I thought about it, and what came to mind was the letter that Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, the former Adventist church president of Kibuye, gave me in Laredo, Texas—the letter he had received on April 15, 1994, from the seven Tutsi pastors who were among the refugees at Mugonero hospital telling him they would be killed on the morrow, and saying, “your intervention will be highly appreciated, the same way as the Jews were saved by Esther.”
Esther was the wife of Ahasuerus, a Persian emperor, whose dominion stretched from India to Ethiopia, two and a half thousand years before the massacre at Mugonero. The essence of the story is well known to readers of the Bible: how Esther marries Ahasuerus without telling him that she is an orphaned Jew, raised by her uncle, Mordechai; how Ahasuerus’s chief deputy, Haman, despises Mordechai because the Jew refuses to bow down before him; how Haman persuades Ahasuerus to issue a decree calling on his subjects throughout his realm “to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate all Jews, young and old, women and children, in one day … and to plunder their goods”; how Esther reveals her identity to her husband, and pleads with him to spare her people; and how the wicked Haman is ultimately hanged on the very gallows he had built for Mordechai. But there is a final, less widely remembered chapter to this heartening story of genocide averted: when Ahasuerus rescinds his earlier order of extermination, Esther has him add a clause allowing Jews “to gather and defend their lives, to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, with their children and women, and to plunder their goods.” In all, the Bible reports, Jews and their allies slew some seventy-five thousand eight hundred “enemies” before peace was restored to the empire with a day of “feasting and gladness.”
The Tutsi pastors at Mugonero would have known their Scripture. Did they, as they waited to be slaughtered, yearn not only to be spared but also to see the enemies of Rwanda’s peace liquidated? The hopes for redemption that stories like Esther’s have inspired among persecuted peoples invariably carry a faith in the restorative power of avenging justice. “Pharaoh’s army got drownded—oh, Mary, don’t you weep,” recalled the old American slave song, just as Homer sang of the sack of Troy and Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors at Ithaca.
By the late twentieth century, of course, we liked to imagine that there were better ways to make righteousness prevail against the wicked in what used to be called “international society” and today goes by the more inclusive term “humanity.” My friend felt that the rest of humanity had betrayed Rwanda in 1994, but he had not lost his faith in the idea of humanity.
“I think of your country,” he told me. “You say all men are created equal. It’s not true and you know it. It’s just the only acceptable political truth. Even here in this tiny country with one language, we aren’t one people, but we must pretend until we become one. That’s a big problem. I know so many people who lost everyone. A young man will come to me for advice. He’ll say, ‘I saw one who did it. I was sixteen then, but I’m twenty now. I have a gun. Will you turn me in if I settle the matter?’ I’ll have to say, ‘I, too, lost much family, but I didn’t know them. I was in exile—in Zaire, in Burundi. Those I lost—it’s a little abstract—I didn’t know them, there wasn’t the love.’ So if this soldier asks my advice, what do I tell him? It’s a terrible business. I’ll take my time. I’ll take him for a walk. I’ll caress him to calm him. I’ll try to find his superior officer and brief him, and say, ‘Watch this little one.’ But seriously, eh? This isn’t going away in one year or two years or five years or ten years—this horror that we saw. It’s intrinsic.”
I didn’t say anything, and after a while my friend said, “We better find the keys to those handcuffs.”
IN MID-DECEMBER OF 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright delivered a speech to the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa in which she said, “We, the international community, should have been more active in the early stages of the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994, and called them what they were—genocide.” Albright, who would be making a brief visit to Rwanda during her tour of Africa, also condemned the use of humanitarian aid “to sustain armed camps or to support genocidal killers.” Simple words—but politicians tend to dislike having to say such things; that same month, in New York, I heard a senior emissary of the UNHCR sum up the experience of the Hutu Power controlled camps in Zaire with the formulation, “Yes, mistakes were made, but we are not responsible.” Albright’s “apology,” as it came to be known, marked a significant break with the habits of shame and defensiveness that often conspired to deny the basic facts of the Rwandan genocide their rightful place in international memory.
