We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

1

IN THE PROVINCE of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, in the swamp- and pastureland near the Tanzanian border, there’s a rocky hill called Nyarubuye with a church where many Tutsis were slaughtered in mid-April of 1994. A year after the killing I went to Nyarubuye with two Canadian military officers. We flew in a United Nations helicopter, traveling low over the hills in the morning mists, with the banana trees like green starbursts dense over the slopes. The uncut grass blew back as we dropped into the center of the parish schoolyard. A lone soldier materialized with his Kalashnikov, and shook our hands with stiff, shy formality. The Canadians presented the paperwork for our visit, and I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom.

At least fifty mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor, wadded in clothing, their belongings strewn about and smashed. Macheted skulls had rolled here and there.

The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They did not buzz with flies. They had been killed thirteen months earlier, and they hadn’t been moved. Skin stuck here and there over the bones, many of which lay scattered away from the bodies, dismembered by the killers, or by scavengers—birds, dogs, bugs. The more complete figures looked a lot like people, which they were once. A woman in a cloth wrap printed with flowers lay near the door. Her fleshless hip bones were high and her legs slightly spread, and a child’s skeleton extended between them. Her torso was hollowed out. Her ribs and spinal column poked through the rotting cloth. Her head was tipped back and her mouth was open: a strange image—half agony, half repose.

I had never been among the dead before. What to do? Look? Yes. I wanted to see them, I suppose; I had come to see them—the dead had been left unburied at Nyarubuye for memorial purposes—and there they were, so intimately exposed. I didn’t need to see them. I already knew, and believed, what had happened in Rwanda. Yet looking at the buildings and the bodies, and hearing the silence of the place, with the grand Italianate basilica standing there deserted, and beds of exquisite, decadent, death-fertilized flowers blooming over the corpses, it was still strangely unimaginable. I mean one still had to imagine it.

Those dead Rwandans will be with me forever, I expect. That was why I had felt compelled to come to Nyarubuye: to be stuck with them—not with their experience, but with the experience of looking at them. They had been killed there, and they were dead there. What else could you really see at first? The Bible bloated with rain lying on top of one corpse or, littered about, the little woven wreaths of thatch which Rwandan women wear as crowns to balance the enormous loads they carry on their heads, and the water gourds, and the Converse tennis sneaker stuck somehow in a pelvis.

The soldier with the Kalashnikov—Sergeant Francis of the Rwandese Patriotic Army, a Tutsi whose parents had fled to Uganda with him when he was a boy, after similar but less extensive massacres in the early 1960s, and who had fought his way home in 1994 and found it like this—said that the dead in this room were mostly women who had been raped before being murdered. Sergeant Francis had high, rolling girlish hips, and he walked and stood with his butt stuck out behind him, an oddly purposeful posture, tipped forward, driven. He was, at once, candid and briskly official. His English had the punctilious clip of military drill, and after he told me what I was looking at I looked instead at my feet. The rusty head of a hatchet lay beside them in the dirt.

A few weeks earlier, in Bukavu, Zaire, in the giant market of a refugee camp that was home to many Rwandan Hutu militiamen, I had watched a man butchering a cow with a machete. He was quite expert at his work, taking big precise strokes that made a sharp hacking noise. The rallying cry to the killers during the genocide was “Do your work!” And I saw that it was work, this butchery; hard work. It took many hacks—two, three, four, five hard hacks—to chop through the cow’s leg. How many hacks to dismember a person?

Considering the enormity of the task, it is tempting to play with theories of collective madness, mob mania, a fever of hatred erupted into a mass crime of passion, and to imagine the blind orgy of the mob, with each member killing one or two people. But at Nyarubuye, and at thousands of other sites in this tiny country, on the same days of a few months in 1994, hundreds of thousands of Hutus had worked as killers in regular shifts. There was always the next victim, and the next. What sustained them, beyond the frenzy of the first attack, through the plain physical exhaustion and mess of it?

The pygmy in Gikongoro said that humanity is part of nature and that we must go against nature to get along and have peace. But mass violence, too, must be organized; it does not occur aimlessly. Even mobs and riots have a design, and great and sustained destruction requires great ambition. It must be conceived as the means toward achieving a new order, and although the idea behind that new order may be criminal and objectively very stupid, it must also be compellingly simple and at the same time absolute. The ideology of genocide is all of those things, and in Rwanda it went by the bald name of Hutu Power. For those who set about systematically exterminating an entire people—even a fairly small and unresisting subpopulation of perhaps a million and a quarter men, women, and children, like the Tutsis in Rwanda—blood lust surely helps. But the engineers and perpetrators of a slaughter like the one just inside the door where I stood need not enjoy killing, and they may even find it unpleasant. What is required above all is that they want their victims dead. They have to want it so badly that they consider it a necessity.

So I still had much to imagine as I entered the classroom and stepped carefully between the remains. These dead and their killers had been neighbors, schoolmates, colleagues, sometimes friends, even in-laws. The dead had seen their killers training as militias in the weeks before the end, and it was well known that they were training to kill Tutsis; it was announced on the radio, it was in the newspapers, people spoke of it openly. The week before the massacre at Nyarubuye, the killing began in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. Hutus who opposed the Hutu Power ideology were publicly denounced as “accomplices” of the Tutsis and were among the first to be killed as the extermination got under way. In Nyarubuye, when Tutsis asked the Hutu Power mayor how they might be spared, he suggested that they seek sanctuary at the church. They did, and a few days later the mayor came to kill them. He came at the head of a pack of soldiers, policemen, militiamen, and villagers; he gave out arms and orders to complete the job well. No more was required of the mayor, but he also was said to have killed a few Tutsis himself.

The killers killed all day at Nyarubuye. At night they cut the Achilles tendons of survivors and went off to feast behind the church, roasting cattle looted from their victims in big fires, and drinking beer. (Bottled beer, banana beer—Rwandans may not drink more beer than other Africans, but they drink prodigious quantities of it around the clock.) And, in the morning, still drunk after whatever sleep they could find beneath the cries of their prey, the killers at Nyarubuye went back and killed again. Day after day, minute to minute, Tutsi by Tutsi: all across Rwanda, they worked like that. “It was a process,” Sergeant Francis said. I can see that it happened, I can be told how, and after nearly three years of looking around Rwanda and listening to Rwandans, I can tell you how, and I will. But the horror of it—the idiocy, the waste, the sheer wrongness—remains uncircumscribable.

Like Leontius, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge—a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, as horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy.

The dead at Nyarubuye were, I’m afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquillity of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there—these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I couldn’t settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful. I just looked, and I took photographs, because I wondered whether I could really see what I was seeing while I saw it, and I wanted also an excuse to look a bit more closely.

We went on through the first room and out the far side. There was another room and another and another and another. They were all full of bodies, and more bodies were scattered in the grass, and there were stray skulls in the grass, which was thick and wonderfully green. Standing outside, I heard a crunch. The old Canadian colonel stumbled in front of me, and I saw, though he did not notice, that his foot had rolled on a skull and broken it. For the first time at Nyarubuye my feelings focused, and what I felt was a small but keen anger at this man. Then I heard another crunch, and felt a vibration underfoot. I had stepped on one, too.

