We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (11 page)

Play first turned to work for the
interahamwe
in early March of 1992, when the state-owned Radio Rwanda announced the “discovery” of a Tutsi plan to massacre Hutus. This was pure misinformation, but in preemptive “self-defense” militia members and villagers in the Bugesera region, south of Kigali, slaughtered three hundred Tutsis in three days. Similar killings occurred at the same time in Gisenyi, and in August, shortly after Habyarimana—under intense pressure from international donors—signed a cease-fires with the RPF, Tutsis were massacred in Kibuye. That October, the cease-fire was expanded to embrace plans for a new, transitional government that would include the RPF; one week later, Habyarimana delivered a speech dismissing the truce as “nothing but a scrap of paper.”

Still, the foreign-aid money poured into Habyarimana’s coffers, and weapons kept arriving—from France, from Egypt, from apartheid South Africa. Occasionally, when donors expressed concern about the killings of Tutsis, there were arrests, but releases followed swiftly; nobody was brought to trial, much less prosecuted for the massacres. To soothe foreign nerves, the government portrayed the killings as “spontaneous” and “popular” acts of “anger” or “self-protection.” The villagers knew better: massacres were invariably preceded by political “consciousnessraising” meetings at which local leaders, usually with a higher officer of the provincial or national government at their side, described Tutsis as devils—horns, hoofs, tails, and all—and gave the order to kill them, according to the old revolutionary lingo, as a “work” assignment. The local authorities consistently profited from massacres, seizing slain Tutsis’ land and possessions, and sometimes enjoying promotions if they showed special enthusiasm, and the civilian killers, too, were usually rewarded with petty spoils.

In retrospect, the massacres of the early 1990s can be seen as dress rehearsals for what proponents of Hutuness themselves called the “final solution” in 1994. Yet there was nothing inevitable about the horror. With the advent of multipartyism, the President had been compelled by popular pressure to make substantial concessions to reform-minded oppositionists, and it required a dogged uphill effort for Habyarimana’s extremist entourage to prevent Rwanda from slipping toward moderation. Violence was the key to that effort. The
interahamwe
was bankrolled and supervised by a consortium of
akazu
leaders, who also ran their own death squads, with names like the Zero Network and the Bullets group. Madame Habyarimana’s three brothers, along with a bevy of colonels and leaders of the northwestern business mafia, were founding members of these outfits, which first rolled into action alongside the
interahamwe
during the Bugesera massacre in March of 1992. But the most crucial innovation at Bugesera was the use of the national radio to prepare the ground for slaughter, and the ratcheting up of the suggestive message of us against them to the categorically compelling kill or be killed.

Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building. A vigorous totalitarian order requires that the people be invested in the leaders’ scheme, and while genocide may be the most perverse and ambitious means to this end, it is also the most comprehensive. In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history. And strange as it may sound, the ideology—or what Rwandans call “the logic”—of genocide was promoted as a way not to create suffering but to alleviate it. The specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual—always an annoyance to totality—ceases to exist.

The mass of participants in the practice massacres of the early 1990s may have taken little pleasure in obediently murdering their neighbors. Still, few refused, and assertive resistance was extremely rare. Killing Tutsis was a political tradition in postcolonia Rwanda; it brought people together.

IT HAS BECOME a commonplace in the past fifty years to say that the industrialized killing of the Holocaust calls into question the notion of human progress, since art and science can lead straight through the famous gate—stamped with the words “Work Makes You Free”—to Auschwitz. Without all that technology, the argument goes, the Germans couldn’t have killed all those Jews. Yet it was the Germans, not the machinery, who did the killing. Rwanda’s Hutu Power leaders understood this perfectly. If you could swing the people who would swing the machetes, technological underdevelopment was no obstacle to genocide. The people were the weapon, and that meant everybody: the entire Hutu population had to kill the entire Tutsi population. In addition to ensuring obvious numerical advantages, this arrangement eliminated any questions of accountability which might arise. If everybody is implicated, then implication becomes meaningless. Implication in what? A Hutu who thought there was anything to be implicated in would have to be an accomplice of the enemy.

