“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“The same as you,” he said. “Laying low. Waiting for the shit to clear so we can go home. I see you’ve done well … playing doctor. You’re just the man I need, Azi. Oh … I’m sorry … Alfred.”
“I’ve changed.” I shook my head. “You don’t want me anymore.”
“Oh, yes. I do. I have a job for you. I want you to get me some drugs out of the hospital. Anything you can get your hands on. I can sell it all here in the camp.”
“I’m not doing that,” I shot back at him quickly. “Now, get the fuck out of here.”
“Azi, you owe me,” he whispered.
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“Yes, you do, Azi. How could you forget that I took the blame for you killing Father Savard?” He grinned sarcastically at me. “Did you think I wouldn’t figure out your little plan when you gave me that knife and never came back? It didn’t me take long, especially when Major Ntagura told me that they were looking for me for a murder I had nothing to do with. Damn-fucking-right, you owe me.”
He gripped me firmly by the arm and pulled me in close as if to emphasize his words. “Azi, there’s a good business here for me—for both of us. See what you can find for us. I’ll be back in a few days.”
I didn’t know how long Idi had been in the camp. With so many thousands now living here it was easy to get lost in the masses. And it was well known that’s exactly what a lot of people were doing. By this time, more than half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been slaughtered in my homeland. It takes a lot of people to carry out that many murders, especially when most of the killings are committed in close contact and not with the use of long-range bombs and artillery. In fact, nearly all of the murders were committed by mobs using clubs and machetes, literally beating and hacking their helpless victims to death. And this was precisely Idi’s specialty, killing up close and personal to witness the terror in the eyes of his victims. Thousands of killing-squad members, like Idi, had fled the country after the holocaust, taking asylum and hiding out in the UN refugee camps that were meant for the truly displaced. Once they arrived in the camps they organized themselves into gangs, creating an underworld that continued their terror and illegal activities right under the noses of the United Nations officials.
Like all other societies, ours at the Nkwenda camp had its own underground economy fueled by drugs and other illicit operations. The security force we had in the camp wasn’t even adequate to perform normal policing operations, let alone try to suppress the gangs controlled by war criminals like Idi.
I spent the next several days anxious about my predicament. There was no way that I wanted to help Idi with his crooked business, but neither did I want to be turned over to the authorities for the things I had done in my past. I was still considering the situation in my mind when Idi caught me by surprise on my way to the school one morning. He was flanked by two of his lackeys. One of them, a boy only a little older than I was when I ran under his influence, carried a machete which dangled by his leg.
“Azi, what have you come up with for me?”
“I can’t, Idi,” I said. “Everything is kept locked and inventoried. Only the doctors are allowed to sign out any medicine.”
“Bullshit. You’re a smart boy. You can figure something out.”
“Even if I could, I wouldn’t.” I had decided to take a stand.
“Oh yes you will, Azi. You fucking well better.” He reached out, and the boy at his side handed him the machete. Idi slapped the blade in the palm of his hand. “I’ll meet you here tomorrow at this time, and I want you to have something for me.”
“Fuck you, Idi.” I surprised myself at my audacity, and the boldness infuriated him.
“You fucking ungrateful wretch,” he said. “After all I have done for you over the years.”
“After all you’ve done for me?” I began shouting, incredulous at his claim. “You killed my family, stole my childhood, ruined my future.” A crowd was gathering at the sound of the argument, and I raised my clenched fists barely able to control myself.
