Located on the northern tip of Lake Kivu, which forms most of the border between the Congo and Rwanda, and underneath the towering Nyiragongo volcano, Goma had been a prime tourist destination in its heyday. The local Belgian elite, Mobutu’s coterie, and adventurous backpackers filled its colonial-style hotels, which featured ceramic tiling, whitewashed exteriors, and lush, manicured gardens. The fertile hinterlands had provided a cheap supply of vegetables—including such Belgian favorites as broccoli, sweet peas, and leeks—and the dairies created by Belgian priests had produced famous cheese rounds that were exported throughout the region. Travel agencies had organized guided tours to Virunga National Park to the north, habitat of the rare mountain gorilla. A beer and soft drinks factory just across the border in Rwanda kept the numerous bars and nightclubs supplied with a steady stream of lager, Coke, and Fanta.
The decay of the Zairian state and the influx of refugees drew a somber curtain over those days. Now the hotels hosted guests of a different caliber. The defeated Rwandan army commanders and politicians began checking into Hotel des Grands Lacs and Nyiragongo, Karibu, and Stella hotels and renting sumptuous villas on the lake. Journalists, fresh from the death-strewn camps, sat with politicians and army officers in their mansions on fake leather couches behind bougainvillea-draped walls.
After several months of confusion, Rwarakabije attended a meeting of the former Rwandan army’s top brass in a Pentecostal church in Goma. Sitting with him in the church’s sacristy, under a large cross, were the dour faces of his remaining army staff. Morale had hit rock bottom. Most of the officers present had evacuated their families on chartered flights to Nairobi, Yaounde (Cameroon), and Paris. “We had lost the war,” Rwarakabije remembered. “Anyone who had enough money eventually left.” Rwarakabije himself was not so fortunate.
The exiled war council took urgent measures. It swiftly reorganized the armed forces into two divisions of 7,680 and 10,240 men, based in camps on the northern and southern end of Lake Kivu, respectively. Support units of 4,000 soldiers pushed their total to 22,000 soldiers. Rwarakabije became the commander of the several thousand soldiers who made up the Fourth Brigade.
The quality of the soldiers varied. The officers came from regular army units, and many had trained in Belgium and France; they set up rigid administrative structures with carefully typed budgets and circulars. But some troops had no military experience. Hundreds of prisoners were recruited; since they were among the only people who benefited from the mayhem, they tended to have high morale. Primary and secondary students, some as young as nine, were coaxed and coerced into training camps, forming the Twenty-Sixth Reserve Brigade.
When I prodded Rwarakabije about the feared Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militias, who had carried out much of the genocidal killing, he scoffed, deriding their lack of discipline. “They drugged themselves on marijuana and cheap liquor, robbed the population. They were thugs,” he remembered. “Many of them eliminated themselves in the war. They would stagger onto the battlefield like zombies, high and drunk, and get picked off by the enemy.” For him, there was a world of difference between the FAR’s discipline and objective of overthrowing the new government in Rwanda and the Interahamwe’s ethnic vendetta.
To raise spirits, the war council authorized the immediate payment of June and July salaries for all state employees and soldiers. They had brought with them the entire treasury of Rwanda, $30–40 million in Rwandan francs, which they stashed in a bank in downtown Goma. According to some reports, they were able to transfer over $100 million dollars in the early days of the genocide into private accounts; they had just collected the yearly taxes, and the coffers were flush with money.15 Most importantly, the commanders agreed on immediately launching guerrilla warfare against the new regime in Kigali. The expectations of the population were now especially palpable—the hopes of a million people, who were dying slow deaths in the camps, weighed on them. Since the Tutsi forces were known as inyenzi, or cockroaches, this offensive was dubbed Operation Insecticide.
Rwarakabije found pleasure, perhaps solace, in reciting troop strengths, names of commanding officers, and dates of battles, but he was reluctant to talk about the more human side of history: feelings, motivations, morality. The tragedy of the past decade was reduced to desiccated statistics.