“We the people are obliged to take responsibility ourselves and wipe out this scum,” explained Leon Mugesera, in November of 1992, during the same speech in which he urged Hutus to return the Tutsis to Ethiopia by way of the Nyabarongo River. Mugesera was a doctor, a vice president of the MRND, and a close friend and adviser of Habyarimana. His voice was the voice of power, and most Rwandans can still quote from his famous speech quite accurately; members of the
interahamwe
often recited favorite phrases as they went forth to kill. The law, Mugesera claimed, mandated death to “accomplices” of the “cockroaches,” and he asked, “What are we waiting for to execute the sentence?” Members of opposition parties, he said, “have no right to live among us,” and as a leader of “the Party” he invoked his duty to spread the alarm and to instruct the people to “defend themselves.” As for the “cockroaches” themselves, he wondered, “What are we waiting for to decimate these families?” He called on those who had prospered under Habyarimana to “finance operations to eliminate these people.” He spoke of 1959, saying it had been a terrible mistake to allow Tutsis to survive. “Destroy them,” he said. “No matter what you do, do not let them get away,” and he said, “Remember that the person whose life you save will certainly not save yours.” He finished with the words “Drive them out. Long live President Habyarimana.”

Mugesera had spoken in the name of the law, but it happened that the Minister of Justice at the time was a man named Stanislas Mbonampeka, who saw things differently. Mbonampeka was a man of parts: he was a well-to-do Hutu from the northwest, the owner of a half share in a toilet paper factory, and he was also an oppositionist, a lawyer and human rights advocate in the top ranks of the Liberal Party, the only opposition party with a sizable Tutsi membership. Mbonampeka studied Mugesera’s speech and issued an arrest warrant against him for inciting hatred. Of course, Mugesera didn’t go to jail—he went to the army for protection, then emigrated to Canada—and Mbonampeka was soon dismissed as Justice Minister. Mbonampeka saw which way the wind was blowing. By early 1993, all of Rwanda’s newborn opposition parties had split into two factions—Power and anti-Power—and Mbonampeka went with Power. Before long, he could be heard on Radio Rwanda, warning the RPF: “Stop fighting this war if you do not want your supporters living inside Rwanda to be exterminated.”

In the summer of 1995, I found Mbonampeka living in a drab little room at the Protestant Guest House in Goma, Zaire, about a mile from the Rwandan border. “In a war,” he told me, “you can’t be neutral. If you’re not for your country, are you not for its attackers?” Mbonampeka was a large man with a calm and steady demeanor. He wore gold wire-rimmed spectacles, neatly pressed trousers, and a pink-and-white-striped shirt, and he had the absurd title of Minister of Justice in the Rwandan government in exile—a self-appointed body culled largely from officers of the regime that had presided over the genocide. Mbonampeka was not in that government in 1994, but he had operated informally as its agent, pleading the Hutu Power cause both at home and in Europe, and he regarded this as a normal career development.

“I said Mugesera must be arrested because he sets people against each other, which is illegal, and I also said that if the RPF continued to fight we must have civil defense,” Mbonampeka told me. “These positions are consistent. In both cases I was for the defense of my country.” And he added, “Personally, I don’t believe in the genocide. This was not a conventional war. The enemies were everywhere. The Tutsis were not killed as Tutsis, only as sympathizers of the RPF.”

I wondered if it had been difficult to distinguish the Tutsis with RPF sympathies from the rest. Mbonampeka said it wasn’t. “There was no difference between the ethnic and the political,” he told me. “Ninety-nine percent of Tutsis were pro-RPF.”

Even senile grandmothers and infants? Even the fetuses ripped from the wombs of Tutsis, after radio announcers had reminded listeners to take special care to disembowel pregnant victims?

“Think about it,” Mbonampeka said. “Let’s say the Germans attack France, so France defends itself against Germany. They understand that all Germans are the enemy. The Germans kill women and children, so you do, too.”

By regarding the genocide, even as he denied its existence, as an extension of the war between the RPF and the Habyarimana regime, Mbonampeka seemed to be arguing that the systematic state-sponsored extermination of an entire people is a provokable crime—the fault of the victims as well as the perpetrators. But although the genocide coincided with the war, its organization and implementation were quite distinct from the war effort. In fact, the mobilization for the final extermination campaign swung into full gear only when Hutu Power was confronted by the threat of peace.

