We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (30 page)

The government attributed the judicial paralysis to its lack of financial and human resources. Police inspectors, responsible for assembling the dossiers against the accused, were constantly being recruited and trained, but even then most were amateurs who found themselves with hundreds of complex cases, no transportation, no support staff, and quite often threats coming at them from both accusers and accused. Rwanda pleaded for bicycles, motorcycles, and pencils and pens from foreign donors, but these basic necessities were much slower in coming than expressions of “concern” that not enough was being done to protect the rights of the accused.

NOBODY EVER TALKED seriously about conducting tens of thousands of murder trials in Rwanda. Western legal experts liked to say that even the lawyer-crowded United States could not have handled Rwanda’s caseload fairly and expeditiously. “It’s materially impossible to judge all those who participated in the massacres, and politically it’s no good, even though it’s just,” the RPF’s Tito Ruteremara told me. “This was a true genocide, and the only correct response is true justice. But Rwanda has the death penalty, and—well, that would mean a lot more killing.”

In other words, a true genocide and true justice are incompatible. Rwanda’s new leaders were trying to see their way around this problem by describing the genocide as a crime committed by masterminds and slave bodies. Neither party could be regarded as innocent, but if the crime was political, and justice was to serve the political good, then the punishment had to draw a line between the criminal minds and the criminal bodies. “With those who masterminded the genocide, it’s clear-cut,” General Kagame told me. “They must face justice directly. I’m not as worried about these ordinary peasants who took machetes and cut people in pieces like animals.” He explained that “long ago” Rwandan justice was conducted in village hearings, where fines were the preferred penalties. “The guy who did the crime can give some salt or something, and that can bring the people back together,” Kagame said.

Salt for state-sponsored mass murder? Village justice, as Kagame sketched it, sounded hopelessly inadequate. But as the lawyer François Xavier Nkurunziza explained: “When you speak of justice with our peasants, the big idea is compensation. A cattle keeper or cultivator who loses his whole family has lost his whole economic support system. You can kill the man who committed genocide, but that’s not compensation—that’s only fear and anger. This is how our peasants think.” The problem, as Kagame suggested when he spoke of salt, was that after genocide compensation could, at best, be symbolic.

The government discussed easing the burden on the courts by ranking degrees of criminality among the
génocidaires,
and assigning lesser offenders to public works or reeducation programs. Politically, the RPF was more concerned with what in postwar Germany was called “denazification” than with holding every individual who had committed a crime during the genocide to account. “Actually, we’re trying to see how to get as many ordinary people off the hook as possible,” Gerald Gahima, an RPF political officer who was the Deputy Minister of Justice, explained. “But that’s not justice, is it? It’s not the justice the law provides for. It’s not the justice most people would want. It’s only the best justice we can try for under the circumstances.”

But if the guilty could never be fully punished and survivors could never be properly compensated, the RPF regarded forgiveness as equally impossible—unless, at the very least, the perpetrators of the genocide acknowledged that they had done wrong. With time, the quest for justice became, in large measure, a quest for repentance. Where ministers and parliamentarians had once preached the civic virtue of murdering one’s neighbors, members of the new government now traveled the countryside to spread the gospel of reconciliation through accountability.

Mass reburial ceremonies for genocide victims were a favorite forum for the new message. I attended such a reburial in the summer of 1995, on a hilltop amid the lush, mist-strewn tea plantations of Gisenyi. In this setting of astonishing tranquillity, the newly grown grass was pulled back to disclose a mass grave. The broken bodies within it were exhumed and laid out on a long rack. On the orders of village leaders, the local peasantry had come to see, and to smell the death smell, and President Bizimungu came with a half dozen cabinet ministers and many other officials. Soldiers distributed translucent plastic gloves among the villagers, and put them to work, placing pieces of the corpses in coffins and wrapping the rest in green plastic sheets. There were speeches and benedictions. A soldier explained to me that the President had used his speech to ask the peasantry where they had been when these dead were killed in their community, and exhorted them to make atonement. Then the dead were placed in new mass graves, and covered up again with earth.

