Dying to Live

by Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga

  We continued our journey north on the afternoon of that first day, and arrived at the Kalehe refugee camp during the night, about twenty kilometers from our starting point, where we slept under the stars. The inhabitants of the camp had not yet fled because up to that point, the fighting had been in the distance. The following morning, they joined us on the road of exodus.

  On our second day of walking, we reached the Ka-Bira refugee camp, the northernmost camp in the Bukavu region. Once again, the people there had not yet started to pack. But the massive influx of new people did not leave them much room for indecision. They in turn joined our sad procession.

  We stopped at the camp for a few hours to stock up on food and I met an old friend from Rwanda who gave me an invaluable gift. Noting that the shoes I wore were completely shredded, he gave me a pair of sandals, known as rugabire, made from used tires. Everyone who has lived in the camps certainly remembers these incredibly durable and practical sandals that became part of the unofficial refugee uniform. Made in the camps by Rwandan shoemakers, they were the footwear of choice for the refugees, who usually couldn’t afford new shoes. Those of us who were forcibly repatriated by the Rwandan Patriotic Army and the rebels back to Rwanda all wore the rugabire when we arrived home. And people teased us, saying we had left the country in cars and now we were returning wearing the tires on our feet. In any event, the pair of sandals turned out to be a great help: I wore them for more than two years and covered more than three thousand kilometers until I reached the border of Congo-Brazzaville and Cameroon, where I could buy myself a pair of new shoes. During those days I didn’t expect to survive for long, otherwise I would have kept a pair of rugabire as a souvenir of all the kilometers we travelled on foot.

  We continued our journey northward on an extremely narrow and muddy road, jostled by people and cars, hoping to find the refugees who had been sheltered in the Goma region. There were so many people that the road was packed at all hours of the day and night; people were loaded like beasts of burden with mattresses, one with huge suitcases, another with a child on her back, someone with a bag on his head and a child on his shoulders.... Everyone thought that the trip would be short. Our passing produced the same effect as an invasion of locusts. The road was lined with banana trees and sugar cane plants that were systematically looted and ravaged under the passive eyes of their poor Zairean owners.

  As we advanced, the bags we were carrying became heavier and heavier due to our fatigue. Things that were less valuable or very bulky got left behind. Those who had nothing, who had lost their baggage in the chaos or didn’t have time to take anything on the morning of the attack on the camps took the opportunity to pick up these abandoned objects and equip themselves. At least we still had the ability to recycle!

  A full day behind the fastest refugees, we arrived during the third day at Nyabibwe, halfway between the city of Bukavu in the south, and Goma in the north. Standing in this hamlet perched more than two thousand meters above sea level in the hills bordering Lake Kivu, I took a moment to contemplate with nostalgia Idjwi Island and the beauty of the “land of a thousand hills” (as Rwanda is often called) all along its western flank, from the Birunga volcanoes to the north, downstream of Lake Kivu to the south, through the hills and forested mountains of the prefectures of Gisenyi, Kibuye and Cyangugu. It was very picturesque, but alas, there was no time for distraction: I was a refugee being pursued and hunted like prey by the RPA and the rebels.

  As they fled the camps at Kashusha, Inera and Adi-Kivu, a big group of refugees had headed north towards Goma, while others headed west through the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the hope of reaching the Miti-Walikale road. Many of them would perish in the inhospitable jungle. Others had scarcely better luck, as the attackers were waiting near the hamlet of Bunyakiri to kill them with their knives and machetes.

  In Nyabibwe, we learned that the war had come to the Goma region and that the area’s refugee camps had been destroyed by the RPA and the rebels. Survivors who had not been repatriated to Rwanda fled west under pursuit, with some of them massacred in the Masisi region.

  So we were caught between two fronts: the southern near Bukavu and the northern near Goma. The only remaining solution was to turn west towards the center of the country. However, there was no road. It was rugged terrain, very difficult to navigate, putting our poor souls once again to the test. But there really wasn’t any choice. Nyabibwe was so dangerous we had to leave as soon as possible. The former leaders of Rwanda, including President Sindikubwabo, some ministers and former military officers, were indeed all there together. It was therefore a target for the RPA and the rebels. After divesting ourselves of some more of our luggage in order to make it through the tight passages of these rocky slopes that you needed to climb on all fours, we resumed walking.

  As there was no road to where we were going, all motor vehicles were left in Nyabibwe. Some car owners abandoned them altogether, others could not bring themselves to make a decision, and still others paid some enterprising young people to guard them, hoping that one day, they’d get them back. Among these vehicles were a dozen buses belonging to the former national mass transit company of Rwanda (ONATRACOM) that had been brought to the spot by members of the former regime as they fled. One contained the remaining top-secret documents from the former government. The others were crowded with hundreds of Hutu soldiers that the Rwandan civil war had left disabled and who had taken refuge in the Panzi refugee camp on the southern edge of Bukavu. Unable to move from place to place without assistance, they were abandoned there, crammed into these buses at Nyabibwe, where everything was burned two days later. They all perished in the fire. Maybe someday we’ll know who killed them: other refugees, who did not want to leave the buses and the disabled to the mercy of the rebels, or elements of the RPA, who wanted revenge against their former adversaries?