RWANDA IS SPECTACULAR to behold. Throughout its center, a winding succession of steep, tightly terraced slopes radiates out from small roadside settlements and solitary compounds. Gashes of red clay and black loam mark fresh hoe work; eucalyptus trees flash silver against brilliant green tea plantations; banana trees are everywhere. On the theme of hills, Rwanda produces countless variations: jagged rain forests, round-shouldered buttes, undulating moors, broad swells of savanna, volcanic peaks sharp as filed teeth. During the rainy season, the clouds are huge and low and fast, mists cling in highland hollows, lightning flickers through the nights, and by day the land is lustrous. After the rains, the skies lift, the terrain takes on a ragged look beneath the flat unvarying haze of the dry season, and in the savannas of the Akagera Park wildfire blackens the hills.

One day, when I was returning to Kigali from the south, the car mounted a rise between two winding valleys, the windshield filled with purple-bellied clouds, and I asked Joseph, the man who was giving me a ride, whether Rwandans realize what a beautiful country they have. “Beautiful?” he said. “You think so? After the things that happened here? The people aren’t good. If the people were good, the country might be OK.” Joseph told me that his brother and sister had been killed, and he made a soft hissing click with his tongue against his teeth. “The country is empty,” he said. “Empty!”

It was not just the dead who were missing. The genocide had been brought to a halt by the Rwandese Patriotic Front, a rebel army led by Tutsi refugees from past persecutions, and as the RPF advanced through the country in the summer of 1994, some two million Hutus had fled into exile at the behest of the same leaders who had urged them to kill. Yet except in some rural areas in the south, where the desertion of Hutus had left nothing but bush to reclaim the fields around crumbling adobe houses, I, as a newcomer, could not see the emptiness that blinded Joseph to Rwanda’s beauty. Yes, there were grenade-flattened buildings, burnt homesteads, shot-up facades, and mortar-pitted roads. But these were the ravages of war, not of genocide, and by the summer of 1995, most of the dead had been buried. Fifteen months earlier, Rwanda had been the most densely populated country in Africa. Now the work of the killers looked just as they had intended: invisible.

From time to time, mass graves were discovered and excavated, and the remains would be transferred to new, properly consecrated mass graves. Yet even the occasionally exposed bones, the conspicuous number of amputees and people with deforming scars, and the superabundance of packed orphanages could not be taken as evidence that what had happened to Rwanda was an attempt to eliminate a people. There were only people’s stories.

“Every survivor wonders why he is alive,” Abbé Modeste, a priest at the cathedral in Butare, Rwanda’s second-largest city, told me. Abbé Modeste had hidden for weeks in his sacristy, eating communion wafers, before moving under the desk in his study, and finally into the rafters at the home of some neighboring nuns. The obvious explanation of his survival was that the RPF had come to the rescue. But the RPF didn’t reach Butare till early July, and roughly seventy-five percent of the Tutsis in Rwanda had been killed by early May. In this regard, at least, the genocide had been entirely successful: to those who were targeted, it was not death but life that seemed an accident of fate.

“I had eighteen people killed at my house,” said Etienne Niyonzima, a former businessman who had become a deputy in the National Assembly. “Everything was totally destroyed—a place of fifty-five meters by fifty meters. In my neighborhood they killed six hundred and forty-seven people. They tortured them, too. You had to see how they killed them. They had the number of everyone’s house, and they went through with red paint and marked the homes of all the Tutsis and of the Hutu moderates. My wife was at a friend’s, shot with two bullets. She is still alive, only”—he fell quiet for a moment—“she has no arms. The others with her were killed. The militia left her for dead. Her whole family of sixty-five in Gitarama were killed.” Niyonzima was in hiding at the time. Only after he had been separated from his wife for three months did he learn that she and four of their children had survived. “Well,” he said, “one son was cut in the head with a machete. I don’t know where he went.” His voice weakened, and caught. “He disappeared.” Niyonzima clicked his tongue, and said, “But the others are still alive. Quite honestly, I don’t understand at all how I was saved.”

Laurent Nkongoli attributed his survival to “Providence, and also good neighbors, an old woman who said, ‘Run away, we don’t want to see your corpse.’” Nkongoli, a lawyer, who had become the vice president of the National Assembly after the genocide, was a robust man, with a taste for double-breasted suit jackets and lively ties, and he moved, as he spoke, with a brisk determination. But before taking his neighbor’s advice, and fleeing Kigali in late April of 1994, he said, “I had accepted death. At a certain moment this happens. One hopes not to die cruelly, but one expects to die anyway. Not death by machete, one hopes, but with a bullet. If you were willing to pay for it, you could often ask for a bullet. Death was more or less normal, a resignation. You lose the will to fight. There were four thousand Tutsis killed here at Kacyiru”—a neighborhood of Kigali. “The soldiers brought them here, and told them to sit down because they were going to throw grenades. And they sat.

“Rwandan culture is a culture of fear,” Nkongoli went on. “I remember what people said.” He adopted a pipey voice, and his face took on a look of disgust: “‘Just let us pray, then kill us,’ or ‘I don’t want to die in the street, I want to die at home.’” He resumed his normal voice. “When you’re that resigned and oppressed you’re already dead. It shows the genocide was prepared for too long. I detest this fear. These victims of genocide had been psychologically prepared to expect death just for being Tutsi. They were being killed for so long that they were already dead.”

I reminded Nkongoli that, for all his hatred of fear, he had himself accepted death before his neighbor urged him to run away. “Yes,” he said. “I got tired in the genocide. You struggle so long, then you get tired.”

Every Rwandan I spoke with seemed to have a favorite, unanswerable question. For Nkongoli, it was how so many Tutsis had allowed themselves to be killed. For François Xavier Nkurunziza, a Kigali lawyer, whose father was Hutu and whose mother and wife were Tutsi, the question was how so many Hutus had allowed themselves to kill. Nkurunziza had escaped death only by chance as he moved around the country from one hiding place to another, and he had lost many family members. “Conformity is very deep, very developed here,” he told me. “In Rwandan history, everyone obeys authority. People revere power, and there isn’t enough education. You take a poor, ignorant population, and give them arms, and say, ‘It’s yours. Kill.’ They’ll obey. The peasants, who were paid or forced to kill, were looking up to people of higher socio-economic standing to see how to behave. So the people of influence, or the big financiers, are often the big men in the genocide. They may think that they didn’t kill because they didn’t take life with their own hands, but the people were looking to them for their orders. And, in Rwanda, an order can be given very quietly.”

As I traveled around the country, collecting accounts of the killing, it almost seemed as if, with the machete, the masu—a club studded with nails—a few well-placed grenades, and a few bursts of automatic-rifle fire, the quiet orders of Hutu Power had made the neutron bomb obsolete.

“Everyone was called to hunt the enemy,” said Theodore Nyilinkwaya, a survivor of the massacres in his home village of Kimbogo, in the southwestern province of Cyangugu. “But let’s say someone is reluctant. Say that guy comes with a stick. They tell him, ‘No, get a masu.’ So, OK, he does, and he runs along with the rest, but he doesn’t kill. They say, ‘Hey, he might denounce us later. He must kill. Everyone must help to kill at least one person.’ So this person who is not a killer is made to do it. And the next day it’s become a game for him. You don’t need to keep pushing him.”

At Nyarubuye, even the little terracotta votive statues in the sacristy had been methodically decapitated. “They were associated with Tutsis,” Sergeant Francis explained.

