We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (36 page)

Thousands of Rwandans from the camps returned to Rwanda during the first weeks of fighting in Zaire, but by early November the great mass of them—at least three-quarters of a million people, from both North and South Kivu—were assembled on the vast lava field in and around the Mugunga camp, about ten miles west of Goma. They had been herded there by the ex-FAR and the
interahamwe,
by the pressure of the advancing Alliance, and even, incredibly, by some UNHCR officers, who had directed them away from Rwanda and toward Mugunga before themselves fleeing the country. After capturing Goma, Kabila declared a cease-fire, and called on the international humanitarian community to come and get the refugees out of his way so that he could continue his advance westward. Of course, Mugunga was completely inaccessible, behind a powerfully armed front line composed of tens of thousands of Hutu Power and Mobutist fighters. And that was precisely the point that Kabila and his Rwandan sponsors were trying to make: to get the refugees out of harm’s way, you had to be prepared to fight. What was needed was not a relief mission, but a rescue mission, because the noncombatants at Mugunga weren’t so much refugees as hostages, being held as a human shield.

It was another very strange time. During the first nine and a half months of 1996, the fact that the Mobutist–Hutu Power alliance in eastern Zaire was slaughtering thousands of people and forcing hundreds of thousands more from their homes did not seem to excite the international press. During that period, exactly one dispatch on the subject, reported from Rwanda, appeared in my local paper,
The New York Times
, and in its competition,
The
Washington Post,
coverage had been limited to two freelance “opinion” pieces. Perhaps the idea that people called refugees not only suffer and require aid but also are capable of systematic crimes against humanity, and may require direct confrontation by military force, was considered too technical or confusing in an age of radically reduced foreign coverage. But, in early November, the prospect of three-quarters of a million refugees dying en masse, under siege or in battle on the lava fields, once more drew a pack of hundreds of reporters to the Rwanda-Zaire border. Goma was again the world’s leading international story—and nothing was happening.

Nobody could get to Mugunga, and nobody knew what condition the people gathered there were in. Relief agency press officers assured reporters that the refugees had to be suffering from mass starvation and cholera. Possible death tolls were invented and announced—tens of thousands of dead, perhaps a hundred thousand. It was terribly upsetting to be sitting at a lakefront hotel in the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi, surrounded by reporters, and to think that just a dozen miles to the west, out of sight and out of reach, people were dying the most preventable sorts of deaths at a record-breaking clip. And it made one feel even worse to wonder if maybe the situation over there wasn’t really so bad. If you asked the relief agency press officers when, in history, previously well-fed people had starved to death in a few weeks, you either got no answer or you were told that most of the people at Mugunga were
women and children.

From New York, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, pronounced that “genocide by starvation” was taking place at Mugunga. Boutros-Ghali had no evidence that anybody was even hungry, and he certainly could not say who was committing this alleged genocide, since refugees could only be hungry because they were being blocked from leaving, and the only people blocking them were other so-called refugees. Still, with reports of famine and mass death among the invisible refugees filling the television news, the Security Council started to draw up plans to deploy a humanitarian, military intervention force to Goma, ostensibly to liberate the refugee masses at Mugunga. This sounded promising, until it emerged that the proposed force might be proscribed by its mandate from doing the one thing that it was needed to do, which was to
use
force to confront, to disarm, or, if necessary, to overwhelm the Hutu Power army and militias.

AT NINE IN the morning on November 15, 1996, I sat in a house on a hill in Gisenyi overlooking Goma, taking notes from the BBC radio news:

Canadian UN-force commander stresses force will
not
disarm or separate militants at Mugunga. Late night UN resolution leaves vague how feeding refugees and at the same time encouraging them to return to Rwanda will work. There’s talk of soldiers fanning out from bases in Goma to find and feed refugees. But UN says it won’t reestablish camps. Canadian commander says, “In order to separate militias, the level of violence would be too high and not only soldiers but innocents would be killed.”

