The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

by Jacqueline Novogratz

  "Hello.... Are you well? ... Is there news? ... This child is sick.... That daughter just married.... Our mother died.... ..

  Almost as soon as all of the women had taken their seats, the guard rapped his baton on a bench and blew his whistle again. As quickly as they had appeared, the women moved away again swiftly and surely, as if these meetings had become as routine as brushing their teeth.

  The prisoners shuffled back through the big metal door, each carrying a green plastic bag filled with the week's provisions. Minutes later, the whole process repeated itself. Three hundred men and 300 women poured a week's provisions from baskets into green plastic bags. Three hundred stories were shouted helplessly over a desperate babble. And at the bang of a wooden stick, both women and men retreated like a regiment of ragtag soldiers. By the end of the day, about 4,000 people would have been in that yard, leaving the confetti of incompleted stories in the air.

  Agnes and I resorted to talking in the spaces between the mad shuffles.

  As I listened to her speak, it occurred to me that Agnes might have taken a completely different road in the genocide, one that might have left her a hero instead of a perpetrator. For years, she worked closely with Annie Mugwaneza, the Belgian member of our group. Agnes and Annie were part of the founding group that created the Liberal Party in the early 1990s, a broad-based, moderate organization focused on a united Rwanda.

  At the time, the West was pushing Rwanda toward multiparty elections. But you can't impose democracy without first establishing some foundation of civic education and understanding of what it means to be an active citizen-a lesson the world is still learning. Most leaders took the opportunity to form parties based not on democratic principles, but on an agenda of gaining power. In Rwanda, an enforced and empty democracy was another lit match in the powder keg.

  In the beginning, Agnes and Annie tried to form a party based on principles of diversity and moderation. At one point the party apparently considered allying itself with the Tutsi-led RPF. But when a far-right wing eventually split off, Agnes left with it to join the extremist Hutu Power party. I'll never understand fully how or exactly when she made that decision and can only believe she followed power itself instead of risking her life for principles.

  Annie Mugwaneza was one of the most vocal of the individuals calling for a diverse but united Rwanda and had to be silenced if the extremists were to be victorious. On April 6, the first evening of the genocide, the Interahamwe murdered Annie, her husband, and four of their five children. Hundreds of Hutu moderates and Tutsi intellectuals also died that night. There are none more dangerous to extremists than moderates.

  Agnes ignored my question when I asked about her friend's death. She seemed to have lost herself in a swirl of words that had little connection to my questions.

  "Let's take the United States, for example," she said. "Neither blacks nor Hispanics are the majority. If one day they seized power, if they started oppressing the rest of the population, you understand, that would be a problem. I don't know if you can imagine the blacks one day fighting and seizing the power. I don't think you could accept that."

  "You're assuming those in power necessarily oppress the rest," I said.

  She just looked at me blankly. Her fear and paranoia summed up the insecurity of a small elite trying fanatically to hold on to power in a society based on a strictly Hobbesian worldview. Power ruled in a zerosum game.

  In one sentence, Agnes laid out her view of Rwanda: "Those who had the power, who didn't want to let it go, had to use any means necessary not to lose it; and those who wanted it also had to use any means to get it."

  As I listened, I realized there was only so much I could learn from her. She seemed to have paid the greatest price for her choices, sacrificing her very principles to become a force for evil. I'd been running a leadership program in the United States that focused on strengthening one's moral compass and building those things inside you that no one could ever take away. While I was visiting in Rwanda, nearly all the many women with whom I spoke who'd worked with Agnes remembered her as kind, intelligent, and warm. They were devastated that so much had gone wrong, that she had lost her way.

  "She was among the strong women who energized the others to work and make better lives for themselves," one of her former friends told me. "She never should have entered into politics, for it is there that you become prey to power."

  "I cannot think that she even knew what was being planned," said another. "When you are in politics, you become part of a machine."

  I would listen to the women with a sense of wonder that they could believe Agnes hadn't known what was being planned despite the fact that she held one of the government's highest positions. At the time, if the minister of justice hadn't known what was happening, I would ask, who would have? Usually, they would just shake their heads.

  When the guard returned to lead Agnes away, she gave me another hug. I thought of how she had traveled with the president to Butare to unleash the killings that would take Honorata's family from her. I thought of the good we all did together for a brief moment, fighting for women's economic justice. I played the same words over and over in my head: How had she gone so far astray?

  I watched her walk away in her pink dress and shaved head, looking so vulnerable, still rubbing her beads, turning every so often to wave to me. I stood there, choked by suffocating sadness. A part of me wanted to push away what I'd just heard, to flee entirely from a situation that would forever seem incomprehensible. But Agnes had helped me internalize what I hadn't wanted to see before-monsters do exist, but not in the way I'd imagined them. I grew up believing in Frank Capra's world, where everyone was good except the bad guys who wore black hats and either died or found redemption by the end of the movie.

  I hadn't imagined a bald woman with long eyelashes and soft eyes in a pink uniform, with whom I had built an institution of social justice. Agnes is currently being tried in Rwanda, though she has been in prison for more than a dozen years. Such a slow road to justice must distort even further the woman Agnes was, while such a delay of justice for some of the genocide's top officials must chip away at and ultimately gash the souls of ordinary Rwandans.