2

IF YOU COULD walk due west from the massacre memorial at Nyarubuye, straight across Rwanda from one end to the other, over the hills and through the marshes, lakes, and rivers to the province of Kibuye, then, just before you fell into the great inland sea of Lake Kivu, you would come to another hilltop village. This hill is called Mugonero, and it, too, is crowned by a big church. While Rwanda is overwhelmingly Catholic, Protestants evangelized much of Kibuye, and Mugonero is the headquarters of the Seventh-Day Adventist mission. The place resembles the brick campus of an American community college more than an African village; tidy tree-lined footpaths connect the big church with a smaller chapel, a nursing school, an infirmary, and a hospital complex that enjoyed a reputation for giving excellent medical care. It was in the hospital that Samuel Ndagijimana sought refuge during the killings, and although one of the first things he said to me was “I forget bit by bit,” it quickly became clear that he hadn’t forgotten as much as he might have liked.

Samuel worked as a medical orderly in the hospital. He had landed the job in 1991, when he was twenty-five. I asked him about his life in that time that Rwandans call “Before.” He said, “We were simple Christians.” That was all. I might have been asking about someone else, whom he had met only in passing, and who didn’t interest him. It was as if his first real memory was of the early days in April of 1994 when he saw Hutu militiamen conducting public exercises outside the government offices in Mugonero. “We watched young people going out every night, and people spoke of it on the radio,” Samuel said. “It was only members of Hutu Power parties who went out, and those who weren’t participants were called ‘enemies.’”

On April 6, a few nights after this activity began, Rwanda’s long-standing Hutu dictator, President Juvénal Habyarimana, was assassinated in Kigali, and a clique of Hutu Power leaders from the military high command seized power. “The radio announced that people shouldn’t move,” Samuel said. “We began to see groups of people gathering that same night, and when we went to work in the morning, we saw these groups with the local leaders of Hutu Power organizing the population. You didn’t know exactly what was happening, just that there was something coming.”

At work, Samuel observed “a change of climate.” He said that “one didn’t talk to anyone anymore,” and many of his co-workers spent all their time in meetings with a certain Dr. Gerard, who made no secret of his support for Hutu Power. Samuel found this shocking, because Dr. Gerard had been trained in the United States, and he was the son of the president of the Adventist church in Kibuye, so he was seen as a figure of great authority, a community leader—one who sets the example.

After a few days, when Samuel looked south across the valley from Mugonero, he saw houses burning in villages along the lakefront. He decided to stay in the church hospital until the troubles were over, and Tutsi families from Mugonero and surrounding areas soon began arriving with the same idea. This was a tradition in Rwanda. “When there were problems, people always went to the church,” Samuel said. “The pastors were Christians. One trusted that nothing would happen at their place.” In fact, many people at Mugonero told me that Dr. Gerard’s father, the church president, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, was personally instructing Tutsis to gather at the Adventist complex.

Wounded Tutsis converged on Mugonero from up and down the lake. They came through the bush, trying to avoid the countless militia checkpoints along the road, and they brought stories. Some told how a few miles to the north, in Gishyita, the mayor had been so frantic in his impatience to kill Tutsis that thousands had been slaughtered even as he herded them to the church, where the remainder were massacred. Others told how a few miles to the south, in Rwamatamu, more than ten thousand Tutsis had taken refuge in the town hall, and the mayor had brought in truckloads of policemen and soldiers and militia with guns and grenades to surround the place; behind them he had arranged villagers with machetes in case anyone escaped when the shooting began—and, in fact, there had been very few escapees from Rwamatamu. An Adventist pastor and his son were said to have worked closely with the mayor in organizing the slaughter at Rwamatamu. But perhaps Samuel did not hear about that from the wounded he met, who came “having been shot at, and had grenades thrown, missing an arm, or a leg.” He still imagined that Mugonero could be spared.

By April 12, the hospital was packed with as many as two thousand refugees, and the water lines were cut. Nobody could leave; militiamen and members of the Presidential Guard had cordoned off the complex. But when Dr. Gerard learned that several dozen Hutus were among the refugees, he arranged for them to be evacuated. He also locked up the pharmacy, refusing treatment to the wounded and sick—“because they were Tutsi,” Samuel said. Peering out from their confines, the refugees at the hospital watched Dr. Gerard and his father, Pastor Ntakirutimana, driving around with militiamen and members of the Presidential Guard. The refugees wondered whether these men had forgotten their God.

Among the Tutsis at the Mugonero church and hospital complex were seven Adventist pastors who quickly assumed their accustomed role as leaders of the flock. When two policemen turned up at the hospital, and announced that their job was to protect the refugees, the Tutsi pastors took up a collection, and raised almost four hundred dollars for the policemen. For several days, all was calm. Then, toward evening on April 15, the policemen said they had to leave because the hospital was to be attacked the next morning. They drove away in a car with Dr. Gerard, and the seven pastors in the hospital advised their fellow refugees to expect the end. Then the pastors sat down together and wrote letters to the mayor and to their boss, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, Dr. Gerard’s father, asking them in the name of the Lord to intercede on their behalf.

“And the response came,” Samuel said. “It was Dr. Gerard who announced it: ‘Saturday, the sixteenth, at exactly nine o’clock in the morning, you will be attacked.’” But it was Pastor Ntakirutimana’s response that crushed Samuel’s spirit, and he repeated the church president’s words twice over, slowly: “Your problem has already found a solution. You must die.” One of Samuel’s colleagues, Manase Bimenyimana, remembered Ntakirutimana’s response slightly differently. He told me that the pastor’s words were “You must be eliminated. God no longer wants you.”

In his capacity as a hospital orderly, Manase served as the household domestic for one of the doctors, and he had remained at the doctor’s house after installing his wife and children—for safety—among the refugees at the hospital. Around nine o’clock on the morning of Saturday, April 16, he was feeding the doctor’s dogs. He saw Dr. Gerard drive toward the hospital with a carload of armed men. Then he heard shooting and grenades exploding. “When the dogs heard the cries of the people,” he told me, “they too began to howl.”

Manase managed to make his way to the hospital—foolishly, perhaps, but he felt exposed and wanted to be with his family. He found the Tutsi pastors instructing the refugees to prepare for death. “I was very disappointed,” Manase said. “I expected to die, and we started looking for anything to defend ourselves with—stones, broken bricks, sticks. But they were useless. The people were weak. They had nothing to eat. The shooting started, and people were falling down and dying.”

There were many attackers, Samuel recalled, and they came from all sides—“from the church, from behind, from the north and south. We heard shots and cries and they chanted the slogan ‘Eliminate the Tutsis.’ They began shooting at us, and we threw stones at them because we had nothing else, not even a machete. We were hungry, tired, we hadn’t had water for more than a day. There were people who had their arms cut off. There were dead. They killed the people at the chapel and the school and then the hospital. I saw Dr. Gerard, and I saw his father’s car pass the hospital and stop near his office. Around noon, we went into a basement. I was with some family members. Others had been killed already. The attackers began to break down the doors and to kill, shooting and throwing grenades. The two policemen who had been our protectors were now attackers. The local citizenry also helped. Those who had no guns had machetes or masus. In the evening, around eight or nine o’clock, they began firing tear gas. People who were still alive cried. That way the attackers knew where people were, and they could kill them directly.”

