By August 1993, the rebel army had scored several convincing military victories in the north and put Habayrimana in a position where he was forced by France, the United States and other Western countries into signing a peace treaty known as the Arusha Accords. He surely must have recognized it as his political obituary. It laid the foundations for a power-sharing government. Habyarimana would be allowed to stay on as president, but only in a ceremonial sense. And in a special insult to all those who hated the Tutsi, a battalion of six hundred RPF soldiers was allowed to occupy the grounds of the parliament building in preparation for the formation of the transitional government. Kangura portrayed these troops as the point of a spear aimed straight at the heart of the Hutu majority. The paper also made a curious prediction: President Habyarimana would not live out the year. He would be assassinated, said the paper, by a rebel hit squad. It would then be the duty of every good and patriotic Hutu to seek revenge. Otherwise, the rebel army would start killing innocents.
In a February 1994 article headlined “Final Attack, ” Ngeze wrote:“We know where the cockroaches are. If they look for us, they had better watch out.” Other features were not as subtle.
“What weapons shall we use to conquer the cockroaches once and for all?” queried the caption of one illustration. The answer was pictured to the side: a wood-handled machete. Children were clearly enemies, too. “A cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly, ” proclaimed one story. Another diatribe went like this: “We say to the cockroaches that if they lift up their heads again, it will no longer be necessary to fight them in the bush. We will start by eliminating the internal enemy [my italics]. They will be silenced.”
This farce of a paper had a small circulation but an enormous reach. Copies were sent out to the villages and passed around gleefully. It seemed a welcome break from the usual tired and boring news out of the capital. Here at last, said many people, is a paper that really says the ugly truth-that the Tutsis are going to kill us when they invade.
Before it stopped publishing two months before the genocide Kangura editorialized: “We must remark to the cockroaches that if they do not change their attitude and if they persevere in their arrogance, the majority people will establish a force composed of young Hutu. This force will be charged with breaking the resistance of the Tutsi children.”
What the newspaper did not say was that just such a force had already been put into place and was busily preparing itself to murder children throughout Rwanda.
In early November 1993, a shipment of cargo was trucked into Kigali. The wooden crates bore import papers announcing that they had been received from China at the seaport at Mombasa in Kenya. Inside were 987 cartons of inexpensive machetes. This was not enough to cause alarm by itself. The machete is a common household tool in Rwanda, used for all manner of jobs-slicing mangoes, mowing grass, harvesting bananas, cutting paths through heavy brush, butchering animals.
If anybody had been paying attention, however, the shipment might have seemed curious when matched with other facts. The recipient, for example, was one of the primary financial backers of the hate-mongering radio station RTLM. Those cartons from China, too, were but a small part of what amounted to a mysterious wave. Between January 1993 and March 1994, a total of half a million machetes were imported into my country from various overseas suppliers. This was a number wildly out of line with ordinary demands. Somebody obviously wanted a lot of sharp objects in the hands of ordinary Rwandans. But nobody questioned the sudden abundance of machetes-at least not publicly.
If those imports were quiet, the formation of the youth militias was obvious. It was hard to miss those roving bands of young men wearing colorful neckerchiefs, blowing whistles, singing patriotic songs, and screaming insults against the Tutsis, their sympathizers and members of the opposition. They conducted military drills with fake guns carved from wood because the government could not afford to give them real rifles. They were known as the Interahamwe, which means either “those who stand together” or “those who attack together, ” depending on who is doing the translating.
