by John Freeman
Implicit in the phrase was a denial that, as it moved through the country taking control, district by district, until it reached the capital in July 1994, the RPF had killed Hutu civilians. This was the biggest taboo of all. In August 1994, as the genocide came to an end, Rwandans had told me that RPF forces would call people to meetings in their localities and then kill Hutus, accusing them of being genocidaires. The same month, a team sent by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, headed by an American called Robert Gersony, interviewed two hundred people and conducted one hundred group discussions inside Rwanda and in the refugee camps in neighbouring countries. The ‘Gersony Report’, as it became known, concluded that as many as 30,000 Hutus had been killed by vengeful RPF forces and other Tutsis. The new Rwandan government was furious. During the hundred days of genocide, the UN had withdrawn its peacekeepers and failed to stop the killing, but now another part of the UN was accusing them – the RPF, the people who had saved Rwanda – of murder. The UN leadership in Rwanda, already struggling to regain legitimacy, put the report in a drawer. Rumours of its existence were denied – it was just an informal briefing that had been discredited. Gersony’s conclusions were dismissed without being publicly challenged or confirmed.
The government admits there were occasional atrocities, but in Rwanda today anyone who suggests that the killings were widespread and systematic, or invokes the ‘Gersony Report’, is accused of revisionism or genocide denial.
‘We’re not able to mourn our own,’ said a Hutu friend I met over a beer one evening. ‘It’s as if only one community suffered or was killed.’
The genocidal Hutu government’s myth of the Tutsi as a kind of master race that must be exterminated by their oppressed Hutu slaves has been replaced by two new myths: first that only Tutsis were killed in 1994 and second that there are no longer any distinctions at all. Those myths cloak a third, namely that Rwanda is a democracy where Hutu and Tutsi share power, because politics is blind to ethnie. It’s partly to please the donors, especially Britain and the US, which provide substantial development aid and insist on elections and the facade of a modernizing political system. But it is not true. A Hutu minister may look powerful, but the real decisions may be made by a Tutsi permanent secretary (not that you can say this, of course, because it would mean discussing ethnie). Real power resides with President Paul Kagame and a small circle of diaspora Tutsis from Uganda who returned with him after the genocide. No one needs to say it, because everyone knows.
I asked François if Rwandans really no longer distinguished between Hutu and Tutsi or whether that was just politics. Garrulous until now in telling his personal story, he fell silent, gesturing over the wooden fence to where his new neighbours were bustling about on the veranda, near where Monsieur Albert had been shot. I changed the subject. François had been through enough; there was no need for him to court more trouble.
The following day, I bought a map of the country from a street seller and recognized almost nothing. Poring over it I realized that the names of towns have been changed – Byumba is now Gicumbi, Gisenyi has become Rubavu, Ruhengeri is Musanze. The authorities are trying to liberate geography from association with the genocide, to wipe the map clean by reviving old names that date back to pre-colonial times. Rwandans are meant to define themselves by their place of origin rather than as Hutus, Tutsis or the pygmy Twa.
Kinyarwanda, spoken by all Rwandans, is a difficult language to monitor because meaning is hidden within words. During the genocide, the notorious Radio Mille Collines encouraged Hutus to kill their Tutsi neighbours with phrases like ‘Go and do your work’. Today anything that could be construed as incitement to kill is illegal under a law against ‘genocide ideology’, defined as ‘an aggregate of thoughts characterized by conduct, speeches, documents and other acts aiming at exterminating or inciting others to exterminate people’.
I thought of my friend Monica, whom I had recently visited in Kenya, whose five children were killed in the genocide. She was calm until I asked if she spoke Kinyarwanda to her two children born after 1994 and brought up outside the country.
‘Never,’ she said, anger flashing across her face. ‘Why should they speak the language of people who kill each other? I don’t want them to know it.’
