We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (37 page)

“This man who is responsible for his acts,” Nyirabeza said, “lives now with all his family and gets his property back, while I remain alone, without a child, without a husband.” Then she said—and this was one time there was a ripple of laughter—“Maybe he will continue these acts of extermination.” She scoffed at Girumuhatse’s request for her pardon. “If he can bring back my children whom he killed and rebuild my house,” she said, “maybe.” There was more laughter from the survivors.

Then a man said wearily, “We’ll live together as usual,” and Nyirabeza walked away. A moment later a woman began weeping, hiding her face in her dress. Another woman, very old and leaning on a long, thin staff, held out her hands and flapped them up and away from her body. “We’re just like birds,” she said with a distant smile. “Flying around, blown around.”

As I walked back down the hill, I found Nyirabeza crouched on a stone, staring out over the valley. She did not look up when I said goodbye. A young civil servant, a survivor himself, who had been helping me as a translator, told me that people generally don’t like to visit the center. “It’s sad,” he said, “and the survivors there ask for things.”

It was true that the survivors made heavy demands. At one point Nyirabeza had said, “I wait only for justice.”

I WAS SURPRISED when Laurencie Nyirabeza said that Girumuhatse had not denied attacking her. In my time in Rwanda, I had never encountered anyone who admitted to having taken part in the genocide. I wanted to hear what Girumuhatse had to say for himself, and two days later I returned to Taba with a Frenchspeaking Rwandan named Bosco, an unemployed florist who had agreed to come along as a translator. We stopped first to see Nyirabeza, because she had suggested that Girumuhatse might still want to kill her. But she refused to be intimidated; she sent a young woman with us to point out Girumuhatse’s place—an adobe compound that stood at the edge of a steep hill planted with bananas, about a hundred yards from the abandoned shop where Nyirabeza was living.

A man sat in the doorway. He had just returned from Zaire with his family, and said he had lived in this house in 1994, when, as he put it, “there were many killings.” On his return, he found a family of Tutsi survivors living there. He knew that government policy allowed returnees fifteen days to evict squatters, but the survivors had nowhere to go, so the two families were living together. The young man said his name was Emanuel Habyarimana. I asked if there were any other men around who had come back from Zaire. He said, “None living in these houses here.”

As Bosco and I walked back to the road, a pack of children crowded around us, and we asked them if they knew Girumuhatse. They laughed and said he lived in the house where we’d just been visiting and was probably inside. “No,” a girl said. “That’s him down there.” She pointed into the valley at a figure climbing toward us along a path. Bosco quickly produced a few banknotes and dispatched the kids to buy themselves sodas.

For a moment, the man appeared to be trying to get away. He cut off into a field, but Bosco hailed him and waved, and he turned back up the path, moving with a long, swinging gait. He wore a sort of soiled canvas lab coat, open over a thin blue shirt, and shabby brown pants and sandals cut from old tires. His eyes were narrow and heavily bloodshot, and his mouth was bunched up tight. He stood freely before us, but he had the aspect of someone cornered. His chest heaved, and although the day was cool, sweat kept beading at his temples and trickling down his forehead.

Bosco struck up a conversation. The man said that Emanuel, whom we’d just met, was his son, and that it was good to be back. We talked about life in the camps, and I said that when I’d visited Zaire, every Rwandan I spoke with had denied the genocide, and insisted instead that since the end of the war all the Hutus in Rwanda were being systematically killed. For instance, according to one rumor circulating in the Zairean camps, women who returned to Rwanda had their breasts cut off, and men were put in the equivalent of doghouses with floors of wet plaster that would then harden around their feet. The man said, “It sometimes happens that some people tell lies and others tell the truth. There were a lot of dead here.”

He introduced himself as Jean Girumuhatse. I told him that his name was familiar to me because it was said in the community that he had killed a whole family. “It’s true,” Girumuhatse said. “They say I killed because I was the leader of the roadblock right here.” He pointed to the road where it passed closest to his house. “Right now, all is well,” he told me. “But then, at that time, we were called on by the state to kill. You were told you had the duty to do this or you’d be imprisoned or killed. We were just pawns in this. We were just tools.”