  Our new objective was the town of Shanje, still in the Kalehe area, not far from the Masisi highlands. Located at an altitude of more than 1800 meters, Shanje enjoys a temperate climate favourable to raising cattle. The local population, who speak perfect Kinyarwanda, are mostly Hutu from northwest Rwanda who settled in these hills a long time ago. They practice intensive rearing of dairy cattle and grow mainly potatoes, peas and beans.

  We reached our destination after two days of arduous walking through mountains thickly forested with bamboo. The journey was especially difficult for us. On the first day we lost track of our son Ange-Claude as the crowd of refugees jostled one another climbing the slopes of Nyabibwe. We walked all day without knowing where he was. Some people told us they had seen him, without saying whether he was ahead of us or lagging behind. The next morning, just before starting out, we unexpectedly and happily found him safe and sound, though exhausted and desperate. He still had his bag, which contained a couple of kilograms of corn flour and a few containers of cooked food. He was limping. The shoes on his feet were so worn that he had lost two toenails. We took a few minutes to listen to the story of his adventure before we started out. He told us he hadn’t suffered any hardship and hadn’t lost hope of seeing us again. He hadn’t been hungry as he still had food to eat, and had only eaten some of it in order to save some for his sisters. The only problem, and it wasn’t trivial, was that he hadn’t had any cover during the night and no protection against the heavy rain. He was soaked to the bone and shivering. It was the middle of November 1996, the rainy season, and we were in a high altitude region where people, especially children, were vulnerable to respiratory diseases such as pneumonia.

  When we arrived in the village of Shanje, we were housed on land formerly used to grow cinchona (a shrub whose bark is used to make quinine, a drug used to combat malaria). Local authorities chose this site so that the NGOs would eventually be able to access the refugees by making use of the dilapidated road infrastructure that had formerly linked the region to the city of Goma, going through Masisi. We had not lost hope that the UN would decide to offer us effective protection.

>   War raged everywhere in eastern Zaire. The international media gave the events wide coverage. The United Nations Security Council discussed a plan to deploy a peacekeeping force between the refugees and the rebels, as it had become widely recognized that the refugees were the Rwandan-backed rebels’ primary target. But despite the media coverage and recognition—albeit tentative—of our plight by international agencies, some countries, including Rwanda of course, but also the United States and Canada, claimed that the refugees had all returned to Rwanda and it was there that humanitarian efforts should be concentrated.

  A UN mission under the command of Canadian General Maurice Baril was mandated to verify if there were still refugees wandering in the forests of eastern Zaire. For an entire week, aircraft, large and small alike, flew over us every day, often at low altitude, trying to find us, or so they claimed. As each one flew over, the refugees applauded and celebrated the fact that they had been seen. But we didn’t realize that the pilots were suffering from severe myopia and were doing everything in their power not to see us. So, to everyone’s surprise, we heard on the evening radio broadcast that aircraft had flown over the entire region and had not seen a single refugee!

  We began to suspect that something was going on, because we couldn’t understand how military aircraft, with their sophisticated devices, could fail to notice the presence of tens of thousands of people crammed into totally exposed countryside! We were especially suspicious of the United States, who continuously opposed UN resolutions in favour of Rwandan Hutu refugees. Nevertheless, the commitment of countries such as France and Canada gave us hope that there was a chance that something similar to Opération Turquoise would soon emerge.

  We still had some food reserves, consisting essentially of corn flour, beans and lentils. You could also buy peas, potatoes and milk from the locals or exchange these food objects for clothes, cooking pots, or radios with people who still had them. However, it was very difficult to find enough food for all our hungry mouths, and sometimes we had to go to the more remote villages to find provisions. We would take these opportunities to learn about various escape routes, since we knew that the enemy was not far away and it would soon launch an assault against Shanje.

  We’d have been better off to have kept right on going instead of settling into this makeshift camp, but the villagers talked us out of it. They explained to us that the only way west to access the Kisangani road via Walikale was by crossing the most inhospitable forest, filled with ferocious animals, giant spiders, snakes, vines and incessant rain. They especially stressed that food was rare, that large rivers without bridges barred the way and the local inhabitants of the forest were particularly unfriendly.

  In Shanje, we had a week of relative calm, which helped to lessen the feeling of terror left over from the destruction of the camps. But just a week. One afternoon when I had stayed in camp, gunshots rang out somewhere to the north. The gunfire only lasted twenty minutes, but it was enough to arouse suspicion and mistrust among the refugees. A few hours later, a friend named Denys, who was returning from some remote villages where he had gone to look for food, came to our tent and whispered with a trembling voice that the shots we had heard earlier had come from the village at Rumbishi, a few kilometers north. Paul Kagame’s soldiers from Rwanda had ambushed a convoy of cars that included the former president of Rwanda Théodore Sindikubwabo. The convoy was trying to reach Shanje by way of an old road through Numbi north of Nyabibwe. He added that the former president and most of the members of his escort were killed in the ambush. Because he could not verify what had happened and was obviously frightened, he asked me not to repeat the sad story to anyone, for fear of being called a liar or troublemaker.