I decided to go to Butare (now Huye), a two-hour drive south of the capital where I had spent some time in June 1994, when the town was still in the hands of the genocidaires. At that time Robert Kajuga, president of the bands of killers known as interahamwe – the word means ‘those who work together’ – was staying at the Hotel Ibis, a run-down establishment painted mustard yellow. I remembered him sitting in a courtyard round the back on a wooden chair, surrounded by menacing red-eyed bodyguards drinking beer in the morning, while a young woman he said was his wife had her hair braided. It was well known that Kajuga’s mother was a Tutsi. Some whispered that his father was also a Tutsi, which was significant because ethnie passed down the male line. If it were true, Kajuga had the zeal of a convert, justifying even the murder of children.
‘It’s a war against the Tutsis because they want to take power, and we Hutus are more numerous,’ he had told me. ‘We defended ourselves. Even the eleven-year-old children came with grenades. That’s why there are bodies at the roadblocks.’
One morning I went to the Ethnographic Museum just outside Butare. After the genocide, the government temporarily suspended the teaching of history in schools, and even now the subject is largely ignored. Museums have been renovated to fit the prevailing way of thinking. Seven galleries of baskets, spears, pots and black-and-white photographs were carefully categorized: ‘Games and Sports’, ‘Dance’, ‘Poetic Tradition’, ‘Different Breeds of Cow’. I read the exhibition notes, reproduced in French, English and Kinyarwanda, but could find no reference to Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. The Ethnographic Museum had been purged of all reference to ethnicity. Photographs of the six post-Independence presidents had been hung near the exit. Under the picture of Théodore Sindikubwabo, acting president 9 April – 19 July 1994, a caption noted: ‘It is under his mandate that genocide against the Tutsi has been committed.’ Anyone basing their knowledge of Rwandan history on the preceding galleries would have found that statement baffling because it was the only mention of the term Tutsi in the entire establishment.
An enthusiastic young man whose job it was to educate schoolchildren on the value of museums emerged from his office to answer my questions.
‘People should know that history is for all Rwandans,’ he said. ‘Those who write Hutu, Tutsi and Twa have their own intention to separate us.’
I asked if, in the interest of historical accuracy, they might explain somewhere in the museum how people used to employ those terms. He replied that the Germans and Belgians had invented the divisions, which had not existed in pre-colonial times, so there was no need to mention them.
‘Today we don’t agree that there are differences,’ he replied. ‘If you want to heal the nation you cannot write that.’
The new orthodoxy has spread beyond the remoulding of history. Every Rwandan knows that, even if a word is not formally banned, the injudicious use of certain terms can land you in trouble for ‘genocide ideology’, so the safest option is not to mention ‘Hutu’ or ‘Tutsi’ at all. A 2010 ‘Reconciliation Barometer’, calculated by asking 3,000 Rwandans about their attitudes to security, politics, justice and other criteria, concluded that more than 80 per cent were ‘reconciled’, but it had proved tricky to question people about the unsayable.
‘Many participants […] incorrectly believed that references to ethnicity or ethnic groups are prohibited by law or instruction in Rwanda,’ said the Barometer report. In other words, the respondents didn’t dare mention the very issue the survey sought to assess.
The RPF’s heroic narrative, contrasting its success in stopping the genocide with the failure of the UN, forms the basis for its legitimacy to govern. But there is no space in the approved lexicon for the complexities of what happened �
� that the genocide was indeed against the Tutsi, but that some Hutus were also killed, and that Rwanda’s saviours and current rulers themselves used violence against civilians to end it.
History, however, leaks out, like water from one of the cracked terracotta pots I saw at the museum. Kagame’s political circle is a modern-day version of the court of the Tutsi kings in the nineteenth century, full of intrigue and back-stabbing. In recent years his closest friends in the RPF, several of whom I used to know, have gone into exile after power struggles within the inner circle. Every now and then there is a mysterious death or unsolved assassination attempt against someone who was once close to the president.
I thought of François shushing me when he thought the neighbours could overhear our conversation. In Rwanda today so much is unspoken or only whispered.
