We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (9 page)

Five years passed, and I saw in the newspaper that Dian Fossey had been murdered in Rwanda. Somebody killed her with a machete. Much later, there was a trial in Rwanda, a murky proceeding: a Rwandan defendant was found hanged in his cell before he could testify, and one of Fossey’s American research assistants was tried in absentia, found guilty, and sentenced to death. The case was closed, but suspicions remained that it had not been solved. Many Rwandans still speak of a cousin or in-law of Madame Agathe Habyarimana as the true sponsor of the murder; his motive was said to have something to do with gold and drugsmuggling operations—or perhaps gorilla poaching—in the national park around Fossey’s research station. It was all very murky.

When Odette told me of her talk with Habyarimana’s security chief about the question of demons, I thought of Fossey. Power is terribly complex; if powerful people believe in demons it may be best not to laugh at them. A United Nations press officer in Rwanda gave me a photocopy of a document he had picked up in the wreckage of Habyarimana’s home after the genocide. (Among the President’s possessions, trophy seekers also found a movie version of Hitler’s
Mein Kampf,
with a hagiographic portrait of the Führer on the package.) The document consisted of a prophecy delivered in 1987 by a Catholic visionary, known as Little Pebbles, who claimed direct communication with Our Blessed Mother Virgin Mary, and who foresaw imminent desolation and the end of time. Little Pebbles’ scenario for the coming years involved a Communist attempt on the Vatican, civil war in every country on earth, a series of nuclear explosions, including that of a Russian reactor on the North Pole that would cause a shield of ice to form in the stratosphere, blocking out the sun and leading to the death of a quarter of the world’s population; thereafter, earthquakes would make whole nations disappear, and famine and plague would eliminate many of the people who had bothered to survive so far. Finally, after a total nuclear war and three days of darkness, Little Pebbles promised, “Jesus Christ will return to earth on Easter Sunday, 1992.”

I can’t say that Habyarimana ever read this forecast, only that it found its way into his household, and that it was close in spirit to views that fascinated his powerful wife. A hill called Kibeho, which stands near the center of Rwanda, became famous in the 1980s as a place where the Virgin Mary had the habit of appearing and addressing local visionaries. In Rwanda—the most Christianized country in Africa, where at least sixty-five percent of the population were Catholics and fifteen percent were Protestants—the Kibeho visionaries quickly attracted a strong following. The Catholic Church got up an official “scientific commission of inquiry” into the phenomenon, and declared it to be largely authentic. Kibeho was a big deal. Pilgrims came from all over the world, and Madame Agathe Habyarimana was a frequent visitor. With the encouragement of the Bishop of Kigali, Monsignor Vincent Nsengiyumva (himself an enthusiastic member of the central committee of the MRND), Madame Agathe often brought several Kibeho visionaries along on international trips. These young women had much to report from their colloquies with the Virgin, but among the Marian messages that made the strongest popular impression was the repeated assertion that Rwanda would, before long, be bathed in blood. “There were messages announcing woe for Rwanda,” Monsignor Augustin Misago, who was a member of the church commission on Kibeho, told me. “Visions of the crying Virgin, visions of people killing with machetes, of hills covered with corpses.”

Rwandans often describe themselves as an uncommonly suspicious people, and with some reason. Wherever you go in Rwanda—to a private home, a bar, a government office, or a refugee camp—drinks are served with the bottle caps on, and opened only before the eyes of the drinker. It is a custom that honors the fear of poison. An open bottle, even a bottle with a visibly loose cap, is unacceptable. Glasses, too, are suspect. When, as with the potent banana beer consumed by the peasantry, a drink comes unbottled from a common pot, or when a drink is to be shared, the provider must take the first sip, like a food taster in a medieval court, to prove that it is safe.

Tales of alleged poisoning regularly punctuate Rwanda’s historical lore. Marc Vincent, a pediatrician from Brussels who served with the colonial administration during the early 1950s, found that the locals regarded poisoning and sorcery as the root causes of all fatal illnesses. In his monograph
L’enfant au Ruanda-Urundi,
Vincent recalled overhearing a very sick ten-year-old boy telling his father, “When I die, you must see who poisoned me.” And an eight-year-old told Vincent, “Yes, death exists, but all those who die here, it’s not ordinary death, it’s sorcery: when you spit on the ground, one takes your saliva, one takes the dust on which you walked. My parents have told me to watch out.” Such attitudes, Vincent reported, pervaded all levels of society: “The natives see poisoners everywhere.”

