by Otto Penzler
In the 1930s, the Belgians, deciding to limit administrative posts and higher education to the Tutsi, needed to decide exactly who was in Rwanda. The most efficient procedure was simply to register everyone and require them to carry cards identifying them as one or the other. Eighty-four percent of the population declared themselves Hutu and 15 percent Tutsi. Considering the degree of intermarriage in Rwandan history, this accounting was hardly scientific. What’s more, Rwandans sometimes switched ethnic identities, the wealthy relabeling themselves as Tutsis and the poor as Hutus.
“Identity became based on what you could get away with,” said Alison Des Forges, a senior adviser to the African Division of Human Rights Watch who has studied Rwanda for thirty years. “Half of the people are not clearly distinguishable. There was significant intermarriage. Women who fit the Tutsi stereotype—taller, lighter, with more Caucasian-like features—became desirable. But it didn’t necessarily mean that the women were one or the other.”
With desire comes its emotional alter ego, resentment. A revolution in 1959 brought the majority Hutus to power. As tensions increased around 1990, politicians began disseminating propaganda denouncing Tutsi females as temptresses, whores, and sexual deviants. Before the 1994 genocide began, Hutu newspapers ran cartoon after cartoon depicting Tutsi women as lascivious seducers.
Unlike the Nazis, who were fueled by myths of Aryan superiority, the Hutus were driven by an accumulated rage over their lower status and by resentment of supposed Tutsi beauty and arrogance. “The propaganda made Tutsi women powerful, desirable—and therefore something to be destroyed,” Rhonda Copelon told me. “When you make the women the threat, you enhance the idea that violence against them is permitted.”
This pernicious idea, of course, came to full fruition during the genocide. The collective belief of Hutu women that Tutsi women were shamelessly trying to steal their husbands granted Hutu men permission to rape their supposed competitors out of existence. Seen through this warped lens, the men who raped were engaged not only in an act of sexual transgression but also in a purifying ritual. “Once women are defiled as a group, anything one does to them is done in some kind of higher purpose,” Robert Jay Lifton said. “It become a profound, shared motivation of eliminating evil. Tutsis must be killed down to the last person in order to bring about utopia. They are seen, in a sense, as already dead.”
This explanation conformed with my sense of Pauline’s view of the Tutsis; like many of her countrymen, she seemed able to view individual Tutsis as abstractions. But in my conversations with Pauline’s mother, things became even more complicated. After Theresa told me about the Tutsi boy she had hidden, she paused, looked at me intently, and told me, matter-of-factly, that Pauline’s great-grandfather was a Tutsi. The great-grandfather had been redesignated a Hutu, Theresa explained, because he became poor. Stunned, and knowing that in Rwanda kinship is defined patrilineally—through the blood of fathers—I asked Theresa if that didn’t mean that Pauline was a Tutsi. “Yes, of course,” she said eagerly. And would Pauline have known that she came from Tutsi lineage? Theresa pursed her lips and gave a firm, affirmative nod.
The young man Theresa hid was not difficult to find. His name is Dutera Agide, 36, a jobless handyman in Ndora. He told me that he is Pauline’s second cousin, and that he is a Tutsi. He said he had spent one week hiding in Theresa’s house, listening to the slaughter going on outside. Then he said something even more surprising. At one point, he said, he was hidden in Pauline’s house. “I saw Pauline twice a week during the genocide,” Dutera told me. “One day she came home, and she said: ‘The war is not ending. I’m starting to get afraid. I don’t know what will happen.’ Then she came back again with her husband, loaded things from the house into a car, and left. She looked scared.”
After my conversation with Dutera, I went back to Theresa’s home one more time. Her exuberance had all but gone. She seemed to have settled into the truth, or a form of it. “People killed people because of fear to be also killed by the perpetrators of the genocide,” she said. “My daughter, who was also a minister in the government, could have participated in the killing not because she wanted to kill but because of fear.” Theresa then used the Kinyarwanda expression Mpemuke ndamuke: “to be dishonest in order to escape death.”
I spoke again with Pauline’s sister, Vineranda. “In 1959, when the Tutsi regime changed, our family changed with the situation,” Vineranda explained. “Because she was a Tutsi, Pauline was afraid that maybe the government would find out. And she was among many men in the government. And she had money and a position. She didn’t want to lose that.”
Robert Jay Lifton was intrigued by the revelation that Pauline was of Tutsi descent. “Part of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s fierceness had to do with eliminating the Tutsi in her,” he hypothesized. “She was undergoing an individual struggle to destroy that defiled element in herself.”
Pauline’s husband, Maurice Ntahobari, denied irritably that there were Tutsi roots in either his or Pauline’s family. After being asked repeatedly about Pauline’s and Shalom’s actions during the genocide, he sighed and said: “Try to understand, try to be in my shoes. This is about my wife and my son.”
