We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (10 page)

In October of 1990, as Rwanda’s jails were being packed with alleged RPF accomplices, Ngeze was released to relaunch
Kangura.
(The editor of
Kanguka
remained conveniently locked away.) With the war as his backdrop, Ngeze struck a clever balance between his persona as a prison-accredited gadfly of the regime and his secret status as front man for the
akazu.
Even as he harangued Hutus to unite behind the President in the struggle against the Tutsi menace, he chided the President for failing to lead that struggle with sufficient vigilance. While government officials still felt publicly constrained by international pressure from speaking openly of ethnicity, Ngeze published what he claimed were RPF documents which purportedly “proved” that the rebel movement was part of an ancient Tutsi-supremacist conspiracy to subjugate Hutus in feudal bondage. He ran lists of prominent Tutsis and Hutu accomplices who had “infiltrated” public institutions, accused the government of betraying the revolution, and called for a rigorous campaign of national “self-defense” to protect the “gains” of 1959 and 1973. And he did all of this with his printing costs defrayed by government credit, giving away most of each print run to Rwanda’s mayors to distribute free.

A host of new periodicals had appeared in Rwanda in 1990. All but
Kangura
served as voices of relative moderation, and all but
Kangura
are now largely forgotten. More than anybody else, Hassan Ngeze, the Hutu supremacist with the populist touch, plucked from obscurity by the President’s wife to play the court jester, was writing the script for the coming Hutu crusade. It would be foolish to dispute his brilliance as a salesman of fear. When another paper ran a cartoon depicting Ngeze on a couch, being psychoanalyzed by “the democratic press”—

Ngeze: I’m sick Doctor!!
Doctor: Your sickness?!
Ngeze: The Tutsis … Tutsis … Tutsis ! ! ! ! ! ! !

—Ngeze picked it up and ran it in
Kangura
. He was one of those creatures of destruction who turn everything hurled at them into their own weapon. He was funny and bold, and in one of the most repressed societies on earth, he presented the liberating example of a man who seemed to know no taboos. As a race theorist, Ngeze made John Hanning Speke look like what he was: an amateur. He was the original high-profile archetype of the Rwandan Hutu
génocidaire,
and his imitators and disciples were soon legion.

Although he was a practicing member of Rwanda’s small Muslim community—the only religious community, according to one Christian leader, that “apparently behaved quite well, and as a group was not active in the genocide, even seeking to save Tutsi Muslims”—Ngeze’s true religion was “Hutuness.” His most famous article, published in December of 1990, was the credo of this newly crystallized faith: “The Hutu Ten Commandments.” In a few swift strokes, Ngeze revived, revised, and reconciled the Hamitic myth and the rhetoric of the Hutu revolution to articulate a doctrine of militant Hutu purity. The first three commandments addressed the stubborn perception, constantly reinforced by the tastes of visiting white men and Hutus with status, that the beauty of Tutsi women surpasses that of Hutu women. According to Ngeze’s protocols, all Tutsi women were Tutsi agents; Hutu men who married, befriended, or employed a Tutsi woman “as a secretary or concubine” were to be considered traitors, and Hutu women, for their part, were commanded to guard against the Tutsi-loving impulses of Hutu men. From sex, Ngeze moved on to matters of business, declaring every Tutsi dishonest—“his only aim is the supremacy of his ethnic group”—and any Hutu who had financial dealings with Tutsis an enemy of his people. The same held for political life; Hutus should control “all strategic positions, political, administrative, economic, military, and security.” Hutus were further commanded to have “unity and solidarity” against “their common Tutsi enemy,” to study and spread “the Hutu ideology” of the revolution of 1959, and to regard as a traitor any Hutu who “persecutes his brother Hutu” for studying or spreading this ideology.

“The Hutu Ten Commandments” were widely circulated and immensely popular. President Habyarimana championed their publication as proof of Rwanda’s “freedom of the press.” Community leaders across Rwanda regarded them as tantamount to law, and read them aloud at public meetings. The message was hardly unfamiliar, but with its whiff of holy war and its unforgiving warnings to lapsed Hutus, even Rwanda’s most unsophisticated peasantry could not fail to grasp that it had hit an altogether new pitch of alarm. The eighth and most often quoted commandment said: “Hutus most stop having mercy on the Tutsis.”