Even today, deaths are often explained on
radio trottoir
—sidewalk radio, the ever-warping word of the street—and in the more formal media as the work of invisible poisoners. In the absence of evidence to prove or disprove such rumors, the enduring fear of poison takes on the quality of metaphor. When death is always the work of enemies, and the power of the state considers itself in concert with the occult, distrust and subterfuge become tools of survival, and politics itself becomes a poison.

SO HABYARIMANA WAS shadowed by his wife, and his wife, at least, had forebodings of total destruction. Rwandans seemed to think she should know. On
radio trottoir,
Madame Agathe was called Kanjogera, after the wicked queen mother of Mwami Musinga, the Lady Macbeth of Rwandan legend.
Le clan de Madame,
Agathe’s court within the court, was known as the
akazu,
the little house. The
akazu
was the core of the concentric webs of political, economic, and military muscle and patronage that came to be known as Hutu Power. When the President crossed the
akazu,
he was quickly set straight. For instance, Habyarimana once cultivated a protégé from outside the
akazu,
Colonel Stanislas Mayuya; he liked Mayuya so much that one of the chiefs of the
akazu
had Mayuya shot dead. The gunman was arrested; then he and the prosecutor on the case were also killed.

Mayuya’s assassination occurred in April of 1988. A strange year followed. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank demanded that Rwanda implement a program of “structural adjustment,” and the government’s budget for 1989 was slashed nearly in half. At the same time, taxes and forced-labor demands increased. Inadequate rains and a mismanagement of resources created pockets of famine. Details of corruption scandals leaked out, and several of Habyarimana’s critics suffered so-called automobile accidents, in which they were run over and killed. To prevent Rwanda’s sterling image from being tarnished in the eyes of international aid donors, the Kigali police launched vice squads to arrest “prostitutes,” a category that included any number of women who had run afoul of the high authorities. The Interior Ministry deputized Catholic militants to vandalize shops that sold condoms. Independent-minded journalists who took note of all this mischief were thrown in jail; they were followed by unemployed idlers whose heads had been shaved in preparation for a “re-education” program.

The more trouble there was, the more new troublemakers emerged. Hutu oppositionists of diverse stripes began finding their voices and lobbying for attention from the Western governments whose aid allocations underwrote about sixty percent of Rwanda’s annual budget. The timing was perfect. Following the breach of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989—the same month that Odette was fired—the victorious Cold War powers of Western Europe and North America began demanding gestures of democratization from their client regimes in Africa. It took a good deal of bullying, but after a meeting with his chief foreign patron, President François Mitterrand of France, Habyarimana suddenly announced, in June of 1990, that it was time to establish a multiparty political system in Rwanda.

Habyarimana’s embrace of reform was conspicuously halfhearted, a capitulation to foreign coercion, and instead of simple relief and enthusiasm, the prospect of an open competition for power provoked widespread alarm in Rwanda. It was universally understood that the northwesterners, who depended on his power and on whom his power increasingly depended, would not readily surrender their percentage. While Habyarimana spoke publicly of a political opening, the
akazu
tightened its grip on the machinery of the state. As repression quickened in direct proportion to the threat of change, a number of the leading advocates of reform fled into exile.

And then, in the early afternoon of October 1, 1990, a rebel army, calling itself the Rwandese Patriotic Front, invaded northeastern Rwanda from Uganda, declaring war on the Habyarimana regime, and propounding a political program that called for an end to tyranny, corruption, and the ideology of exclusion “which generates refugees.”

EVERY WAR IS unconventional after its own fashion. Hutu Power’s unconventionality did not take long to show. The RPF invasion began with fifty men crossing the border, and although hundreds soon followed, the field of combat was clearly demarcated: a patch of national park in the northeast. If it was the RPF you wanted to fight, all you had to do was go up to the front. But on the night of October 4—three days after the invasion—there was a lot of shooting in and around Kigali. In the morning, the government announced that it had successfully put down a rebel attempt on the capital. This was a lie. There had been no battle. The gunfire was a charade, and its object was simple: to exaggerate Rwanda’s danger and to create the impression that rebel accomplices had infiltrated the country to its core.