ON THE NATIONAL average, Tutsis made up a bit less than fifteen percent of Rwanda’s population, but in the province of Kibuye, Tutsis counted for a much higher proportion of the citizenry. It is estimated that on April 6, 1994, at least one out of three people in Kibuye was Tutsi. A month later most of them had been killed. In many of Kibuye’s villages, no Tutsis survived.

Manase told me that he was surprised when he heard that “only a million people” were killed in Rwanda. “Look at how many died just here, and how many were eaten by birds,” he said. It was true that the dead of the genocide had been a great boon to Rwanda’s birds, but the birds had also been helpful to the living. Just as birds of prey and carrion will form a front in the air before the advancing wall of a forest fire to feast on the parade of animals fleeing the inferno, so in Rwanda during the months of extermination the kettles of buzzards, kites, and crows that boiled over massacre sites marked a national map against the sky, flagging the “no-go” zones for people like Samuel and Manase, who took to the bush to survive.

Sometime before midnight on April 16, the killers at the Mugonero Adventist complex, unable to discover anybody left there to kill, went off to loot the homes of the dead, and Samuel in his basement, and Manase hiding with his murdered wife and children, found themselves unaccountably alive. Manase left immediately. He made his way to the nearby village of Murambi, where he joined up with a small band of survivors from other massacres who had once more taken shelter in an Adventist church. For nearly twenty-four hours, he said, they had peace. Then Dr. Gerard came with a convoy of militia. Again there was shooting, and Manase escaped. This time, he fled high up into the mountains, to a place called Bisesero, where the rock is steep and craggy, full of caves and often swaddled in cloud. Bisesero was the only place in Rwanda where thousands of Tutsi civilians mounted a defense against the Hutus who were trying to kill them. “Looking at how many people there were in Bisesero, we were convinced we could not die,” Manase told me. And at first, he said, “only women and children were killed, because the men were fighting.” But in time tens of thousands of men fell there, too.

Down in the corpse-crowded villages of Kibuye, live Tutsis had become extremely hard to find. But the killers never gave up. The hunt was in Bisesero, and the hunters came by truck and bus. “When they saw how strong the resistance was, they called militias from far away,” Manase said. “And they did not kill simply. When we were weak, they saved bullets and killed us with bamboo spears. They cut Achilles tendons and necks, but not completely, and then they left the victims to spend a long time crying until they died. Cats and dogs were there, just eating people.”

Samuel, too, had found his way to Bisesero. He had lingered in the Mugonero hospital, “full of dead,” until one in the morning. Then he crept out of the basement and, carrying “one who had lost his feet,” he proceeded slowly into the mountains. Samuel’s account of his ordeal following the slaughter at his workplace was as telegraphic as his description of life in Mugonero before the genocide. Unlike Manase, he found little comfort at Bisesero, where the defenders’ only advantage was the terrain. He had concluded that to be a Tutsi in Rwanda meant death. “After a month,” he said, “I went to Zaire.” To get there he had to descend through settled areas to Lake Kivu, and to cross the water at night in a pirogue—an outrageously risky journey, but Samuel didn’t mention it.

Manase remained in Bisesero. During the fighting, he told me, “we got so used to running that when one wasn’t running one didn’t feel right.” Fighting and running gave Manase spirit, a sense of belonging to a purpose greater than his own existence. Then he got shot in the thigh, and life once again became about little more than staying alive. He found a cavern, “a rock where a stream went underground, and came out below,” and made it his home. “By day, I was alone,” he said. “There were only dead people. The bodies fell down in the stream, and I used those bodies as a bridge to cross the water and join the other people in the evenings.” In this way, Manase survived.

3

RWANDA HAS GOOD roads—the best in central Africa. But even the roads tell a story of Rwanda’s affliction. The network of proper two-lane tarmac that spokes out from Kigali, stitching a tidy web among nine of the country’s ten provincial capitals, excludes Kibuye. The road to Kibuye is an unpaved mess, a slalom course of steep hairpin switchbacks, whose surface alternates between bone-rattling rocks and red dirt that turns to deep, slurping clay in the rain, then bakes to stone-hard ruts and ridges in the sun. That the Kibuye road is in this condition is no accident. In the old order—“Before”—Tutsis were known in Rwanda as inyenzi, which means cockroaches, and, as you know, Kibuye was teeming with them. In the 1980s, when the government hired road builders from China, the Kibuye road was last on the list for a makeover, and when its turn finally came, the millions of dollars set aside for the job had vanished. So beautiful Kibuye, pinned east and west between mountains and lake, hemmed in north and south by swaths of primeval forest, remained (with a hotel full of idle Chinese road builders) a sort of equatorial Siberia.

The seventy-mile trip from Kigali to Kibuye town could normally be accomplished in three to four hours, but it took my convoy of four-wheel-drives twelve. A downpour began just after we started, around three in the afternoon, and by six, when the slick, shin-deep mud of a mountain pass sucked the first of our vehicles into the ditch, we had made only half the journey. Night fell and clouds of rippling mist closed in, amplifying the darkness. We didn’t see the soldiers—a dozen men with Kalashnikovs, in slouch hats, trench coats, and rubber Wellington boots, picking their way through the mud with long wooden staffs—until they tapped on our windows. So it was no comfort when they informed us that we should shut off our lights, gather in one vehicle, and keep quiet, while we waited for rescue. This was in early September of 1996, more than two years after the genocide, and Hutu militiamen were still terrorizing Kibuye almost nightly.

On one side of the road, the mountain formed a wall, and on the other side, it plunged into an apparently vertical banana plantation. The rain dwindled to a beady mist, and I stood outside the designated vehicle, listening to the arrhythmic plink and plonk of water globules bouncing among the banana leaves. Unseen birds clucked fitfully. The night was a sort of xylophone, and I stood keenly alert. “You make a nice target,” one of the soldiers had told us. But, so long as our periphery held, I was glad to be out there, on an impassable road in an often impossible-seeming country, hearing and smelling—and feeling my skin tighten against—the sort of dank, drifting midnight that every Rwandan must know and I had never experienced so unprotectedly.

An hour passed. Then a woman down in the valley began to scream. It was a wild and terrible sound, like the war whoop of a Hollywood Indian flapping his hand over his mouth. Silence followed for as long as it takes to fill lungs with air, and the ululating alarm rang out again, higher now and faster, more frantic. This time, before the woman’s breath broke, other voices joined in. The whooping radiated out through the nether darkness. I took it that we were under attack, and did nothing because I had no idea what to do.

Within moments, three or four soldiers materialized on the road, and went over the shoulder, pitching down through the banana trees. The continuous whooping knotted around a focal point, reached a peak of volume, and began to subside into shouting, in which the voice of the original woman stood out with magnificently adamant fury. Soon the valley fell quiet, except for the old plink and plonk among the banana leaves. Another hour elapsed. Then, just as cars arrived from Kibuye to escort my halted party to our predawn beds, the soldiers climbed back onto the road, leading a half dozen ragged peasants who carried sticks and machetes. In their midst walked a roughed-up, hang-dog-looking prisoner.

