It was not difficult for me to find a witness to the massacre. The groundskeeper at the church showed me to a small mud hut built on the slope beneath the road. This was where Patrice,6 a local handyman and a catechist at the church, lived. It was a typical hut for the region: a low structure built on a frame of bamboo sticks, with mud packed onto the sides to keep out the cold at night. Patrice, a deferential man wearing an untucked, stained shirt, told me to sit on a bench in the corner. The shack was barely big enough for both of us, but people attracted by the presence of a foreigner quickly gathered by the window to listen to our conversation. On the wall there was a faded picture of Jesus in a wooden frame with a saying in Swahili: “A drunken wife arouses anger. Her shame cannot be hidden.” Arranged on a crossbeam overhead were Patrice’s few belongings: a machete, a row of Chinese-made AA batteries held together by a rubber band that served as a power source for his transistor radio, and a broken storm lantern.
“There was a thick mist in town that morning,” he began. “There had not been a Mass on Sunday due to the commotion, so the priest rang the bell to call the village to Mass that Monday morning. It must have been around 6:30. We saw some soldiers on the way to Mass, but didn’t think anything of it.”7
I had been awakened just that morning by a similar Mass. A catechist had struck the old rim of a car tire before slow choral singing in Swahili began to the beating of drums. When I peered through the air ducts in the side of the church, I had seen several rows of women and men swaying gently and clapping their hands. It was the same air ducts, according to Patrice, through which they saw the Rwandan soldiers gathering outside. They had machine guns and small hatchets slung across their shoulders.
“The priest had just begun blessing the host,” Patrice remembered, “when they entered the church. The priest was alarmed, but didn’t interrupt the consecration, motioning discreetly with one hand to the sacristy behind him, at the back of the church. I was sitting at the front of the church and made a run for it with six others. We hid in the thick bushes by the back door before the soldiers blocked off the exit.”
At this point, the crowd outside Patrice’s window began groaning and sucking their teeth. They knew what came next.
Patrice spoke calmly, making sure he didn’t forget any details. “ The Tutsi tied up the people in the church, hands behind their backs, and then took the priest and the three nuns outside. I could hear the nuns screaming, screaming: ‘ Don’t kill our father—please don’t kill him. Take us instead!’ Father Stanislas, the priest, told them to calm down, that the Lord would provide. The soldiers separated them, taking the nuns to the convent next door and the priest to the parish, where they forced him to give them money and his radio. My friend the plumber was hiding in the ceiling and heard all of this. Then they told the priest to kneel down and pray. And shot him in the back of his head.”
The crowd outside the hut where we were sitting erupted into lamentations: “They killed them all!” “They killed our Father!” “He was such a good man!” “His poor father went crazy afterwards—he was all he had!” “Animals!” Patrice looked down at his hands and shook his head. The name of the priest, he told me, was Stanislas Wabulakombe. In their language, it meant “What God wants, he does.”
The gunshots at the parish house triggered the massacre in the church. The soldiers began by using their hatchets to bludgeon the worshippers to death—so as not to alert the village, some of the villagers I interviewed said. Others said it was to save bullets. When Patrice emerged from the bushes the next day, he found most of the victims with crushed skulls. The three nuns were lying in the convent with their underwear around their ankles; he suspected they had been raped. One of them was still breathing when he found her, but she died before they could get her to the local health center. In the parish, he found the priest dead, face down on the floor in his white robes. As he walked around, he heard the voice of the plumber from his hiding place in the ceiling: “ I’m up here! They shot me in my buttocks, but I’m still alive!”
Another group of soldiers had gone to the chief ’s residence. They were furious, the villagers said, that he had lied to them about the security situation and that they had been ambushed twice. They also thought that the Mai-Mai, who recruited along ethnic lines, were inherently linked to the customary chief. Chief Naluindi’s whole extended family had sought refuge in his house, thinking that they would be safe there. “ In our tradition, the mwami [chief ] is sacred,” the chorus outside Patrice’s house lamented. “You don’t kill the mwami during the war. Killing him is like killing all of us.”
At least fourteen people were in the chief ’s house when the soldiers arrived. The rebels killed all of them. Villagers who had run into the bushes came back the next morning and found the chief ’s pregnant wife eviscerated, her dead fetus on the ground next to her. The infants of the chief’s younger brother had been beaten to death against the brick walls of the house.
The way the victims were killed said as much as the number of dead; they displayed a macabre fascination with human anatomy. The survivors said the chief’s heart had been cut out and his wife’s genitals were gone. The soldiers had taken them. It wasn’t enough to kill their victims; they disfigured and played with the bodies. They disemboweled one woman by cutting her open between her anus and vagina, then propped up the dead body on all fours and left her with her buttocks facing upwards. Another corpse was given two slits on either side of his belly, where his hands were inserted. “Anavaa koti—they made him look like he was wearing a suit,” the villagers told me. Another man had his mouth slit open to his ears, was put in a chair and had a cigarette dangling from his lips when he was found. The killers wanted to show the villagers that this would be the consequence of any resistance. There were no limits to their revenge—they would kill the priests, rape the nuns, rip babies from their mothers’ wombs, and twist the corpses into origami figures.
