The Rwandan Hostage

by Christopher Lowery

  Jenny led her up to the terrace and into the house. “Would you like to freshen up first or have a coffee on the terrace and tell me all about your round the world trip.”

  Emma smiled wearily. “Coffee would be wonderful and I can’t wait to give you a blow by blow account.”

  They walked through a large hallway out onto a wide, sunny terrace littered with settees and loungers. Emma gasped at the panoramic view. Swimming pool, gardens, golf course and the Mediterranean were laid out in front of her under the warm sunshine.

  A large, happy looking Spanish lady was fussing with the cushions on the settees. “This is Encarni,” Jenny introduced them. “She’s the boss around here, so you’ll have to be nice to her. Dos cafes con leche, por favor, Encarni,” she said, and the woman laughed and went into the kitchen. “Encarni loves my Spanish. She’s the mother of Leticia, with whom I share the house,” she explained. “It’s a bit complicated, but I’ll explain it to you when we’ve caught up on your travels and what’s happened in Johannesburg. Now, sit down and tell me all.”

  Emma sighed and wiped her eyes. “It was a wonderful trip, thank you, Jenny. If only I hadn’t been leaving Leo behind, it would have been the trip of a lifetime. But it must have cost you an absolute fortune. First the private plane, then the business class seat to Paris and to Malaga. I’ve never been so spoiled in my life. I suppose you fly like that all the time, but it was a very special treat for me.”

  “Good. If you’re feeling rested and ready for the next stage, then it was money well invested.” Jenny didn’t mention that she almost always travelled with easyJet and always in economy. “How did you leave things in Joburg?”

  “I did a runner, just as you suggested. Took two taxis and then the jet. I was terrified to look behind me, but as far as I know they didn’t find out until too late. Once I got to Mauritius I was more relaxed. I knew they wouldn’t have time to get a warrant or suchlike to stop me there. After that I just let myself be pampered and tried to think positive thoughts, but they’ve still got Leo and it’s breaking my heart.

  “I’m sure they must have wanted me too. That’s what all the questions were about. You’re right, there’s something they want that I know or that I’ve got and I have an idea what it is but I can’t think it’s of any importance after all these years. Now that I’ve got away from them I suppose they’re trying to work out what to do next.”

  Jenny waited until Encarni had brought their coffees then said, “Now, Emma. I think it’s time you told me about Leo and his father. Maybe we can work out what it is they’re after. She took her iPad to make notes. Take your time, we’re in no hurry.”

  “Right.” She took a couple of deep breaths and assembled her thoughts. “This is going back fifteen years, Jenny, so it’s going to take a while and I’m going to have some memory gaps, but I’ll do my best.

  “After the genocide in Rwanda, I wanted to go down and help. It was such a dreadful situation down there. A million people massacred in just three months, most of them with machetes. The Red Cross wasn’t ready to send people, but the SOS Médicale, it’s a small French medical relief organisation, they went into action with a few teams and I was able to go down with them. It was March, 1995. I remember arriving there; it was a Sunday, a lovely, sunny day. Flying in over the mountains I thought I’d never seen such a beautiful place. Then I discovered what was waiting for me on the ground. I worked in a dilapidated, makeshift clinic, looking after young women and girls who were pregnant from being raped. It was too horrible to describe, but I really felt I was making a difference.”

  Jenny settled herself back into the settee and took a swallow of coffee. Her sister was in full flow now, finally able to tell the story she’d concealed for fifteen years, since the day her son was born. She would listen, take notes and learn, hoping to find the reason for Leo’s abduction.

  It was thirty-eight hours since Leo had been taken.

  RWANDA

  1995

  SIXTEEN

  April, 1995

  Bumbogo, outside Kigali, Rwanda

  “Poussez, Mutesi, Poussez. I can see the baby’s head. One more big push. A deep breath, that’s it. Now poussez!”