Going through my notes later, the vision of two generals clashed in my head. One was of the pleasant old man who always had time for me and my many questions, who never seemed troubled or bothered by my probing. This was also the man his soldiers knew. In my interviews with the former Hutu troops under his command in demobilization camps in Rwanda, they painted a picture of a respected, caring commander who had become a father figure to many of the officers. They remembered him as a judicious leader, always conferring with his fellow leaders before making decisions.
The other Rwarakabije I had to infer through human rights reports and interviews with victims. While he was commander of the Hutu rebels between 1996 and 2003, his troops were guilty of massacres, mass rape, and routine pillage in both the Congo and Rwanda. Given the tight discipline that reigned, it was difficult to imagine that the general did not know about his soldiers’ behavior. At the very least, he failed to punish them.
During my first journey to the eastern Congo in 2001, to work for a local human rights group, Héritiers de la Justice (Heirs of Justice), in the border town of Bukavu, I heard daily the stories of people who had been raped or tortured or had their family members killed by the ones they called Interahamwe, the catch-all term for Rwarakabije’s rebels. Individual cases were then entered into a hardcover blue ledger in clipped terms:On 10/08/2000, Mr. Nono Marandura, from Nkono village in the territory of Bunyakiri, was shot to death in his house by Interahamwe. The victim left behind a widow and six children who until now suffer from a lack of support.
On 19/09/2000, Mr. Papayi wa Katachi was killed by Interahamwe. The victim was 17 years old. He lived in Kaloba, in Bunyakiri territory. His brother was injured by bullets and their belongings were stolen. According to the information collected, the authors of these acts targeted the victim for unknown reasons.
The ledger contained hundreds of such entries.
I turned back to my own notes to reread Rwarakabije’s answers to my questions. I had scrawled “Abuses?” on the top of one page with an arrow pointing at his answer: At the beginning we didn’t have many abuses. We even taught courses in international humanitarian law to our soldiers; some of our officers had done that training. But the troops got tired and hungry and started taking food by force from the population. We called it “pillage operations”—you would attack a village and take all of its cows and steal money.
When I pushed him, Rwarakabije conceded: “You have to remember that we had 10,000 soldiers and their families to feed. And once the pillage started, soldiers lost control and raped and even killed sometimes. If we caught them, we punished them. At the beginning, we executed several soldiers for murder, but that gave us problems, so we started caning. I remember we gave one rapist 300 strokes of a stick on his naked buttocks and expelled him from the troops. But how did you know who raped? The villagers were afraid of us; they didn’t tell us. So most of the criminals went unpunished.”
By October 1994, the Inzirabwoba—“those who are not afraid”—were infiltrating Rwanda from the refugee camps every week. Rwarakabije began leading nocturnal raids across the border. “We destroyed administrative buildings and killed local officials,” Rwarakabije explained, showing no sign of remorse. “It was a war; they were collaborators.”
As during the genocide, every Tutsi was seen as an accomplice of the RPF. In October 1994, rebels infiltrated across the hills at 3 AM, surrounding a village just yards from the border. They massacred thirty-seven people, mostly children. “Some killed out of hatred for Tutsi, others to prevent the survivors of the genocide from speaking out against them,” Rwarakabije remembered. Monitors from the United Nations tallied hundreds of killings of Tutsi in the first two ye
ars after the RPF drove the FAR from Rwanda.
It was not just Tutsi who suffered. If Hutu refugees dared to return home from the camps, they were considered traitors. Anatole Sucyendore was a Hutu doctor who had fled to Goma with the other refugees but had returned to Rwanda several months later to work in the Gisenyi hospital, despite numerous death threats. On February 25, 1995, Hutu rebels broke into his house, shot the doctor, stabbed his two-year-old infant to death, and severely injured his wife and other child.
Anonymous pamphlets distributed by Hutu militias in the camps give a taste of the rhetoric of the day:You Hutu fools, who keep giving money which is used to buy weapons to kill your fellows. You say you are studying. Don’t you know where those who studied are? How many studies did Kagame undertake, he to whom you give your money, who leads all the massacres?