“We had seen people killed before,” Patrice told me. “But this was worse than killing. It was like they killed them, and then killed them again. And again.”
Around twenty miles further north on the road to Bukavu lay the town of Kilungutwe. It was situated on the banks of one of the many tributaries that flow into the Congo River far to the west and was known as the gateway to the jungle from the highlands to the northeast. On the day of Nyakiliba’s ambush in Kasika, several dozen traders from Bukavu arrived at Kilungutwe for the large market that was held there every Monday. Michel,8 a thirty-nine-year-old trader from Bukavu, was on a truck that had dropped them off a few miles before the market. There had been an accident, he was told by the Congolese soldiers there. No trucks were allowed down the road. Anxious to get to the market to sell the salt, sugar, soap, and clothes he had brought, Michel took off on foot down the road, along with around sixty other traders.
When they arrived in Kilungutwe, they noticed something strange. The streets were almost deserted, and a large number of Rwandan soldiers were milling about. A bunch of Congolese soldiers passing in a truck waved at them furtively to go back in the direction they had come from, but they didn’t understand. “We thought it had just been an accident,” Michel remembered.9 As they passed over a large bridge made out of tree trunks, a group of four Tutsi soldiers hissed at them.
“Hey! You! Put down those bags!” The soldiers were tall and lanky and had long knives in their belts. They separated the locals from the Bukavu traders. To the group of around ten locals they said, “Ah! So it is your children who have been killing us!” The locals protested that they didn’t know what they were talking about, but the soldiers began beating them anyway.
It was only later that Michel found out that the rebels who had been ambushed in Kasika had radioed ahead and told their advance party to stop wherever they were and to “clean up.” The soldiers herded the traders and the locals into a small house below the road, a sturdy cement structure about twenty feet by forty feet, with blue wooden doors and windows and a corrugated iron roo
f. The sixty people stood packed like sardines in the small house. The sun went down, leaving the room in darkness except for some cracks in the window, through which they could see a fire that the soldiers had lit outside. It was hot and humid, and the air was filled with the sound of muttering and breathing. Several people prayed out loud. A baby’s cry turned into a persistent wail, until finally her mother began sobbing and said that her baby was about to suffocate.
“We called the soldiers outside and asked them to have pity on the newborn,” Michel told me.
Without asking any questions and as if on cue, the soldiers let the woman out. Suddenly, the prisoners heard screams coming from outside, first from both mother and child, then just from the child, then silence. Michel was not near a window, but someone who was whispered, his voice wavering. “ Knives. They are using knives,” he said. “ They grabbed her hands and feet and slit her throat,” another said. All of a sudden, the room was full of people crying and praying to God in French, Swahili, and whatever other language came to their lips.
Michel was in the back of the room, where he was crushed against a wall as the others tried to get as far as possible from the door, through which the soldiers came and grabbed people one by one. “ This is for our brothers that you killed,” they heard the soldiers tell their victims outside. The screams were silenced as the throats were slit and the next person was dragged out of the house. It took what seemed to Michel to be an eternity to empty the room. As the people thinned out, he was able to get a better look at his surroundings in the half-light. He saw that one of the thin ceiling boards was loose. He hastily climbed up and bumped into several other people lying in the small space between the ceiling and the roof. It was even hotter and danker here, and he could feel the bodies of his neighbors trembling with fear. He was close to fainting and felt like vomiting.
After a while, the screams faded below them and they could hear soldiers shuffling around and the sound of bodies being moved outside. Someone was counting, then a voice in Kinyarwanda said:
“How many did we put in the house? Did you count?”
“Yes, there were at least sixty.”
“Are you sure? Where did the rest of them go?”
“I’ll check again.”
Feet began to scrape the floor below them and then someone poked the ceiling boards.
“We! You up there! How many are there?” Michel’s neighbors’ trembling increased until he was afraid they would begin to rattle the ceiling boards. “I can hear you up there! How many are you?”
After poking for a while, the soldier went outside. They hear the men muttering with each other, and then several came back into the room. Suddenly, an iron spear tip burst through a ceiling board not far from where Michel was lying. The boards were made out of flimsy plywood and the spear pierced it easily. The next jab hit Michel’s neighbor in the leg, who cried out.
“Come down now, or we will get our guns! Just tell us how many you are, and then come down!”
Several more spear jabs came through the roof. Three of Michel’s fellow prisoners climbed down from the hideout. Michel turned to a woman who was lying next to him.
“We must pray now,” he told her. “ We are going to die.” She started crying.
I met Michel many years later in Bukavu through a minister in his church. Michel—he wanted me to use a fake name to protect his identity—fidgeted while he sat in my living room in Bukavu and spoke in bursts. When I asked him how he had survived, he said I would not believe him and was then silent for several minutes, twisting his boney hands and looking at the ceiling.