  After ten years of non-use, Emma Stewart’s school French wasn’t exactly fluent, but in the circumstances, there was no room for misunderstanding. She concentrated on her midwifery duty and ignored the rancid, suffocating stink of sweat and filth in the makeshift clinic. Once a bicycle storage and repair warehouse, the building, near Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, had been ‘converted’ a few months previously to a ‘Family Assistance Clinic’. It could accommodate fifty females. There were presently ninety of them in the building, most of them rape victims who had managed to survive the Hutu genocide. The sanitation system was still nonexistent and a dozen battered tin baths of tepid water could hardly stretch to all the women and girls who hadn’t bathed for days as they made their way to the clinic in the hope of giving birth to their child in some vestige of civilisation.

  As usual, the decision to send any kind of help to Rwanda after the genocide was discussed by many governments at all levels and for many months. Meanwhile the country was in chaos as the new Tutsi leaders commenced their retaliation to the Hutu massacres. There was no government in place to run hospitals, schools, shelters, food programs, or factories. Public utilities; telephones, electricity and water had ceased to function. Most of the previous Hutu officials had either been killed or had fled to neighbouring countries. Perversely, the initial international help was provided to the Rwandans who had fled to refugee camps in Zaire, Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda and not to those who were still in Rwanda itself. In other words, the help was being provided mostly to the perpetrators and not the victims.

  Non-government bodies, like the UN, the International Red Cross and Médecins sans Frontières, were stymied in their desire to intervene in the country. A few smaller, less orthodox organisations made the first moves. At that time Emma was employed by the British Red Cross, in London, but when she heard that a small, effective French charity group, called SOS Médicale, was to send in a few medical teams, she immediately applied for a position with them. With a little help, she managed to convince them her school French was good enough to pass muster and her previous work in a hospital maternity ward made her a suitable candidate. She was amongst the first volunteers to arrive in Rwanda in the aftermath of one of the greatest human catastrophes since the Second World War.

  Her preparation period had provided her with many dreadful statistics; almost a million Rwandan people, both Tutsi and Hutu, had been massacred in the space of just one hundred days. Adult males now represented only twenty per cent of the Tutsi population and many families were now headed by women or even young children, because all the men had been slaughtered. Over one hundred thousand children had been orphaned. The majority of the population suffered psychological damage, either from being victims, seeing atrocities or being forced to commit them. Many of the victims remained disfigured and physically handicapped, making their reintegration into society an almost impossible task. Very few survivors were able to bury their relatives, perform mourning ceremonies or even see the remains of loved ones. Afterwards, Ihahamuke, a new word, appeared in the Rwandan vocabulary to describe the post-traumatic stress and grief caused by genocide.

  The most astounding fact of all was that the Tutsis had then overthrown the Hutu government, to take control of a country where their own people had been almost wiped out.

  Emma had digested all these facts and figures, but nothing could have prepared her for the devastating sight of the young female survivors, great with child, walking, stumbling or being helped towards the clinic, overcoming their fear and terror to try to bring their unborn child into the world in their home country. A country that had showed no mercy to them, but which was the only option they had to try to regain some kind of dignity and peace of mind, beginning with the most historical and natural role of women everywhere - motherhood.
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  She had already assisted several teenage girls to give birth, some more successful than others, but none of them had been as young as her present charge. Mutesi was just fourteen. Thirteen when she’d been raped the previous July, when her luck ran out, and she, her father, mother and eight brothers and sisters were caught by a group of Hutu Interahamwe, the so-called ‘self-defence’ organisation that led and coordinated the atrocities after the death of President Habiyarimana in April. Ironically and sadly for Mutesi and her family, it was only a few days before the killing frenzy came to an end, at least the Hutu part.