And You Tutsi, you have stretched your noses and necks because you think you have protectors! And you support your Inyenzi [RPF] fellows in their extermination of the Hutu, instead of fighting [us]. We will kill you until you are no longer contemptuous, and understand that you must cohabit with others.16
The general knew, however, that guerrilla attacks alone were never going to work. “We were nettling them, harassing them, but not really challenging their hold on power,” Rwarakabije remembered. They needed to resort to a stronger weapon: blackmail.
A leader of the former government boasted to journalists from the comfort of his villa in Goma: “Even if the RPF has won a military victory, it will not have the power. It has only the bullets, we have the population.”17 Failing to beat the enemy, they would use blackmail, holding the million refugees in Zaire for ransom to force Kigali to negotiate.
The exiled leaders resorted to similar organizational models to those they had used in their homeland. The Rwandan administration had been a tightly woven mesh that reached from Kigali to the provincial authorities, down to the commune, sector, and cell, a chain of command that had made possible the mass murder of 800,000 people in just a hundred days. They grafted this grid onto the camps, regrouping refugees by their places of origin in Rwanda and placing trusted officials in charge, often the same ones who had been involved in the killings back home.
When I asked Rwarakabije about these practices, he shook his head.
“It is true. We were brainwashed. And there were a lot of extremists there who preyed on people’s fear.”
“Did you ever use this kind of language?” I asked.
“Yes, but we never did what the tracts said. We needed to scare them. There were extremists who wanted to kill Tutsi, but that was wrong. We had Tutsi with us in the camps! There were officers who had been in the Rwandan army and had fled with us. One of my bodyguards was Tutsi. We had to tell them not to stray too far from the barracks or the population could kill them.”
“Did you ever order the killing of civilians?”
“No, never.”
“But civilians were killed.”
Rwarakabije sighed and fidgeted with his loose watch again. “Chain of command ... I’m not sure you can apply that to our rebellion.”
“You didn’t control some of your own commanders?”
“My troops, yes. But the civilian ideologues, the extremists, no. Many of the army commanders did not support the genocide. It was something that had been organized by the civilians along with some extremist commanders.”
Rwarakabije ducked and weaved, denying responsibility, blaming massacres on others, using ends to justify means. “Where elephants fight,” he said, “the grass is trampled.” It was a convenient metaphor. Almost every commander I met in the region used it when I asked them about abuses against civilians.
In his calm serenity, Rwarakabije was a counterpoint to the images of hatedriven killers. According to everyone who knew him, he didn’t have any apparent hatred for Tutsi. One of his battalion commanders in the insurgency was Tutsi, and he was more comfortable being called Kiga than Hutu. Apparently he hadn’t joined and led the so-called Hutu rebellion out of ethnic chauvinism, even if the movement was deeply bigoted. He had joined because this is where he had ended up and what made sense for him to do when the civil war broke out; he could have tried to change it, but it would have been too difficult, too risky. Back to the description of Eichmann’s trial: “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”18
The same went for many rank-and-file soldiers I met. Many had joined because they were poor and unemployed or because they wanted “to be a man”; a gun and a uniform were among the best tools of social empowerment. Ethnicity was fundamental in this dynamic. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard “Tutsi aggression” invoked as the reason for the war in the Congo, but it is not the origin of the conflict, as the quote from the BBC at the beginning of this chapter might have you believe. By limiting ourselves to the simplistic “Hutu militia killed half a million Tutsi,” we are suggesting that there is a reason for that violence implicit in those identities, that something about being Hutu and Tutsi caused the violence. While ethnicity is probably the strongest form of social organization in the region, we need to scratch behind that surface, to see what its history is, who is using it or being used by it, and for what reasons.
