We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (22 page)

First the genocide, and now this, I thought: Hutus kill Tutsis, then Tutsis kill Hutus—if that’s really all there is to it, then no wonder we can’t be bothered with it. Was it really so mindless and simple?

The piled-up dead of political violence are a generic staple of our information diet these days, and according to the generic report all massacres are created equal: the dead are innocent, the killers monstrous, the surrounding politics insane or nonexistent. Except for the names and the landscape, it reads like the same story from anywhere in the world: a tribe in power slaughters a disempowered tribe, another cycle in those ancient hatreds, the more things change the more they stay the same. As in accounts of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, we are told that experts knew the fault line was there, the pressure was building, and we are urged to be excited—by fear, distress, compassion, outrage, even simple morbid fascination—and perhaps to send a handout for the survivors. The generic massacre story speaks of “endemic” or “epidemic” violence and of places where people kill “each other,” and the ubiquity of the blight seems to cancel out any appeal to think about the single instance. These stories flash up from the void and, just as abruptly, return there. The anonymous dead and their anonymous killers become their own context. The horror becomes absurd.

I wanted to know more. The killings at the Kibeho camp offered a preview of one way that the UN border camps—particularly the heavily militarized Hutu Power enclaves in Zaire—might eventually be disbanded. Those camps were themselves havens for war criminals and champions of atrocity, and their very existence placed everyone in and around them in mortal danger. Nobody had any idea how to close them peacefully; in fact, nobody really seemed to believe that was possible. The story of Rwanda had been bothering my mind, and I wanted to explore how the killings at the Kibeho camp related and compared to the genocide that preceded them. According to the human rights orthodoxy of our age, such comparisons are taboo. In the words of Amnesty International: “Whatever the scale of atrocities committed by one side, they can never justify similar atrocities by the other.” But what does the word “similar” mean in the context of a genocide? An atrocity is an atrocity and is by definition unjustifiable, isn’t it? The more useful question is whether atrocity is the whole story.

Consider General Sherman’s march through Georgia at the head of the Union Army near the end of the American Civil War, a scorched-earth campaign of murder, rape, arson, and pillage that stands as a textbook case of gross human rights abuses. Historians don’t seem to believe that the atrocities of Sherman’s march fulfilled any otherwise unfulfillable strategic imperative. Yet it’s generally agreed that the preservation of the Union and the consequent abolition of slavery served the national good, so historians regard Sherman’s march as an episode of criminal excess by agents of the state rather than as evidence of the fundamental criminality of the state.

Similarly, in France, during the months immediately following World War II, between ten and fifteen thousand people were killed as fascist collaborators in a nationwide spasm of vigilante justice. Although nobody looks back on those purges as a moment of pride, no national leader has ever publicly regretted them. France, which considers itself the birthplace of human rights, had a venerable legal system, with plenty of policemen, lawyers, and judges. But France had been through a hellish ordeal, and the swift killing of collaborators was widely held to be purifying to the national soul.

The fact that most states are born of violent upheaval does not, of course, mean that disorder leads to order. In writing the history of events that are still unfolding in a state that is still unformed, it is impossible to know which tendencies will prevail and at what price. The safest position is the human rights position, which measures regimes on a strictly negative scale as the sum of their crimes and their abuses: if you damn all offenders and some later mend their ways, you can always take credit for your good influence. Unfortunately, the safest position may not necessarily be the wisest, and I wondered whether there is room—even a need—for exercising political judgment in such matters.

THE CAMP AT Kibeho had been one of dozens of camps for “internally displaced persons”—IDPs—established in the
Zone Turquoise.
When the French withdrew in late August of 1994, the camps held at least four hundred thousand people, and they were placed under the supervision of the refurbished UNAMIR and an assortment of UN and private international humanitarian agencies. The new government had wanted the camps closed immediately. Rwanda, the government claimed, was safe enough for everyone to go home, and significant concentrations of Hutu Power military and militia members among the IDPs made the camps themselves a major threat to the national security. The relief agencies agreed in principle, but insisted that departure from the camps should be entirely voluntary.