When I spoke again with Pauline’s attorney, Nicole Bergevin, in July, and told her what Pauline’s mother had told me about Pauline being of Tutsi descent, Bergevin said she knew. (In an odd reversal, she later denied that Pauline was Tutsi.) Bergevin’s demeanor had changed since we had last spoken. This time around, she sounded defeated. Though she still insisted that Pauline knew nothing of the mass raping or murdering, she said, “I’m sure she’s going to be found guilty.” Then she paused and said with resignation, “When you do murder trials, you realize that we are all susceptible, and you wouldn’t even dream that you would ever commit this act.” There was a short silence. “But you come to understand that everyone is. It could happen to me, it could happen to my daughter. It could happen to you.”
The crimes Pauline Nyiramasuhuko are accused of are monstrous. Her capacity for pity and compassion, and her professional duty to shield the powerless, deserted her, or collapsed under the irresistible urge for power. But in seeking a reasonable explanation for Pauline’s barbarity, I remembered something that Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch told me.
“This behavior lies just under the surface of any of us,” Des Forges said. “The simplified accounts of genocide allow distance between us and the perpetrators of genocide. They are so evil we couldn’t ever see ourselves doing the same thing. But if you consider the terrible pressure under which people were operating, then you automatically reassert their humanity—and that becomes alarming. You are forced to look at these situations and say, ‘What would I have done?’ Sometimes the answer is not encouraging.”
Pauline did possess humanity, but it was in short supply, and she reserved it for her only son, Shalom, whom she had helped turn into a rapist and a killer. In one of her last moments as an engineer of the genocide, however, she returned to her role as woman and mother.
It was in July 1994, right when the Hutu army was collapsing.
Butare had descended into mayhem, and Pauline’s side had lost. One of Pauline’s neighbors, Lela, spotted the minister in the streets. “I saw Pauline and Shalom at a roadblock,” she said. “Pauline was wearing military fatigues, and she was still trying to separate Tutsis and Hutus, but the confusion was massive. There were people running everywhere. The Rwandan Patriotic Front was coming.” A short time later, Lela saw Pauline again. This time she was standing alone outside her home, looking worried.
“I was shocked,” Lela said. “She was wearing camouflage. She was standing upright in her uniform like a soldier, trying to see what was happening up and down the road. She just looked furious. She was looking everywhere for Shalom. He was her pet. She loved Shalom so much.”
How odd and in some ways appropriate that the reporting of this profoundly disturbing story about Rwanda began on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border,
and not with me but with my wife. Ten days after September 11, I was on a plane to Islamabad and beyond, and my wife, Kimberlee Acquaro, was on her way to Kigali on a Pew Fellowship for International Journalism. We spoke nightly by satellite phone, relating the horrors before us, the ones before me unfolding and the ones before Kimberlee surviving as living memories. I was exhausted. I had been on one intensive assignment after another for nearly eighteen months, and when I returned from South Asia I almost immediately left on still another story. I was out of gas.
But Kimberlee, a photographer as well as a writer, insisted we return to Rwanda together, to make an attempt to force an Afghanistan-centered readership to pay attention to a critical, as-yet-untold story that continues to reflect the worst of us. The Rwandan genocide, all things considered, may have been human history’s most awful moment. And the woman at the heart of this particular angle, a woman mandated to care after the lives of women and children, who helped orchestrate and personally carry out a campaign of unprecedented sexual torture and mass murder, in some ways reflects the demon sleeping in us all.
I entered the reporting reluctantly. But once in Rwanda, Kimberlee and I realized that this story was emblematic of a form of warfare and human behavior that has not been addressed honestly. One million dead in ten weeks, not in a hail of gunfire and not in rooms of gas, but hacked to pieces and sexually mutilated at the hands of neighbors, friends, priests, and relatives. I became obsessed, and remain so, by the angle that in this one 8,000-word article I could not make the room to fully address: What is the source of bloodlust? Rwanda was an orgiastic frenzy of almost joyful slaughter. What in us—in me and you—permits us to slough off what we know to be true, and to allow us to club to death a best friend or skewer a baby niece?
The first drafts of this story were too upsetting to read. My editor told me that he could hardly get through them. As difficult as the details are to digest, please do know that the most difficult job in the writing of this story was to cull the imagery enough to allow the typical brunch-time reader of The New York Times Magazine to turn the page.
But this story, more than any I have written, became a Pandora’s box. It is about the relationship between the West and Africa, between white and black, between man and woman, and between a reporter and his own conscience. It took me nearly six months to accumulate the will to move on to another story. But the questions that the Minister of Rape raised (there are no answers) echo loudly and every day.
CONTRIBUTORS
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a newspaper editor/publisher, ROBERT SAM ANSON was educated at the University of Notre Dame. He began working for Time while still a college student and served as correspondent in the Chicago, Los Angeles, Saigon, and New York bureaus. Taken captive by North Vietnamese/Khmer Rouge forces while on assignment in Cambodia in August 1970, he was released after several weeks.
He served as chief anchorman/executive producer for special events at WNET/13 and was a senior writer for New Times magazine, a special correspondent for Life, a contributing editor for Esquire, and editor in chief of Los Angeles Magazine. At present a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author of six books and has written for, among others, The New York Times, New York, the London Sunday Times, U.S. News & World Report, and the Los Angeles Times.