IN DECEMBER OF 1990, the same month that Hassan Ngeze published “The Hutu Ten Commandments,”
Kangura
also hailed President Mitterrand of France with a full-page portrait, captioned “A friend in need is a friend indeed.” The salutation was apt. Fighting alongside Habyarimana’s Forces Armées Rwandaises, hundreds of superbly equipped French paratroopers had kept the RPF from advancing beyond its first foothold in the northeast. Initially, Belgium and Zaire also sent troops to back up the FAR, but the Zaireans were so given to drinking, looting, and raping that Rwanda soon begged them to go home, and the Belgians withdrew of their own accord. The French remained, and their impact was such that after the first month of fighting Habyarimana pronounced the RPF defeated. In fact, the battered rebel forces merely retreated westward from the open grasslands of northeastern Rwanda to establish a new base on the jagged, rain-forested slopes of the Virunga volcanoes. There—cold, wet, and poorly supplied—the RPF suffered greater losses to pneumonia than to fighting, as they trained a steady trickle of new recruits into a fierce, and fiercely disciplined, guerrilla army that might have swiftly forced Habyarimana to the negotiating table, or brought him to outright defeat, had it not been for France.

A military agreement signed in 1975 between France and Rwanda expressly forbade the involvement of French troops in Rwandan combat, combat training, or police operations. But President Mitterrand liked Habyarimana, and Mitterrand’s son Jean-Christophe, an arms dealer and sometime commissar of African affairs in the French Foreign Ministry, liked him, too. (As military expenditures drained Rwanda’s treasury and the war dragged on, an illegal drug trade developed in Rwanda; army officers set up marijuana plantations, and Jean-Christophe Mitterrand is widely rumored to have profited from the traffic.) France funneled huge shipments of armaments to Rwanda—right through the killings in 1994—and throughout the early 1990s, French officers and troops served as Rwandan auxiliaries, directing everything from air traffic control and the interrogation of RPF prisoners to frontline combat.

In January of 1991, when the RPF took the key northwestern city of Ruhengeri, Habyarimana’s home base, government troops backed by French paratroopers drove them out within twenty-four hours. A few months later, when the United States ambassador to Rwanda suggested that the Habyarimana government should abolish ethnic identity cards, the French ambassador quashed the initiative. Paris regarded Francophone Africa as “
chez nous
,” a virtual extension of the motherland, and the fact that the RPF had emerged out of Anglophone Uganda inspired the ancient French tribal phobia of an Anglo-Saxon menace. Swaddled in this imperial security blanket, Habyarimana and his ruling clique were free to ignore the RPF for long stretches and to concentrate on their campaign against the unarmed “domestic enemy.”

A few days after the RPF’s overnight occupation of Ruhengeri, in January of 1991, Habyarimana’s FAR faked an attack on one of its own military camps in the northwest. The RPF was blamed and, in retaliation, a local mayor organized massacres of the Bagogwe, a quasi-nomadic Tutsi subgroup that subsisted in extreme poverty; scores were killed, and the mayor had them buried deep in his own yard. More massacres followed; by the end of March hundreds of Tutsis in the northwest had been slaughtered.

“We were really terrorized in that period,” Odette recalled. “We thought we were going to be massacred.” In 1989, when she was fired from the hospital, Odette had been furious at the speed with which people she had trusted as friends turned away from her. A year later, she looked back on that time as the good old days. Like many Rwandan Tutsis, Odette first reacted to the war with indignation toward the refugee rebels for placing those who had stayed in the country in jeopardy. “We always thought those on the outside were well settled and better off,” she told me. “We had come to see our situation here as normal. I used to tell my exiled cousins, ‘Why come back? Stay there, you’re much better off,’ and they said, ‘Odette, even you have adopted the discourse of Habyarimana.’ The RPF had to make us aware that they suffered, living in exile, and we started to realize that we hadn’t thought of these exiles for all this time. Ninety-nine percent of the Tutsis had no idea that the RPF would attack. But we began to discuss it, and realized these were our brothers coming and that the Hutus we’d lived with didn’t regard us as equals. They rejected us.”

When Odette and her husband, Jean-Baptiste, visited the wives of imprisoned Tutsis, Jean-Baptiste got a call from the Secretary-General of Intelligence, whom he considered a good friend. The intelligence chief’s friendly advice was: “If you want to die, keep going to those people.”