I also wrote my impressions of this news:

Another lame UN force. Innocents are getting killed, have been getting killed, and will get killed however this plays out. And how can you feed hundreds of thousands, dig them holes to shit in, give them plastic sheets to sleep under, and say you haven’t established a camp? Anyway, why use an army in a place you don’t care enough to kill and die for? Total paralysis.

Then I switched stations to Radio Star, the rebel “voice of the liberated Congo” from Goma, and took more notes:

The road to Mugunga and west is open. The
interahamwe
have fled. Announcer says, “The whole problem is cleaned up.” Refugees are marching home to Rwanda. The rebellion continues on to Kinshasa.

This time, my impressions were briefer: “Huh? Can it be?”

I ran out the door, drove to the border and across, into Goma, where I turned onto the Mugunga road, heading west toward the camp, and found myself inching along against a stream of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans heading east, trudging steadily home. Over the preceding days, it turned out, the ADFL and the RPA had again taken the offensive, encircling Mugunga, and attacking it from the rear, in such a way as to draw the armed elements away from the border while pushing the refugee masses homeward. The main evidence of the battle lay nearly twenty miles beyond the camp itself—a line of blown-up trucks, buses, and cars that had been headed toward the Zairean interior. Fluttering around them on the road were heaps of papers, including much of the archive of the ex-FAR high command: receipts for arms shipments from dealers all over Europe, charters for the creation of political front organizations among the refugees, tax collection tables for the camps, accounts of financial transactions with humanitarian agencies, correspondence with Mobutu and his generals—even meticulously handwritten lists of Tutsis in North Kivu.

As the return got under way, it was widely reported that the ex-FAR and the
interahamwe
had retreated deeper into Zaire with the remnants of Mobutu’s army, allowing the so-called ordinary refugees to head home. The reality was not so perfect: among those who fled west into Zaire’s jungles—perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand people, perhaps twice as many; nobody knows—there were many noncombatants; and inside Rwanda, it quickly became clear that a great number of people with crimes to answer for had melted into the flood of returnees. But the immediate threat to Rwanda of a renewed total war had been removed, and—hap—pily—it appeared that the refugees had not starved in the process.

All along the road to Mugunga and in the rat-infested wreckage of the camp itself, I found aid workers shaking their heads and marveling at the fact that most of the refugees still had at least a few days’ rations and the strength to walk as much as fifteen or twenty miles a day at a brisk clip, carrying impressive loads under a fierce sun. In just four days, some six hundred thousand Rwandans marched back across the border from Goma. By the end of November, the total number of returnees was said to be around seven hundred thousand, and thousands more kept straggling in. Although the Rwandan government continued to issue adamant denials of military involvement in Zaire, General Kagame himself was less guarded. “Because we are not necessarily unhappy about what’s happened—and, on top of that, what has happened is what we would have wished to have happened—I’m sure people would be right to suspect our involvement,” he told me. What’s more, he added, “We have the satisfaction that, on our part, we have always tried to do what we thought was right. There can never be greater satisfaction for me than this. I think it’s a good lesson for some of us. We can achieve a lot by ourselves for ourselves, and we’ve got to keep struggling to do that. If people can help, that’s all well and good. If they can’t, we should not just disappear from the surface of this earth.”

DURING THE DAYS I spent on the road amid the returning six hundred thousand, I was repeatedly visited by an image—remembered or imagined from various paintings and movies—of the Napoleonic armies straggling home from Russia: limping hussars and frozen horses, blood on the snow, the sky a blackness, mad eyes fixed forward. The weather was kinder in Africa, and the people on the road were mostly in good health, but that recurrent image of another time and place made me wonder why we in the West today have so little respect for other people’s wars. The great homeward trundling of these Rwandans marked the rout, at least for the moment, of an immense army dedicated to genocide, yet the world had succored that army for years in the name of humanitarianism.