In Butare, unlike Kigali, you might have a nightmare about the past and on waking find it hard to push aside, because there is little in the physical environment to tell you this is a new country, that history has been banished, that you’re supposed to be safe now, or forgiven, that you’re living in a country with 8 per cent annual economic growth that serves as a model of development for the African continent. There are no shopping malls, and what passes for a supermarket boasts fewer than a dozen rows of groceries and other goods. Heavy trucks rumble through on the way to Burundi without stopping. Hand-painted signs (SUN PHOTO STUDIO BUTARE, VICTORY PHARMACY) mingle with ubiquitous Western Union Money Transfer and mobile-phone company logos. The tallest building is still only about five storeys high although new blocks are under construction.
The Hotel Ibis was being renovated, repainted in its distinctive mustard colour, two new floors rising from behind a temporary fence of iron sheeting, so I checked into the Hotel Credo, about half a mile down the road – it was shabbier but felt more neutral, less haunted. That night the downpour was so ferocious I was aware of it in my sleep. In the morning a small, bedraggled brown bird sheltered on my balcony to dry its wings. Mist rose from the hillsides across the valley, mingling with smoke from hundreds of kitchens where breakfast was being cooked on charcoal stoves.
Butare has a special place in the story of the Rwandan genocide. Six officials were tried together and convicted of conspiring to wipe out the Tutsis in the town and surrounding area. The case was one of the key trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania. The most notorious of the six accused was the then Minister of Family and Women’s Development, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko.
Some months after the genocide, I had chased her down to a refugee camp across the border in what was then called Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she was looking after orphans for the Catholic charity Caritas. A short, plump woman, wearing a sky-blue dress like the Virgin Mary in a medieval painting, she agreed to speak but not to show her face. The cameraman filmed her back. I interviewed her in French as she spoke no English. She was, she said, an exemplary wife, mother and government minister. She knew nothing and had done nothing. I remember a sentence she spat out in anger when I confronted her with evidence I had heard from survivors and witnesses. ‘Je ne peux pas tuer même un poulet!’ (‘I can’t even kill a chicken!’) As the atmosphere grew tense, her acolytes closed in around us, eyes burning, weapons surely somewhere close.
‘Time to go,’ said the cameraman. We drove as fast as we could to the border, leaving the smouldering anger of the camp behind.
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was convicted on seven charges, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Many of her surviving victims, including some who had testified against her, still live in Butare. Among them is Rose Birizihiza. A woman of medium height with delicate features, she came to my hotel wearing neither the traditional Rwandan long cotton-print wrap skirt nor Western clothes, but loose pink trousers and a tunic, like a Pakistani salwar kameez. She had a strong presence, a sense of self that was rare in survivors. I had taken a suite so I could talk to her somewhere private, where she would feel safe, but the Hotel Credo turned out to be a bad choice as it was a mere twenty yards from the house where a local official had kept Rose for three months as a sex slave during the genocide, and even nearer the place along the main road where she had watched people being hauled out of their vehicles and slaughtered.
‘I remember seeing people being killed in the rain at Nyiramasuhuko’s roadblock. There was a hole right behind this building where they would throw the bodies,’ said Rose. ‘She gave the men the idea of raping Tutsi women. She had a house in town where her boys could take them. Sometimes they stripped them there at the roadblock.’
The ICTR had concluded: ‘Sexual violence was a step in the process of destruction of the Tutsi group – destruction of the spirit, of the will to live, and of life itself.’ It had not worked with Rose. Not only had she escaped death, but her spirit and will to live were remarkably intact. It was hard to stop the words that tumbled out of her, even to get her to pause for translation. Some inner force compelled her to keep talking.
‘Before, I used to cry when I told my story and sometimes I couldn’t finish,’ she said. ‘I had many things inside me. I could take a piece of paper and write everything. Many people encouraged me to talk because they saw how talking helped me.’
Rose had mended her broken life through bearing witness. Rejecting shame and silence, she had testified at courts in Canada and the US, where genocidaires from Butare had fled, as well as at the ICTR in Arusha and at gacaca. She was especially valuable in legal cases because she had witnessed far more than most survivors. As the genocide unfolded, a local official called Pascale Habyarimana had decided that not only should she be his to rape at will, but also that she should provide some kind of warped validation to his intent. He had put her in the back of his car, driven her to where her fellow Tutsis were being tortured and murdered and forced her to watch.