  But little by little, the information circulated by word of mouth. People spoke of seeing Inkotanyi (the term used to describe armed RPA soldiers) on top of nearby hills. Panicked at the idea of an impending attack, that same night refugees began leaving towards the west in the hope of reaching the Bukavu-Walikale paved road, which was our last hope. My family and I also decided it was time to go. At four o’clock in the morning, we finished packing up and left Shanje behind us.

  Around ten o’clock the sun began to get to us and we started to feel our fatigue. Along with some other refugees who, like us, had been walking since dawn, we stopped to rest and eat in the shade of the trees. We didn’t have time to finish eating when a group of young people, empty-handed, rushed past in terror, uttering a single sentence: “Run for your lives! Inkotanyi!”

  Shanje camp had been attacked. The survivors of the carnage told us how the RPA and the rebels, after taking up position on the heights overlooking the camp, had begun shelling the refugees with heavy weapons. Those who were not killed by shrapnel and tried to escape fell under the bullets and grenades of the attackers, who were waiting at every exit.

  Only because of the large numbers of refugees was it possible to challenge the small number of well-equipped soldiers and rebels. A few thousand people able to climb the steep hills managed to slip through the cracks, leaving behind thousands of dead and wounded who would themselves be later hacked to death or left to rot in this remote and desolate place. Others, who were still able to walk, were repatriated to Rwanda under the most humiliating conditions! Many of them would be brutally killed on the way back home.

  Upon hearing the news, we started running to try to stay ahead of the RPA and the rebels. Meanwhile, our ranks had been swollen by the fleeing survivors of the camps in Goma and North Kivu, who were also trying to reach the paved road.

  We walked all through the day in order to reach the very forest that the local farmers had told us was completely impassable in the hope of finding hiding places, or at least places that were not too exposed. The next morning, at the break of dawn, after a night spent sleeping in the woods, we began a journey that we would never forget.

  First of all, there wasn’t even a trail through the jungle. We had to make our own. The strongest young men and the men without family responsibilities took the lead. They ventured into the thick bush in search of a passage, followed by a procession of close to three hundred thousand people. In a few minutes, what began as the hint of a trail quickly became a highway as a consequence of being trampled by a crowd of people on foot.

  The mass of humanity flowed down the forest track in the pouring rain. Even when it wasn’t raining, the leaves of the tall trees of this thick forest, which allowed not a ray of sunshine through, retained a sufficient amount of moisture to make sure we stayed constantly wet. Trampled by a multitude, the soft and wet ground became a sea of mud, and some people became stuck. We had to use hoes to try to dig them out.

  Children, women and the weakest men were pushed this way and that and sometimes simply run over by the strongest, who accused them of blocking the path and even of complicity with the enemy (ibyitso) because of their slowness. Nobody felt compassion for anyone else. It was survival of the strongest. Everyone was obsessed with the idea of getting to “the road.”

  Through this region of steep mountains and deep valleys ran a number of rivers without bridges, whose current was very rapid during the flood season. These were the biggest obstacles we had to overcome, especially because of the lack of navigable rivers and lakes in Rwanda, very few of us knew how to swim.

  When we were lucky, the river was not too deep and we could wade across, or when that wasn’t possible, we’d sometimes find one or two tree trunks already spanning the water over which we could walk, keeping our balance, one person after another. Otherwise, we could spend the whole day chopping down trees along the shore and dropping them into the water in order to be able finally wade through the water while clinging to the branches.

  For men like me travelling with a wife and children, these crossings were a veritable obstacle course. Each time, I first had to carry my luggage to the other side, then the luggage of each member of my family and finally help my wife and daughters get across. Ange-Claude was holding up pretty well under the c
ircumstances and despite his young age, was able to be a big help to the family.

  The forest turned out to be just as the Shanje peasants had described it. The only happy event was finding enough food so that everyone was able to eat their fill, no small matter. Large quantities of taros, known here as amabungu, and yams grew everywhere in the wild. These are two tubers rich in starch.

  The civilian-military dynamic, which up to that point had not played much of a role, began to assert itself little by little. Those who had weapons or even an army hat, shirt or pants could issue a few commands and help put a little order into the generalized disorder. But they could also take advantage of certain benefits at the expense of civilians. During difficult crossings, priority was given to military personnel and their families. If one of their loved ones was sick or injured, they would requisition civilians to carry them. In addition, any kind of antisocial behaviour was attributed to civilians as if they were undoubtedly the worst dregs of society. Who farted? Who defecated on the side of the trail or in the water? The civilian!

  On December 2, my family and I finally reached the village of Hombo on the asphalted road from Bukavu to Walikale. Despite our fears, the RPA soldiers and rebels, who had known which way we were going, were not waiting in ambush for us as we left the forest. It had taken us eleven days to go the thirty kilometers that separated us from the road.

  Our joy upon arriving in Hombo was intense, as if we had just won an Olympic medal. The houses of this forest village lined both sides of the road and were in a state of disrepair that nevertheless bore witness to a prosperous past. Here, we hoped to not only reconnect with civilization and walk on a paved road, but also to be accessible to NGOs.