Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

by Jason Stearns

  It was, of course, not the first time Rwarakabije had experienced ethnic hatred. Although many families had intermarried with the other ethnicity, and they all shared the same language, culture, and traditional religious practices, the Hutu-Tutsi rift had grown steadily since independence. “In secondary school I was taught that Hutu come from Chad and Niger, while Tutsi are from Abyssinia, what is now Ethiopia. This was the ideology that was hammered into us, even at the military academy: Tutsi are more intelligent, more beautiful, but also tricksters, unreliable. But,” he laughed, “they said it was the Hutu who had developed the country, who had farmed the fields!”

  When Habyarimana was killed on the evening of April 6, 1994, Rwarakabije, then the operational commander for the gendarmerie, became part of a war council that was supposed to name new commanders to take the country forward. The commander of the army had been killed along with President Habyarimana, and a new leader needed to be named. Rwarakabije was in close contact with the acting commander in chief, who opposed the killing of Tutsi civilians. “He used to call me every day,” he said, “telling me to make sure no gendarmes kill civilians.”

  Rwarakabije, in the meantime, concentrated on the civil war, pushing back the RPF rebels, who had launched a major attack on Kigali as soon as the president’s plane was shot down. However, parallel chains of command permeated the security services, and his orders were often contradicted by extremists. The acting commander lost control of much of the army; Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, a close confidant of President Habyarimana, took control of the most important units and began orchestrating massacres. The presidential guard and the various youth militia began systematically killing Tutsi civilians. On one occasion, Rwarakabije’s own officers, whom he had sent to evacuate a group of eight Tutsi who lived next to his house, were attacked by a mob of militiamen who accused them of conniving with the enemy.

  “I knew that members of the police were also carrying out massacres, but what could I do to stop them?” When I asked the general whether he had given orders to stop the killings, he nodded, then put his hands in the air. “Of course. But what could we do? We were no longer in control.” On his way to work every morning, Rwarakabije passed by roadblocks where Tutsi were picked out and hacked to death. The smell of rotting flesh hung in the air over Kigali; his children complained and cried in their beds at night. Crows circled in the skies, and packs of dogs roamed the streets, scavenging for dead bodies.

  And yet Rwarakabije continued to go to the office every day, continued to do his job. Unlike other officers, who defected to the RPF, Rwarakabije was determined to win the war. He sent his family to his home village in the north and only fled Kigali when it was clear the fight was lost. When talking about the genocide, he emphasized the military, not the human dimension: “The army deployed most of its forces to massacre civilians, diverting trucks, ammunition, and manpower to slaughter them. The genocide caused our resistance to crumble. It was a cafouillage, a real mess.”

  The words “chaos,” “mess,” and “confusion” recurred in my discussions with the general. They contrasted with his refrain that all he tried to do during this time was obey orders and uphold discipline. They were two conflicting ways of absolving himself from responsibility, but also means of coping morally and psychologically with the killing around him.

  According to everybody who knew him, Rwarakabije was not himself involved in the killing. In 2009, he stood trial in court for crimes of genocide, but his former neighbors and colleagues quickly came to his defense. “I was glad I was put on trial,” he insisted, “so that once and for all, my reputation would be cleared.” A Tutsi man whom he helped bring to safety testified for him; one of the officers whom he had sent to evacuate a group of Tutsi argued on his behalf.

  He was, however, part of an organization that caused the deaths of over 800,000 people, and he was in a position to save lives. When I pressed Rwarakabije about his loyalty to the army, even when it became obvious that many of his superiors were involved in the massacres, he shook his head, exasperated: “You are much too logical about this! We were in the middle of a war. We didn’t have time to think whether we were complicit in a genocide—we were just trying to survive!” He thought they still had a chance to win the war, he said. They thought their flight to Zaire was a tactical retreat, nothing more.

