The Shadow of the Sun

A Lecture on Rwanda

Ladies and gentlemen.

Our subject is Rwanda. It is a small country, so small that on certain maps of Africa it is marked with only a dot. You must read the accompanying explanatory notes to discover that this dot, at the continent’s very center, indicates Rwanda. It is a mountainous country. Plains and plateaus are more characteristic of Africa, whereas Rwanda is mountains and more mountains. They rise two thousand, three thousand meters, even higher. That is why Rwanda is frequently called the Tibet of Africa — although it earned this moniker not only because of its mountains, but also on account of its singularity, distinctness, difference. It is extraordinary not only geographically, but also socially. As a rule, the populations of African states are multitribal (Congo is inhabited by 300 tribes, Nigeria by 250, and so on), whereas only one group inhabits Rwanda, the Banyarwanda, a single nation divided into three castes: the Tutsi cattle owners (14 percent of the population), the Hutu farmers (85 percent), and the Twa laborers and servants (1 percent). This caste system (bearing certain analogies to India’s) took shape centuries ago; because no written sources exist on the subject, there is ongoing disagreement as to whether this occurred in the twelfth century, or as late as the fifteenth. Suffice it to say that a kingdom has existed here for hundreds of years, ruled by a monarch called mwami, who was Tutsi.

This mountain kingdom was a closed state, maintaining relations with no one. The Banyarwanda initiated no conquests, and, like the Japanese at one time, they did not allow foreigners into their territory (which is why, for example, they had no experience of the slave trade, the bane of other African peoples). The first European to enter Rwanda, in 1894, was a German traveler and officer, Count G. A. von Götzen. It is worth noting that eight years prior to this, at the Berlin Conference that partitioned Africa, the colonial powers awarded Rwanda to the Germans, a development about which no Rwandan, including the king, was so much as informed. For a number of years, the Banyarwanda lived as a colonized people, without knowing it. Later, too, the Germans took little interest in the colony, and after World War I they lost it to Belgium. The Belgians also were not exceedingly active here. Rwanda was distant from the coasts, more than 1,500 kilometers away, and, most important, it was of little value, no significant raw materials having ever been discovered there. The Banyarwanda’s social system, shaped centuries ago, was thus able to endure unaltered in its mountainous stronghold until the second half of the twentieth century.

This system had several characteristics reminiscent of European feudalism. The country was ruled by a monarch surrounded by a group of aristocrats and a throng of noblemen. Together, they constituted the ruling caste: the Tutsis. Their greatest, and really sole wealth was cattle: the zebu cows, a breed characterized by long, beautiful, swordlike horns. These cows were never killed — they were sacred, untouchable. The Tutsis nourished themselves with their milk and blood (the blood, drawn from arteries in the neck cut with the point of a spear, was collected in vessels that had been washed with cow’s urine). All these actions were performed by men, for women were forbidden to have contact with cattle.

The cow was the measure of everything: wealth, prestige, power. The more cattle one had, the richer one was; the richer one was, the more power one had. The king owned the most cattle, and his herds were under special protection. The main focus of the festivities marking the yearly national holiday was the parade of cattle. A million of them would pass before the monarch. This lasted hours. The animals raised clouds of dust that hung over the kingdom for a long time. The dimensions of these clouds attested to the health of the monarchy, and the ceremony itself was endlessly and emotionally extolled in Tutsi poetry.

“The Tutsi?” I often heard in Rwanda. “The Tutsi sits on the threshold of his house and watches his herds grazing on the mountainside. The sight fills him with pride and happiness.”

The Tutsis are not shepherds or nomads; they are not even breeders. They are the owners of the herds, the ruling caste, the aristocracy.

The Hutus, on the other hand, constitute the much more numerous and subordinate caste of farmers (in India they are called Vaisyas). The relations between the Tutsis and the Hutus were authentically feudal — the Tutsi was the lord, the Hutu his vassal. The Hutus lived by cultivating land. They gave a portion of their harvest to their master in exchange for protection and for the use of a cow (the Tutsis had a monopoly on cattle; the Hutus could only lease them from their seigneurs). Everything according to the feudal order — the dependence, the customs, the exploitation.

