by Tony Park
Richard could see the fingers of the infantrymen curling tighter on the triggers of their raised rifles, imagine the sight pictures they were taking – a dozen black circles trained on the officer’s back as he wobbled away in search of another victim to sate his need for revenge.
As Richard turned to look for his next patient he saw Liesl Nel, the South African civilian news photographer step from the ruins of the church. She had taken pictures of him treating several victims, spending most of her time and attention getting shots of him working on a girl aged about eight who had been slashed with a panga across her back. The camera she held was fitted with a long lens, perhaps a three-hundred-millimetre zoom. She strode through the rubbish towards him.
‘Did you get that?’ Richard asked, gesturing with a flick of his head towards the departing RPA man.
Liesl nodded. The camera was shaking in her hands.
‘Good.’
She looked down at the blood on his hands and reached out to his chest and unbuttoned the uniform pocket. They were fellow smokers and she knew where he kept his cigarettes with the lighter in the packet. She took two out and put one in his mouth and one in hers. She lit them both and replaced the pack in his pocket. Her hands were still shaking. ‘The Aussie soldiers have been trying to stop me taking pictures. They say it’s just inflaming the RPA.’
Richard shrugged. ‘It’s your job. Someone needs to show the world what’s going on here. Don’t be hard on the soldiers. They’re trying to do their job, and they don’t like it. Some of them – me included – would like the RPA to get enraged enough to open fire on us. I’d like to take a few of the bastards with me.’
‘Brave words.’ She exhaled smoke into the air. ‘They’d kill us all, though. You know it. There are too many of them.’
Who do you think you are? the officer had taunted them. Richard knew it was a good question, and one none of them could answer. He felt the bile rising in his throat and swallowed it down. There was another victim being laid at his feet. Liesl stepped back and took photos of him and the medic as they worked.
The double hell of it was that the drunk or stoned RPA officer was right. Some of the people being slaughtered today were, more likely than not, guilty of mass murder themselves. It was so bloody impossible to make sense of. The Hutu were the majority tribe in Rwanda, the Tutsi the minority and once the ruling elite. Rwanda’s civil wars and unrest had been going on since the 1950s with the balance of power ebbing and flowing between the two tribes. The Tutsis, who were cattle herders, had been initially favoured by the Belgian colonialists who had taken over Rwanda from its former German rulers after the First World War. The Belgians introduced identity cards which labelled a person by their tribe, adding to the segregation of the population. This disadvantaged the crop-growing Hutu majority, but when Rwanda gained independence after the Second World War the Belgians had tried to atone for the perceived unfairness by backing the Hutu majority in the post-colonial government. More than seven hundred thousand Tutsis had fled Rwanda since 1959 when Hutus had risen up and killed thousands of their Tutsi countrymen.
The latest tsunami – you couldn’t call it just a wave – of bloodshed had been sparked by the downing of an aircraft carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi and the death of both leaders.
After President Habyarimana’s death the majority Hutu tribe had risen up again and, egged on by the Interahamwe militia, had set about eradicating the country of all remaining Tutsis, as well as the moderate Hutus who had opposed their dead leader. Richard knew from the briefings he had received that this refugee camp was supposedly home to as many or more moderate Hutus as those who were in the Interahamwe and génocidaires, but it was impossible to know for sure. State radio had egged on the killings, denouncing all Tutsis as cockroaches who had to be exterminated. The total number of people killed was still unknown, but it was feared to be close to a million. Even the women he’d treated and watched die today could have been murderers.
Richard and the Australian peacekeeping force he was attached to, as a medical officer on an exchange posting, were part of the second rotation of UN peacekeepers to try to make sense of the genocide. The first rotation had had to deal with the clean-up of hundreds of thousands of bodies and then make a start on repairing equal numbers of hacked, beaten and shot people.