“To you we were just dots in the mass,” one returnee observed, after I had spent the first days of the migration driving through the boiling swarm on the road from Mugunga. They had always sworn, in the camps, that they would go home as they had left—en masse, as one. To be dots in the mass was precisely the point: it was impossible to know who was who. They came at a rate of twelve thousand an hour (two hundred a minute), a human battering ram aimed at the frontier. But this wasn’t quite the triumphant invasion long promised by the extremist Hutu leaders; rather, it was a retreat from exile conducted in near-silence. At one point, through the men and women and children pouring over fifty miles of blacktop, pushing bicycles, wheelbarrows, motorbikes, even automobiles, dragging wooden crates like sleds, balancing enormous bundles on their heads, toting babies in slings and cradling them in their arms, carrying steamer trunks and empty beer bottles, and sometimes carrying nothing but the burden of their pasts, there came four men shouldering a blanket-draped figure on a stretcher. As they pushed through the knotted thousands, one kept saying, “A cadaver, a cadaver.” What made this man singular was his need to declare himself. Except for the knock of cooking pots, the swish of bare feet and rubber sandals, and the bleat of a stray goat or a lost child, the homecoming throng, as a rule, was ominously mute.

Back in Rwanda, thousands stood for hours along the roads watching the influx with the same wordless intensity. Never before in modern memory had a people who slaughtered another people, or in whose name the slaughter was carried out, been expected to live with the remainder of the people that was slaughtered, completely intermingled, in the same tiny communities, as one cohesive national society.

20

“A CERTAIN GIRUMUHATSE is back,” an old woman in the highlands of central Rwanda told me a few weeks after the mass return from Goma. She spoke in Kinyarwanda, and as she spoke her right hand described a graceful chopping motion against the side of her neck. Her full statement was translated like this: “A certain Girumuhatse is back, a man who beat me during the war with a stick, and from whom I received a machete blow also. This man threw me in a ditch after killing off my whole family. I was wounded. He’s now at his house again. I saw him yesterday at the community office after he registered. I told him, ‘Behold, I am risen from the dead,’ and he replied, ‘It was a human hell,’ and he asked my pardon. He said, ‘It was the fault of the authorities who led us in these acts, seeking their own gains.’ He said he regretted it, and he asked my pardon.”

The woman gave her name as Laurencie Nyirabeza. She was born in 1930, in the community of Taba, a few minutes’ walk from where we met in the shade of an empty hilltop market above a small commercial center—two short rows of derelict concrete and adobe storefronts on either side of a sandy red-dirt road. Twice a week, on market days, the center was teeming; otherwise, it had the air of a ghost town. The rusting hull of a burned-out bus lay on the road’s shoulder and thick bushes sprouted from the prominent ruins of a large home that had belonged to Tutsis, killed in 1994.

Most of Taba’s Tutsis were killed then. Those who remained, like Nyirabeza, were quite alone, and nearly all had lost their homes. With no means to rebuild, and afraid to stay amid neighbors whose conduct during the killings they remembered too well, many survivors had moved to this center to squat in the stores left vacant by dead Tutsis or by Hutus who had fled to Zaire. Now they feared eviction. In the preceding two weeks, more than two thousand people had returned to Taba from the camps in Zaire, and among them was the man, Girumuhatse, who Laurencie Nyirabeza said had massacred her family and left her, too, for dead.

Nyirabeza was a small woman with eyes set deep in a face that thrust forward. She wore her hair combed straight up from the slope of her forehead in a crown nearly six inches high. The effect was at once imposing and witty, which was in keeping with her manner. More than a dozen survivors had responded to my invitation to meet in the market, but most said nothing. The voices of those who did speak rarely rose above a furtive murmur, and whenever a stranger approached, they fell silent. Nyirabeza was different. She did not whisper or shrink. She seemed to feel she had little left to lose. Even as she told me about Girumuhatse, her lips occasionally twitched in a smile, and more than once the other survivors responded to her speech with edgy laughter. Nyirabeza described herself as “a simple peasant”; her schooling had ended after the third grade. But she had a way with words—spirited and wry, and barbed with the indignation of her injury. Still, she said she had been shocked speechless when Girumuhatse, her former neighbor, with whom she used to share food and drink, claimed that his acts were not his fault. Girumuhatse had killed ten members of her family, she told me, mostly her children and grandchildren.