  The West wants easy answers for modern atrocities that revolve around ancient tribal hatreds, international aid gone astray, or political corruption. The real world does not oblige. Clearly, perpetrators must be held accountable for their actions, and justice must be done for victimsfor everyone in the country-to heal. At the same time, our world's challenge is not simply in determining how we punish, but instead in how we prevent the kinds of atrocities that can come only from a deep-seated fear of the Other in our midst. Such fear is fueled in a world where the rich feel above the system and the poor feel entirely left out.

  I determined to work on gaining more courage to put myself in others' shoes and more vision to enable me to create ways for them to help themselves. I wanted to become part of a movement to extend to all of humanity the notion that all human beings are created equal-for our world was shrinking even then. Somewhere along the way, Agnes must have put aside that notion of our shared humanity, possibly from a combination of real fear and the equally real desire for power. We'll never fully know.

  IF RECONCILING WHAT HAD become of Agnes was impossible for me, I found myself confused and humbled by Prudence's story.

  She had been imprisoned near her hometown of Byumba in the northern part of the country. Like Agnes, she'd been accused of category 1 crimes, meaning that she was allegedly a major perpetrator of the genocide. But the most complex aspect of her story was that Prudence was potentially neither victim nor perpetrator. Catholics speak of sins of commission and sins of omission. I assumed Prudence must have known what was happening, though many with much greater power to do something about it had also known, including UN officials.

  My hired driver, Leonard, and I departed early one morning for the 2-hour drive from Kigali to Byumba. Jeeps filled with soldiers and trucks overflow
ing with Ugandan bananas drove straight toward us, swerving at the last possible moment to spare our lives. Boys on bicycles carrying enormous bundles of tall grasses extending 3 feet on either side of their skinny bodies careened down both sides of the narrow road. Goats chased by barefoot boys with sticks trotted past regal women draped in bright colors who were holding massive loads of firewood on their heads. A gray mist mixed with the yellow sunshine, lending brilliance to a teeming, beautiful morning in this land of a thousand hills.

  Leonard drove his battered Nissan with a dour, depressed, and unchanging mien. He, too, had lost his family. Suddenly, just outside Byumba, our old Nissan broke down, and for all his efforts, Leonard couldn't restart the car.

  He stepped out, walked to the front, and, like a surgeon, plunged his aging hands into the car's belly. Out of nowhere-always the case in Rwanda, where you can be in an entirely empty place and a minute later, surrounded by a crowd-two children approached the car and pressed their faces against my window. Both had closely shaved heads. The girl's round, black eyes were framed by thick lashes. The boy wore an old Tshirt with the neck stretched out of shape. I opened the car door and took in the length of their thin bodies. Her dress hung beneath her knees, and his shorts were rolled at the waist in an effort to keep them up. Both were barefoot.

  They didn't say a word. As they stared, I held their gazes.

  "Hello," I said.

  Shyly, the little girl repeated my greeting. I wondered whether they were among the 400,000 orphans in the country.

  "My name is Jacqueline," I said.

  Their silence was more heartbreaking than any begging would have been.

  I gave them each 300 francs just a dollar. They took the money and ran, disappearing into the trees on the hillside. I remembered how the boy in my blue sweater had fled so many years ago.

  We are connected, but the weave is sometimes fragile.

  There wasn't a gas station until Byumba, another 10 miles away. As Leonard worked silently on the car, I moved to stand in the middle of the empty road, confused and a bit frightened by the sudden lack of traffic. Marauding gangs still had too much control in the north and west especially. With relief, I remembered the walkie-talkie UNICEF had issued me in case of an emergency, but the battery was dead.

  Looking at the long road ribboning its way through the hills, suddenly I felt very small. As I stood with the defunct walkie-talkie in my hand, I said a prayer and waited.

  Twenty, maybe 30 minutes later, a white jeep joggled by. I ran after the vehicle, waving my arms wildly. The passengers-both aid workersagreed to drive me to Byumba and offered to help me get to the prison. From the jeep, I noticed a massive hill to my right that was covered with thousands of tents made of the ubiquitous UN blue plastic, lined up row after row. It looked like a canvas pasted with blue postage stamps from top to bottom. Twenty thousand Hutus were living there, still too frightened to go home. They suffered from insufficient water, disastrous levels of disease, inadequate food, a lack of latrines, and the stench of death. The RPF had killed thousands in this area, war crimes still a part of the country's wounds; you could feel the weariness in the air.

  It was past noon when I reached Byumba's central prison, an old edifice with a capacity of 100 people now holding more than 1,000. We drove through the gate into a sweaty swarm of men. The compound, enclosed by a high fence, was wide open, with several brick buildings in the middle. All around me, men dressed in pink Bermuda shorts were fixing engines, shaping metal into useful objects, talking among themselves. One group was engaged in a boisterous competition to see who could do the most push-ups. In the bright sun under a cobalt sky, these boys swinging on bars and showing off to one another looked more postcard than prisoner.