WHEN RWANDANS SPOKE of reconstruction and reconciliation, they spoke of the need to overcome or to liberate themselves from “the old mentalities” of colonialism and dictatorship, and from the perfect pecking order of intimidation and obedience that had served as the engine of the genocide. The systems by which the old mentalities had been implanted had names—impunity, cronyism, ethnicity, feudalism, Hamitism—but the mentalities themselves lay deeper within each Rwandan, internalized in the reflexive habits of a lifetime’s experiences and expectations of brutality: us or them; kill or be killed. When Kagame said that people can be made bad, and can be taught to be good, he added, “There are mechanisms within society—education, a form of participation. Something can be achieved.” This view was widely shared, with varying degrees of certainty and skepticism, not only within the RPF but among many of the surviving anti-Habyarimana Hutu leaders, and—on a good day, at least—by much of the Rwandan public.

But where was Rwanda to turn for a model? The justice at Nuremberg was helpfully brought by foreign conquerors, and denazification in Germany was carried out in a context where the group that had been subjected to genocide would no longer be living side by side with the killers. In South Africa, armed struggle had ended, and the post-apartheid Truth Commission could presume that the country’s defeated white masters had accepted the legitimacy of the new order. Rwanda offered no such tidy arrangement. Guerrilla attacks from Hutu Power forces in Zaire escalated steadily throughout 1995, as did attacks on witnesses and survivors of the genocide. “Right now, if you were to give a general amnesty you would be inviting chaos,” said Charles Murigande, chairman of Rwanda’s Presidential Commission on Accountability for the Genocide. “But if we could put our hands on the leaders, even an amnesty would be very well received.”

That was a very big “if.” Just as Habyarimana’s death had made him a martyr for Hutu Power, it also ensured that the killing which was purportedly carried out in “defense” of his name had never carried a signal signature: a Hitler, a Pol Pot, a Stalin. The list of Rwanda’s “Most Wanted” was a hodgepodge of
akazu
members, military officers, journalists, politicians, businessmen, mayors, civil service functionaries, clerics, schoolteachers, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, and untitled hatchet men—dizzying to keep track of and impossible to rank in a precise hierarchy of command. Some were said to have given orders, loudly or quietly, and others to have transmitted or followed orders, but the plan and its execution had been ingeniously designed to look planless.

Still, Rwandan investigators were able to draw up a list of some four hundred top
génocidaires
—masterminds and master implementers. But all of them were in exile, beyond Rwanda’s reach. Almost immediately after its installation in 1994, the new government had appealed to the United Nations for help in apprehending fugitive Hutu Power leaders, so that they might stand trial before the nation. Instead, the UN created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which was essentially a subset of the tribunal that had been established for the ugly Balkan war of the early 1990s. “We asked for help to catch these people who ran away and to try them properly in our own courts,” a Rwandan diplomat told me. “But the Security Council just started writing ‘Rwanda’ under the name ‘Yugoslavia’ everywhere.”

The Rwandan government regarded the UN’s decision to keep its resources to itself as an insult. The very existence of the UN court implied that the Rwandan judiciary was incapable of reaching just verdicts, and seemed to dismiss in advance any trials that Rwanda might hold as beneath international standards. “If the international community really wants to fight impunity in Rwanda, they should help Rwanda to punish these people,” Gerald Gahima told me at the Ministry of Justice. “It makes it harder to forgive the ordinary people if we don’t have the leaders here to be tried in Rwandan courts before the Rwandan people according to Rwandan law.” But the UN tribunal would not even sit in Rwanda, where the witnesses and concerned audience were; instead it was headquartered on “neutral territory,” in Arusha, Tanzania. “The tribunal,” Charles Murigande said, “was created essentially to appease the conscience of the international community, which has failed to live up to its conventions on genocide. It wants to look as if it is doing something, which is often worse than doing nothing at all.”