‘I want you to see everything,’ he had said. ‘Then when I kill you, you can go and tell the Tutsi god that Hutus are strong and have power.’
Rose and I drove along rutted roads, splashing though puddles in the potholes. It was just before midday and children were streaming home from school in their royal-blue uniforms and green plastic sandals. They had been born more than a decade after the genocide; theirs was the generation that was meant to know nothing of Hutus and Tutsis. She was taking me to Mukura, her home village, where she had formed a supportive community of women who had been raped.
In the years following the genocide, widows found themselves isolated in remote villages, often the sole survivors living among those who had killed their families. Haunted by memory, too weak and traumatized to earn a living, they were unwelcome envoys from a time that others want to forget, deny or exploit. Rose showed me a dozen cream-coloured cement houses that she had persuaded the government and non-governmental organizations to construct in Mukura. The women found that living together as a community eased the pain of survival.
Life in rural Rwanda was brutal even before 1994. As a girl, Rose said, she had dreamed of a life in the convent but that had been impossible. I asked why.
‘My husband loved me for a long time so one night he just took me,’ she said. ‘It’s a traditional way of marriage but it’s really like rape. It meant I couldn’t become a nun.’ She spoke as if to kidnap a young woman and assault her was normal, and in a way it was. So many terrible things had happened to Rose that forced marriage was nothing.
In fact, she had grown to love her husband, Innocent, and had been happy when their three children – two boys and a girl – had come along. Although she hadn’t finished her secondary education, she taught literacy. The genocide destroyed all that. Pascale Habyarimana, her rapist, forced Innocent, who was a construction worker, to build him a house. He raped Rose in front of her husband and then killed him in front of her. He threw her two sons to the dogs outside, but she rescued them and hid them in giant traditional milk pots. The details of her story were almost too grim to listen to: girls tortured, men skinne
d alive, her own toddler daughter strangled with a rope and dragged along the road.
‘For a long time I didn’t want to see any Hutus,’ she said. ‘I wanted them all to stay in prison. And I hated all men.’ She wouldn’t allow male doctors to examine her, nor could she bear the idea of being touched by a man. Habyarimana had forced her to milk his cows – she still couldn’t drink milk. Unable to sleep, for years she had no peace. But eventually Rose found that hatred itself was the heaviest burden.
‘A time came when I realized that I had two sons so I couldn’t hate men because I couldn’t hate my two boys,’ she said. ‘Now I’m better. I told them everything and they have heard me giving testimony. They say all men are not the same – do you think Kagame is bad? Or our dad? Or your father? They are good men. Kagame helped us. You’re free and considered as a human being. Now I am beginning to think they are right …’
Few of the people I met could reflect on their feelings and remake their lives as Rose had done. In the nearby village of Kibilizi I met a group of women who had given birth to children conceived of rape. Their counsellor, Marie Josee Uweye, herself a survivor, had written an academic paper in which she quoted the mothers and their children:
One day when the rains failed people said it was because of these children, of which there are many in this area. Everything bad that happens is because of them.
I don’t know what that child is thinking. He doesn’t speak often and when he does it’s to insult others. I think he is bad like his father.
Sometimes my mother looks at me and cries. I don’t know why, and it’s only me not my little sisters. When I ask her why she just cries more.
Marie Josee took me to meet Epiphane Mukamakombe in the half-built adobe house where she lives with her son.
‘It used to be the best in the village,’ she said. ‘But my father had a reputation for disliking Hutus so it was the first to be burnt down.’ She was rebuilding but didn’t have the money to complete it. Her son, Olivier Utabazi, otherwise known as Ninja, had written in pidgin English, NO GOD NOT LIF, on one wall. On another, he had stuck up posters of Tom Close, a popular Rwandan singer, and Miss Rwanda 2012. She wore a strapless red dress and a fixed smile. There was no electricity and the plastering around the window was crumbling.
