We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (33 page)

The profits from refugee commerce went in many directions, but large slices went straight through the political rackets into the purchase of arms and munitions. Richard McCall, chief of staff of the United States Agency for International Development, described Zaire as “an unfettered corridor for arms shipment” to the
génocidaires.
The UNHCR, more cautiously, made similar statements, but that never stopped it from asking for more money to keep the camps going.

Officially, the UNHCR’s policy in the border camps was to promote “voluntary repatriation.” At first, this was done by having people sign up a day or two in advance for buses that would take them back to Rwanda. When a number of the people who did that got beaten or killed before their departure date, it was decided simply to station idling buses in the camps every morning, and let those who wanted make a run for them. Not surprisingly, that program, too, was soon judged a failure. “What is voluntary?” General Kagame once asked me. “It normally means that somebody has to think and make a decision. I don’t think that even staying in the camps is a voluntary decision for the innocent people. I believe there is some influence. So how can we speak of them leaving voluntarily?”

In fact, influence against returning to Rwanda often came from within the very humanitarian community that was ostensibly promoting repatriation. “It’s not safe for them to go home,” I was told by one aid worker after another. “They could get arrested.” But what if they deserved to be arrested? “We can’t judge that,” I was told, and then, to finish the discussion, it was usually said, “Anyway, the government in Kigali doesn’t genuinely want them back.” Of course, very few of the people working in the camps had ever spent any time in Rwanda; their organizations did not encourage it. So, with time, there developed among them an epidemic of what diplomats call clientitis: an overly credulous embrace of your clients’ point of view. As soon as I crossed back over the border to Rwanda, I felt that I’d passed through a looking glass. At UNHCR Goma, I would be told that Rwanda was determined to prevent repatriation and that returnees were frequently harassed just to ensure that the rest of the refugees stayed away. But at UNHCR Kigali, I would be regaled with statistics and arguments demonstrating not only that Rwanda wanted the refugees home but that those who had come back were received with all due propriety.

In June of 1995, Zaire’s Prime Minister, Kengo Wa Dondo, visited Goma, and delivered a speech in which he said that if the international community wouldn’t shut down the camps, Zaire would be obliged to send the Rwandans home. That August, Zairean soldiers did move on the camps, and in traditionally roughshod manner—lots of shakedowns, and torched huts—they hustled about fifteen thousand Rwandans across the border in less than a week. That was more than the UNHCR had accomplished in the preceding six months. But the UNHCR opposed forced repatriation—unless, as Gerald Gahima at Rwanda’s Justice Ministry reminded me, you happened to be a Vietnamese boat person in Hong Kong. The UN refugee commissioner herself, Sadako Ogata, persuaded President Mobutu to call off his boys—it was widely rumored that he was paid cash—and the repatriation “deadlock” that she often decried to the Security Council promptly resumed.

Press coverage of the Zairean action stressed the numerous violations of international humanitarian law that the refugees—mostly older people, women, and children, who were unable to run away—had suffered. There were almost no follow-up stories from the Rwandan side of the border, and events there
were
rather dull: the refugees were smoothly resettled in their communities, arrest rates were below average, and the Kigali office of the UNHCR, impressed by the government’s handling of the matter, proclaimed it an auspicious demonstration of Rwanda’s sincerity in calling its people home.

“THERE’S NO WAY you can stop the international community from coming, given a situation like a genocide,” General Kagame once said to me. “But they may provide the wrong remedies to our problems. On the one hand, they admit that a genocide took place in Rwanda, but they don’t seem to understand that someone was responsible for it, that someone planned and executed it. That’s why we get confused when there are insinuations that we should negotiate. When you ask, ‘With whom?’ they cannot tell you. They can’t quite bring themselves to say that we should negotiate with the people who committed genocide. Of course, in the long run they create a bigger problem, because the genocide can be made to seem less and less visible as a very big crime that people should be hunted for and prosecuted.” What’s more, Kagame said, “there are some directly innocent people in those camps, and this has been a very bad situation for them. At least here in Rwanda, although some incidents may take place, there is some level of sanity. It may not be pleasant, it may not be the best, but it is the best in these circumstances.”