The IDPs, however, were not eager to leave the camps, where they were well fed, and provided with good medical care by the relief agencies, and where rumors that the RPF was exterminating Hutus en masse were being circulated by the
génocidaires,
who maintained a powerful influence over the population. As in the border camps,
interahamwe
agents didn’t hesitate to threaten and attack those who wished to leave Kibeho, fearing that a mass desertion of the civilian population would leave them isolated and exposed. The
génocidaires
also made frequent sorties out of the camps to terrorize and steal from the surrounding communities, attacking Tutsi genocide survivors and Hutus whom they suspected might bear witness against them. Kibeho was the epicenter of such activity. According to Mark Frohardt, who worked with the UN’s Rwanda Emergency Office and later served as deputy chief of the UN’s Human Rights mission in Rwanda, UNAMIR “determined that a disproportionately high percentage of the murders that were taking place in Rwanda, in late November and early December of 1994, had occurred within a twenty-kilometer radius of Kibeho.”

That December, UNAMIR and the RPA ran their only joint operation ever, a one-day sweep of Kibeho in which about fifty “hard-core elements”—that is,
génocidaires
—were arrested and some weapons were confiscated. Shortly afterward, the RPA began closing the smaller camps. The preferred strategy was one of nonviolent coercion: people were evicted from their shanties, then the shanties were torched. The IDPs got the message, and relief agencies, too, went along with the program, helping to move more than a hundred thousand people home. Follow-up studies by international relief workers, and UN human rights monitors, found that at least ninety-five percent of these IDPs resettled peacefully in their homes. At the same time, many
génocidaires
fled to other camps, especially to Kibeho, while some IDPs who returned to their villages were arrested on accusations of genocide, and some were alleged to have been killed in acts of revenge or banditry.

By early 1995, a quarter of a million IDPs remained in the camps, of which Kibeho was the largest and home to the largest collection of hard-core
génocidaires.
The UN and relief agencies, fearing the consequences of coercive closings, offered to come up with an alternative course of action. The government waited. Months went by; but the humanitarians could not agree on a coherent closing plan. In late March, the government announced that time was running out, and in mid-April the RPA was redeployed to do the job: camp by camp, the army sent at least two hundred thousand Hutus home in an orderly fashion.

Kibeho was left for last. Before dawn on April 18, the RPA ringed the camp, which still held at least eighty thousand men, women, and children. Alarmed by the soldiers, and worked into a panic by the resident Hutu Power operatives, the IDPs rushed pell-mell up the hill and gathered in a tight knot around the heavily sandbagged and razor wire-fortified headquarters of Zambatt—UNAMIR’s Zambian contingent. In this stampede, at least eleven children were crushed to death, and hundreds of people were severely burned by overturned cooking pots or badly cut up as they were forced against the UN razor wire.

The RPA tightened its cordon around the throng, and over the next two days, several gates were established around the perimeter. Relief agencies set up registration tables, and about five thousand people from the camp were searched and transported to their homes. But the gates were too few, the registration process was slow, there weren’t enough trucks to speed it up, the
génocidaires
among the IDPs were putting pressure on the rest not to cooperate, and some foreign relief workers were also advising camp residents to resist evacuation. Little food or water remained in the camp. Most people could barely move; they stood in their own urine and feces. On April 19, some IDPs hurled rocks at the RPA, and some reportedly attempted to grab RPA weapons. Soldiers opened fire, killing several dozen people. In the course of the day members of the Australian medical battalion of UNAMIR, Ausmed, began arriving at the camp to reinforce the Zambians.