The RPF invasion offered the Habyarimana oligarchy its best weapon yet against pluralism: the unifying specter of a common enemy. Following the logic of the state ideology—that identity equals politics and politics equals identity—all Tutsis were considered to be RPF “accomplices,” and Hutus who failed to subscribe to this view were counted as Tutsi-loving traitors. Habyarimana’s crowd didn’t want a border war, but they welcomed nationwide turmoil as a pretext for rounding up “internal enemies.” Lists had already been prepared: educated Tutsis, prosperous Tutsis, and Tutsis who traveled abroad were among the first to be arrested, and prominent Hutus who were, for one reason or another, considered to be out of step with the regime were picked up as well.

Odette’s husband, Jean-Baptiste, received a call from a presidential deputy, who said, “We know you’re a Hutu, but you’re very close to these Tutsis because of your wife. If you love your family, tell these Tutsis to write a letter to the President, confessing their acts of treason with the RPF.” The deputy dictated a sample letter. Jean-Baptiste replied that his friends had nothing to do with the RPF, which was true. Before the RPF struck, almost nobody outside of its ranks had known of its existence. But Habyarimana had repeatedly expressed his fear that the Rwandans in the Ugandan army were plotting against him, and the RPF invasion had, in fact, involved a mass desertion from the Ugandan ranks. As far as Habyarimana and his entourage were concerned, that was proof that anybody they suspected was, by virtue of their suspicion, an enemy agent.

Jean-Baptiste told his interrogator that he had no contacts with exiles. Odette didn’t know why he was left alone after that; nearly ten thousand people were arrested in October and November of 1990. But all sorts of mistakes were made. For instance, when men were sent to the hospital to arrest Odette they got the wrong person. “I had been given my job back,” she said, “and I had a colleague who had the same name. She was Hutu and she denied that she was me, but she was much taller than I am and they said, ‘There’s only one Tutsi doctor named Odette.’ So she was imprisoned and tortured, and in 1994 she was again mistaken for a Tutsi, and killed.”

Throughout the first weeks of the war, the government called on the population to keep calm. But the fake attack on Kigali, and the mass arrests, sent another message. On October 11, just ten days after the RPF invasion, local officials in the village of Kibilira, in Gisenyi, instructed Hutus that their communal work duty for the month would consist of fighting their Tutsi neighbors, with whom they had lived in peace for at least fifteen years. The Hutus went to work with singing and drumming, and the slaughter lasted three days; some three hundred fifty Tutsis were killed, and three thousand fled their homes. For those whose memories do not extend as far back as Odette’s, the massacre at Kibilira is remembered as the beginning of the genocide.

7

BACK IN 1987, a newspaper called
Kanguka
began appearing in Rwanda.
Kanguka
means “Wake Up,” and the paper, edited by a Hutu from the south and backed by a prominent Tutsi businessman, was critical of the Habyarimana establishment. Its originality lay in presenting an analysis of Rwandan life based on economic rather than ethnic conflict.
Kanguka’s
courageous staff faced constant harassment, but the paper was a hit with the small public who could read it. So in early 1990, Madame Agathe Habyarimana secretly convened several leaders of the
akazu
with the idea of launching a rival publication. They didn’t know the first thing about newspapers, but they were experts on human weakness—especially vanity and venality—and as their editor they hired a small-time hustler and big-time self-promoter named Hassan Ngeze, a former bus-fare collector who had established himself as an entrepreneur, selling newspapers and drinks outside a gas station in Gisenyi, and from that vantage point had turned himself into a humorous man-on-the-street correspondent for
Kanguka.

The paper Ngeze produced,
Kangura
—“Wake It Up”—billed itself as “the voice that seeks to awake and guide the majority people.” It began as little more than a lampoon of
Kanguka
, with an identical format that tricked readers into buying it. This ruse was helped along by the fact that just as
Kangura
appeared, the government seized several numbers of
Kanguka
. But the paper’s irreverent tone was a bit too much like its opposite’s for the tastes of the
akazu,
and it annoyed Ngeze’s sponsors that he devoted large portions of the first issues to photo-essays extolling his own virtues. In July of 1990, when Habyarimana’s security force arrested the editor of
Kanguka
on charges of high treason, they made a show of balance by simultaneously jailing Hassan Ngeze for disturbing the public order. The ploy worked on several levels. Western human rights groups like Amnesty International issued joint appeals for the release of the two editors, bestowing on Ngeze an aura of antiestablishment martyrdom, when the truth was that he was a propagandist of the regime who had disappointed his patrons. At the same time, prison taught Ngeze that his welfare depended on his being a more diligent flunky, and he was an ambitious man who took the lesson to heart.