ON AUGUST 4, 1993, at a conference center in Arusha, Tanzania, President Habyarimana signed a peace agreement with the RPF, officially bringing the war to an end. The so-called Arusha Accords ensured a right of return for Rwanda’s refugee diaspora, promised the integration of the two warring armies into a single national defense force, and established a blueprint for a Broad-Based Transitional Government, composed of representatives of all the national political parties, including the RPF. Habyarimana would remain President, pending elections, but his powers would be basically ceremonial. And, crucially, throughout the peace-implementation period a United Nations peacekeeping force would be deployed in Rwanda.

The RPF had never really expected to win its war on the battlefield; its objective had been to force a political settlement, and at Arusha it appeared to have done that. “You use war when there is no other means, and Arusha opened a means to come and struggle politically,” Tito Ruteremara, one of the RPF leaders who negotiated the Accords, told me. “With Arusha we could go inside Rwanda, and if we had good ideas and a very nice organization, we’d make it. If we failed, it meant that our ideas were no good. The struggle wasn’t ethnic, it was political, and Habyarimana feared us because we were strong. He had never wanted peace, because he saw that we could be politically successful.”

For Habyarimana, it was true that the Arusha Accords amounted to a political suicide note. Hutu Power leaders cried treason, and charged that the President himself had become an “accomplice.” Four days after the signing at Arusha, Radio Television Libres des Milles Collines, a new radio station funded by members and friends of the
akazu,
and devoted to genocidal propaganda, began broadcasting from Kigali. RTLM was a
Kangura
of the airwaves; its reach was virtually ubiquitous in radio-saturated Rwanda, and it became wildly popular with its mixture of rousing oratory and songs by such Hutu Power pop stars as Simon Bikindi, whose most famous number was probably “I Hate These Hutus”—a song of “good neighborliness”:

I hate these Hutus, these arrogant Hutus, braggarts, who scorn other Hutus, dear comrades …

I hate these Hutus, these de-Hutuized Hutus, who have disowned their identity, dear comrades.

I hate these Hutus, these Hutus who march blindly, like imbeciles,

this species of naive Hutus who are manipulated, and who tear themselves up, joining in a war whose cause they ignore.

I detest these Hutus who are brought to kill,

to kill, I swear to you,

and who kill the Hutus, dear comrades.

If I hate them, so much the better …

And so on; it is a very long song.

“Anyone who thinks that the war is over as a result of the Arusha Accords is deceiving himself,” Hassan Ngeze warned in
Kangura
, in January of 1994. Ngeze had railed against Arusha as a sellout from the start, and with the arrival of the blue-helmeted soldiers of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda at the end of 1993, he had a new target. UNAMIR, Ngeze proclaimed, was nothing but a tool “to help the RPF take power by force.” But, he reminded his readers, the record showed that such peacekeepers were generally cowardly, inclined to “watching as spectators” when violence broke out. He predicted that there would be plenty to watch, and he explicitly warned UNAMIR to stay out of the way. “If the RPF has decided to kill us, then let’s kill each other,” he urged. “Let whatever is smoldering erupt … . At such a time, a lot of blood will be spilled.”

8

IN 1991, ODETTE had left her job at the hospital to serve as the doctor for the United States Peace Corps mission in Kigali. Two years later, when Washington suspended the program in Rwanda, Odette put her kids in school in Nairobi, and took a series of short-term Peace Corps postings—in Gabon, Kenya, and Burundi. She liked being in Burundi, because it was easy to get home to see her family, and because Burundi appeared, at last, to have become a country where Hutus and Tutsis were committed to sharing power peacefully. In August of 1993, after nearly thirty years of brutal Tutsi dictatorship, a Hutu was sworn in as Burundi’s first popularly elected president. The transfer of power was smoothly accomplished, and Burundi was celebrated at home and abroad as a beacon of hope for Africa. Then, in November, four months after the new President took office, some Tutsi military men assassinated him. The President’s death triggered a Hutu uprising and a violent crackdown by the Tutsi army that eventually left at least fifty thousand people dead. The violence in Burundi provided great grist for the mills of Rwanda’s Hutu Power purveyors of fear, who trumpeted the news as proof of Tutsi treachery, but it left Odette without a job.