The minister agreed to provide the laissez-passer. Gersony then asked that at the bottom of the letter, it should be noted that a copy had been sent to “Vice President Paul Kagame.” The minister shrugged and agreed. The laissez-passer with Kagame’s name at the bottom arrived that afternoon. Gersony knew that Kagame had only been copied. But that wouldn’t matter in the field, where merely having Kagame’s name on the document would work magic.
Bob, Cindy, and Tony left the next morning, driving northwest to the province of Ruhengeri, bordering Uganda and Zaire. They would cover seven hundred miles inside tiny Rwanda over the coming weeks, four hundred miles of which would be on dirt laterite roads, from which they were officially barred, supposedly because of the danger of land mines.
Ruhengeri constituted a labyrinthine swirl of hills, wreathed in a complex pattern of narrow dirt paths, making the earth appear even more beautiful. Here and there were tea and coffee plantations, adding to the dignity of the landscape. Gersony looked up at the hillsides and will never forget the sight: of vast numbers of people silently walking home, single file, their possessions on their heads—men, women, children, old people—from Goma, the refugee camp over the border in Zaire. He thought of the organization of ant columns. The pageant contradicted the operating assumption that no one was returning home because the Hutu genocidalists were not permitting them to. But here were all these Hutus reversing their original exodus, after the new Tutsi-led regime had taken power in the country. Cindy and Tony did house counts: how many were occupied, reoccupied, or empty. Meanwhile, Bob did one-on-one random interviews. They found that 60 percent of the houses were again occupied. People told Gersony that they had seeds to plant and required nothing else.
“Do you feel safe?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Has anyone bothered you?”
“No.”
The three went from commune to commune in this regimented, hierarchical society. In some areas there were 90 percent occupancy rates.
Gersony felt deflated. “I’m the repatriation strike force and these people don’t need my help,” he thought.
Then they drove off the main roads and headed still further north. At the village of Kinigi, they came to a roadblock filled with mean-looking government troops. He showed them the laissez-passer. The soldiers told him that they didn’t care about any letter, and that the U.N.-emblazoned vehicle could not pass, no matter what. “We’re de-mining,” a soldier explained. “De-mining,” Gersony thought, “on a small dirt road leading nowhere?”
He kept the roadblock at Kinigi in mind. The mystery would soon be solved.
They headed south throughout the province of Gisenyi. There were cows with big horns known as Ankole cattle. People stood by the sides of the roads washing down goat brochettes with banana beer. Cindy and Tony tried the brochettes with piri-piri sauce, which Bob avoided, afraid at first of getting sick. He disapproved of lunch anyway. “If we skipped lunch, we could interview one more refugee, and each refugee was precious—you never knew which one would yield a breakthrough in understanding.”
Here, though, there were no columns of people returning for him to interview. The atmosphere seemed tenser than in Ruhengeri to the north. Only 15 percent of the houses were occupied, and those returning were mainly doing so for a brief look-see. The people he did find filled Gersony’s notebook with stories of beatings, arrests, and disappearances perpetrated by Tutsi RPF regime troops. Hutus began asking him nervously if they should leave and go back to Goma over the border. They spoke of RPF troops arresting groups of a dozen or two dozen people at a time, and killing them in the nearby Gishwati Forest.
“I was still not surprised at this point,” Gersony recalls. “Many hundreds of thousands of Tutsis had just been murdered by the Hutus. What I was hearing, given what had transpired, still fell into the category of revenge killings.”
But he kept hearing of whole families disappearing, and in southern Gisenyi, even more people were preparing to flee to Goma.
Goma lay directly over the border from where they were at this point. Bob and Tony crossed the border on foot to Goma, while Cindy headed south with the car into the province of Kibuye to conduct more house counts.
