted more than a day. Most ended with sentences of death or life imprisonment, but there were some lighter sentences and there were acquittals, which was the only way to determine that the judiciary exercised any independence.
In late January of 1997, the highest-ranking génocidaire in Rwandan custody—Froduald Karamira, who had been Bonaventure Nyibizi’s friend in prison before becoming an extremist and giving Hutu Power its name—was brought to court in Kigali. Karamira had been arrested in Ethiopia; he was the only suspect Rwanda had succeeded in extraditing from abroad. For his trial, he appeared in a prisoner’s suit—pink shorts and a pink short-sleeved shirt—and many Rwandans later told me that seeing this once immensely powerful man so humbled had been cathartic in itself. The proceedings were broadcast from loudspeakers to a crowd outside the courthouse, and on the radio to a fixated national audience. The case was quite well prepared: tapes and transcripts of Karamira’s bloodthirsty propaganda speeches were brought in as evidence, and witnesses and survivors of his numerous crimes described how he had rallied the masses to kill and ordered the massacre of his next-door neighbors. When Karamira took the stand, he denounced his trial as a charade and the government as illegitimate, because Hutu Power was excluded from the ruling coalition, and he denied that Tutsis had been systematically exterminated in 1994. “I am accused of genocide,” he said, “but what does that mean?” He remained defiant even when he said, “If my death will bring reconciliation, if my death will make some people happy, then I’m not afraid to die.”
I HAD WANTED to be in Rwanda for Karamira’s trial, but it was over in three days, and I arrived two weeks later, just after he was sentenced to death. More trials were scheduled, of course, but none in Kigali, and I was advised against traveling outside the city. Around the same time that the trials had begun, bands of ex-FAR and interahamwe—many of them just returned from Zaire—had resumed their terror campaign. Tutsis were the primary victims, but Hutus who were known to have behaved humanely toward Tutsis in 1994, or who cooperated with the new government, were also targeted. The mood of tentative relief that had attended the breakup of the camps quickly ebbed, and Rwandans were beginning to wonder whether their country hadn’t been invaded after all.
In January, in the northwestern province of Ruhengeri, three Spanish aid workers and a Canadian priest were shot to death—the first killings of Westerners since the genocide. The government blamed Hutu insurgents for these murders, but no conclusive investigations were ever conducted. Then, in early February, three Rwandans and two international field workers from the UN Human Rights mission were massacred in an ambush staged by interahamwe in the southwestern province of Cyangugu. The UN team had been on its way to a meeting, organized by the government, to urge villagers to resist the pressure to collaborate with génocidaires. One of the dead Rwandans was a genocide survivor, and one of the internationals was a Cambodian survivor of Pol Pot’s killing fields. The Cambodian’s head had been completely removed from his body. After that, most of Rwanda was treated as a “no-go” zone by foreigners.
Rwandans, too, advised me against travel. Even when I wanted to go back to Taba—just a half hour’s drive south from Kigali along good roads—to see what had become of Laurencie Nyirabeza and the killer Jean Girumuhatse, I was told that nobody would hesitate to call me a fool if I got killed. The night before I flew into Kigali, a minibus taxi had been stopped by a tree placed across the main road twenty miles north of the city. The vehicle was quickly surrounded by armed men, who made the passengers get out and separate—Tutsis here, Hutus there—then opened fire on the Tutsis, killing many of them. At a bar in Kigali, I listened to a mixed group of Hutus and Tutsis discussing the incident. What seemed to disturb them most was that none of the Hutu minibus passengers, all of whom were left unharmed, had voluntarily come forward to identify themselves and report the attack.
Similar acts of terror continued, on an almost daily basis, throughout 1997 and the early months of 1998. In a good week, only one or two people might be killed, and in some weeks hundreds were killed. On at least half a dozen occasions, bands of more than a thousand well-coordinated Hutu Power fighters engaged the RPA in pitched battles for several days before retreating and melting back into the villages of the northwest, where they made their bases. As in the old UN border camps, the génocidaires lived indistinguishably intermingled with civilians, and thousands of unarmed Hutus were reported killed by RPA troops. The RPA was sensitive enough to these charges that it arrested hundreds of its own soldiers for committing atrocities against civilians, while Hutu Power’s policy was to slaughter civilians who failed to join them in committing atrocities.
That was the choice in Rwanda’s new-old war. In their wake the génocidaires left leaflets, warning that those who resisted them would be decapitated. Other leaflets told Tutsis, “You will all perish,” and, “Good-bye! Your days are numbered.” Hutus, for their part, were called upon, in the spirit of John Hanning Speke’s Hamitic hypothesis, to drive all Tutsis “back to Abyssinia,” and advised, “Whoever collaborates with the enemy, works for him, or gives him information, is also the enemy. We will systematically eliminate them.”
One day, I stopped by the Justice Ministry to see Gerald Gahima. “How’s justice?” I asked. He shook his head. For months, government ministers had been traveling around the country, from prison to prison, distributing copies of the special genocide law, and explaining its offer of sentence reductions for the vast majority of prisoners, if they wished to confess. But prisoners refused to come forward. “It’s deliberate sabotage,” Gahima said. “Their leaders have them brainwashed. They still wish to maintain that there was no genocide in this country, when the fact of the matter is the genocide is still going on.”
I wondered if the government regretted having the people home from the camps. “Never,” Gahima told me. “The international community would have kept feeding them until we were all dead. So now just some of us die. We cannot be happy. We can only fight to live in peace.” He smiled, a bit wearily, and said, “We have no exit strategy.”
AFTER ONLY A few days in Kigali, I experienced the sense of total exhaustion that on previous trips had taken weeks, sometimes months, to overwhelm me. I booked a seat on the next flight out, and spent my days on a friend’s porch, surrounded by bird-of-paradise flowers, listening to songbirds, watching the towering clouds over the valley collide and shred, and I escaped into a hundred-year-old novel about a dentist in San Francisco. The book was McTeague, by Frank Norris, and its final pages told of two men, once the brotherly best of friends, who meet and fight in the alkaline desolation of a lonely desert; one kills the other, but in their struggle, the dead man has handcuffed their wrists together.
I put the book down and went to have a beer with a Rwandan friend. I told him the story
I had just read, that ultimate image: one man dead, the other locked to the body—in the desert.
“But, Philip,” my friend said, “let’s not be idiots. Where there are handcuffs, there’s a key.”
I reminded him that there was no key to unlock the vast desert in which the surviving man was stranded. I used Gahima’s phrase, “No exit strategy.”
“Novels are nice,” my friend said. “They stop.” He waggled his fingers to make quotation marks in the air. “They say, ‘The End.’ Very nice. A marvelous invention. Here we have stories, but never ‘The End.’” He drank some beer. Then he said, “I’ve thought a lot lately about Jack the Ripper, because the Tutsis now say, ‘Jack is in.’ They don’t say it, but that’s the thought since this return from Zaire. They don’t tell you that they haven’t slept all night because there are assassins in the wall. But think of what happens in the conscience of a Tutsi who expects the arrival of his killer.”
We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families Page 33