“When I looked to my side, I saw a woman in white lying next to me,” he finally said. “ I hadn’t seen her before, and I thought it was strange that she was wearing all white. I turned to the woman lying on my other side, who was sobbing, and asked her, ‘Do you see her? The woman in white?’ It was very strange to see a woman dressed all in white. It was very dusty then; it was the dry season. White clothes were maybe things you wear to church or to a baptism. And she seemed—she seemed to be glowing. My neighbor shook her head and continued sobbing. Then the woman in white said—her voice didn’t seem to be coming from her mouth, but from inside my head—she said, ‘Stand up! Stand up now!’ And I gathered my strength and just stood up. The roof was very low—you couldn’t even kneel there—but as I stood up, a sheet of roofing came undone from its bolts, and I could see the night sky. There was no moon that night, I remember. I stood up and slid down the roof. ‘Someone’s getting away!’ one of the soldiers cried out, and they opened fire. I could hear the bullets whistling by me and going into the ceiling where I had been lying with the others. But I wasn’t hurt. I jumped down from the roof and began running into the bush that surrounded the house. My legs were moving on their own.” Michel looked at me. “That angel saved me. God saved me.”
He told me that he ran through the palm trees and the cassava fields that surrounded the village as shots rang out behind him. He kept on running until he found the hut of a relative of his on a hill several miles away. Together, they watched the village burn in the valley below them.
The next morning, they watched the columns of soldiers departing toward Bukavu. When they were gone, Michel and his relatives went down into town, where ashes and smoke still filled the air. They found a mound of bodies smoldering next to the house where he had been held prisoner. The corpses had been doused in gasoline and set on fire. They had been reduced to a tarry mess of charred skin, bones, glasses, and belt buckles. They found dozens of other bodies strewn across town, in houses, on the street, and in ditches beside the road. In some cases, the corpses had been stuffed down pit latrines. The found the charred remains of one body in an oil drum used to brew palm oil.
Over the next several days, the survivors buried hundreds of bodies. The better known among them—the chief, the priest, the nuns, an evangelical minister, a local administrator—were given their own grave. Others were dumped in anonymous mass graves by the roadside, where the soil was soft and deep. Still others were left to decompose in the latrines, water tanks, and septic pits where their killers had thrown them. Neighbors buried their neighbors, mothers and fathers buried their children, and ministers buried their church members. They were in a rush; they didn’t know when the rebels would be back through town. They had to bury their dead and then leave. People I spoke with said they had counted 704 people they had buried themselves; a United Nations investigation conducted years later concluded that there had been over 1,000 victims.10
Mass violence does not just affect the families of the dead. It tears at the fabric of society and lodges in the minds of the witnesses and perpetrators alike. A decade after the violence, it seemed that the villagers were still living in its aftershocks. They had all fled after the massacre; no one wanted to stay in town. They fled deep into the jungles, where they crossed the strong currents of the Luindi River. It was only on the other side that they felt safe. They lived in clearings, where they built grass huts. There was no place to start farming, and no one had the energy to cut down the brush and trees to start planting cassava and beans, so they ate what they could find: wild yams, caterpillars, forest mushrooms, and even monkeys when they could catch them. Exposed to the cold at night and deprived of adequate nutrition, many newborns and old people died. A scabies infestation ravaged their makeshift camps, and they couldn’t even find the most rudimentary medicine for their various afflictions. They would sometimes visit their homes along the main road, but they would do so like burglars, at night and quickly, for fear of detection.
Some of them had radios, and they gave the nickname “Kosovo” to their hometown of Kasika after they heard of the war and massacres in the Balkans. The main difference, of course, was that the press was giving the small Balkan region, barely a sixth the size of South Kivu Province, nonstop coverage, while no foreign journalist visited Kasika for a decade.
Social life was deeply affected as well. The death of their traditional ch
ief, along with the only priest, left the community without any leaders. “They killed our father and our mother,” one villager told me. The church closed down, and the chief’s family was embroiled in a succession battle that the RCD finally put an end to by imposing someone of their choice, much to the chagrin of many community members. Again and again, the villagers told me how the chief’s death had affected them much more than anything else. The well-being of the community was vested in the chief; he presided over harvest ceremonies, gave out land, and blessed weddings. Who would call for salongo, the weekly communal labor, to be performed? Who would reconcile feuding families and solve land conflicts?
The community felt orphaned in other ways too. After the massacre, not a single national politician came to visit them and hear their grievances. While Kasika featured in thousands of speeches that lambasted Rwanda and the RCD, no investigation was ever launched, and no compensation was ever offered for any of the victims. The lack of justice had allowed the villagers to stew in their resentment and had made their anger fester into more hatred.
“I hate the Tutsi,” Patrice told me. “If I see a Tutsi face, I feel fear.”
I ask them if they could ever forgive the soldiers for what they did.
“Forgive whom? We don’t even know who did it,” someone outside Patrice’s house said.
In Kilungutwe, I met with some local elders at an open-air bar on the main street, not far from where Michel had hidden on the night of the massacre. The meeting turned into a popular assembly, as people heard what we were talking about and gathered around.
“We are still living through the massacre,” one elder who had lost his wife and two children told me. “There has been no justice, not even a sign on a tree, or a monument in the honor of those who died that day.”11
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters Page 31