Girumuhatse, who said he was forty-six years old, could not recall any specific cases of Hutus who had been executed simply for declining to kill; apparently, the threat—kill or be killed—had been enough to ensure his participation in murder. But Girumuhatse had run a roadblock, and to be the chief of a roadblock was to be not a pawn but a mid-level figure in the local chain of command—a mover of pawns. Girumuhatse said he had no choice, and at the same time, he told me, “In most cases with the killing it’s my responsibility, because I was the leader, and now that I’m back I will tell all to the authorities.”

WHEN THE MASS repatriation from Zaire began on November 15, 1996, the government of Rwanda ordered a moratorium on arrests of suspected genocide perpetrators. In a month of extraordinary developments, this was surely the most unexpected. But just as in 1994 the radio had rallied the masses to kill, so once again the radio explained how things stood. Everyone heard, for instance, that President Pasteur Bizimungu had gone to the border to welcome the returnees as brothers and sisters. A version of the President’s message was repeatedly broadcast on Radio Rwanda, and throughout the country his words were being studied for guidance.

After calling the mass return “a tremendous joy for all Rwandans,” the President said, “The Rwandan people were able to live together peacefully for six hundred years and there is no reason why they can’t live together in peace again.” And he addressed the killers directly: “Let me appeal to those who have chosen the murderous and confrontational path, by reminding them that they, too, are Rwandans. I am calling upon you to abandon your genocidal and destructive ways, join hands with other Rwandans, and put that energy to better use.” Then he said, “Once again welcome home.”

But why should survivors be asked to live next door to killers—or even, as happened in Girumuhatse’s house, under the same roof? Why put off confronting the problem? To keep things calm, General Kagame told me. “You don’t necessarily just go for everyone you might think you should go for,” he said. “Maybe you create an atmosphere where things are stabilized first, then you go for those you must go for. Others you can even ignore for the sake of gradually leading a kind of peaceful coexistence.” Kagame recognized that this was asking a lot of his people; and, following the return, there were numerous reports of soldiers rescuing alleged killers from angry mobs and placing them in “protective custody.” It would not be easy to balance the demands for justice and the desire for order, Kagame told me. “In between these two intentions there are prcblems, there are the feelings of people.”

AS SOON AS Girumuhatse told me he was a killer, he stopped sweating. His breath came more easily. His eyes even looked clearer, and he seemed eager to keep talking. A storm had blown in, dumping rain, so we moved into my jeep, which was parked right where Girumuhatse’s roadblock had stood during the genocide. As we settled in, he announced that one reason he had been under pressure during the genocide was that he had been told to kill his wife, a Tutsi.

“I was able to save my wife because I was the leader,” he said, adding that he had feared for his own life, too. “I had to do it or I’d be killed,” he said. “So I feel a bit innocent. Killing didn’t come from my heart. If it was really my wish to kill, I couldn’t now come back.” Girumuhatse’s voice was unnervingly cozy beneath the thrum of the rain. Did he feel at least a bit guilty? He remained unmoved when he told me, “I knew many of the people that I ordered killed.” I asked how many deaths he had ordered. He was slow in answering. “I know of six people who were killed before my eyes by my orders.”

“Did you never kill with your own hands?”

“It’s possible I did,” Girumuhatse said. “Because if I didn’t they’d have killed my wife.”

“Possible?” I said. “Or true?”

Bosco, the translator, said, “You know what he means,” and didn’t translate the question.

Girumuhatse reiterated his wish to explain everything to the authorities. As he understood it, he was being allowed to recover his property and his health—“and then they will call me.” He wasn’t afraid. If he told all, he believed, he would get “a limited punishment.” He said, “The authorities understand that many just followed orders.”