Gradually, toward the middle of the twentieth century, a dramatic conflict arises between the two castes. The object of the dispute is land. Rwanda is small, circumscribed, and densely populated. As often in Africa, a battle erupts between those who make their living raising cattle and those who cultivate the land. Usually, however, the spaces on the continent are so great that one side can move onto unoccupied territory and the sparks of war are extinguished. In Rwanda, such a solution is impossible — there is no place to go, nowhere to retreat to. Meantime, the Tutsis’ herds increase and need ever more grazing land. There is but one way to create new pastures: by taking land from the peasants, i.e., by ejecting the Hutus from their territories. But the Hutus are already cramped. Their numbers have been swelling rapidly for years. Making matters worse, the lands they farm are poor, for all intents and purposes infertile. The mountains of Rwanda are covered with a very thin layer of soil, so thin that when the rainy season comes each year, the downpours wash away large stretches of it, and in many places where the Hutus had their little fields of manioc and corn, naked rock now glistens.

So, on the one side, the powerful, expanding herds of cattle — the symbol of Tutsi wealth and strength; and on the other the squeezed, huddled, increasingly displaced Hutus. There is no room, there is no land. Someone must leave, or perish. Such is the situation in Rwanda in the fifties, when the Belgians enter the picture. They have suddenly become highly involved: Africa is just then at a critical juncture, there is a surging wave of liberation, of anticolonialism, and there is pressure to act, to make decisions. Belgium is among those powers whom the independence movement has caught most by surprise. Thus, Brussels has no game plan, its officials do not really know what to do. As is usual in these circumstances, their response is to delay finding real solutions, to stall. Until now, the Belgians ruled Rwanda through the Tutsis, leaning on them and using them. But the Tutsis are the most educated and ambitious sector of the Banyarwanda, and it is they who now are demanding freedom. And they want it immediately, something for which the Belgians are utterly unprepared. So Brussels abruptly switches tactics: it abandons the Tutsis and begins to support the more submissive, docile Hutus. It begins to incite them against the Tutsis. These politics rapidly bear fruit. The emboldened, encouraged Hutus take up arms. A peasant revolt erupts in Rwanda in 1959.

In Rwanda, alone in all of Africa, the liberation movement assumed the form of a social, antifeudal revolution. In all of Africa, only Rwanda had its siege of the Bastille, its dethronement of the king, its Gironde and its terror. Groups of peasants, enraged, inflamed Hutus armed with machetes, hoes, and spears, moved against their masters-rulers, the Tutsis. A great massacre began, such as Africa had not seen for a long time. The peasants set fire to the households of their lords, slit their throats, and crushed their skulls. Rwanda flowed with blood, stood in flames. A massive slaughter of cattle began; the peasants, often for the first time in their lives, could eat as much meat as they wished. At the time, the country had a population of 2.6 million, including 300,000 Tutsis. It is estimated that tens of thousands of Tutsis were murdered, and as many fled to neighboring states — to the Congo, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Burundi. The monarchy and feudalism ceased to exist, and the Tutsi caste lost its dominant position. Power was now seized by the Hutu peasantry. When Rwanda gained its independence in 1962, it was members of that caste who formed the first government. At its head was a young journalist, Grégoire Kayibanda. I was visiting Rwanda for the first time then. My memories of Kigali, the capital, are of a small town. I was unable to find a hotel; perhaps there wasn’t one. Some Belgian nuns finally took me in, letting me sleep in the maternity ward of their neat little hospital.

The Hutus and the Tutsis awoke from such a revolution as from a bad dream. Both had lived through a massacre, the former as its perpetrators, the latter as its victims, and such an experience leaves a painful and indelible mark. The Hutus have mixed emotions. On the one hand, they vanquished their masters, cast off the feudal yoke, and for the first time attained power; on the other hand, they did not defeat their lords in an absolute way, did not annihilate them, and this consciousness, that the enemy was painfully wounded but still lives and will seek vengeance, sowed in their hearts an insuppressible and mortal fear (let us remember that fear of revenge is deeply rooted in the African mentality, that the immemorial right of reprisal has always regulated interpersonal, private, and clan relations here). And there is a lot to be afraid of. For although the Hutus seized the mountainous fortress of Rwanda and established their rule there, a Tutsi fifth column, numbering around 100,000, remains within its borders; furthermore, and perhaps even more dangerously, the fortress is encircled by the encampments of Tutsis expelled from it yesterday.