Goma, in Zaire, was a vision out of hell, coated in white lime, used to prevent decay of dead bodies, where there was insufficient potable water and the hard volcanic soil made it difficult to dig latrines. A million people stretched out along roads in squishy mud, barely able to move, with few or no provisions, and disease ubiquitous. Of the thirty-six individuals interviewed by Gersony there, half said they had personally witnessed RPF violence and the other half said they had heard about it. Naturally, these people were afraid to return home. Meanwhile, the Hutu genocidalists were regrouping within this sprawling refugee encampment.
“Is the RPF hunting down actual perpetrators [of the genocide] or just shooting fish in a barrel?” he asked himself. He still wasn’t convinced that all of this was much more than revenge killings that had gotten out of hand.
He met the UNHCR representatives in Goma, Filippo Grandi and Joel Boutroue. Filippo, a tall and aristocratic Italian, would go on to become the head of UNHCR. It was mid-August and the two officials were working under unbelievable stress. Gersony was glad he hadn’t agreed to simply parachute into Goma in order to be a fifth wheel. They showed him a just-received report that the RPF had killed 150 men, women, and children with machetes in the village of Kinigi in northern Ruhengeri. Gersony was heartened by the news—heartened, that is, that his suspicions about the de-mining excuse the soldiers had given him about the roadblock there were well founded.
“We’re getting very granular,” he thought to himself. “It’s hard to miss things here, the country is too small.” Still, he wasn’t altogether pessimistic. There was the overall positive situation in Ruhengeri, while Gisenyi to the south was what you would expect: killings by the new Tutsi regime in the scores, maybe hundreds, yet still not mass killings. The new de facto Tutsi government simply had to discipline its troops more. Until then, the situation was not quite ready for Hutu refugees to return home.
In fact, there were some repatriations of Hutus from Goma already in progress. People would sign up the night before and be taken by bus back to Rwanda the next morning. But even those numbers were rapidly diminishing, Gersony learned. The Hutu genocidalists were beating up the people who had signed up to go back and live under the Tutsi regime, and later the Hutu who was in charge of the operation was found beaten to death, his face barely recognizable.
Crossing the border from Zaire back into Rwanda, they linked up with Cindy, who told them that she could hardly find any Hutus in Kibuye. The houses there were nearly empty of occupants. A pattern had developed. The situation was getting grimmer as they moved south into Rwanda’s southwestern corner. They were in fact retracing from the opposite direction the sweep of RPF General Ibingira’s 157th mobile division through the country.
Just as they were about to continue across the south of Rwanda, from the southwest to the southeast, Gersony got a message that he was wanted immediately back in Kigali. He was angry. Capital cities always catch you in a spiderweb of official responsibilities where you learn nothing compared to what you learn in the field, even as they corrupt you with their creature comforts. “Just as I was getting into a rhythm, this damn thing happens,” he told Tony and Cindy. “Just as I was getting used to the bad food, to the harsh conditions and sleeping arrangements, and filling up my notebook, I now have to break the spell.”
He had been summoned back for a meeting with Michel Moussalli and Kamel Morjane. Moussalli had been named by Mrs. Ogata as her special representative for the Great Lakes region of Africa. A decade earlier he had treated Gersony to a memorable, expensive dinner by Lake Leman in Geneva when Gersony was burning up with the news he had of atrocities in Uganda’s Luwero Triangle. Morjane was the head of Africa for UNHC
R and was Mrs. Ogata’s most trusted colleague in this crisis. He would go on to become the defense minister and later foreign minister of Tunisia. But as soon as he got back to Kigali, Gersony first tackled the basic necessities: he showered, ate sandwiches in his room, and handed in his laundry. Then he had drinks alone with Moussalli and Morjane. Cindy and Tony had remained in their hotel rooms.
Gersony briefed them for half an hour. He expressed doubts about his earlier plan for the repatriation of Hutu refugees to Rwanda, now controlled by the Tutsis. Seeing how sympathetic both Moussalli and Morjane were, Gersony then decided to really trust them, the way he had trusted Roy Stacy in Harare about what he was discovering about RENAMO. Opening his heart, he said to them to make a decision. He had heard rumors, and also had a feeling, that as he continued to travel across the south of the country, in the opposite direction of RPF General Ibingira’s Tutsi army, he might find out things that could put UNHCR in a very difficult position.