Habyarimana’s government formed them into “self-defense militias” that operated as a parallel to the regular Rwandan army and were used to threaten the president’s politicial enemies. They were also a tool for building popular support for the ruling regime under the all-embracing cloak of Hutu Power. The ongoing civil war brought a whole new flock of members. Most of the new recruits came from the squalid refugee camps that formed a ring around Kigali. It is difficult for me to describe just how terrible the conditions were inside these camps: no decent food, no sanitation, no jobs, no hope. There were several hundred thousand people crammed into these tumbledown wastelands, most of them chased away from their homes in the countryside by the advancing RPF army. Kigali itself held about 350, 000 people at the time-a city about the size of Minneapolis, Minnesota -and the strain on the infrastructure was very great. These refugees saw plenty of reasons to be angry at the rebels-and, by unfair extension, angry at each individual Tutsi. Plus, the militias were fun, in the same way that the hate radio was fun. They brought a sense of purpose and cohesion to an otherwise dreary life. It was like being in the Boy Scouts or a soccer club, only there was a popular enemy to hate and a lot of built-up frustration to vent. The boys were also hungry and full of the restlessness of youth. It was easy to get them to follow any orders imaginable.
The groundwork for the genocide went even deeper. In the fall of 1992 mayors in each of Rwanda’s hundred little communes were asked by the president’s political party to compile lists of people-understood to be Tutsis and people who were threatening to Habyarimana-who had left the country recently or who had children who had left. The implication was that these people had joined the ranks of the RPF. These lists could then be used to identify “security threats” in times of emergency. Tutsis throughout the country suspected their names were being entered into secret ledgers. Many tried without success to have their identity cards relabeled so that they would appear to be Hutu.
I used to be in the habit of stopping off at a bar near my home after work and buying a round for some of my friends from the old Gitwe days. One afternoon when I wasn’t there, a man wearing the uniform of a soldier tossed a grenade in the door and sped off on a motorcycle. The bar was destroyed. I started going straight home after that. The minister of public works, Félicien Gatabazi, was gunned down by thugs as he was entering his house. A taxi driver witnessed the assassination; she was shot as a precaution the next day. Her name was Emerita and she had been one of the freelance drivers who competed for fares in the parking lot of the Hotel Mille Collines. At least one hundred other innocent people would be killed in this fashion by the increasingly violent teenagers of the Interahamwe and also rebel soldiers who had infiltrated Kigali. People didn’t want to stand at bus stops or taxi stations anymore because the crowds were targets for grenade throwers.
A scary incident happened on the road. My wife, Tatiana, was driving our son to school when she was forced off the road by a man in a military jeep. He walked over to her door, took off his sunglasses, and bid her to roll down her window.
“Do you know me?” he asked.
“No, ” said my wife.
“My name is Étincelles, ” he said. It was the French word for “explosions, ” apparently his nom de guerre.
He went on: “Madam, we know your home. We know you have three big German shepherds in the yard for protection, as well as two gate guards. The Youth of the Democratic Republic Movement has said they plan to kidnap you. They will be trying to get ransom money from your husband. So I am telling you, if anybody should try to pull you over, don’t stop. Keep driving, even if you have to run somebody over. Do it for your own safety. I am telling you all of this because I come from the same part of the country as your husband and I don’t want to see any harm come to you.”
When my wife told me about this I searched my memory for anyone from my village who might be calling himself Étincell
es. I couldn’t think of who it might be. To this day I have no idea if this was an actual kidnap plot or just an attempt to scare us. Regardless, we no longer felt comfortable living at home after that, and so I moved us all into a guest suite at the Diplo-mates. It felt awful to be governed by fear, but these were very dangerous times. I did not want anybody coming through my windows.
Life went on, even in the surreal twilight of that spring. At nights on the terrace I would share beers with the leaders of the militia movement, trying to keep quiet as I heard them talking of events in the neighboring country of Burundi. The president there, Melchior Ndadaye, had been assassinated by Tutsi officers in his own army. A series of reprisal killings followed. The international community had little to say about these massacres. Was it true the Tutsi were planning to do a similar thing here: take power and then start a campaign of genocide against the Hutu? I heard it said more than a few times over glasses of Carlsberg or Tuborg: “It may come down to kill or be killed.”