The image of the fortress is not poetic license. Whether you enter Rwanda from Uganda, Tanzania, or Zaire, you will always have the same impression of stepping through the gates of a stronghold that rises up before you, fashioned from immense, magnificent mountains. And so it is now for the Tutsi, a freshly exiled and homeless vagabond; when he awakens in the morning in a refugee camp and walks out in front of his shabby tent, he beholds the mountains of Rwanda. In those early hours of the day, they are a startlingly beautiful sight. I myself often jumped up at dawn just to look. High yet gentle peaks stretch before you into infinity. They are emerald, violet, green, and drenched in sunlight. It is a landscape devoid of the dread and darkness of rocky, windswept peaks, precipices, and cliffs; no deadly avalanches, falling rocks, or loose rubble are lying in wait for you here. No. The mountains of Rwanda radiate warmth and benevolence, tempt with beauty and silence, a crystal clear, windless air, the peace and exquisiteness of their lines and shapes. In the mornings, a transparent haze suffuses the green valleys. It is like a bright veil, airy, light and glimmering in the sun, through which are softly visible the eucalyptus and banana trees, and the people working in the fields. But what the Tutsi sees there above all else are his grazing herds. Those herds, which he no longer possesses yet which were for him the foundation of existence and the reason for living, now swell in his imagination into myth and legend, become his fondest desire, dream, obsession.

That is how the Rwandan drama is engendered, the tragedy of the Banyarwanda nation, born of an almost Israeli-Palestinian inability to reconcile the interests of two social groups laying claim to the same scrap of land, too small and confined to accommodate them both. Within this drama is spawned the temptation, at first weak and vague, but with the passing of years ever more clear and insistent, of the Endlosung—a final solution.

But this is still a long way off. We are in the sixties, Africa’s most promising and optimistic years. The great expectations and euphoria reigning on the continent ensure that no one pays much attention to the bloody events in Rwanda. There is no communication or newspapers, and besides — Rwanda? Where is that? How does one get there? The country appears forgotten by God and men alike. It is quiet here, lifeless, and — as can be quickly ascertained — boring. No major road runs through Rwanda, there are no big cities, it is rare for anyone to pass this way. Years ago, when I told a friend of mine, a reporter from the Daily Telegraph, Michael Field, that I had been to Rwanda, he asked: “And did you see the president?” “No,” I answered. “So what did you go there for?” he exclaimed, astounded.

It is true that what strikes you most in a place like Rwanda is its deep provincialism. Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces. A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star. For most people, the real world ends on the threshold of their house, at the edge of their village, or, at the very most, on the border of their valley. That which is beyond is unreal, unimportant, and even useless, whereas that which we have at our fingertips, in our field of vision, expands until it seems an entire universe, overshadowing all else. Often, the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens. The newcomer has a wide-angle lens, which gives him a distant, diminished view, although one with a long horizon line, while the local always employs a telescopic lens that magnifies the slightest detail.

For the natives, however, the dramas are real, and the tragedies painful and not exaggerated. So it was in Rwanda. The revolution of 1959 divided the Banyarwanda nation into two opposing camps. From now on, the passage of time would serve only to strengthen the mechanisms of discord, sharpen the conflict, lead again and again to bloody collisions and, finally, to apocalypse.

The Tutsis, who have spread out in the camps along the borders, conspire and contract. In 1963 they strike from the south, from neighboring Burundi, where their kinsmen, the Tutsis of Burundi, hold power. Two years later — another Tutsi invasion. The Hutu army stops it, and in retaliation organizes a great massacre in Rwanda. Twenty thousand Tutsis die, hacked to pieces by Hutu machetes. (Other estimates put the figure at fifty thousand.) No outside observers are present, no international commissions, no media. I remember that a group of us, foreign correspondents, tried to get into Rwanda but were refused entrance by the authorities. We were reduced to gathering what information we could in Tanzania, from escapees — mainly women with children, terrified, wounded, hungry. The men were usually killed first, did not return home from expeditions. Many wars in Africa are waged without witnesses, secretively, in unreachable places, in silence, without the world’s knowledge, or even the slightest attention. And thus it was with Rwanda. The border skirmishes, pogroms, massacres go on for years. Tutsi partisans (called “cockroaches” by the Hutus) burn villages and slaughter the locals. The Hutu villagers, in turn, supported by their army, organize rapes and massacres.