A Rwandan in my convoy made inquiries and announced, “This fellow was wanting to rape the woman who cried.” He explained that the whooping we’d heard was a conventional distress signal and that it carried an obligation. “You hear it, you do it, too. And you come running,” he said. “No choice. You must. If you ignored this crying, you would have questions to answer. This is how Rwandans live in the hills.” He held his hands up flat, and tipped them against each other this way and that, shuffling them around to indicate a patchwork, which is the way the land is parceled up, plot by plot, each household well set off from the next within its patch. “The people are living separately together,” he said. “So there is responsibility. I cry, you cry. You cry, I cry. We all come running, and the one that stays quiet, the one that stays home, must explain. Is he in league with the criminals? Is he a coward? And what would he expect when he cries? This is simple. This is normal. This is community.”

It struck me as an enviable arrangement. If you cry out, where you live, can you expect to be heard? If you hear a cry of alarm, do you add your voice and come running? Are rapes often averted, and rapists captured, in this way in your place? I was deeply impressed. But what if this system of communal obligation is turned on its head, so that murder and rape become the rule? What if innocence becomes a crime and the person who protects his neighbor is counted as an “accomplice”? Does it then become normal for tear gas to be used to make people in dark hiding places cry so that they can be killed? Later, when I visited Mugonero, and Samuel told me about the tear gas, I remembered the woman’s cry in the valley.

IN MID-JULY of 1994, three months after the massacre at the Mugonero Adventist complex, the church president, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, fled with his wife to Zaire, then to Zambia, and from there to Laredo, Texas. It wasn’t easy for Rwandans to get American visas after the genocide, but the Ntakirutimanas had a son named Eliel in Laredo, a cardiac anesthesiologist who had been a naturalized United States citizen for more than a decade. So the pastor and his wife were granted green cards—“permanent resident alien” status—and settled in Laredo. Shortly after they arrived, a group of Tutsis who lived in the Midwest sent a letter to the White House, asking that Pastor Ntakirutimana be brought to justice for his conduct during the Mugonero massacre. “After several months,” one of the letter’s signers told me, “an answer came from Thomas E. Donilon, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, expressing sympathy for what happened and then just stating the terms of all the foreign aid America was giving to Rwanda. We were saying, here are one million people killed, and here’s one man—so we were kind of upset.”

On the second anniversary of the Mugonero massacre, a small group of Tutsis descended on Laredo to march and wave signs outside the Ntakirutimanas’ residence. They hoped to attract press coverage, and the story was sensational: a preacher accused of presiding over the slaughter of hundreds in his congregation. Serbs suspected of much less extensive crimes in the former Yugoslavia—men with no hope of American green cards—were receiving daily international coverage, but aside from a few scattered news briefs, the pastor had been spared such unpleasantness.

Yet, when I returned to New York in September of 1996, a week after my visit to Mugonero, I learned that the FBI was preparing to arrest Elizaphan Ntakirutimana in Laredo. The United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, sitting in Arusha, Tanzania, had issued an indictment against him, charging him with three counts of genocide and three counts of crimes against humanity. The indictment, which made the same charges against Dr. Gerard Ntakirutimana, as well as the mayor, Charles Sikubwabo, and a local businessman, told the same story that survivors had told me: the pastor had “instructed” Tutsis to take refuge at the Adventist complex; Dr. Gerard had helped to extricate “non-Tutsis” from among the refugees; father and son had arrived at the complex on the morning of April 16, 1994, in a convoy of attackers; and “during the months that followed” both men were held to have “searched for and attacked Tutsi survivors and others, killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to them.”

The indictment was a secret, as were the FBI’s plans for an arrest. Laredo, a hot, flat town, tucked into one of the southernmost bends of the Rio Grande, overlooks Mexico, and the pastor had a record of flight.

THE ADDRESS I had for Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana in Laredo was 313 Potrero Court—a suburban brick ranch house at the end of a drab cul-de-sac. A dog growled when I rang the bell, but nobody answered. I found a pay phone and called the local Adventist church, but I don’t speak Spanish, and the man who answered didn’t speak English. I had a tip that Pastor Ntakirutimana was working at a health-food store, but after making the rounds of a few places with names like Casa Ginseng and Fiesta Natural that seemed to specialize in herbal remedies for constipation and impotence, I went back to Potrero Court. There was still nobody at 313. Down the street I found a man spraying his driveway with a garden hose. I told him I was looking for a family of Rwandans, and indicated the house. He said, “I don’t know about that. I only know the people next door here a little.” I thanked him, and he said, “Where’d you say these people were from?” Rwanda, I said. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Colored people?” I said, “They’re from Africa.” He pointed to 313, and told me, “That’s the house. Fancy cars they drive. They moved out about a month ago.

Eliel Ntakirutimana’s new phone number was unlisted, but late at night I got hold of an operator who gave me his address, and in the morning I drove there. The house was on Estate Drive, in an expensive-looking new private community, designed, as in Rwanda, with each home set within a walled compound. An electronic gate controlled access to the subdivision, where most of the plots were still empty prairie. The few houses were wild, vaguely Mediterranean fantasias, whose only common attribute was immensity. The Ntakirutimanas’ stood at the end of the road behind another electronic security fence. A barefoot Rwandan maid led me past an open garage that housed a white Corvette convertible and into a vast kitchen area. She phoned Dr. Ntaki—he had chopped down his name as a professional courtesy to American tongues—and I told him I was hoping to meet his father. He asked how I’d found the house. I told him that, too, and he gave me an appointment in the afternoon at a hospital called Mercy.

While I was still on the phone, the doctor’s wife, Genny, a handsome woman with an easy manner, came home from taking her kids to school. She offered me a cup of coffee—“From Rwanda,” she said proudly. We sat on huge leather couches beside a gigantic television in an alcove of the kitchen, with a view over a patio, a barbecue pavilion, and, on the far shore of a tiled swimming pool, a patch of garden. The distant voices of the Rwandan maid and a Mexican nanny echoed off the marble floors and lofty ceilings of further rooms, and Genny said, “With my father-in-law, we were the last ones to hear anything. He was in Zaire, he was in Zambia, a refugee, and an old man—more than seventy years old. His one great wish was retirement and old age in Rwanda. Then he comes here and suddenly they say he killed people. You know Rwandans. Rwandans go crazy with jealousy. Rwandans don’t like if you are rich or in good health.”

Genny’s own father was a Hutu who had been involved in politics and was killed by rivals in 1973. Her mother was a Tutsi who was saved by chance on the brink of being killed in 1994, and who still lived in Rwanda. “We mixed people don’t hate Tutsi or Hutu,” Genny said. This was an inaccurate generalization—many people of mixed parentage had killed as Hutus, or been killed as Tutsis—but Genny had been living in exile, and she explained, “Most Rwandans who are here in America like my husband have been here so long that they all take positions according to their families. If they say your brother killed, then you take his side.” She did not seem to have her own mind entirely made up about her father-in-law, the pastor. She said, “This is a man who can’t stand to see blood even when you kill a chicken. But anything is possible.”

Just before noon, Dr. Ntaki called with a new plan: we would lunch at the Laredo Country Club. Then the family lawyer, Lazaro Gorza-Gongora, showed up. He was dapper and mild-mannered and very direct. He said that he wasn’t prepared to let the pastor speak to me. “The accusations are outrageous, monstrous, and completely destructive,” he said with disarming tranquillity. “People say whatever they want, and an old man’s last years are in jeopardy.”