Three months later, President Clinton followed Albright to Africa, and on March 25, 1998, he became the first Western head of state to visit Rwanda since the genocide. His stop there was brief—he never left the airport—but it was highly charged. After listening for several hours to the stories of genocide survivors, Clinton forcefully reiterated Albright’s apologies for refusing to intervene during the slaughter, and for supporting the killers in the camps. “During the ninety days that began on April 6, 1994, Rwanda experienced the most intensive slaughter in this blood-filled century,” Clinton said, adding, “It is important that the world know that these killings were not spontaneous or accidental … they were most certainly not the result of ancient tribal struggles … . These events grew from a policy aimed at the systematic destruction of a people.” And this mattered not only to Rwanda but also to the world, he explained, because “each bloodletting hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable.”
Clinton’s regrets about the past were more convincing than his assurances for the future. When he said, “Never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence” of genocide, there was no reason to believe that the world was a safer place than it had been in April of 1994. If Rwanda’s experience could be said to carry any lessons for the world, it was that endangered peoples who depend on the international community for physical protection stand defenseless. On the morning of Albright’s visit to Rwanda in December, Hutu Power terrorists, shouting “Kill the cockroaches,” had hacked, bludgeoned, and shot to death more than three hundred Tutsis at an encampment in the northwest, and in the days before Clinton’s arrival in Kigali, as many as fifty Tutsis were killed in similar massacres. Against such a backdrop, Clinton’s pledge to “work as partners with Rwanda to end this violence” sounded deliberately vague.
Still, in Rwanda, where expectations of the great powers had been bitterly diminished to very nearly zero, Clinton’s account of the political organization of the genocide and his praise for the government’s “efforts to create a single nation in which all citizens can live freely and securely” were understood as the sharpest international rebuke yet to the ongoing bid by the génocidaires to equate ethnicity with politics and to prove that equation by murder. It was a measure of Rwanda’s sense of isolation that his remarks were heralded as extraordinary. After all, Clinton was simply proclaiming the obvious. But he had been under no political pressure to pay attention to Rwanda; he might more easily have continued to ignore the place and said nothing. Instead, having chosen to sit out the genocide, he was making what was—even at so late a date—a dramatic intervention in the war about the genocide. As the voice of the greatest power on earth, he had come to Kigali to set the record straight.
“It was very startling to us,” a Hutu friend told me over the phone from Kigali. “Here was a politician who had nothing at stake, and who told the truth at his own expense.” And a Tutsi I called told me, “What he said to us is that we are not just forgotten savages. Maybe you have to live somewhere far away like the White House to see Rwanda like that. Life here remains terrible. But your Mr. Clinton made us feel less alone.” He laughed. “It should be surprising that somebody who didn’t really seem to mind seeing your people get killed can make you feel like that. But it’s
hard to surprise a Rwandan anymore.”
I CANNOT COUNT the times, since I first began visiting Rwanda three years ago, that I’ve been asked, “Is there any hope for that place?” In response, I like to quote the hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina. When he told me that the genocide had left him “disappointed,” Paul added, “With my countrymen—Rwandans—you never know what they will become tomorrow.” Although he didn’t mean it that way, this struck me as one of the most optimistic things a Rwandan could say after the genocide, not unlike General Kagame’s claim that people “can be made bad, and they can be taught to be good.”
But hope is a force more easy to name and declare one’s allegiance to than to enact. So I’ll leave you to decide if there is hope for Rwanda with one more story. On April 30, 1997—almost a year ago as I write—Rwandan television showed footage of a man who confessed to having been among a party of génocidaires who had killed seventeen schoolgirls and a sixty-two-year-old Belgian nun at a boarding school in Gisenyi two nights earlier. It was the second such attack on a school in a month; the first time, sixteen students were killed and twenty injured in Kibuye.