Gersony explains to me twenty-five years later: “I knew they couldn’t say no to me. But I had to have it on the record, that it was their decision that I continue my journey. For the reigning assumption in the West was still that the Hutus were simply the perpetrators and the Tutsis only the victims.”
Moussalli and Morjane did, in fact, say yes. They told Gersony that he should continue his travels. Moussalli and Morjane simply wanted to know the truth. They wanted “field-based, quality-of-information,” that’s all. Gersony reveres them to this day.
On August 22, 1994, Bob, Cindy, and Tony left Kigali for the southwest to pick up where they had left off.
* * *
—
They planned to travel from the province of Butare eastward to the province of Kibungo in Rwanda’s southeastern corner. Only 25 percent of the houses in Butare were occupied. There was the unmistakable odor of human flesh. Everywhere fat dogs were hanging about: always a bad sign. But the start of the genocide was already four months past, and it was four months since the RPF had swept through here, pacifying the province. Whereas Gersony had been pleased by what he saw in northwestern Rwanda and had been concerned by the situation in western Rwanda, here in the south of the country he became truly alarmed. There was a real atmosphere of tension. The three crossed the border into Burundi, where Hutu refugees told them that they had been invited back home by the Tutsi authorities, but after they had witnessed large-scale arrests and killings, they came back to Burundi as refugees a second time.
The three returned over the border into Rwanda and then headed east, to the province of Kibungo: a true step into hell.
Kibungo was flatter with fewer trees. There were no goat brochettes or other food available, so they survived on a wheel of cheese that Bob and Tony had bought at a makeshift stand in Goma. Soldiers were everywhere, not letting their vehicle through at a main roadblock, despite the laissez-passer and the U.N. logo on their car. It was the first time since Kinigi that this had happened. They finally managed to enter a military headquarters. It was buzzing with activity. Some kind of major operation was ongoing. The RPF soldiers all had fresh uniforms and expensive Motorola phones and radios. The three obtained a quick meeting with a snarly, arrogant major from military intelligence, who had a real command presence. He had no time for polite conversation. Yes, he knew they had a laissez-passer, but nobody goes into the area of the operation. Gersony pointed out Kagame’s name at the bottom of the letter. The major said: “I’ll let you in. But don’t be a reporter. Things happen to reporters here.”
They drove further inside Kibungo.
It was all deserted, no civilians; “there were more people in the middle of the Gobi Desert,” Gersony thought. But there were quite a few military outposts: again, soldiers with neat uniforms and expensive Motorola radios. There was no sense of a looming battle or engagement with another army. The province was truly pacified. The RPF was in complete control.
Once in a great while they saw an old man or old woman sticking his or her head out from behind a tree or hut. Gersony interviewed them deep in the bush, disobeying the order not to be a reporter. They told him about mass killings. Cindy and Tony did house counts: there was nobody in the houses. They saw what appeared to be a brick schoolhouse surrounded by about half a dozen fat, greasy dogs. The smell was overpowering; it had even seeped into their car. Bob went inside the small building. Stacked up against all the walls, with hands tied behind their backs in kneeling positions, were fresh human bodies, all executed within the past few days: thus the smell.
On one wall, smeared in red, presumably blood, Gersony read:
“Hutu can [sic] home to die.”
He interviewed a man on the road, who told him:
“The army is killing everybody they can find.”
Further down the road was a Catholic church. Strewn throughout the churchyard were bodies, but these were shriveled and desiccated, and thus emitted no smell. Inside, in the pews, they counted sixty more bodies in the same condition. These people had been dead for some months: victims of the original genocide. Here there were no dogs prowling about. They could easily tell the difference between the bodies in the church and the bodies in the school building. The two scenes told the story of Butare and Kibungo.