The RPA, and its political wing the Rwandan Patriotic Front, had successfully taken over the country, putting an end to the mass killings, but not for long. The RPA’s Tutsi soldiers had returned from years in exile in Uganda and Kenya only to find in many cases that their entire families had been killed, their women raped before death, their homes destroyed and their wealth looted.
The UN, late to act and hamstrung when it did, had not been able to prevent the slaughter of the Tutsis, but, ironically, it was doing its best to ensure protection and safe passage out of Rwanda for the perpetrators. Camps such as Kibeho, where Richard and the Australians were deployed, had been set up as refuges for Hutus fleeing the vengeful RPA. Those who had stopped in the refugee camps had thought they would be safe, but they were wrong. It seemed that the power of an eye for an eye was stronger than the UN’s. But even though Richard knew the history was as complex as it was bloody, he could not reconcile the violence that he was witnessing as justifiable in any way.
An orderly had crossed the barricade to check on the woman who had been shot in the head. Richard looked at the soldier, who shook his head and stood there numbly, the woman’s blood on his hands.
The man Richard turned back to treat was perhaps in his late fifties or early sixties. He wore what had once been a good suit but was now stained with red mud, blood and human waste. It looked like he’d crawled from his attackers. The left side of his face was masked with blood and the white of his skull was visible beneath a flap of skin. His right arm had been crudely bandaged. Worse than these wounds, however, was revealed as Richard prised the man’s hands away from his belly. Dark blood welled from beneath a soaked towel. A young girl, perhaps eleven or twelve, kneeled in the mud beside him, weeping.
Richard was aware of Liesl off to one side, shooting pictures of him with the old man. The battery-operated motor wind of her Nikon wasn’t distracting, but she was. He forced himself to concentrate.
‘Doctor,’ the man said in accented English, ‘I am dying, yes?’
The girl spoke rapidly and tearfully in French, and Richard’s schoolboy translation was that she was telling the man he would be fine and the doctor was here to help him.
Richard ignored both of them. He would be the judge of whether the man was dying or not, and if he could be fixed. Richard ordered the medic to start an IV drip and rolled the man over to check for an exit wound; there was none. He was probably right in his self-diagnosis. The man gripped Richard on the arm.
‘I have something for you. It is important,’ he said.
‘I need to treat you first.’
‘No . . .’ With his ebbing strength the man pushed Richard’s hand aside and reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat. Richard knelt beside him and opened a fresh dressing. With a trembling hand the man produced a photograph. He held it out to Richard.
The colour print had been folded and the shiny surface had cracked in a line down the centre. It was now smeared with the man’s bloody fingerprints. Richard glanced at it quickly. He registered two black men, dressed in camouflaged uniforms and berets, and a white man in a two-piece khaki safari outfit. The white man was holding a weapon of some sort, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. While the faces of the white man and one of the black men were visible, neither of them were looking towards the camera. The other man had his back to the camera.
‘Do you know what this is, what this picture means?’ the wounded man asked, trying to clutch his belly. The medic held his hands aside while Richard cut away the man’s shirt.
Liesl had moved beside them, still taking pictures.
‘No.’ As fast as Richard could soak up the blood it welle
d out from the wound. He pressed the pad down on the wound and passed the tapes of the dressing around the old man’s back as the medic lifted him a little. ‘There’s a bit too much going on today for me to take a guess.’
The old man nodded. ‘All that is going on around you today, all these people dying, all the innocents who have been killed already, all that has happened in this country of mine is because of this photograph.’
Richard didn’t care about the cause of this madness. Hutu, Tutsi, they were one as bad as the other, he thought. He’d sat through the intelligence briefing before he’d left Australia with the medical contingent, and listened to Carmel’s legal briefing about rules of engagement, but at the end he’d still have had trouble answering which tribe was responsible for which outbreak of violence, and which had the moral high ground, and why the armed UN peacekeepers manning the sandbags and wire around him couldn’t stop a soldier from shooting an unarmed woman in the head in front of them.
‘This white man . . .’ the wounded man said, holding the photo up to Richard’s face, ‘he is . . .’