Living in such a country is difficult. There are still many villages and towns with a mixed population. Tutsis and Hutus live side by side, pass each other on the roads, work in the same place. And, privately, they conspire. Such a climate of suspicion, tension, and fear is fertile breeding ground for the old, tribal African tradition of underground sects, secret associations, and mafias. Real and imaginary. Everyone secretly belongs to something — and is convinced that everyone else, the Others, also belongs to something. And, naturally, the thing they belong to is a hostile, enemy organization.

…

Rwanda’s twin country is its southern neighbor, Burundi. The two have a similar geography and social structure, and a common history going back centuries. Their destinies diverged only in 1959: in Rwanda, the peasant revolution of the Hutus was triumphant, and its leaders assumed power, whereas in Burundi the Tutsis maintained and even strengthened their rule, expanding the army and creating something akin to a feudal military dictatorship. Nevertheless, the preexisting, almost organic connections between the twin countries continued to function, and the massacre of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda evoked a retaliatory massacre of Hutus by Tutsis in Burundi, and vice versa.

In 1972, the Hutus from Burundi, emboldened by the example of their brothers in Rwanda, attempted to stage an insurrection, slaughtering, for starters, several thousand Tutsis, who, in response, killed more than a hundred thousand Hutus. It was not the fact of the massacre alone, for these occurred regularly in both countries, but its staggering proportions that created an uproar among the Hutus of Rwanda, who decided to react. They were further inspired by the fact that during the pogrom, several hundred thousand (a million, they sometimes say) Hutus from Burundi sought shelter in Rwanda, creating an enormous problem for this poor country already periodically beset by food shortages.

Taking advantage of this crisis (they are murdering our kinsmen in Burundi; we do not have the wherewithal to support a million immigrants), the commander in chief of the Rwandan military, General Juvénal Habyarimana, staged a coup d’état in 1973 and declared himself president. The coup exposed the profound rifts and conflicts within the Hutu community. The defeated president Grégoire Kayibana (who would later be starved to death) represented a moderately liberal Hutu clan from the country’s central region. The new ruler, on the other hand, hailed from a radical, chauvinistic branch inhabiting Rwanda’s northwest. (Habyarimana, one can say, is the Radovan Karadžić of the Rwandan Hutus.)

Habyarimana will rule for twenty-one years, until his death in 1994. Massively built, powerful, energetic, he focuses all his attention on erecting an iron-clad dictatorship. He institutes a one-party system. He names himself party leader. All the country’s citizens must be party members from the time of birth. The general now improves upon the all-too-simple scheme of enmity: Hutu versus Tutsi. He will enrich this formula by adding another dimension, a further division — those in power versus those in the opposition. If you are a loyal Tutsi, you can become the head of a hamlet or a village (although not a minister); if you criticize the authorities, however, you will end up behind bars or on the scaffold, even if you are 100 percent Hutu. The general was absolutely correct to proceed this way: Tutsis were not the only ones hostile to his dictatorship; there were also large numbers of Hutus who genuinely hated him and resisted him in every way they could. Finally, the conflict in Rwanda was not only a quarrel between castes, but also a violent clash between tyranny and democracy. In this sense the language of ethnic categories, and the mind-set it stems from, is terribly deceptive and misleading. It blurs and neglects the more profound truths — good versus evil, truth versus lies, democracy versus dictatorship — limiting one to a single, and indeed superficial and secondary dichotomy, a single contrast, a single set of oppositions: He is of infinite worth because he is Hutu; or he is worthless because he is Tutsi.

While strengthening the dictatorship was the first task to which Habyarimana devoted himself, gradual advances were also being made on a parallel front: the privatization of the state. With each passing year, Rwanda was increasingly becoming the private property of the clan from Gisenyi (the general’s small hometown), or, more strictly speaking, the property of the president’s wife, Agathe, and of her three brothers, Sagatawa, Seraphin, and Zed, as well as of a bevy of their cousins. Agathe and her brothers belonged to the clan called Akazu, and this name became the password that could open many doors within Rwanda’s mysterious labyrinths. Sagatawa, Seraphin, and Zed had luxurious palaces around Gisenyi, from which, together with their sister and her husband, the general, they ruled over the army, the police, the banks, and the bureaucracy of Rwanda. So, a little nation somewhere in the mountains of a distant continent, ruled by a greedy family of voracious, despotic petty chieftains. How did it come to acquire such tragic worldwide renown?