Idi must have thought I was about to hit him and countered by raising the machete over his shoulder and swiping down at me. Reacting instinctively, I raised my left arm to block the slash but was only partially successful and I felt the steel blade strike my face. For a split second it was the force of the blow that I noticed, and I didn’t think of the slicing damage until a thick syrup of blood completely blinded my right eye. Blood quickly began to cloud the vision of my left eye as well, and I knew I had to do something before I lost all my sight. I could see Idi raising the machete for a second strike, and I lunged into him reaching for his arm that held the blade. We struggled for several seconds for control of the large knife, but I was now thoroughly blinded by the blood that covered both my eyes. It ran down in streams, soaking my entire chest. Suddenly feeling, but not seeing, the handle of the machete in my own right hand I stepped back and swung it wildly at the air attempting to keep distance between Idi and myself. On my third blinded swing of the blade I felt it ever so slightly meet some resistance, like slicing through a green bamboo shoot. A moment later Idi let out an agonized scream, and the commotion in the crowd around us stopped. All else went silent.
I could feel the blood running from my face in such a steady stream that it now soaked my entire shirt and was wetting the front of my pants as well. Unable to see anything, I crouched in a defensive position, holding the blade out, ready to swing it at anything that threatened me.
Idi began shrieking over and over, “My hand … my hand!”
“You’ve cut off his fucking hand!” Idi’s boy screeched.
I tried to gather my wits but was beginning to panic at my own loss of blood.
“Is it completely severed?” I asked, still ready to swipe.
“Yes, yes!” the boy wailed. “It’s lying in the dirt.”
I knew I needed to stay focused, remain controlled. “Somebody tie off his arm. Quickly. Take us to the clinic and bring the hand with us.”
Someone gave me a rag to cover my own wounds, and I pressed it against my face and did my best to stop the flow of blood. The small crowd guided us through the dirt streets of the tent village, hurrying us to the clinic. Upon entering I heard Vincent’s voice calmly taking command of the situation. “Bring them here. Sit this one here. Lay the one with the face wounds on the gurney. Nurse, stop the bleeding. I need a proper tourniquet on this arm, quickly. Someone tell me what happened.”
A voice spoke up, “That one first struck this one, and then he took the machete from him and cut off the other one’s hand.”
“Where’s the hand?” I heard Vincent ask.
“Here, Doctor.”
I heard Idi ask in a shocked voice, “Can you put it back on, Doctor?”
“No,” Vincent answered. “But you’re lucky, the sever was clean and you’ll be able to keep the arm. I’ll sew it as soon as they get it disinfected and get the blood clamped off properly.”
Someone was pressing firmly on the wound on my face, while someone else tried to mop blood. I could feel the sticky wet of it covering my face and, now that I was lying down, it was running back over my head as well, soaking the pillow underneath me.
“Is he still conscious?” I heard Vincent’s voice close over my face. “Can you hear me, son?”
I realized that I must be so covered in blood that Vincent didn’t even recognize me.
“It’s me, Vincent, Alfred.”
For the first time since I had known him I heard a fleeting flash of panic in his voice. “Oh my god, Alfred. What’s happened?” And then, in a brief moment of unprofessionalism, I could feel his two hands gently take the sides of my head, and his lips touched down on my bloody wet forehead and kissed me. “You’ll be all right, Alfred. You’ll be all right,” he whispered to me.
&nb
sp; After that it was total professionalism. Vincent worked back and forth between Idi and me with the aid of two assistants. He sawed another section of bone away from Idi’s wrist leaving enough flesh to draw the skin around and make a proper stump out of it, and painstakingly sutured twenty-two stitches into the cut above my eye socket and twenty-two into the one below which ran down to the side of my jaw. In the eyes of the good doctor we were equal patients needing comfort and healing, and he did all he could to help the two of us. His skills proved ample as we both mended fine, except for the permanent reminders we were each left with. Idi’s stump was much more of a disability than my scar, nonetheless the reminders would be with each of us for the rest of our lives.
In explaining the incident later to Vincent I practiced my lying by omission and only told him the part of the story where Idi had demanded that I steal drugs from the hospital. I didn’t want Vincent to know of my horrid past with Idi, and I continued to try to forget it by never mentioning it to anyone, not even Vincent.