Liesl’s camera clicked and flashed.
‘Look,’ Richard brushed the proffered picture aside, ‘I don’t care who the white man in the picture is. All I care about right now is getting you patched up and out of here, back to Kigali.’
‘This man is evil, he is . . . S–’
The man coughed and a spray of blood hit Richard in the face. ‘He’s arresting!’
‘Papa!’ wailed the girl.
When they could do no more, Richard stood and peeled off his bloodied gloves and tossed them aside.
‘No! Do something, please, Doctor,’ cried the girl in English. ‘Please!’
Richard looked down at her cradling her dead father’s head, her tears streaming down her face. He had to move on to the next patient. He turned and started to move away, but something made him stop. He looked back and saw the girl’s face, tilted up to him.
‘Where is your mother?’ he asked her.
‘Dead, Doctor.’ Her body was racked with sobs.
‘Do you have any other family?’
She shook her head.
Christ, he thought. There was nothing he could do, technically. They couldn’t transport a relatively healthy child, orphan or not, back to Kigali. She would have to stay with her own people.
‘They were trying to kill us, Doctor,’ the girl said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘Who, the RPA?’
‘Oui . . . yes,’ she said, ‘but also the people in the camp. It is the bad men here, inside Kibeho, who shot my father.’
Richard ran a hand down his face. ‘Do you have other family here?’
The girl shook her head. ‘I have nowhere to go, Doctor. I think the bad men will want to kill me now.’ Her thin body sagged next to her dead father, as if she was too tired to run and had accepted that her fate now was to be the same as the rest of her family’s.
Richard looked around. There was an infantryman named Jackson; he carried a Minimi squad automatic weapon. Jackson had his machine gun perched on a sandbag wall. ‘Come with me,’ he said to the girl.
‘Private Jackson,’ Richard said, leading the girl by the hand.
Jackson looked over at him, his face grim. ‘Doc?’
‘This is . . . what’s your name?’
She looked up at him. ‘Collette.’
‘This is Collette, Private Jackson. We’re going to look after her.’
‘Whatever you say, boss.’
Richard led Collette to the soldier and she sat down beside him in the shade of the sandbag wall, drew her knees up to her chest and rested her face down between her knees.
‘Don’t let anybody harm her or take her away,’ Richard said to the soldier.
Jackson nodded. ‘No worries, boss.’ It wasn’t the infantryman’s job to guard a child, and if anything it would hamstring him further, but Richard sensed the big man was more than happy to be given an order that he could understand and would quite possibly give his life in following it.
Liesl stood by, her camera hanging loose in her right hand. Her face was white. Richard walked back to her. ‘What was that man talking about before he died?’ she asked. ‘Why did he keep holding up that picture?’
In his effort to try to save the man, Richard had momentarily forgotten about his ravings. Richard saw the man’s hand had opened as he’d died. The crumpled, blood-smeared picture was on the muddy ground. Two infantrymen, called by the medic, walked over. One grabbed the man’s arms, the other continued walking towards the feet. Richard thought he should pick up the picture, but as he started towards it, the second soldier trod on it. As the soldier crouched to grab the dead man’s ankles Richard could see the photo was stuck to the bottom of his boot, along with a smear of blood and human excrement. He was tempted to grab it anyway, to peel it off the sole, but the medic called, ‘Doc! Little kid – she’s lost an arm and is bleeding out.’
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Richard said to Liesl as he ran to where the medic was bent over a screaming girl of no more than seven.
He fought back the tears as he ran. Richard didn’t care who’d started this madness. He really didn’t.
6
The convoy of Land Rovers, painted white for UN service, rolled in through the gates of the former Rwandan Army military academy on the Avenue de l’Armée in Kigali, where the Australian peacekeeping force was based. Captain Carmel Shang moved to the window of the office she shared with the army public relations officer and photographer on the first floor of one of the red-brick buildings in what the soldiers referred to as ‘Club Med Kigali’, and looked out at the mud-spattered vehicles coming in.