I told him I kept meeting Rwandans who said that Rwandans never tell the truth, that Rwanda has a culture of dishonesty, that to understand Rwanda one has to get inside that realm of mystification. I wondered what he thought.

“Maybe even those who’re saying that are not speaking the truth,” he said, and let out an unusually hearty laugh. Then he said, “I don’t think it’s our culture, especially since I don’t see a lot of honesty in politics in many other countries. But in some other countries, when you try to tell lies you are exposed by strong institutions that work to know what exactly has been happening.” He fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “Personally, I have no problem with telling the truth, and I’m Rwandan, so why don’t people also take me as an example of a Rwandan? People have even told me that perhaps, in politics, sometimes there are certain things you don’t say that I have been saying publicly. The more they tell me that, the more I get convinced I am right.”

In Kagame’s view, lying was not a Rwandan trait but a political tactic, and he thought it a weak one. That didn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep secrets; but secrets, even if they involve deception, aren’t necessarily lies—just truths you don’t tell. In a world where politicians were presumed to be liars, Kagame had found that one could often gain a surprise advantage by not being false. “Sometimes,” he said, “you tell the truth because that is the best way out.”

If there is one thing sure in this world, it is certainly this: that it will not happen to us a second time.

—PRIMO LEVI, 1958
Survival in Auschwitz

It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.

—PRIMO LEVI, 1986
The Drowned and the Saved

18

IN THE FOOTHILLS of the Virunga volcanoes, in the Masisi zone of North Kivu, Zaire, on a rise overlooking a lakeside peasant village called Mokoto, there stood the ruin of a monastery which might have been taken for a relic of medieval Europe. But this ruin was new. Until early May of 1996, Mokoto operated very much like an ancient cathedral town. While the villagers lived below, in huts made mostly of mud brick and thatch, Trappist monks on the hill lived in an imposing compound of masonry and fine woodwork, with a large church, a library, a hostel for visitors, a dairy with nearly a thousand cows, a motor-vehicle repair shop, and an electrical plant powered by a waterwheel. The monastery was the chief provider of social services to Mokoto and neighboring villages; the monks ran six schools and a dispensary, and they had designed a waterworks for the villagers, who had previously spent much of their time carrying buckets. In January and February of 1996, when hundreds of people began showing up at the monastery, seeking sanctuary from bands of attackers who had chased them from their homes, Father Dhelo, the Zairean superior at Mokoto, did not hesitate to take them in.

Father Dhelo knew that the displaced people were Tutsis fleeing the attacks of Hutus led by the ex-FAR and
interahamwe
from the UN camps in Goma, which lay about thirty rugged miles southeast of Mokoto. Since early 1996, as some Western governments began to tire of paying for the camps, rumors had proliferated about aid being shut down or the camps being forced to close, and the resident
génocidaires
and their Zairean Hutu allies had intensified and expanded their war in North Kivu. The effort now appeared to be to “ethnically cleanse” the mountainous agricultural heartland of North Kivu, with the objective of creating a more permanent Hutu Power base, which was already being informally referred to throughout the region as Hutuland.

Father Dhelo knew all this, and he knew that in 1994 the
génocidaires
had not hesitated to violate the sanctuary of churches in Rwanda. But when local Hutu leaders threatened to kill him for giving sanctuary to the displaced Tutsis at Mokoto, he refused to be intimidated. “I said to them that if they thought my death could solve the problem and I would die alone, I would be content to die,” Father Dhelo told me. “After that, they didn’t come for me.” Then, in early May, Father Dhelo went away on business.

Close to a thousand Tutsis were camped around the monastery at the time. According to Father Victor Bourdeau, a French monk who had lived at Mokoto for seventeen years, a Hutu mob assembled around the camp on the evening of Wednesday, May 8. Shots were fired in the air, and hundreds of Tutsis took refuge inside the church. On Friday, the monastery received warning that a major attack was planned. There was no safe way to move the Tutsis out, but most of the monks were evacuated; Father Victor was one of six who stayed until Sunday, May 12. That morning, Hutu fighters forced their way into the church, dragged some Tutsis outside, and executed them with machetes. “There was nothing to be done,” Father Victor said. He and his fellow monks fled on a tractor.