I have already mentioned how in 1959 tens of thousands of Tutsis fled the country to save their lives. For years after, thousands upon thousands of others followed. Their camps stretched along Rwanda’s borders in Zaire, Uganda, Tanzania, and Burundi, communities of unhappy and impatient exiles living with only one thought: to return home, to their (already mythic) herds. Life in such camps is listless, wretched, and hopeless. But there are people who are born in such places, reach adulthood, and still retain the desire to accomplish something, who try to fight for something. So it was with the Tutsis. Their main objective, of course, was returning to the lands of their ancestors. The ancestral ground is a sacred concept in Africa, a deeply desired and magnetic place, the source of life. But leaving a refugee camp is no simple matter; doing so is often forbidden by the local authorities. The one exception is Uganda, where a civil war has been raging for years, and disorder and confusion prevail. In the eighties, the young activist Yoweri Museveni starts a guerrilla war against the horrific regime of the psychopath and butcher Milton Obote. Museveni needs fighters. And he quickly finds them, because in addition to his Ugandan brethren, the young men from Rwandan refugee camps are volunteering: militant, battle-hungry Tutsis. Museveni gladly accepts them. They undergo military training in Uganda’s forests, under the direction of professional instructors, and many of them go on to finish officer-training schools abroad. In January 1986, Museveni enters Kampala at the head of his divisions and seizes power. Many of these divisions are commanded by, or include in their ranks, Tutsis born in the refugee camps — sons of the fathers who had been driven out of Rwanda.

For a long time no one notices that there has arisen in Uganda a well-trained and battle-tested army of Tutsi avengers, who think of one thing only: how to revenge themselves for the disgrace and injury inflicted upon their families. They hold secret meetings, create an organization called the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and make preparations to attack. During the night of September 30, 1990, they disappear from the Ugandan army barracks and from the border camps, and at dawn enter Rwandan territory. The authorities in Kigali are completely surprised. Surprised and terrified. Habyarimana has a weak and demoralized army, and the distance from the Ugandan border to Kigali is not much more than 150 kilometers: the guerrillas could march into Kigali in a day or two. That is what would certainly have happened, for Habyarimana’s troops offered no resistance, and maybe it would never have come to that hecatomb and carnage — the genocide of 1994—were it not for one telephone call. This was the call for help General Habyarimana made to the French president, François Mitterrand.

Mitterrand was under strong pressure from the French pro-African lobby. Whereas the majority of European capitals had radically broken with their colonial past, Paris had not. French society still includes a large, active, and well-organized army of people who made their careers in the colonial administration, spent their lives (quite well!) in the colonies, and now, as foreigners in Europe, feel useless and unwanted. At the same time, they believe deeply that France is not only a European country but also the community of all people partaking of French culture and language; that France, in other words, is also a global cultural and linguistic entity: Francophonie. This philosophy, translated into the simplistic language of geopolitics, holds that if someone, somewhere in the world, is attacking a French-speaking country, it is almost as if he were striking at France itself.