  Along with about forty other Tutsi men, women and children, the family had fled from their home in Rukara, one of the most eastern villages of Rwanda, about seventy kilometres north east of Kigali and close to the lakes on the Tanzanian border. A final murderous wave of Hutu violence was washing closer and closer to their isolated village, leaving no survivors. They crossed the hilly terrain along the western edge of the Akagera National Park and were hiding in the Gabiro High School, supposedly under the protection of the school staff. They were hoping to make their way across the park into Tanzania, unaware that already forty thousand of their tribespeople had been slaughtered or had committed suicide on the banks of the nearby Akagera River, their bodies being swept through the park in the fast flowing river and deposited in Lake Victoria.

  Just after nightfall on the Saturday evening they were to make their escape, a dozen machete-wielding Hutus were let into the building by the teachers. After raping the screaming women and adolescent girls for hours on end, with the men and children forced to watch, the Interahamwe finally hacked every member of the families to death in a frenzied bloodbath. Everyone, except Mutesi.

  Over the last two days, Emma had managed to glean the story of the young girl’s escape, often needing to consult her pocket dictionary to translate words and phrases that were beyond her vocabulary. Mutesi spoke a little French, which was easier to understand than the local language, but it was still a challenge for her and the dreadful story she learned in dribs and drabs from the girl made her want to go out and commit murder herself. She knew every one of the women and girls in the building had a similar story to tell, but she hadn’t yet learned to suppress her feelings of disgust and helplessness at the pain and suffering that these poor innocent victims had born.

  “Voilà! Il arrive. Here he is.” She gently manoeuvred the baby’s shoulders until it slid free and she could take the tiny body into her hands. “It’s a boy, Mutesi. A beautiful little boy.” She tied and snipped the umbilical cord then bathed the child and laid him, wrapped in a piece of clean towelling, alongside Mutesi’s breast, helping to put her arms around the screaming infant. She wasn’t strong enough to hold him safely and Emma sat beside her, holding the baby in position.

  Mutesi’s hair was soaked with sweat, her eyes were dark and sunken, her face was drained of colour. She looked at the baby in her arms and tears poured from her eyes. “Mon fils. He’s beautiful. Son nom est Léopold,” she breathed, her voice barely discernible. “Thank you, Emma, milles mercis.”

  She lay back onto the soaked sheet, breathing raggedly. “Emma?”

  “Oui, Mutesi.”

  “Si quelque chose m’arrive, veille sur lui. Promets le moi. If anything happens to me, look after him, Promise me.”

  “Of course I will. But nothing will happen. Just rest and you’ll feel much better soon.”

  Her eyes closed and she fell into an exhausted sleep.

  SEVENTEEN

  April, 1995

  Bumbogo, outside Kigali, Rwanda

  Emma ignored the noise and mayhem around them in the makeshift ward and sat by the bed for a while watching Mutesi sleep. Then she gently removed the baby from her grasp, wrapped him in a cotton blanket and laid him in the plastic cot at the side of the bed. As she gently rocked the cot, she thought about Mutesi’s story. The story that the young girl had relived as she lay, exhausted and emotionally drained, waiting to give birth to a baby that had been conceived by a man she didn’t even know.

  Mutesi hadn’t been touched by the Interahamwe who had raped and murdered her family and friends in July the previous year. She was grabbed and taken aside by two of the Hutu men as soon as they arrived and tied to a post by her hands and feet. The next few hours of savagery were a nightmare that would scar her mind forever. She tried to ignore the bestiality that took place in front of her, but had to live through the horror of seeing her mother and three sisters raped repeatedly then slaughtered with her father and brothers by the blood-drunk Hutu murderers. By this time she was in a hysterical state, unable to stand, hanging dizzily from the ropes that bound her to the post.

  When the Interahamwe had finally slaked their bloodthirsty appetites, the same two men dragged her outside and bundled her into a jeep, her hands and feet still bound. The jeep drove northwest for about sixty kilometres, arriving at the lake of Ruhondo, just outside of Ruhengeri, the stronghold of the Hutu rulers. They pulled into the driveway of a large property situated on a hillside overlooking the lake with large, well-lit gardens running down to the lakefront. Mutesi was taken to the basement of the house and pushed into a small, room with barred windows high up on the wall, containing only a bed, a small table and a tin bucket. The door locked shut and the thirteen year old girl who had just witnessed the deaths of all of her family members from the worst atrocities imaginable was left alone in the total darkness.