Dr. Ntaki was a round, loquacious man with strikingly bulging eyes. He wore a malachite-faced Rolex watch and a white dress shirt with a boldly hand-stitched collar. As he drove Gorza-Gongora and me to the country club in a Chevrolet Suburban that had been customized to feel like a living room, complete with a television set, he spoke with great interest about Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s preparations for open-heart surgery. Dr. Ntaki himself presided over the intravenous drips of open-heart patients, and he shared his wife’s view that any charges against his father were the product of typical Rwandan class envy and spite. “They see us as rich and well educated,” he said. “They can’t take it.” He told me that his family owned a spread of five hundred acres in Kibuye—kingly proportions in Rwanda—with coffee and banana plantations, many cattle, “and all those good Rwandan things.” He said, “Here’s a father with three sons who are doctors and two other children who work in international finance. This is in a country that didn’t have a single person with a bachelor’s degree in 1960. Of course everyone resents him and wants to destroy him.”

We ate overlooking the golf course. Dr. Ntaki held forth on Rwandan politics. He didn’t use the word “genocide”; he spoke of “chaos, chaos, chaos,” with every man for himself just trying to save his own skin. And Tutsis had started it, he said, by killing the President. I reminded him that there was no evidence linking Tutsis to the assassination; that, in fact, the genocide had been meticulously planned by the Hutu extremists who set it in motion within an hour of the President’s death. Dr. Ntaki ignored me. “If President Kennedy had been assassinated in this country by a black man,” he said, “the American population would have most certainly killed all the blacks.”

Gorza-Gongora watched me writing this absurd statement in my notebook and broke his silence. “You say ‘extermination,’ you say ‘systematic,’ you say ‘genocide,’” he said to me. “That’s just a theory, and I think you’ve come all the way to Laredo to hold up my client as a clever proof of this theory.”

No, I said, I had come because a man of God was accused of having ordained the murder of half his flock, co-religionists, simply because they had been born as something called Tutsi.

“What’s the evidence?” Gorza-Gongora said. “Eyewitnesses?” He chuckled. “Anybody can say they saw anything.”

Dr. Ntaki went further; he detected a conspiracy: “The witnesses are all government tools. If they don’t say what the new government wants, they’ll be killed.”

Still, Dr. Ntaki said that despite his lawyer’s counsel, his father was concerned for his honor and wished to speak to me.

“The pastor thinks silence looks like guilt,” Gorza-Gongora said. “Silence is peace.”

Leaving the country club, I asked Dr. Ntaki if he ever had doubts about his father’s innocence. He said, “Of course, but—” and, after a second, “Do you have a father? I will defend him with everything I have.”

PASTOR ELIZAPHAN NTAKIRUTIMANA was a man of stern composure. He sat in a wing chair in the doctor’s parlor, clutching a manila folder in his lap, and wearing a gray cap over his gray hair, a gray shirt, black suspenders, black pants, black square-toed shoes, and squarish wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke in Kinyarwanda, the language of his country, and his son translated. He said, “They are saying I killed people. Eight thousand people.” The number was about four times higher than any I had previously heard. The pastor’s voice was full of angry disbelief. “It is all one hundred percent pure lies. I did not kill any people. I never told anybody to kill any people. I could not do such things.”

When the “chaos” began in Kigali, the pastor explained, he didn’t think it would reach Mugonero, and when Tutsis began going to the hospital, he claimed he had to ask them why. After about a week, he said, there were so many refugees that “things started turning a little weird.” So the pastor and his son Gerard held a meeting to address the question “What are we going to do?” But at that moment two policemen showed up to guard the hospital, and he said, “We didn’t have the meeting, because they had done it without our asking.”

Then, on Saturday, April 16, at seven in the morning, the two policemen from the hospital came to Pastor Ntakirutimana’s house. “They gave me letters from the Tutsi pastors there,” he said. “One was addressed to me, another to the mayor. I read mine. The letter they gave me said, ‘You understand they are plotting, they are trying to kill us, can you go to the mayor and ask him to protect us?” Ntakirutimana read this, then went to the mayor, Charles Sikubwabo. “I told him what my message from the Tutsi pastors said, and gave him his letter. The mayor told me, ‘Pastor, there’s no government. I have no power. I can do nothing.’

“I was surprised,” Ntakirutimana went on. “I returned to Mugonero, and I told the policemen to go with a message to the pastors to tell them, ‘Nothing can be done, and the mayor, too, said he can do nothing.’” Then Pastor Ntakirutimana took his wife and some others who “wanted to hide” and drove out of town—to Gishyita, which is where Mayor Sikubwabo lived, and where many of the injured refugees at Mugonero had received their wounds. “Gishyita,” he explained, “had killed its people already, so there was peace.”

Pastor Ntakirutimana said that he hadn’t returned to Mugonero until April 27. “Everybody was buried,” he told me, “I never saw anything.” After that, he said, “I never went anywhere. I stayed at my office. Only, one day I went to Rwamatamu because I heard that pastors had also died there, and I wanted to see if I could find even a kid of theirs to save. But I found nothing to save. They were Tutsis.”

The pastor made himself out as a great patron of Tutsis. He said he had given them jobs and shelter, and promoted them within the Adventist hierarchy. He lifted his chin and said, “As long as I live, in my whole life, there is nobody I tried to help more than Tutsis.” He could not understand how Tutsis could be so ungrateful as to make accusations against him. “It looks as if there is no justice anymore,” he said.

The name Ntakirutimana means “nothing is greater than God,” and the pastor told me, “I think I’m closer to God than I have ever been in my life.” He said, “When I see what happened in Rwanda, I’m very sad about it because politics is bad. A lot of people died.” He didn’t sound sad; he sounded tired, harassed, indignant. “Hatred is the result of sin, and when Jesus Christ comes, he’s the only one who’s going to take it away,” he said, and once more, he added, “Everything was chaos.”

“They say you organized it,” I reminded him.

He said, “Never, never, never, never.”

I asked him whether he remembered the precise language of the letter addressed to him by the seven Tutsi pastors who were killed at Mugonero. He opened the folder in his lap. “Here,” he said, and held out the handwritten original and a translation. His daughter-in-law, Genny, took the documents to make me copies on the fax machine. Dr. Ntaki wanted a drink, and fetched a bottle of scotch. The lawyer, Gorza-Gongora, told me, “I was always against this meeting with you.” Genny brought me the letter. It was dated April 15, 1994.

The letter was signed by Pastors Ezekiel Semugeshi, Isaka Rucondo, Seth Rwanyabuto, Eliezer Seromba, Seth Sebihe, Jerome Gakwaya, and Ezekias Zigirinshuti.

Dr. Ntaki walked me out to my car. In the driveway, he stopped and said, “If my father committed crimes, even though I am his son, I say he should be prosecuted. But I don’t believe any of it.”

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after we met, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana was in his car, driving south on Interstate 35 toward Mexico. To the FBI agents who were tailing him, his driving appeared erratic—he would speed up, slow down, change lanes, and again accelerate abruptly. A few miles from the border, they pulled him over and took him into custody. The arrest went almost entirely unnoticed in the American press. A few days later, in the Ivory Coast, the pastor’s son Dr. Gerard was also arrested, and he was quickly transferred to the UN tribunal. But the pastor had a United States green card and the rights that came with it, and he retained Ramsey Clark, a former Attorney General, who specialized in defending politically repugnant cases, to fight his extradition. Clark argued, speciously, that it would be unconstitutional for the United States to surrender the pastor—or anybody else—to the tribunal, and Judge Marcel Notzon, who presided over the case in federal district court, agreed. On December 17, 1997, after fourteen months in a Laredo jail, Pastor Ntakirutimana was released unconditionally, and he remained a free man for nine weeks before FBI agents arrested him a second time, pending an appeal of Judge Notzon’s decision.