  Many of his colleagues, however, did run, and called him from Canada and Belgium, urging him to join them in exile. He refused. One of his fellow police commanders, who had defected during the genocide and didn’t want me to reveal his name, told me: “He was a disciplinarian to the core. He never really asked why he was fighting; that was for the politicians to decide. And when the politicians ran, he just kept on fighting, like a robot.”

  Even if he had decided to defect, it would not have been simple. Several of Rwarakabije’s colleagues surrendered to the RPF but were never heard from again. There were stories of President Habyarimana’s former officers turning themselves in only to be found the next day in a banana grove, their hands tied behind their back and their brains shot out.

  “Don’t forget that this was a war,” the avuncular general repeated. “If I had deserted, I could have been killed by my own commanders or by the RPF.” He paused and fiddled with his watch. “The genocide was terrible, of course,” he said. “I thought it was a huge mistake.” He saw the killing out of his office window, as it were, disagreed with it, and got on with his work.

  Watching him seated behind his almost empty desk, I found it hard to imagine that this man had been the leader of one of the most notorious rebel groups in Africa. He explained with his steady, glued-on smile that he had never learned how to use a computer in the bush. Instead, he operated with pen and a stack of printer paper, on which he made random notes and diagrams, as if to illustrate his thoughts to himself as he spoke with me. He was writing his own history of the war, he told me, showing me a stack of worn notebooks. He flipped through their pages as we talked, to find dates and names he was uncertain of. He had highlighted important passages in yellow or circled them with a ballpoint pen. When I asked him when he would publish his own book, he smiled. “Not yet. The country is not yet ready for everything I have to say. It is too early.”

  Ethnic-based violence, the most extreme form of which was the genocide, is so often associated with the Congolese and Rwandan wars that it is worth trying to understand its causes. We tend to see the history of Rwanda as the history of a struggle between two ethnic groups, the agriculturist Hutu and the cattleherding Tutsi. An honest interrogation of the past, however, would require us to throw most of these crude concepts out the window, or at least to deconstruct them. The Rwandan state in its current geographical and political form did not come into existence until the twentieth century, after centuries of fighting between competing kingdoms and princely states.

  Ethnic identities behind the rift between Hutu and Tutsi are being constantly contested and redefined with the changing political, cultural, and economic landscape. Until the eighteenth century, for example, ethnicity was less important than class and clan-based identities, which themselves coexisted alongside several layers of regional and social identities. Thus, each of the twenty major clans in Rwanda includes both Hutu and Tutsi, and among each ethnic group one can find poor, landless peasants as well as wealthier princes. To label someone a Hutu and leave it at that neglects that she may, depending on the social context, see herself more as a southerner, a member of the Abega clan, or a follower of the Pentecostal church. This is not just hair-splitting; much of contemporary Rwandan politics has been shaped by these competing and overlapping identities.

  The polarization of Rwandan society into Hutu and Tutsi increased with King Rujugira’s consolidation of the Rwandan state in the eighteenth century. He expanded his armies and began subjugating much of what is today Rwanda, including areas where these ethnic distinctions previously had little traction. His armies’ long military campaigns required more revenues and deeper admini
strative penetration of society. The military, which was led by Tutsi, became the basis for a bureaucracy that administered land and collected taxes. Progressively, the loose distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi tightened and became more hierarchical. By the late nineteenth century, when the first colonizers arrived, many Hutu depended on Tutsi chiefs for land to farm and had to pay tithes as well as provide free manual labor. Still, ethnic identity remained fluid, with intermarriages between ethnic groups and the possibility, albeit rare, for rich Hutu to become “promoted” to Tutsi if they owned many cattle and had power in society. At the local level, Hutu remained influential, in particular in the administration of land. Still, social arrangements varied greatly between different regions, with some, like Gisaka in eastern Rwanda, not showing much ethnic polarization until much later.