Moreover, the bureaucrats and generals of the pro-African lobby still suffered acutely from the Fashoda complex. A few words about this. In the nineteenth century, when European countries were dividing Africa among themselves, London and Paris were obsessed by a bizarre (although then quite understandable) notion: that their possessions on this continent be arranged in a straight line with territorial continuity. London wanted to have such a line stretching north to south, i.e., from Cairo to Cape Town, and Paris wanted it from west to east, i.e., from Dakar to Djibouti. Now, if we take a map of Africa and draw two perpendicular lines on it, they will cross in southern Sudan, in a place along the Nile where a small fishing village lies — Fashoda. Europe at the time was convinced that whoever first secured Fashoda would realize his expansionist ideal of an uninterrupted colonial empire. A race began between London and Paris. Both capitals sent military expeditions toward Fashoda. The French got there first. On July 10, 1898, covering on foot the difficult track from Dakar, Captain J. B. Marchand reached Fashoda and planted the French flag. Marchand’s division consisted of 150 Senegalese — brave and devoted men. Paris went wild with joy. The French were bursting with pride. Two months later, however, the British arrived in Fashoda. The commander of that expedition, Lord Kitchener, realized with astonishment that the village was already occupied. Ignoring this, he raised the British flag. London went wild with joy. The British were bursting with pride. A fever of nationalist euphoria engulfed both countries. At first, neither side wanted to back down. There were many indicators that World War I might erupt then and there, in 1898—over Fashoda. In the end (for this is a long story), the French had to withdraw. England was victorious. Among old French colonials, the Fashoda episode would remain a painful wound, and they would instantly go on the attack at the news that somewhere, anywhere, the Anglophones were making a move on something.

And so it was this time, when Paris learned that the English-speaking Tutsis, from the territories of English-speaking Uganda, had invaded French-speaking Rwanda, and thus violated the borders of Francophonie.

The divisions of the Rwandan Patriotic Front were already closing in on the capital, and Habyarimana’s government and clan were packing their bags, when airplanes deposited French paratroopers at the airport in Kigali. Officially, there were only two companies of them. But that was enough. The guerrillas wanted to fight Habyarimana’s regime, but they preferred not to risk war with France, against which they wouldn’t have stood a chance. They called off the offensive on Kigali but remained in Rwanda, permanently occupying its northeastern territories. The country was de facto partitioned, although both sides considered this to be a temporary, provisional situation. Habyarimana counted on being strong enough in time to expel the guerrillas, and they in turn believed the French would withdraw one day, and that the regime, together with the entire Akazu clan, would fall on the very next.

There is nothing worse than this state of being neither at war nor at peace. One group went on the attack hoping to enjoy the fruits of victory; but now this dream is dying — the offensive must be suspended. The mood is even darker among those who were attacked: yes, they survived, but they saw before their eyes the specter of defeat, realized that the end of their rule was possible. They now want to save themselves at all cost.

Three and a half years will pass from the 1990 fall offensive to the slaughter of April 1994. Violent disputes erupt within Rwanda’s government between those favoring compromise through the creation of a national ruling coalition (Habyarimana’s people plus the guerrillas) and members of the fanatical, despotic Akazu clan directed by Agathe and her brothers. Habyarimana himself hedges, hesitates, does not know what to do, and increasingly loses his influence over events. A radical branch of the Akazu clan seizes the upper hand, rapidly and resolutely. The clan has its ideologues: they are the intellectuals, scholars, professors of history and philosophy from the Rwandan university in Butare — Ferdinand Nahimana, Casimir Bizimungu, Leon Mugesira, and several others. It is they who formulate the ideology that will legitimize genocide as the only possible solution, the only means of ensuring Hutu survival. The theory developed by Nahimana and his colleagues holds that the Tutsis are simply a foreign race. They are Nilotic people, who arrived in Rwanda from somewhere along the Nile; conquered this land’s indigenous inhabitants, the Hutus; and started to exploit, enslave, and destroy them from within. The Tutsis seized everything that is valuable in Rwanda: land, cattle, markets, and, with time, the state itself. The Hutus were relegated to the role of a conquered people, condemned for centuries to live in poverty, hunger, and humiliation. But the Hutu nation must take back its identity and dignity, resume its place as an equal among the other nations of the world.

But what — Nahimana reflects, in dozens of speeches, articles, and brochures — does history teach us? Its experiences are tragic, and fill us with dispiriting pessimism. The entire history of Hutu-Tutsi relations is a dark passage of unceasing pogroms and massacres, of mutual extermination, forced migrations, furious hatred. There is not room enough in tiny Rwanda for two nations so foreign and mortally at odds with each other. Moreover, Rwanda’s population is growing at a dizzying rate. By mid-century, the country had two million inhabitants; now, fifty years later, close to nine million live here. So what is the way out of this cursed circle, what escape is there from this cruel fate, for which the Hutus themselves, as Mugesira admits self-critically, are responsible: “In 1959 we committed a fatal error, allowing the Tutsis to escape. We should have acted then: erased them from the surface of the earth.” The professor believes that now is the last opportunity to correct this mistake. The Tutsis must return to their real native land, somewhere along the Nile. “Let us send them back there,” he exhorts, “alive or dead.” That is what the scholars from Butare envision as the only answer, the final solution: someone must die, must permanently cease to exist.