When I heard that Pastor Ntakirutimana had been returned to his family in time for Christmas, I went back through my notes from Mugonero. I had forgotten that after my meetings with survivors, my translator, Arcene, asked me to go with him to the hospital chapel, where there had been a lot of killing; he wanted to pay homage to the dead, who were buried nearby in mass graves. We stood in silence in the empty chapel with its cement pews. On the floor below the altar sat four memorial coffins, draped in white sheets, painted with black crosses. “The people who did this,” Arcene said, “didn’t understand the idea of a country. What is a country? What is a human being? They had no understanding.”

4

IN THE FAMOUS story, the older brother, Cain, was a cultivator, and Abel, the younger, was a herdsman. They made their offerings to God—Cain from his crops, Abel from his herds. Abel’s portion won God’s regard; Cain’s did not. So Cain killed Abel.

Rwanda, in the beginning, was settled by cave-dwelling pygmies whose descendants today are called the Twa people, a marginalized and disenfranchised group that counts for less than one percent of the population. Hutus and Tutsis came later, but their origins and the order of their immigrations are not accurately known. While convention holds that Hutus are a Bantu people who settled Rwanda first, coming from the south and west, and that Tutsis are a Nilotic people who migrated from the north and east, these theories draw more on legend than on documentable fact. With time, Hutus and Tutsis spoke the same language, followed the same religion, intermarried, and lived intermingled, without territorial distinctions, on the same hills, sharing the same social and political culture in small chiefdoms. The chiefs were called Mwamis, and some of them were Hutus, some Tutsis; Hutus and Tutsis fought together in the Mwamis’ armies; through marriage and clientage, Hutus could become hereditary Tutsis, and Tutsis could become hereditary Hutus. Because of all this mixing, ethnographers and historians have lately come to agree that Hutus and Tutsis cannot properly be called distinct ethnic groups.

Still, the names Hutu and Tutsi stuck. They had meaning, and though there is no general agreement about what word best describes that meaning—“classes,” “castes,” and “ranks” are favorites—the source of the distinction is undisputed: Hutus were cultivators and Tutsis were herdsmen. This was the original inequality: cattle are a more valuable asset than produce, and although some Hutus owned cows while some Tutsis tilled the soil, the word Tutsi became synonymous with a political and economic elite. The stratification is believed to have been accelerated after 1860, when the Mwami Kigeri Rwabugiri, a Tutsi, ascended to the Rwandan throne and initiated a series of military and political campaigns that expanded and consolidated his dominion over a territory nearly the size of the present Republic.

But there is no reliable record of the precolonial state. Rwandans had no alphabet; their tradition was oral, therefore malleable; and because their society is fiercely hierarchical the stories they tell of their past tend to be dictated by those who hold power, either through the state or in opposition to it. Of course, at the core of Rwanda’s historical debates lie competing ideas about the relationship between Hutus and Tutsis, so it is a frustration that the precolonial roots of that relationship are largely unknowable. As the political thinker Mahmood Mamdani has observed: “That much of what passed as historical fact in academic circles has to be considered as tentative—if not outright fictional—is becoming clear as post-genocidal sobriety compels a growing number of historians to take seriously the political uses to which their writings have been put, and their readers to question the certainty with which many a claim has been advanced.”

So Rwandan history is dangerous. Like all of history, it is a record of successive struggles for power, and to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality—even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood. Yet some facts, and some understandings, remain unchallenged. For instance, Rwabugiri was the heir to a dynasty that claimed to trace its lineage to the late fourteenth century. Five hundred years is a very long life for any regime, at any time, anywhere. Even if we consider the real possibility that the rememberers of the royal house were exaggerating, or marking time differently than we do, and that Rwabugiri’s kingdom was only a few centuries old—that’s still a ripe age, and such endurance requires organization.

By the time Rwabugiri came along, the Rwandan state, having expanded gradually from a single hilltop chieftaincy, administered much of what is now southern and central Rwanda through a rigorous, multilayered hierarchy of military, political, and civil chiefs and governors, subchiefs, and deputy governors, subsubchiefs, and deputy deputy governors. Priests, tax collectors, clan leaders, and army recruiters all had their place in the order that bound every hill in the kingdom in fealty to the Mwami. Court intrigues among the Mwami’s sprawling entourage were as elaborate and treacherous as any Shakespeare sketched, with the additional complications of official polygamy, and a prize of immense power for the queen mother.

The Mwami himself was revered as a divinity, absolute and infallible. He was regarded as the personal embodiment of Rwanda, and as Rwabugiri extended his domain, he increasingly configured the world of his subjects in his own image. Tutsis were favored for top political and military offices, and through their public identification with the state, they generally enjoyed greater financial power as well. The regime was essentially feudal: Tutsis were aristocrats; Hutus were vassals. Yet status and identity continued to be determined by many other factors as well—clan, region, clientage, military prowess, even individual industry—and the lines between Hutu and Tutsi remained porous. In fact, in some areas of modern-day Rwanda that Mwami Rwabugiri failed to conquer, these categories had no local significance. Apparently, Hutu and Tutsi identities took definition only in relationship to state power; as they did, the two groups inevitably developed their own distinctive cultures—their own set of ideas about themselves and one another—according to their respective domains. Those ideas were largely framed as opposing negatives: a Hutu was what a Tutsi was not, and vice versa. But in the absence of the sort of hard-and-fast taboos that often mark the boundaries between ethnic or tribal groups, Rwandans who sought to make the most of these distinctions were compelled to amplify minute and imprecise field marks, like the prevalence of milk in one’s diet, and, especially, physical traits.

Within the jumble of Rwandan characteristics, the question of appearances is particularly touchy, as it has often come to mean life or death. But nobody can dispute the physical archetypes: for Hutus, stocky and round-faced, dark-skinned, flat-nosed, thicklipped, and square-jawed; for Tutsis, lanky and long-faced, not so dark-skinned, narrow-nosed, thin-lipped, and narrow-chinned. Nature presents countless exceptions. (“You can’t tell us apart,” Laurent Nkongoli, the portly vice president of the National Assembly, told me. “We can’t tell us apart. I was on a bus in the north once and because I was in the north, where they”—Hutus —“were, and because I ate corn, which they eat, they said, ‘He’s one of us.’ But I’m a Tutsi from Butare in the south.”) Still, when the Europeans arrived in Rwanda at the end of the nineteenth century, they formed a picture of a stately race of warrior kings, surrounded by herds of long-horned cattle and a subordinate race of short, dark peasants, hoeing tubers and picking bananas. The white men assumed that this was the tradition of the place, and they thought it a natural arrangement.

“Race science” was all the rage in Europe in those days, and for students of central Africa the key doctrine was the so-called Hamitic hypothesis, propounded in 1863 by John Hanning Speke, an Englishman who is most famous for “discovering” the great African lake that he christened Victoria and for identifying it as the source of the Nile River. Speke’s basic anthropological theory, which he made up out of whole cloth, was that all culture and civilization in central Africa had been introduced by the taller, sharper-featured people, whom he considered to be a Caucasoid tribe of Ethiopian origin, descended from the biblical King David, and therefore a superior race to the native Negroids.