During that dangerous time I did something that had the potential to be my death warrant. The RPF leadership was looking for a place to give a press conference and every public venue in town had rejected them. When they approached me about a room at the Diplomates, I agreed to host them, and I charged them the standard rate of five hundred dollars. It wasn’t the profits I cared about. I really believed they deserved to have equal access like anybody else. It was not my place to discriminate based on ideology or what people would think of me. But I heard later that the government was unhappy with me. I suppose, in retrospect, it was like the incident with Habyarimana’s silly medals. These were symbolic stands, and probably foolish, but ones I thought were worth the risk.
I have said that those first months of 1994 were like watching a speeding car in slow motion heading toward a child. There was a thickness in the air. You could buy Chinese-made grenades on the street for three dollars each and machetes for just one dollar and nobody thought to ask why. Many of my friends purchased guns for themselves in the name of home protection. This was something I refused to do, despite the urging of my wife. In one tense conversation she told me I was acting like a coward for not acquiring a firearm. “You know that I have always said I fight with words, not with guns, ” I told her. “If you want to call me a coward for this, then I guess that is what I am.” She stared back at me, hurt and silent.
A few days later, I took her and our little son, Tresor, along with me to a manager’s meeting in Brussels that I had been scheduled to attend. With the other children at boarding school in Rwanda, it was just the three of us, and we made a little vacation out of it. We traveled by train through Luxembourg, Switzerland, and France. Walking amid the gray monuments and plazas, drinking the yeasty beer, and eating the starchy tourist food made it possible-almost-to forget the slow boil back at home.
After three weeks, I had to return to my job, and we arrived in Kigali on the red-eye on the morning of March 31. At that hour the city was quiet, the militias were mostly asleep and the tension that I had come to associate with Rwanda was at low ebb. The rolling green hills had never looked so good or so welcoming. Perhaps things were finally calming down. The United Nations had sent twenty-seven hundred troops to Rwanda a few months earlier to enforce the Arusha peace agreement, and it seemed the visible presence of the blue helmets was finally making a difference in keeping the militias contained. The UN seemed capable of maintaining the peace. They had given us hope.
It had been so long since we had been to our house that we decided to go straight there instead of to our suite at the Diplo-mates. For the first time in almost two years we felt good about the future.
FIVE
I STILL REMEMBER the sunset on that night of April 6, 1994. There was no rain. The sky was hazy with spring moisture and dust and the slanted dying light made the bottoms of the clouds turn blood orange. The colors deepened and darkened as the sun went lower, reaching for the hillcrest in a nimbus of purples, violets, and indigos, the colors of oncoming night. Around town some people paused to watch, cocking their heads to the west. It was a moment of beautiful stillness.
I have been told that it is common for people to mark exactly where they are when they learn of death on a grand scale. I have met Americans, for example, who can tell me in detail which suit they were putting on or what highway they were driving down at the time of the suicide jet attacks on the World Trade Center. Perhaps it is a way to link our own small presence to the great bloodstained currents of history for just a moment. I suppose this is also a way of feeling a part of an overwhelming fatal event, a slight flirtation with the finality that awaits us all-a rehearsal for our own deaths, you might say.
I know with certainty that you will find nobody living in Rwanda today who does not remember what they were doing in the early evening hours of April 6, 1994, when the private jet of President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down with a portable missile as it approached for landing at Kigali Airport.
As it happened, I was in my usual place for that time of day. I was eating a dinner of panfried fish on the terrace of the Diplomates Hotel. Sitting next to me was my brother-in-law. We were celebrating a small victory-I had helped his wife get a job as a saleswoman for a Dutch car dealer named NAHV.
The airport is about ten miles away and so we heard nothing out of the ordinary. Less than a minute after the crash, however, the waiter came over with a house telephone. It was my wife on the line.
“I have heard something I have never heard before, ” she told me. “Get home as fast as you are able.”
I couldn’t have known it then, but phones were ringing all over the city and would continue to ring all night long.