Around the time of my disfiguring encounter with Idi, the camp peaked in size. Many had arrived only to find that the UN was so overextended that they might have been better off where they had come from. And, with all the war criminals who were flocking to the camps, many new arrivals were feeling that perhaps they would have been safer back in their home communities. Eventually word filtered in to us that a new provisional government was slowly regaining control inside Rwanda. The few trickling out of the camp gradually increased to a steady flow, and the population finally began to decrease to a manageable number. In October of 1997, Vincent brought news from the head of the UN mission at Nkwenda.
“Alfred, we’ve just heard that they’ll be decommissioning the camp. Closing it.”
“When?” I asked. “How soon?”
“Next year,” he answered. “It’ll take them at least six to twelve months to completely close it up.”
“What’ll you do, Vincent?”
He laughed. “The question is not what I’ll do, it’s what you’re going to do. I’ll go back home to France and get reacquainted with the bureaucracy at my hospital in Paris, for a while anyhow. But you have some choices to make, Alfred.”
I hated thinking about this. I had dreaded it and avoided it for a long time. I knew that the camp was not permanent, and God knows that I wanted to get away from the place as much as anyone. But I had no place to go, no home to go back to.
“Have you thought about leaving Africa, Alfred? For a while at least, maybe not forever.” He paused to assess my reaction before continuing. “Why don’t you come to France? You can go to university there, perhaps medical school. I can’t think of anyone better equipped to go into medicine than you.”
I was flattered by his comments but was much too practical to take them seriously. “You know that would be impossible, Vincent.”
“Not if you really wanted to, Alfred. There are ways. France has a very open and generous refugee program. Nothing’s for sure, but you could apply. I’d like to act as your sponsor, if you’d allow me.”
I was overwhelmed with Vincent’s proposal and wanted to respond, but I was afraid that if I spoke I would begin to cry. It took all my control to just nod without letting tears form.
Vincent and I had become close, very close, over the past three years. He’d long ago begun to treat me as more than just a translator or a medical assistant. We were close friends, each other’s only family in this lonely despondent place. I was the apprentice, he was the mentor; I the fatherless son, he the epitome of benevolence. I suppose in some ways we filled a void in each other’s lives, but at the time I only recognized the huge part he played in mine. It wasn’t until years later, when I thought back and reflected on our relationship, that I linked it to something I had once heard Vincent say to a news reporter.
A camera crew from France had trundled into the camp about a year earlier. They were doing a story on the French organization, Médecins Sans Frontières, and had somehow found their way to Nkwenda. I watched them interview him.
“Dr. Bergeron, what would make a successful physician from the West want to come to such a forsaken place as this and work under such deplorable conditions?”
“There are plenty of good reasons,” Vincent answered. “Look at this poverty and suffering. Where else could I possibly help so much? Where else could I be so needed?”
It took us a full year to get the necessary approvals from France for me to accompany Vincent home as a refugee. The Rwandan government did nothing to help speed the process by taking nearly eight months to issue me a passport. It probably would have gone faster if they could have located a birth certificate for me. When we initially wrote away to the Office of Civil Registration in search of one, I had to come clean to Vincent and tell him my real age. He was surprised that instead of being twenty, as I had led him to believe, I was only nineteen. The office was unable to locate any reference to my birth. To be fair to them, the records might have been lost during the war or, as often happened in those days in the rural parts of the country, there might never have been anything filed in the first place. Using my baptismal certificate we were able to establish citizenship and then finally obtain a passport.
While this process went on Vincent helped me to begin the refugee application process for France, acting as my guarantor and sponsor. As soon as we received my Rwandan passport things went more smoothly with the French authorities. Nkwenda camp had almost emptied out and we were among the last handful of volunteers and United Nations personnel still there when news came in the fall of 1998 that my final paperwork had arrived from France and was waiting for us in Dodoma. It was a bittersweet departure that we made from the camp at Nkwenda. Bitter in that it closed a chapter in my life in which I had matured into a man, and sweet in that I was beginning a new one with boundless optimism for my future in Europe. The moment, however, was indelibly blemished by the sight of Idi ominously waving goodbye with his stumped arm.