2
AIDING AND ABETTING
INERA REFUGEE CAMP, ZAIRE, OCTOBER 1994
Beatrice Umutesi was one of the million Rwandans who had fled to Zaire. She was more fortunate than most. Born in 1959 to a Hutu peasant family in northern Rwanda, she had been a good student, obtaining a scholarship to study sociology in Belgium before returning to work in a rural development cooperative. When fighting broke out in Kigali in April 1994, she fled with her ailing mother and members of her family, and after several weeks of walking, she crossed the border into Zaire and made herself at home in Inera, a camp on the shores of Lake Kivu. There a slum of 55,000 refugees living in squalid huts had sprung up overnight on the muddy silt.
Beatrice drew on her professional experience, quickly becoming a leader in a network of nonprofit groups working in the camps. She organized a small microcredit program to allow refugees to make a living in the camps, and she helped publish two newsletters for refugee women to express themselves and explain their problems.
Although Beatrice had a small salary, she lived in one of the blindés, the tiny, doghouse-size tents where the refugees lived. Each family was given one tarpaulin, four meters by five, with the insignia of the UN refugee agency: a laurel wreath protecting a family inside. They tied it over a lean-to made out of eucalyptus saplings. If they were lucky, they had enough tarp left over to cover the cold, wet ground. They got some scratchy fleece blankets, pots and pans, and a yellow jerry can to haul water from the wells.
Beatrice was thirty-five when she fled Rwanda. She was unmarried, and she crossed the border with her sixty-seven-year-old mother and four sisters. Other people joined her family: Virginie, Assumpta, and Marcelline, three young, abandoned girls she met in the camps and took in as nieces; and Bakunda, a thirteen-year-old boy she had taken in when the RPF rebels had invaded northern Rwanda in 1993, displacing thousands of people. Beatrice slowly gathered under her wings a motley bunch of seven ragged children who had lost their own families during the war and the flight to Zaire.
The refugee camps were set up in July 1994 and stayed in place for over two years. Some would swell to contain more than 400,000 inhabitants, becoming the largest refugee camps in the world and larger than any city in eastern Zaire. Together they housed over a million people. In a perverse way, they provoked a mobilization of international resources that the genocide never had. Within days of the first arrivals, aid workers detected a cholera outbreak; the virulent parasite spread fast in the unhygienic and cramped quarters. Without proper health care, the disease killed the weak refugees within days, emptying their bodies of liquids through violent diarrhea and vomiting until their organs fai
led. By July 28, 1994, a thousand bodies were being collected a day and dumped unceremoniously into chalk-dusted pits by the dump-truck load.
Foreign television crews who had not been able to reach Rwanda during the genocide now set up camp in Goma; the pictures of hundreds of chalk-dusted bodies tumbling into mass graves suggested a strange moral equivalency to the recent genocide, except that this catastrophe was easier to fix: Instead of a complicated web of violence in which military intervention would have been messy and bloody, here was a crisis that could be addressed by spending money. Over the next two years, donors spent over $2 billion on the refugee crisis in eastern Zaire, more than twice as much as they spent on helping the new Rwandan government. 1 The RPF was furious. Vice President Paul Kagame lamented, “Personally, I think this question of refugees is being overplayed at the expense of all our other problems. We no longer talk about orphans, widows, victims [in Rwanda]. We’re only talking about refugees, refugees, refugees.”2
In the camps the living stretched out next to corpses, which nobody had the strength or the means to remove. Medical workers ran from patient to patient, jabbing intravenous liquids in their arms as fast as possible, often failing to find veins. Diarrhea stained people’s clothes and rags; everywhere, the smell of shit and death clogged the air. After one month, 50,000 people had died.
Beatrice arrived in a smaller refugee camp to the south of Goma and was spared some of the worst of the cholera epidemic. She had to face other challenges, however. Her days were made up of long stretches of waiting for the next food distribution, punctuated by meetings of her women’s group and visits to the health clinics. “Feeling useless is the worst,” she later wrote.3 Men would try to make extra money working in local fields or transporting sugarcane and cassava to the market, while women busied themselves washing the few pans and clothes they had taken with them from Rwanda.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters Page 4