Preparations begin. The army, which numbered five thousand, is expanded to thirty-five thousand. The Presidential Guard is honed to become a second strike force, elite units heavily armed with modern weaponry (arms and materiel are sent by France, South Africa, and Egypt; France also provides instructors). But the greatest emphasis is placed on forming a paramilitary organization, Interahamwe (meaning “Let Us Strike Together”). Joining it and undergoing military and ideological training are people from villages and towns, unemployed youths and poor peasants, schoolchildren, students, office workers — a huge throng, a veritable popular movement, whose task it will be to carry out the apocalypse. Simultaneously, the prefects and deputy prefects are ordered to start drawing up lists of those in the opposition, as well as all kinds of suspicious, uncertain, ambiguous individuals, malcontents of various sorts, pessimists, skeptics, liberals. The theoretical mouthpiece of the Akazu clan is the newspaper Kangura, but the main organ for propaganda, as well as the principal medium through which orders are disseminated to the largely illiterate populace, is Radio Mille Collines, which later, during the slaughter, will broadcast this call several times daily: “Death! Death! Graves with Tutsi bodies are still only half full. Hurry, and fill them to the top!”

In the middle of 1993, African states compel Habyarimana to enter into an agreement with the Rwandan Patriotic Front. The guerrillas are to participate in government and in the parliament, and to make up 40 percent of the army. But such a compromise is unacceptable to the Akazu clan. They would thereby lose their monopoly on power, something they will not agree to. They declare that the hour of final reckoning has arrived.

On April 6, 1994, “unknown perpetrators” fire a rocket shooting down the plane of President Habyarimana as it is making its landing approach to Kigali. Habyarimana was returning from abroad in disgrace, having signed a pact with the enemies. The downing of his plane is the signal to begin the slaughter of the regime’s opponents: the Tutsis first and foremost, but also the large Hutu opposition. The officially orchestrated massacre of the defenseless population lasts three months, until the day the RPF troops seize control of the country, forcing the adversary to flee.

Estimates of the number of victims vary. Some say half a million, others one million. No one will ever know for sure. The most terrifying fact is that people who only yesterday were guilty of nothing today were murdering other completely innocent people. And so even if the number of victims was not one million, but, let us say, just one, would it not be proof enough that the devil is among us, and that in the spring of 1994 he just happened to be in Rwanda?

Between a half million and one million murdered — that is of course a tragically high number. But, given the hellish striking power of Habyarimana’s army, its helicopters, heavy machine guns, artillery, and armored vehicles, many more could have been killed in the course of three months of systematic shooting. Yet this did not happen. Most perished not on account of bombs or heavy machine guns; instead they were hacked and bludgeoned to death with the most primitive of weapons — machetes, hammers, spears, and sticks. For the leaders of the regime had more than just the ultimate goal — the final solution — in mind. On the road to the Highest Ideal, which was nothing less than the total annihilation of the enemy, it was critical that the nation be united in crime; through mass participation in the criminal act there would arise an all-unifying feeling of guilt, so that every citizen, having on his conscience another’s death, would be haunted from that moment by someone else’s inalienable right to retaliation, behind which he could glimpse the specter of his own end.

Whereas in the Nazi and Stalinist systems death was meted out by executioners from specialized institutions, the SS or the NKVD, and the deed perpetrated by independent operatives in hidden locations, in Rwanda the point was for everyone to be a bearer of death, for the crime to be a mass, popular, and even elemental act — so that there would remain not a single pair of hands not steeped in the blood of those deemed by the regime to be enemies.

That is why, later, the terrified and defeated Hutus would flee in such numbers to Zaire, and once there roam from place to place, carrying their meager possessions on their heads. Those in Europe, observing the endless columns on their television screens, could not fathom what force propelled these emaciated wanderers, what power commanded these skeletons to keep walking, in punitive formations, without stopping or resting, without food or drink, without speaking or smiling, trudging humbly, obediently, and with vacant eyes along their ghastly road of guilt and anguish.