  The conquest of Rwanda—first by Germans, then Belgians—radically altered social structures. A tiny group of white administrators was faced with ruling a complex, foreign country they barely understood. As elsewhere in Africa, the new rulers chose to rule through what they thought were well-established, existing structures. They thus empowered the Tutsi monarchy, which they saw as the “natural” elite, abolished checks and balances on the royal family, and streamlined the local administration by ousting Hutu chiefs and vesting all power in a Tutsi-dominated administration. At the same time, they helped the royal court double the territory under its control, conquering kingdoms and princely states around its periphery.

  The delicate social balance between the farmers and the pastoralists, the royal elite and the peasantry, the rich and the poor was brutally disrupted. Whereas Hutu peasants had previously been able to appeal to their relatives in case of abuses by the government, or at least play different chiefs off against each other, now they were left at the mercy of a Tutsi administration.6

  The European rulers grounded their rule in an ideology and ethnography heavily influenced by racial theories popular in the United States and Europe at the time. John Hanning Speke, one of the first British explorers in the region, had written in 1863 about a distinct “Asiatic” sophistication among some of the people, presumably Tutsi, he encountered. “In these countries,” he wrote, “government is in the hands of foreigners, who had invaded and taken possession of them, leaving the agricultural aborigines to till the ground.” Speke, dabbling in history and religion, conjectured a link between these tribes and Ethiopia and proposed a “historical” basis for what he claimed to observe: “The traditions of these tribes go as far back as the scriptural age of King David.”

  Speke’s theory was not a mere flight of fancy. Since the Middle Ages, Europeans had studied Africa through the lens of the Bible, trying to find divine design in nature and human society. One of the passages of most interest was from Genesis 9 and 10. Just before a description of how Noah’s sons peopled the earth after the flood, the text tells the story of when Noah, drunk from wine, falls asleep naked. His sons Shem and Japheth avert their eyes and cover him, but their brother, Ham, stares at his naked body. When he awakes, Noah is furious at Ham and condemns Ham’s son, Canaan, to slavery: “a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”

  Although the Bible remains vague about Ham and Canaan’s destiny, well into the nineteenth century biblical scholars and scientists alike categorized the nations of the world as the descendents of Noah’s sons: the Semitic races of the Middle East, the Japhetic races of Europe, and the Hamitic races of Africa. Turned on its head, this theory explained the advanced civilizations found in Africa: Rock-cut wells, complex political organization, and irrigation systems were all creations of a Hamitic race that traced its lineage back to the Middle East. In Speke’s view, this explanation placed the continent’s Negroid races firmly where they belonged: on the bottom of the racial hierarchy, incapable of advanced civilization, and open game for slavery. Elsewhere, in the Muslim world, leaders also used the Hamitic theory to justify the enslavement of black Africans.

  The first German governor of Rwanda, Count von Goetzen, theorized “the Tutsi are Hamitic pastoralists from Ethiopia, who have subjugated a tribe of Negro Bantus,” while Catholic prelate Monsignor Le Roy put it differently: “Their intelligent and delicate appearance, their love of money, their capacity to adapt to any situation seem to indicate a Semitic origin.” Armed with rulers and measuring tape, craniometric Belgian administrators went about rigidifying with physical measurements the previously more fluid boundaries between Tutsi and Hutu identities.

  These colonial fantasies soon became engraved on the consciousness of the colonized, as well. The Tutsi elite, long favored under the Belgians, seized on the myths to justify their continued superiority, imbibing the stereotypes of Hutu—as espoused by a Belgian priest—as “the most common type of black, brachycephalic and prognathous, with agronomic taste and aptitudes, sociable and jovial ... with thick lips and squashed noses, but so good, so simple, so loyal .”7 Hutu dissidents, in the meantime, appropriated the stereotypes of Tutsi as a race of crafty herders from Ethiopia to rally support against “the foreigners.”