In fact, during its first two years, the UN tribunal didn’t appear to be doing much. It was understaffed and systematically mismanaged, and its prosecutorial strategy appeared directionless and opportunistic. Most of its indictments followed the chance arrest on immigration charges of Rwandan fugitives in various African countries, and in some high-profile cases, like that of Colonel Bagasora, who was captured in Cameroon, the UN fought a Rwandan extradition request to advance its own. In this way, the tribunal ultimately wound up with an impressive sampler of Hutu Power masterminds in its custody. But it quickly became clear that the prosecutors had no intention of trying more than a few dozen cases. This only served to aggravate the feeling in Kigali that the UN court was not designed to serve Rwanda’s national interest, since the message to the vast majority of fugitive
génocidaires
was that they had nothing to fear: the international community would not help Rwanda get them, nor would it pursue them itself. “It’s a joke,” Kagame’s adviser, Claude Dusaidi, said to me. “This tribunal is now acting as a spoiler.”

The largest concentrations of Rwanda’s most-wanted were settled in Zaire and Kenya—states whose notoriously corrupt Presidents, Mobutu Sese Seko and Daniel arap Moi, had been intimates of Habyarimana and had taken to hosting his widow, Madame Agathe, at their palaces. Mobutu had called Habyarimana his “little brother,” and the slain Rwandan’s remains, which had been spirited across the border amid the mass flight to Goma, were entombed in a mausoleum on the grounds of Mobutu’s primary estate. When I asked Honoré Rakotomanana, a Madagascan who headed the UN’s prosecution team in Rwanda, how he expected to indict anybody from Zaire or Kenya, he said, “There are international treaties to which those countries are signatories.” But in nearly two years, before he was sacked in 1997, Rakotomanana never bothered to send a single investigator to Zaire. Meanwhile, in October 1995, Kenya’s President Moi assailed the tribunal as a “haphazard process,” and announced, “I shall not allow any one of them to enter Kenya to serve summonses and look for people here. No way. If any such characters come here, they will be arrested. We must respect ourselves. We must not be harassed.”

Watching the old-boy network of African strongmen protect its own, Kagame spoke of “a feeling of betrayal, even by our African brothers,” and he added, ominously, “We shall remind them that what happened here can happen elsewhere—it can happen in these other countries—and then I am sure they will run to us. It can happen tomorrow. Things have happened, and they can happen again.”

Even when genocidal leaders were eventually turned over to the tribunal, the problem remained that the UN had forbidden the court to recommend a death penalty. The Nazis at Nuremberg and the Japanese war criminals in Tokyo had faced the death penalty after World War II. Were the crimes committed against humanity in Rwanda lesser offenses than those which prompted the Genocide Convention to be written? According to Kagame, when Rwanda protested that the tribunal should carry the death penalty out of respect for Rwanda’s laws, the UN advised Rwanda to abolish
its
death penalty. Kagame called this advice “cynical.”

“The Rwandan people know this is the same international community that stood by and watched them get killed,” Gerald Gahima said. And his RPF colleague Tito Ruteremara, noting that Rwandans convicted by the tribunal were expected to serve their sentences in Scandinavia, told me, “It doesn’t fit our definition of justice to think of the authors of the Rwandan genocide sitting in a full-service Swedish prison with a television.” As it turned out, even those Hutu Power leaders who wound up in custody at Arusha found the croissants they were regularly served for breakfast a bit rich. After a while, the tribunal prisoners mounted a protest to demand a normal Rwandan breakfast of gruel.

17

“IN YOUR COUNTRY,” the RPA colonel said, “I think you have many comedians.” We were sitting on his porch, in the cool, drizzling night of the central Rwandan highlands, drinking beer and whiskey and eating boiled potatoes and brochettes of grilled goat. The colonel dragged a chunk of meat off his skewer with his teeth. He chewed on it for a while, then he said, “In my understanding, many of these comedians in America are black. Why do you think that is?”

I suggested that it might have to do with adversity. People who feel up against it sometimes develop a canny take on how the world works—the rawness of it, the absurdities—and sometimes, if they’re funny, they make fun of it.

“Those black guys
are
funny,” the colonel said.

I said, “The funny ones are.”

He coughed out a one-syllable chuckle and the other guys on the porch, his associates, followed him with some laughter. After a while, the colonel said, “No comedians in Rwanda. Plenty of black people, plenty of adversity—no comedians.”