Girumuhatse had the government’s policy almost right. Three months earlier, after nearly a year of debate, Rwanda’s parliament had adopted a special genocide law, which categorized responsibility for the crime according to the perpetrator’s position in the criminal hierarchy, and offered sentence reductions for lower-level criminals who confessed. Although all murderers were liable to the death penalty under Rwanda’s standard penal code, the genocide law reserved execution only for the elites defined in Category One: “Planners, organizers, instigators, supervisors, and leaders … at the national, prefectural, communal, sector, or cell level,” as well as “notorious murderers who, by virtue of the zeal or excessive malice with which they committed atrocities, distinguished themselves” and perpetrators of “acts of sexual torture.” For the vast remainder of rank-and-file killers and their accomplices—the followers—the maximum penalty of life imprisonment could be whittled down, with a valid confession and guilty plea, to as little as seven years. Penalties for nonlethal assault and property crimes were comparably reducible.

Girumuhatse had absorbed the spirit of the new law. “If it can end that way, and after being punished I can return to my home and recover my life, I would accept that,” he told me. “If this vengeance can end in this country and wrongdoers can be punished, that would be best.” What he didn’t seem to grasp was that his leadership position during the genocide placed him firmly in Category One, where the death penalty could not be staved off with a confession.

Even as Girumuhatse prepared to tell all, he laid the blame for his crimes on the former mayor of Taba, Jean Paul Akayesu, who was remembered as a famously avid hunter of Tutsis and who had installed Girumuhatse as the roadblock leader. In 1995, Akayesu was arrested in Zambia, and in 1997 he was brought to trial for genocide before the International Tribunal for Rwanda, where, after countless delays in the proceedings, a verdict was expected in the summer of 1998. In court, Akayesu himself blamed his political superiors for any killings of innocent Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

The genocide “was like a dream,” Girumuhatse told me. “It came from the regime like a nightmare.” Now, it seemed, he had not so much waked up as entered a new dream, in which his confession and his pat enthusiasm for Rwanda’s reform—“The new regime is quite good. There are no dead. We were surprised by the welcome. There is a new order”—did not require any fundamental change of politics or heart. He remained a middleman, aspiring to be a model citizen and to reap the rewards. When the authorities said kill, he killed, and when the authorities said confess, he confessed.

BETWEEN VISITS TO Taba, I talked to an aid worker in Kigali who had just returned from western Tanzania, where close to five hundred thousand Rwandan Hutus still remained in refugee camps. (A month later, in mid-December of 1996, Tanzania closed the camps and repatriated the Rwandans, bringing the total number of returnees to nearly a million and a half in six months.) During his visit to the camps, the aid worker had heard that children there had a game of making clay figures and placing them in the road to be run over by passing vehicles. The clay figures represented Tutsis, and each time one was crushed the children cheered, because they believed they had just caused a Tutsi to die in Rwanda. The aid worker told me this story as a sort of parable. It make him wonder whether it wasn’t Rwanda’s inevitable destiny to endure another round of mass butchery.

That possibility was all too obvious. Rwanda’s government since the genocide had staked its credibility on proving that systematic murder between Hutus and Tutsis was avoidable. The mass return from the camps, which the government presented as a triumph, was the great test of that claim. Yet Kagame, as always, regarded the victory as incomplete. “Yes, people have come back,” he said. “That’s one problem solved, and it has created another problem, which we also have to solve.” He then proceeded to name a lot of problems—housing, justice, the economy, education, the demobilization of thousands of ex-FAR soldiers returning from exile, and, above all, “this issue of ethnicity.”

A few months earlier, shortly before the fighting began in South Kivu, Kagame had told me two stories about men in his army. One soldier, he said, had recently written a letter, “telling me how he was left alone in his family, and how he knew that some people killed his family during the genocide, and how he has chosen not to hold anybody else responsible for that. Instead, he has decided to take his own life because he doesn’t see what his life means anymore.” The letter was found after the soldier’s suicide. As Kagame understood it, “he had somebody in mind to kill but instead of doing that he decided to kill himself.” The second story was about an officer who killed three people and wounded two in a bar. Some soldiers were about to kill him for his crimes, but he said, “Let me tell you what the problem is and then you can kill me.” So the soldiers arrested the officer, and he explained, “I’ve been seeing killers who’ve been allowed to live and just roam around and nobody takes action against them. Well, I decided I cannot take any more of that, so I killed them. Now, go ahead and do whatever you want with me.”