Brussels
By the time I finish relating to Bart and Anna the rest of the story about my time spent in Tanzania at the Nkwenda refugee camp, and then giving Bart the short version of my earlier childhood spent with Idi, we are exhausted. It had already been a draining day, beginning with the presentation of evidence through the morning, then the playing of Idi’s video testimony after lunch, and now my own tale being laid out in the open.
“This is good,” says Bart. “Definitely a lot more for us to work with than I thought we had a few hours ago. Give me some time to think about this, and we can start fresh tomorrow.”
As the three of us pack our things and prepare to leave the courthouse Anna is in significantly improved spirits, not so much because of anything that I just told them but rather because I have new fight in me. She is glad that I am refusing to just give in to my old feelings of guilt, that I am ready to go the distance to prove my innocence in the murders of the four sisters. I, myself, feel as if I have shaken off another layer of the load that has been burdening me for so many years, and the three of us walk with purpose down the empty after-hours halls of the courthouse.
Even the throng of reporters and media people that have waited for hours to assail us at the front door doesn’t daunt us. The cameras that were absent in the courtroom begin flashing, and videographers jockey for position to get the best angles. Bodies and microphones crowd us, and questions are flying in several languages, each reporter trying to outshout the other.
Bart takes command of the situation by opening his hand and raising it in the air, quieting things quickly.
“I have one short statement to make on behalf of Dr. Olyontombo,” he says. “First, he strenuously denies the charges against him. He was not present at the murders of the Four Sisters of Peace and was not even in Rwanda at the time of the offenses. Further, Dr. Olyontombo was not even of accusable adult age at the time of these murders. We intend to prove all of this and loo
k forward to his full exoneration before this inquiry.”
For the first time in weeks I go to bed with a sense of hope. I feel positive and energized. Seeing Idi glaring at me through the camera lens has inspired a determination to put my childhood transgressions behind me once and for all. Even the crowd of media that sets up camp outside our apartment can’t bother me, and I don’t let the stories that flood the internet in Belgium get to me. Predictably, they report how the case against me is ironclad and how justice will finally be served for the deaths of the Four Sisters of Peace. However, my optimism is so solidly based in my antipathy toward Idi Mbuyamba that I blindly ignore this practical consideration and fall asleep in good spirits.
Unfortunately, the night’s sleep is sobering, and I awake the following day with reality facing me head-on. I have to leave all the blinds shut to avoid the peering telephoto lenses that are set up on the sides of the street. Police have erected barricades on our little neighborhood lane, allowing no through traffic. They have helped to set up a media zone with a half-dozen broadcast vehicles jacked up on stabilizers. There are many more reporters gathered outside than were at the courthouse yesterday, and it’s not yet even seven o’clock in the morning. The police themselves have a command-post vehicle parked a little farther down the street. I take to my laptop for the news websites that I have been monitoring, and every single one of them has the inquiry as the lead story in prominent bold headlines. By now, they all have photos of me. Some were shot yesterday outside the courthouse, some were probably obtained from the Denver media, of me on the steps of my home in Boulder. There are also some court sketches of me from yesterday with my head hanging low. The courtroom artists have depicted me with a look of shame and guilt, and they emphasize my facial scar as if it is some sort of confirmation of demonhood. The stories take all sorts of angles: some are rereporting the whole tale of the murder from 1994; some report the new facts presented yesterday; some are telling the stories of the war crimes trials, including new updates about Idi; and some have new angles on the Rwandan civil war and genocide. There is no shortage of experts to provide commentary: war experts, legal experts, experts to explain the court process I am facing, experts analyzing my body and facial language from the inquiry, forensic experts, and experts on what my likely sentencing will be.
Truth, by Omission Page 28