  For a split second I forgot where I was-until two men walked past me and stared with searing intensity, sending a chill down my spine. Alone, unguarded, and unarmed inside a prison overflowing with men accused of mass murder, I wanted to flee.

  I moved quickly to the director's office. Alongside a wall, a row of barefoot women dressed in skirts the color of cotton candy sat doing needlework. They reminded me of cutout dolls all made of a single sheet of paper. They had the faces of grandmothers and next-door neighbors, of nurses and sisters.

  It had been a decade since I'd seen Prudence, who, along with Agnes, had been one of Rwanda's first woman parliamentarians, but more important, had been a mentor to me. On my last day in Rwanda, we'd hugged so fiercely that it hurt. She had written my recommendation for business school; I hadn't yet found out if I'd been accepted, but she sent me off with all great wishes and confidence that I would make the cut. When I did let her know of my acceptance, she wrote me a wonderful congratulatory note that arrived on featherweight pale blue airmail paper and was filled with praise and caring.

  Would she remember me, I wondered as I stood in my white T-shirt and khakis, looking like a Gap ad, waiting among hundreds of men for an old friend now on death row for crimes I could not imagine. She'd been accused of being a planner, just as Agnes had been, though many believed she hadn't played an active role. In an upside-down world, it was hard to ever know.

  Prudence walked across the compound with a bright silk scarf of scarlet, lime, and turquoise draped over her shaved head. She seemed more petite than I remembered and yet oddly attractive. Even in prison garb, she stood apart.

  With her head cocked to the side and her hand held to shade her eyes, she squinted in my direction as she walked. Recognition: She ran to embrace me, and I held her tightly, trying to conceal my nervousness.

  "I can't believe you came all the way to see me," she said. "And here I am in prison. It has been so long, and I've thought of you so often and yet barely recognized you."

  Sitting in the director's bare, dark office on two wooden chairs with our knees touching, I was again torn between my desire to know what had happened to Prudence and an impulse to disassociate myself-a mix of shame and revulsion. I held Prudence's hands, and she started weeping. We looked at each other, partly to assess, partly to remember.

  She'd been in prison for nearly 2 years-arrested without charges. She described the conditions of the environment, explaining how the women slept on the concrete floor one after another, like cards. There were only two toilets for 80 or 90 women.

  "You really must have a supernatural energy to survive here," she said. "We're all in such close contact with each other, touching even as we sleep. Right now, for example, everyone has the flu. I've not gotten it, I think because I won't allow myself to get sick. One survives thanks to one's own energy and thanks to God."

  Prudence had held a high-ranking position in government before the genocide as head of the General Assembly-the equivalent of Speaker of the House in the United States. She explained to me that, unlike Agnes, her power was nonetheless limited after the Arusha Accord in August 1993. The Arusha Accord was a peace agreement built on a power-sharing negotiation between the Rwandan government and the RPF. A transitional government was put in place until general elections could be held, though, of course, they never were.

  While I imagined that Prudence must have known something, my understanding was paltry at best. I wondered why she hadn't blown whistles, but could barely conceive of the stakes for anyone close to power. If she had known, she must have understood she would be among the first killed if she protested the policies.

  Where is the line between knowing and participating? Prudence didn't believe she was guilty. Indeed, she told me she had returned from living for 2 years in the refugee camps along with everyone else to make her way home, assuming that everyone understood her innocence. Agnes, on the other hand, had fled along with other government officials to Zambia, where she'd been abducted by the Rwandan government. Prudence had just made it home to Byumba in November 1996 when she was arrested on the street and imprisoned. She was put in solitary confinement, though not charged. Soon after, she was transferred to this local prison.

  I remembered her as kind. She
was kind. She told me about the Tutsi housegirl she had hidden during the chaos. Yet here she was, accusedif not charged-with crimes of genocide.

  The ambiguity felt toxic, infecting me with a sense of vertigo. "How did you get here?" I asked, barely audibly.

  She shook her head, telling me she didn't know. "I walked back with the rest of the refugees because I was innocent and returning to my home. I never thought they would arrest me," she repeated for the second time.

  "Rwanda was caught up in a great wind," Prudence said. "And now the country itself is the biggest loser." She went on to talk about the humiliation experienced by women like her who were innocent, but were now spending their lives in prison. I just listened. Even if she were only partly right, the humiliation of people accused of false crimes and sent to horrific prisons for years would deepen fissures of mistrust.

  Later, a friend told me haltingly through tears about how she'd felt upon seeing Prudence return from the refugee camps, where my friend had also spent 2 years. "I couldn't look at her. Her hair was loose, and she carried everything on her head, like we all did. Prudence was never common-she was always extraordinary. It broke my heart in two to see her looking like a beggar woman. I suppose we all did, but it seemed so much worse to see it in someone who had commanded so much respect."

  At the time of my visit, women already were beginning to play major roles in the reconstruction of Rwanda. They were starting businesses and building homes and representing as members of parliament in numbers that had never been seen before-in Rwanda or anywhere else on the continent. The sad truth is that the first three woman parliamentarians in the country, who had made such extraordinary strides for women, ended up with tragic histories.