More wounded from Kibeho had been dropped at the Kigali Central Hospital up the road, and the troops were now, finally, returning to barracks. Carmel could only imagine the horrors they’d seen. She’d been to Kibeho herself two days ago, to help set up the casualty clearing post. It was before the mass killings had begun, but she’d seen the chaos as the movement started from the camp; people moving in shoals, like fish, across the grassy hills and being crushed against the slicing razor wire of the Zambian compound as they’d tried to claim sanctuary from the encircling RPA troops.
Carmel headed downstairs, but hung back, watching him. She saw Richard climb down out of the cab of a truck. His hair, too long for the liking of the task force’s regimental sergeant major, was awry, and his uniform was darkly stained – with blood, she presumed. He was talking to a female doctor.
Carmel thought he was one of the most beautiful men she’d ever seen. Beautiful probably wasn’t a good word to describe a man, but his features were aquiline rather than chiselled, his hands soft rather than callused. She didn’t think him effeminate – not in the slightest – just, well, beautiful. She thought that when – if, she corrected herself – people saw them together as a couple they’d think her the lucky one. And she was lucky. He was smart, compassionate, funny, sexy and he made her orgasm every time he made love to her.
Across the crush of people, over the noise of barked orders from a platoon sergeant, he saw her and winked. Carmel blushed, knowing what she’d just been thinking.
A section of infantrymen dismounted from a Land Rover troop carrier. Some lit cigarettes, all of them seemed listless, shocked. One, a private named Green – Greeny to his mates – started walking towards her. He carried his rifle by the pistol grip, the barrel pointing down. As he came closer Carmel nodded a greeting. She saw that his uniform was also stained with blood. He scratched himself under his arm with his left hand. His face was streaked with dirt and dried sweat. He smelled of rotting meat and shit.
‘Why?’
‘Private Green,’ she said in reply.
‘Tell me, ma’am, why. You’re the lawyer.’
They were probably about the same age, although he might have been a year or two younger. She’d only graduated university and law school the year before. Greeny had joined the army st
raight from school and was a generally exemplary soldier, although he had a hot head. She knew all this because she’d defended him, back at his base in Townsville, when he’d been brought up before his company commander on a charge of assaulting a lance corporal. The lance corporal had chosen to slip in a jibe about Greeny’s girlfriend during a dressing-down. Private Green had king-hit his superior, breaking his nose. The lance corporal was a bully – borderline psychopath, Carmel reckoned on the quiet – and had since been discharged from the army. The word around the barracks was that after the incident with Greeny a few of the others, a couple of other NCOs as well, had sorted the bully out. Greeny was still guilty, but given the circumstances, the fine and seven days’ restriction of privileges had been a good result. Green had been grateful at the time, relieved not to be sent to the military correctional establishment at Holsworthy in New South Wales.
‘What do you mean, Rick?’ she asked, recalling his first name and trying the friendly approach, hoping that might work. Carmel had joined the army as a lawyer and, like other professional people taken into uniform because of their jobs, such as doctors, psychologists, PR people, nurses and padres, her officer training had been limited to a six-week ‘knife and fork’ course, designed to teach them the basics of soldiering and which way to pass the port at a mess dinner. He hadn’t addressed her respectfully as he should have, but Carmel knew respect was something that had to be earned from these hard men, not demanded.
‘I mean, ma’am,’ and the word was said as an insult, ‘why does the fucking law say we can’t do anything when we see some cunt shooting a defenceless woman in front of us?’
Carmel took a breath. She knew the words were designed to shock, and she knew his temper. She saw the vein pulsing in his neck, the free fist clenched, the other hand tightening on the grip of his rifle. ‘It’s the UN that makes the rules, Rick, and it’s our job to enforce them. You know that.’
‘The UN? More fucking lawyers. I just can’t get my fucking head around it. We watched them kill women and children. Hundreds of them, thousands –’