On the way out to the parking lot we talked to an Army major who had been listening to his radio. Roadblocks were going up all over town, he told us, though he could not explain why. Don’t take the Gikondo road, he said. Take the one that leads past the Parliament. Oddly, this was where the rebel army had its local stronghold. My brother-in-law shook hands in the parking lot and we urged each other to be careful. I could not have known it then, but I was shaking his hand for the last time.
I drove on the Boulevard of the Organization of African Unity through Kigali, which was unnaturally deserted. The power had been cut off and all the street lamps were off. There was virtually nobody on the streets. I saw glimpses of cooking fires flickering behind adobe walls, an occasional face mooning out from the shadows. It occurred to me that a coup d’état might be taking place, or perhaps the long-awaited RPF invasion. But I was calm. For some reason it did not occur to me to be frightened.
I drove slowly and carefully, but passed no other drivers. Kigali was like a city battening down before the arrival of a hurricane. It was 8:35 P. M.
The killing could have ended right there. It all could have been stopped quite easily at this early stage with just a small fraction of the police department of any midsized American city. Rwandans have always shown respect to authority figures-it is part of our national personality-and a brigade of international soldiers would have found it surprisingly easy to keep order on the streets of Kigali if they had had the guts to show they meant business about saving lives. But they didn’t.
A force of twenty-seven hundred United Nations peacekeeping soldiers was already inside the country. But they were ill equipped and under strict orders from UN headquarters not to fire their weapons except in defense of themselves. “Do not fire unless fired upon” was the mantra. The recent U.S. disaster in Somalia, in which eighteen Army Rangers had been killed by street mobs, had made the idea of “African peacekeeping” a poisonous concept in the minds of many diplomats in the American State Department and the UN Security Council. They saw nothing to gain from it and everything to lose.
The leader of the UN troops in Rwanda was a lantern-jawed general from Canada named Romeo Dallaire. None of us knew it at the time, but he was handcuffed by a lack of resolve from his bosses in New York. He and his troops also had no idea what they had
gotten into. In terms of background intelligence, Dallaire had only a map of Rwanda ripped out of a tourist guide and an encyclopedia entry hastily photocopied from the Montreal Public Library. But he got a quick and nasty education about Rwanda after an informant from a high level of the Hutu Power movement sneaked over to the UN compound one night, that winter. This man, later nicknamed “Jean-Pierre, ” came with a story that would have seemed incredible to anyone who hadn’t been watching the frog slowly boiling for the last year. Up to seventeen hundred Interahamwe members had apparently been trained to act as an extermination squad against civilians. There were secret caches of arms scattered all around Kigali-stores of Kalashnikovs, ammunition, and many more of those damnably cheap grenades-to supplement the militia’s arsenal, which consisted largely of traditional Rwandan weapons like spears and clubs. Jean-Pierre himself had been ordered to register all Tutsis and opposition elements living in a certain area, and he strongly suspected it was being prepared as a death list. Those who were planning the genocide expected there to be some half-hearted resistance from the UN at the beginning, said Jean-Pierre. And there was a strategy to cope with this-a brutal attack aimed at Belgian soldiers serving with the UN mission. It was thought that the Europeans would have no stomach for taking casualties and quickly withdraw their troops, leaving Rwandans to shape their own destiny.
In disregard of his UN superior in Rwanda, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, Dallaire had not sat on this news. On January 11, 1994, he had sent a cable to his superiors in New York informing them of his intention to raid the arms caches. It would have put only the tiniest dent in the amount of sharp-edged killing weapons being stockpiled around Rwanda, but I believe that it would have inflicted a devastating psychological blow to the architects of the genocide. They would have seen that somebody was paying attention and that genocidal actions would be met with reprisals. But the response Dallaire received from his UN bosses nicely summarized just about every cowardly, bureaucratic, and incompetent step this organization was to make in a nation on the brink of mass murder. Stockpiling of weapons may have violated the peace accords, Dallaire was told, but going after them was “beyond the mandate” of the United Nations. He was instead encouraged to take his concerns to a man who surely would be the last one in the world to care: President Habyarimana.
An Ordinary Man Page 8