When I met the Mokoto monks nine days later, they were displaced people themselves, living in temporary quarters in Goma. Father Victor, a tall, slender man with the anxious look of an ascetic, sat in his khaki cassock on a cot in a small stuffy room. “Everybody in the village was an accomplice, by silence or by looting, and it is impossible to divide the responsibility,” he said. “It’s like in Rwanda—one can’t say all of them are guilty, but to sort it out is impossible.” Father Victor had been in Kigali on April 7, 1994, the day after Habyarimana’s assassination, and he told me, “It was exactly the same scenario.”

MOKOTO’S ISOLATION WAS such that it took three days for news of the monastery massacre to reach Kigali, where I was staying at the time. The story fit the pattern of recent events. In the preceding month and a half, at least ten thousand Tutsis had been chased out of North Kivu and forced to take refuge in Rwanda. The Rwandan government had accused Zaire of complicity in their expulsion, since its troops had often trucked Tutsis to the border, then confiscated or ripped up their Zairean citizenship papers. Zairean officials responded by invoking a much disputed and never enforced nationality law, passed in 1981 in violation of Zaire’s own constitution and a host of international legal conventions, that stripped Zaireans of Rwandan ancestry of their citizenship, rendering them stateless. “These refugees from North Kivu are Zaireans,” General Kagame’s adviser, Claude Dusaidi, told me. “We ask for our citizens to return from the camps, and they send us theirs. They must take them back and give us ours.”

As reports of the Mokoto massacre began to circulate in Kigali, similar expressions of outrage greeted me at every Rwandan government office I visited. If Zaire had it in for ancestral Rwandans, I was asked, why were Zairean Tutsis being singled out while Zairean and Rwandan Hutus killed them with impunity? “It’s really a genocide going on again,” Dusaidi said, “but supported by Zaire against its own citizens.” I was repeatedly reminded that Zaire’s President, Mobutu Sese Seko, had backed Habyarimana’s fight against the RPF, facilitated arms shipments to Rwanda during the genocide, provided bases for the French forces of
Opération Turquoise,
and abetted the resurgent Hutu Power forces in the border camps. A UN investigative team had just published a report showing that the infamous Colonel Bagasora of the ex-FAR traveled under Zairean military papers to the Seychelles to purchase weaponry and munitions. In the first half of 1996, as the war in North Kivu grew fiercer, attacks against Rwanda by the Hutu Power forces in Zaire had also intensified and infiltrators killed hundreds of genocide survivors in an effort that the organization African Rights described as “killing the evidence.” So it particularly galled Rwandan officials that the international community kept pouring money into Zaire by way of the camps, but did nothing to hold Mobutu accountable for the actions of his genocidal guests.

Mobutu was the longest-ruling despot in Africa. His ascent to power, between 1960 and 1965, had been accomplished with the careful assistance of the CIA and various bands of white mercenaries through the violent suppression of the popularly elected Congolese national movement, and his endurance was due, in large measure, to his genius for turning the misery of his neighbors to his own advantage. During the Cold War, the United States and its allies propped him up as a bulwark against Communist forces in central Africa. Then the wall came down in Berlin, and Mobutu was no longer of use. Promoting democracy was the new dispensation, and when Mobutu failed to produce anything but a violent parody of multiparty reforms, his erstwhile Western patrons cut him loose. His immense country—the size of Western Europe or the United States east of the Mississippi—was loaded with cobalt, diamonds, gold, and uranium, and he was rumored to be one of the wealthiest men in the world. But by the end of 1993, as his unpaid army ran riot, murdering, looting, and raping its way through the land, Zaire was enduring ten thousand percent inflation, and Mobutu, ostracized, and unable to get a visa to the United States or Europe, appeared headed for ruin. Then the Rwandan genocide put him back in the spotlight—this time as the man who had to be dealt with if you wanted to deal with the refugees.