They were driving down a dirt road in Kibungo when they came upon a surreal sight: a long line of stocky Hutu men in bright pink medical scrubs, carrying picks and shovels, being force-marched by Tutsi RPF soldiers with assault rifles at the front and the rear of the line. They stopped the U.N. car to shake hands with the RPF soldiers, in order to show deference. Later they saw another such column, and then another. Finally they slowed the U.N. car to a crawl and asked one of the men in the middle of the column, far from the soldiers at the front and back, “What are you all doing?”
“We’re burying fresh bodies.”
Another day they passed large groups of men in pink scrubs digging long pits. The armed RPF soldiers around them looked relaxed, none in defensive positions. There were evidently no Hutu militias anymore to guard against. But they did occasionally encounter RPF troops packed into the backs of trucks screaming and chanting. Their excited mien was unlike the other soldiers that they had seen.
They spent eight days traveling about southern Rwanda, sleeping at night in abandoned homes.
Gersony became terrified of what he knew, of what he had accumulated in his notebooks the past few weeks, and the possibility of having his notebooks confiscated; or of being arrested, or worse, by the RPF. The fact that he was protected by his U.N. status did not alleviate his paranoia.
He was overcome with relief as their car crossed the Akagera River bridge into Tanzania on August 30, 1994. They passed through a drier, more open landscape and soon arrived at the vast refugee camp of Ngara. They headed for the UNHCR headquarters there, with its clean latrines, hot showers, mouthwatering buffets, and general ambience of glamping. They slept on army cots, a luxury after Butare and Kibungo, despite the bedbugs. Cindy and Tony relaxed, drinking Primus beer. Bob shared their findings with the local UNHCR officials. They told him that all the evidence about large-scale killings by the new Tutsi regime that they had gathered from the refugees there was identical to his, and that they were fishing dozens of bodies with machete and gunshot wounds out of the river daily. He conducted interviews with randomly selected refugees in Ngara and its satellite camps for several days.
By this time they had conducted over two hundred one-on-one interviews, and one hundred one-on-two-or-three interviews at ninety-one locations, including nine refugee camps in three countries. Within Rwanda they had covered 41 of 145 communes, and gathered some material from 10 others, totaling about a third of those in the country.10 The stories they had heard were corroborating each other. While those in the refugee camps might have been influenced by the propaganda of Hutu genocidalists, their stories, nevertheless, tracked with those of the many more people he interviewed inside Rwanda
itself. Moreover, UNHCR workers in the refugee camps had been hearing the same stories from refugees just as they stumbled across the border, before they could be influenced by the genocidalists.
Gersony knew he had to get back to Geneva and brief Mrs. Ogata about what was going on. His plan was to drive for several days southeast across Tanzania, from Ngara to the capital of Dar es Salaam, where the three of them could fly back to Geneva. He was frightened of reentering Rwanda. He called Gerald Walzer on the UNHCR satellite phone. Afraid of being monitored, he casually mentioned to Walzer that he had something important to tell him. Walzer insisted that they return first to Kigali, only four hours away to the northwest, so as not to insult their Rwandan hosts.
So they returned to Kigali, spent one night there, said their goodbyes, and flew to Nairobi with all the notebooks. For Gersony, every minute back in Rwanda was nerve-racking. In Nairobi they camped out in a luxury hotel for a week, organizing and analyzing all the interviews, which Gersony typed up, working all day, every day they were there, internalizing the results of his reporting through the typing process, and going out periodically for BLT sandwiches.
“I had previously hated Nairobi,” Cindy explains. “I always found it congested and unfriendly. But coming out of Rwanda with all of its horrors, Nairobi was like paradise, a place where we could comfortably work.”
* * *
—
The more than three hundred accounts of the interviewees told the following story:
The RPF had met little resistance at first, as it wheeled its army through Rwanda, so that the countryside was occupied by relatively friendly Tutsi soldiers with Hutus among them. Weeks went by. These soldiers were replaced by others: all Tutsis, the kill units, the soldiers that Gersony had observed chanting and screaming from the backs of trucks, their legs draped over the sides.
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