Toward evening on April 20, a hard rain began to fall. That night, in the packed camp, some people began hacking at those around them with machetes. There was also sporadic shooting by RPA soldiers and by armed elements within the camp. By morning, at least twenty-one people had been killed, primarily by gunfire, and many more were wounded, primarily by machetes. Children kept getting trampled to death. The RPA kept tightening its cordon. Throughout the next day, people continued to file through the registration points and to leave the camp, mostly on foot, because the rain had made the roads largely impassable. The RPA restricted IDPs’ access to medical and water supplies and periodically fired into the air to drive the crowd toward the registration points. Acts of violence continued within the camp. “At the Zambian company,” an Ausmed officer later recalled, “a group kept running for shelter and hiding in the compound. We helped the Zambians push them back past the wire.”

Late in the morning of April 22, the wet and tormented mass of IDPs at Kibeho once again surged and stampeded against the RPA lines, breaching the cordon at the downhill end of the camp. A stream of IDPs ran through the opening, heading across the valley to the facing hills. RPA troops opened fire, shooting nonstop and indiscriminately into the crowd, and scores of soldiers set out in pursuit of those who had fled, shooting and lobbing grenades at them. The RPA barrage continued for hours; in addition to machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and at least one mortar were fired into the camp.

Barred by their mandate from using force except in self-defense, the UNAMIR peacekeepers in the Zambatt compound took up weapons only to fend off invasion by the crush of IDPs. Many later recalled weeping in distress and confusion as death and mutilation surrounded them. In typical testimony, a member of Ausmed described seeing “through a window a man attacking a woman with a machete,” then IDPs “throwing bricks, etc., at us,” then RPA soldiers firing rifles and tossing grenades at IDPs, then an IDP shooting at the peacekeepers, then “four RPA chase a young girl behind the Casualty Collection Point and shoot her eighteen times,” then a “vehicle-mounted machine gun … mowing down a large crowd of IDPs in long bursts,” then “RPA kill two old women … kick them downhill.”

Another Ausmed man recalled watching RPA soldiers murdering women and children, and said, “They seemed to be enjoying it.” And yet another Ausmed testimony described a couple of RPA soldiers firing into the crowd: “They were jumping around laughing and carrying on. It was like they were in a frenzy.” The same man also said, “It was pretty horrific to see at least four RPA stand around one IDP and empty a magazine each into him. Some of the IDPs stopped, so the RPA threw rocks at them to make them run again so they could shoot at them again. These IDPs were unarmed and frightened.”

By four o’clock that afternoon, when Mark Cuthbert-Brown, a British major who was serving as provost marshal of UNAMIR, arrived at Kibeho by helicopter, the shooting had tapered off to a sporadic background popping and small bursts of automatic fire. From the air, Cuthbert-Brown had seen long files of thousands of IDPs being searched and registered at RPA checkpoints and heading down the road, away from Kibeho. The Australians, the Zambians, and relief workers had been able to go out and begin collecting the dead and wounded, although their access was often blocked by RPA men. Then, after an hour in the camp, Major Cuthbert-Brown heard “a sudden rise in the tempo of firing.” Once again, the IDPs had broken through the RPA cordon and spilled down the hill, and the eariler scenes of atrocity repeated themselves for several hours. Crouched behind sandbags with binoculars, Cuthbert-Brown watched RPA soldiers hunt the IDPs down the valley and across the far hills, while other RPA soldiers continued to process thousands of IDPs for departure.

Shortly after nightfall, the second wave of intensive shooting abated. Cuthbert-Brown took notes:

20:10 HRS. Become aware of a background wailing from the area of the compound to the west (but this may have built up gradually over a period of time).

21:00 HRS. Wailing continues but there is a letup in firing and grenade explosions.

21:20 HRS. A few grenade explosions heard near the Zambatt HQ.

21:30 HRS. Sporadic single shots in the same area.

21:33 HRS. Six rounds fired by the camp wall.

21:55 HRS. Hysterical screaming rises above the background wailing; Zambian officers speculate that it is related to a machete fight in the compound. Shortly gives way to normal level of wailing; it remains throughout the night.

An Ausmed man said, “We finished up that day disgusted with the RPA and why the UN didn’t send more people in than just a company of Zambians and approximately twenty-five Australians.”