  Where loyalty and power stirred General Rwarakabije, the masses were moved more by fear, ideology, and local politics. In the popular imagination, the RPF had been cast as subhuman, as demons. By the time the genocide began, the civil war had been raging for almost four years. Over a million people, mostly Hutu, had been displaced from the north of the country, and many of them had moved toward Kigali, where they spread the word of the rebels’ abuses. Hutu extremists preyed on this paranoia in their radio broadcasts. A Tutsi officer, having seized a village, was asked by one of the few Hutu who had stayed to lift up his shirt so the villagers could see if he had a tail, so sure were they that he was a devil.8 Even the sick and frail marched hundreds of miles to the border to escape the sure death they thought awaited them under the RPF. In the camps, refugees’ reluctance to return came at least as much from their fear of the RPF. The intimidation had become internalized.

  Recent studies of the genocide have also revealed the importance of local politics in determining whether an area carried out genocide or not. Seasonal laborers and the landless, for example, were more likely to be manipulated by rural elites who stood to lose if the Hutu regime lost power.9 The local strength of more extremist political parties reinforced pressure to carry out killings, as did the presence of Burundian Hutu refugees who had fled violence in their home country. In total, some 200,000 probably took part in the killing for many reasons: 10 Some were forced to do so by authorities; others sought economic gain; still others participated out of a mixture of social pressure and the belief that they would be killed themselves if they did not comply.11

  In southwestern Rwanda, the Hutu flight was stalled by the deployment of a UN-mandated French military mission, dubbed Operation Turquoise, intended to protect the few remaining Tutsi in that region as well as aid workers. It was one of the many absurdities of the Rwandan crisis: The French government and its contractors had made thirty-six shipments of weapons to Habyarimana’s government between 1990 and 1994, worth $11 million, and had deployed seven hundred fifty French troops, who helped with military training, planning, and even interrogation of RPF prisoners.12 Just months after they had finished helping to train the Interahamwe, the French, wolves turned shepherds, announced a humanitarian intervention to bring an end to the killing.

  The French troops did save Tutsi lives. They also, however, refused to arrest the Habyarimana government and army officials in their territory who were known to have organized massacres. Hate radio continued broadcasting unhindered from the area controlled by the French, exhorting the population to continue the extermination of Tutsi. Meanwhile, across the Zairian border in Goma, the base of French operations, at least five shipments of weapons from France were delivered to the ex-FAR leadership who had fled from Kigali.13 To add insult to injury, French president François Mitterrand personally authorized a donation of $40,000 to Habyarimana’s wife, one of the most extremist members of the president�
��s inner circle, when she arrived in Paris fleeing the violence in country. The donation was labeled as “urgent assistance to Rwandan refugees.”14

  When Rwarakabije crossed into Zaire and arrived in Goma in July 1994, he spent a few days wandering about, disoriented and deflated. Goma, a town of 300,000, was inundated with goats, cars, and a teeming mass of people that surged in various directions, confused, without bearings. Rwarakabije had arrived in a truck with fellow officers, but everybody had dispersed to tend to their families. He finally managed to rent a house on the edge of town from a traditional chief for his wife and four children. Like all officers, he had benefited from the looting of state coffers before leaving Rwanda. They needed the extra cash, as the influx of refugees had sent prices in the markets skyrocketing. A kilo of meat was almost $10, five times the normal price.

  Whereas the price of food had peaked, the value of weapons and ammunition had plummeted because of their abundance. At the border crossing, within sight of French troops, the fleeing Rwandan soldiers were supposed to give their weapons over to Mobutu’s presidential guard. Machine guns and rocket launchers piled up.

  Behind the customs offices, however, an arms market had spontaneously sprung up, where ex-FAR officers negotiated to buy back their arms. An AK-47 went for $40 to $50, a Russian-made rocket launcher for just under $100. Other weapons were never handed over to the Zairians. Rwarakabije saw tons of ammunition smuggled through in trucks, hidden under bags of rice and maize. “We gave the border guards some money to look the other way. All they wanted was money.”