Regarded as an investigative specialist, he covered Bosnia, organized crime, race riots, national politics, the New Left, the civil rights movement, and the sixties. He thinks of himself as the Susan Lucci of the National Magazine Awards.
MARIE BRENNER is writer at large of Vanity Fair and the author of five books, including the best-selling Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women (Crown 2001) and House of Dreams: The Bingham Family of Louisville (1988).
“The Man Who Knew Too Much,” her investigation of the life of Big Tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, inspired the Michael Mann movie, The Insider, starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, which was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. She is the winner of three Front Page Awards and her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, New York, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. Her reporting on the Enron case was used as the basis for questioning during the Senate hearings on the matter.
RENE CHUN is a New York-based writer who has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, Esquire, GQ, and New York. He is currently working on a book about the former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer, which is based on an article of his that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.
GARY COHEN lives in Washington, D.C., and writes for The Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair magazines.
DEVIN FRIEDMAN is a senior writer at GQ magazine. He has also been on staff at Men’s Journal and Esquire. He would appreciate your not making any men’s magazine jokes. He’s written for Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, among others, and he was nominated for a National Magazine Award and was a finalist for the Livingston Award. He was raised by a criminal defense attorney and used to work for the public defender’s office; it’s not surprising that he often has somewhat more compassion for criminals than normal people do.
JOSHUA HAMMER has been Newsweek’s Jerusalem bureau chief since January 2001. Before that, he was the magazine’s bureau chief in Nairobi, Buenos Aires, and Berlin. He is the author of Chosen by God: A Brothers Journey, a finalist for the 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the forthcoming A Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place.
SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH has been writing crime stories for Texas Monthly for fifteen years. He has been nominated for the National Magazine Award four times and several of his articles have been optioned by film producers. He is now working on a nonfiction book for HarperCollins on the mysterious murders of seven women in Austin, Texas, in the late nineteenth century.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER, the author of the international bestseller The Perfect Storm and Fire, has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS-Novartis Prize for his journalism. He lives in New York.
TOM JUNOD is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award. He is a writer at large for Esquire, and lives in Marietta, Georgia.
JESSE KATZ is a senior writer for The Los Angeles Magazine. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Texas Monthly. He received a 2002 gold medal in reporting from the national City and Regional Magazine Association for his investigation into the murder of former Los Angeles police chief Bernard Parks’s granddaughter. As a Los Angeles Times reporter from 1985 to 2000, he was a member of the Metro staff that twice won Pulitzer Prizes in the spot news category, for the 1992 LA riots and for the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
JAY KIRK has written for Harpers Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, the Chicago Reader, Nerve.com, and other publications. This story was nominated for a National Magazine Award.
ROBERT KURSON is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Harvard Law School. He is a senior editor at Chicago magazine, a frequent contributor to Esquire, and has written for Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications.
PETER LANDESMAN is a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. His nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. His first novel, The Raven, was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters prize for best first fiction in 1996. He lives in Los Angeles and New York with his wife, photographer and journalist Kimberlee Acquaro.
DOUG MOST is a senior editor at Boston Magazine and a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Sports Illustrated and The New York Times Magazine. He’s had pieces chosen to appear in Best American Sports Writing and the first edition of Best American Crime Writing. He’s the author of Always in Our Hearts: Amy Grossberg, Brian Peterson, and the Baby They Didn’t Want
Award-winning journalist MAXIMILLIAN POTTER has been on staff at GQ since 2000, covering sports, business, politics, and crime. He’s written for Outside, Premiere, Details, and Philadelphia Magazine. He lives with his wife and two sons in Pennsylvania.<
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PETER RICHMOND is a staff writer for GQ magazine, a commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition, and the author of three books. His fourth, a biography of the late singer Peggy Lee, will be published by Henry Holt in 2005. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone.
JEFF TIETZ has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and Rolling Stone. He lives in Texas.
PAIGE WILLIAMS is a native of Tupelo, Mississippi, and has written for The New York Times Magazine, Men’s Journal, Playboy, and Atlanta, and before that wrote for The Charlotte Observer. Now she lives in New York and is a first-year MFA candidate in fiction at Columbia University.
EVAN WRIGHT is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, where he has been dubbed “ambassador to the underbelly” for his coverage of the West Coast’s peculiar underworld of porn magnates, celebrity drug addicts, anarchist environmentalists, Internet scam artists, punk skateboarder gangs, and unrepentant murderers. He previously worked for Larry Flynt as the entertainment editor at Hustler magazine. He has also contributed to Time Asia, Men’s Journal, ESPN magazine, and LA Weekly. During the past eighteen months he has reported from the Middle East on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Evan Wright lives in Southern California.
LAWRENCE WRIGHT is a writer of books, magazine articles, and screenplays, both fiction and nonfiction. His screenplay, Siege, coauthored with Menno Meyjes and its director, Edward Zwick, based on Wright’s original story, was called by Panorama “the most chillingly prescient terrorism film of them all.” He lives in Austin, Texas.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
“The Journalist and the Terrorist” by Robert Sam Anson (Vanity Fair, August 2002). Copyright © 2002 by Robert Sam Anson. Reprinted by permission of the author.