The prisoner on television explained that the massacre was part of a Hutu Power “liberation” campaign. His band of a hundred fifty militants was composed largely of ex-FAR and interahamwe. During their attack on the school in Gisenyi, as in the earlier attack on the school in Kibuye, the students, teenage girls who had been roused from their sleep, were ordered to separate themselves—Hutus from Tutsis. But the students had refused. At both schools, the girls said they were simply Rwandans, so they were beaten and shot indiscriminately.
Rwandans have no need—no room in their corpse-crowded imaginations—for more martyrs. None of us does. But mightn’t we all take some courage from the example of those brave Hutu girls who could have chosen to live, but chose instead to call themselves Rwandans?
May 1995—April 1998
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted above all to the hundreds of Rwandans in all walks of private and public life who generously entrusted me with their stories.
To supplement my own reporting, I consulted a great variety of writings on Rwanda, published and unpublished. I wish to acknowledge the authors of some of the standard works, representing diverse perspectives, which helped to inform me: Colette Braeckmann, Jean-Pierre Chrétien, Alain Destexhe, Alison des Forges, André Guichaoua, René Lemarchand, Louis de Lacger, Catherine Newbury, Rakiya Omaar, Gérard Prunier, and Filip Reyntjens. I’m also grateful for the United Nations IRIN electronic news bulletins.
My reporting from Rwanda first appeared in The New Yorker, and the support of its editors has been essential in writing this book. I am especially grateful to Tina Brown for her unflagging commitment to this distant and difficult story, to Bill Buford, who first sent me to Rwanda, and to my superb editor, Jeffrey Frank, whose advice, friendship, and sanity have buoyed me through my work. Jennifer Bluestein, Jessica Green, and Valerie Steiker helped with research and as anchors during my long absences from home; Henry Finder, William Finnegan, and David Remnick gave good counsel; John Dorfman, Ted Katauskas, and Liesl Schillinger in the fact-checking department, along with Eleanor Gould and an army of back-up readers, saved me from many errors and infelicities.
Many thanks to the editors of The New York Review of Books, Transition, DoubleTake, The New York Times Magazine and its Op-Ed Page, for publishing pieces of my work from central Africa. And special thanks to Seth Lipsky, at The Forward, who first put me to work as a reporter.
Many thanks to Elisabeth Sifton, my editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her intelligence, humor, and rigor—always invigorating—make it an honor to work with her.
Many thanks for the kindness and guidance of Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency, whose commitment has been a boon to my writing life. And thanks also to Chris Calhoun for his dedication and friendship at the outset.
Many thanks to the Corporation of Yaddo, where part of this book was written; to the echoing green foundation and The United States Institute for Peace, for essential financial support; and to The World Policy Institute for institutional support.
Many thanks for the generous hospitality in Kigali of Richard Danziger, Aline Ndenzako and their daughter Daisy, and of Peter Whaley, Kate Crawford and their daughter Susan. On the road in Rwanda and Zaire, Alison Campbell, Thierry Cruvelier, and Annick van Lookeren Campagne were great company. At home, in New York, Vijay Balakrishnan provided a crucial pillar of friendship and a sharp ear for work in progress. I am especially fortunate to have wise parents, Jacqueline and Victor Gourevitch, and a true brother, Marc, who are my most demanding and rewarding readers, great companions, and a constant stimulus. I also thank my grandmother, Anna Moisievna Gourevitch; my memory of the stories she told me presides over this book. Finally, Elizabeth Rubin, by her example, her intelligence and her pluck, her wit and her warmth, has inspired and sustained me throughout this work. For her company, from near and from far, I am truly grateful.
Notes
1 Because Rwanda and Burundi were administered as a joint colonial territory, Ruanda-Urundi; because their languages are remarkably similar; because both are populated, in equal proportions, by Hutus and Tutsis; and because their ordeals as postcolonial states have been defined by violence between those groups, they are often considered to be the two halves of a single political and historical experience or “problem.” In fact, although events in each country invariably influence events in the other, Rwanda and Burundi have existed since precolonial times as entirely distinct, self-contained nations. The differences in their histories are often more telling than the similarities, and comparison tends to lead to confusion unless each country is first considered on its own terms.
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