For those in jail, like Bonaventure Nyibizi, a staffer at the Kigali mission of the United States Agency for International Development, the expectation of death was even greater. “They were killing prisoners every night, and on October 26, I was going to be killed,” he told me. “But I had cigarettes. The guy came and said, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ and I gave him a cigarette, so he said, ‘Well, we’re killing people for nothing and I’m not going to kill you tonight.’ People were dying every day from torture. They were taken out, and when they came back, they were beaten, bayoneted, and they were dying. I slept with dead people several nights. I think the initial plan was to kill everybody in prison, but the Red Cross started registering people, so it became difficult. The regime wanted to keep a good international image.”

One of Bonaventure’s best friends in prison was a businessman named Froduald Karamira. Bonaventure and Karamira both came from Gitarama, in the south, and both were Tutsi by birth. But early in life, Karamira had acquired Hutu identity papers, and he had benefited accordingly; in 1973, when Bonaventure was expelled from school because he was Tutsi, Karamira, who attended the same seminary, was left unmolested. “But the Habyarimana government didn’t like the Hutus from Gitarama, and Karamira was rich, so they arrested him,” Bonaventure explained. “He was a very nice person in prison, always trying to help people out, buying cigarettes, a place to sleep, blankets. When he got out of prison before me, my wife was pregnant with our first child, and he went straightaway to visit her. After March of 1991, when the government released all of us from prison, I saw him several times. He used to come to my house, or my office. And then one night”—Bonaventure snapped his fingers—“he changed completely. We couldn’t talk anymore because I am Tutsi. This happened with so many people. They changed so quickly that you would say, ‘Is this the same person?’”

In the summer of 1991, the much anticipated multiparty order had begun in Rwanda. Such a leap from totalitarianism to a political free market will be tumultuous even when it is undertaken by sincerely well-intentioned leaders, and in Rwanda the political opening was contrived in conspicuously bad faith. Most of the dozen parties that suddenly began scrapping for attention and influence were simply puppets of Habyarimana’s MRND, created by the President and the
akazu
to sow confusion and make a mockery of the pluralist enterprise. Only one of the genuine opposition parties had a significant Tutsi membership; the rest were divided between committed reformers and Hutu extremists who swiftly transformed the “democratic debate” into a wedge that further polarized the divided citizenry by presenting Rwandan politics as a simple question of Hutu self-defense. It was us against them——all of us against all of them: anybody who dared to suggest an alternative view was one of them and could prepare for the consequences. And it was Froduald Karamira, the convert to Hutuness, who gave this tidy proposition, and the cacophony of ideological discourse that crackled behind it, the enthusiastic name of Hutu Power.

“I don’t know exactly what happened,” Bonaventure told me. “People say that Habyarimana paid him tens of millions to change, and he did become the head of ElectroGaz”—the national utility company. “All I know is that he became one of the most important extremists, and that is not the way he was before. So much was changing so suddenly, and still it was hard to see—hard to believe—how much it was changing.”

ONE DAY IN January of 1992, soldiers visited Bonaventure’s home in Kigali, while he and his wife were out. “They broke the doors,” Bonaventure said. “They took everything, they tied up the house staff, and I had a son who was nine months old—they left grenades with him. He was there playing with a grenade in the living room, for three hours. Then somebody passed by and noticed, and fortunately my son was not killed.”

So it went—an attack here, a massacre there—as the increasingly well-organized Hutu extremists stockpiled weapons, and Hutu youth militias were recruited and trained for “civil defense.” First among these militias was the
interahamwe
—“those who attack together”—which had its genesis in soccer fan clubs sponsored by leaders of the MRND and the
akazu.
The economic collapse of the late 1980s had left tens of thousands of young men without any prospect of a job, wasting in idleness and its attendant resentments, and ripe for recruitment. The
interahamwe,
and the various copycat groups that were eventually subsumed into it, promoted genocide as a carnival romp. Hutu Power youth leaders, jetting around on motorbikes and sporting pop hairstyles, dark glasses, and flamboyantly colored pajama suits and robes, preached ethnic solidarity and civil defense to increasingly packed rallies, where alcohol usually flowed freely, giant banners splashed with hagiographic portraits of Habyarimana flapped in the breeze, and paramilitary drills were conducted like the latest hot dance moves. The President and his wife often turned out to be cheered at these spectacles, while in private the members of the
interahamwe
were organized into small neighborhood bands, drew up lists of Tutsis, and went on retreats to practice burning houses, tossing grenades, and hacking dummies up with machetes.