  Ruhondo, outside Ruhengeri, Rwanda

  The next morning, Sunday, Mutesi was lying curled up on the bed in a foetal position, having finally fallen into a troubled sleep, when she was woken by a skinny Hutu woman. She pulled away and pressed against the corner of the wall, shivering in fear, her eyes closed, trying to avoid contact with her. The woman spoke softly and said her name was Irene, the housekeeper, and she was to look after her. Gently but forcefully, she got Mutesi down from the bed, undressed her and took her to a washroom along the corridor. Irene stood her in the bath and washed her body and hair with great care, using a scented soap, then dried her with a soft cotton towel which smelled of lemons.

  “Has your monthly bleeding started?” she asked.

  Mutesi couldn’t speak, she just nodded. The woman smiled and finished drying the girl’s hair. With her she had a white shift decorated with red and yellow designs and she pulled it over her head. She left the girl in her room then returned with some breakfast, a dish of manioc and beans, fruit and milk. She waited until Irene had gone again then ate the meal ravenously, wondering fearfully what was in store for her.

  Irene came back a little later and asked her if she could swim. Mutesi nodded, she had learned a primitive form of swimming in the lake near her village. She took her upstairs and out into the garden. The girl was overcome by the ostentatious opulence that surrounded her. Sculptures, fountains, streams, bridges, there was even a summer house built from white stone blocks and red tiles. It was a paradise on earth. Behind her, she saw the house was as big as a castle, like the ones in the French fairy story book she had seen in the village church. Irene took her to a large swimming pool, water cascading into it from a rocky cliff and running out over a small precipice into a stream that meandered down to the lake.

  “Viens.” She said and helped her to take off the shift. “Vas y, la piscine est à toi. In you go, it’s all yours.”

  Mutesi walked nervously forward then turned at the poolside, still suspicious of everyone and everything.

  “Jump in”, said Irene, encouraging her with a wave of the hand.”

  The girl jumped into the warm, clear water, staying under the surface as long as she could, trying to cleanse her naked body, trying to escape from the terrible events she’d suffered. Then she resurfaced and threw herself across the pool like an animal, swimming with a clumsy paddle stroke.

  A man was standing at the window of a room on the third floor of the mansion. He was naked. He was looking through binoculars, held in his left hand. He watched Irene pull Mutesi’s
shift over her head and reveal her shapely nubile body. His eyes followed her as she walked to the pool. He stared as she came to the surface and swam across the pool. With his other hand, he began to masturbate.

  Mutesi had just eaten another light meal, served by Irene. She was curled up once more on the bed, crying and wishing she had perished with her family instead of surviving to be brought to this place. Wondering who had saved her from the horrors that had befallen her family and friends, and why. Frightened and fearful that the nightmare wasn’t yet over.

  The door opened and a man entered the room. He wore spectacles but didn’t look very old, a little older than her father. He was tall and slim, with a moustache and he was dressed in a black bath robe. “Bonjour, Mutesi,” he said. “My name is Jean-Bousquet. This is my home; I hope you are comfortable here.” He came to sit on the bed beside her. He smelled of perfume, like a sweet smelling flower.

  Mutesi shivered and moved away into the corner of the wall. “Oui, Monsieur.” she stammered.

  Jean-Bousquet placed his hand on her leg. “Tell me Mutesi, have you ever been with a man?”

  She shook her head and looked away, trembling.

  “Bien.” He stood up, placed his spectacles on the table and unloosened the sash of his robe and shook it off. She saw he was aroused, like the Hutu men who had raped her mother and sisters. She turned her head away again and cowered against the wall, shaking with fear, sobbing silently.

  He stretched out his hand and pulled her towards him by the arm. “Come Mutesi, I want to be your friend,” he said.

  EIGHTEEN

  July - December, 1994