Much of Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile is devoted to descriptions of the physical and moral ugliness of Africa’s “primitive races,” in whose condition he found “a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures.” For his text, Speke took the story in Genesis 9, which tells how Noah, when he was just six hundred years old and had safely skippered his ark over the flood to dry land, got drunk and passed out naked in his tent. On emerging from his oblivion, Noah learned that his youngest son, Ham, had seen him naked; that Ham had told his brothers, Shem and Japheth, of the spectacle; and that Shem and Japheth had, with their backs chastely turned, covered the old man with a garment. Noah responded by cursing the progeny of Ham’s son, Canaan, saying, “A slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” Amid the perplexities of Genesis, this is one of the most enigmatic stories, and it has been subjected to many bewildering interpretations—most notably that Ham was the original black man. To the gentry of the American South, the weird tale of Noah’s curse justified slavery, and to Speke and his colonial contemporaries it spelled the history of Africa’s peoples. On “contemplating these sons of Noah,” he marveled that “as they were then, so they appear to be now.”

Speke begins a section of his Journal, headed “Fauna,” with the words: “In treating of this branch of natural history, we will first take man—the true curly-head, flab-nosed, pouch-mouthed negro.” The figure of this subspecies confronted Speke with a mystery even greater than the Nile: “How the negro has lived so many ages without advancing seems marvelous, when all the countries surrounding Africa are so forward in comparison; and, judging from the progressive state of the world, one is led to suppose that the African must soon either step out from his darkness, or be superseded by a being superior to himself.” Speke believed that a colonial government—“like ours in India”—might save the “negro” from perdition, but otherwise he saw “very little chance” for the breed: “As his father did, so does he. He works his wife, sells his children, enslaves all he can lay hands upon, and unless when fighting for the property of others, contents himself with drinking, singing, and dancing like a baboon, to drive dull care away.”

This was all strictly run-of-the-mill Victorian patter, striking only for the fact that a man who had so exerted himself to see the world afresh had returned with such stock observations. (And, really, very little has changed; one need only lightly edit the foregoing passages—the crude caricatures, the question of human inferiority, and the bit about the baboon—to produce the sort of profile of misbegotten Africa that remains standard to this day in the American and European press, and in the appeals for charity donations put out by humanitarian aid organizations.) Yet, living alongside his sorry “negroes,” Speke found a “superior race” of “men who were as unlike as they could be from the common order of the natives” by virtue of their “fine oval faces, large eyes, and high noses, denoting the best blood of Abyssinia”—that is, Ethiopia. This “race” comprised many tribes, including the Watusi—Tutsis—all of whom kept cattle and tended to lord it over the Negroid masses. What thrilled Speke most was their “physical appearances,” which despite the hair-curling and skin-darkening effects of intermarriage had retained “a high stamp of Asiatic feature, of which a marked characteristic is a bridged instead of a bridgeless nose.” Couching his postulations in vaguely scientific terms, and referring to the historical authority of Scripture, Speke pronounced this “semi-Shem-Hamitic” master race to be lost Christians, and suggested that with a little British education they might be nearly as “superior in all things” as an Englishman like himself.

Few living Rwandans have heard of John Hanning Speke, but most know the essence of his wild fantasy—that the Africans who best resembled the tribes of Europe were inherently endowed with mastery—and, whether they accept or reject it, few Rwandans would deny that the Hamitic myth is one of the essential ideas by which they understand who they are in this world. In November of 1992, the Hutu Power ideologue Leon Mugesera delivered a famous speech, calling on Hutus to send the Tutsis back to Ethiopia by way of the Nyabarongo River, a tributary of the Nile that winds through Rwanda. He did not need to elaborate. In April of 1994, the river was choked with dead Tutsis, and tens of thousands of bodies washed up on the shores of Lake Victoria.

ONCE THE AFRICAN interior had been “opened up” to the European imagination by explorers like Speke, empire soon followed. In a frenzy of conquest, Europe’s monarchs began staking claims to vast reaches of the continent. In 1885, representatives of the major European powers held a conference in Berlin to sort out the frontiers of their new African real estate. As a rule, the lines they marked on the map, many of which still define African states, bore no relationship to the political or territorial traditions of the places they described. Hundreds of kingdoms and chieftaincies that operated as distinct nations, with their own languages, religions, and complex political and social histories, were either carved up or, more often, lumped together beneath European flags. But the cartographers at Berlin left Rwanda, and its southern neighbor Burundi, intact, and designated the two countries as provinces of German East Africa.[1]

No white man had ever been to Rwanda at the time of the Berlin conference. Speke, whose theories on race were taken as gospel by Rwanda’s colonizers, had merely peered over the country’s eastern frontier from a hilltop in modern-day Tanzania, and when the explorer Henry M. Stanley, intrigued by Rwanda’s reputation for “ferocious exclusiveness,” attempted to cross that frontier, he was repulsed by a hail of arrows. Even slave traders passed the place by. In 1894, a German count, named von Götzen, became the first white man to enter Rwanda and to visit the royal court. The next year, the death of Mwami Rwabugiri plunged Rwanda into political turmoil, and in 1897, Germany set up its first administrative offices in the country, hoisted the flag of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Reich, and instituted a policy of indirect rule. Officially, this meant placing a few German agents over the existing court and administrative system, but the reality was more complicated.

Rwabugiri’s death had trigged a violent succession fight among the Tutsi royal clans; the dynasty was in great disarray, and the weakened leaders of the prevailing factions eagerly collaborated with the colonial overlords in exchange for patronage. The political structure that resulted is often described as a “dual colonialism,” in which Tutsi elites exploited the protection and license extended by the Germans to pursue their internal feuds and to further their hegemony over the Hutus. By the time that the League of Nations turned Rwanda over to Belgium as a spoil of World War I, the terms Hutu and Tutsi had become clearly defined as opposing “ethnic” identities, and the Belgians made this polarization the cornerstone of their colonial policy.

In his classic history of Rwanda, written in the 1950s, the missionary Monsignor Louis de Lacger remarked, “One of the most surprising phenomena of Rwanda’s human geography is surely the contrast between the plurality of races and the sentiment of national unity. The natives of this country genuinely have the feeling of forming but one people.” Lacger marveled at the unity created by loyalty to the monarchy—“I would kill for my Mwami” was a popular chant—and to the national God, Imana. “The ferocity of this patriotism is exalted to the point of chauvinism,” he wrote, and his missionary colleague Father Pages observed that Rwandans “were persuaded before the European penetration that their country was the center of the world, that this was the largest, most powerful, and most civilized kingdom on earth.” Rwandans believed that God might visit other countries by day, but every night he returned to rest in Rwanda. According to Pages, “they found it natural that the two horns of the crescent moon should be turned toward Rwanda, in order to protect it.” No doubt, Rwandans also assumed that God expressed himself in Kinyarwanda, because few Rwandans in the insular precolonial state would have known that any other language existed. Even today, when Rwanda’s government and many of its citizens are multilingual, Kinyarwanda is the only language of all Rwandans, and, after Swahili, it is the second most widely spoken African language. As Lacger wrote: “There are few people in Europe among whom one finds these three factors of national cohesion: one language, one faith, one law.”

Perhaps it was precisely Rwanda’s striking Rwandanness that inspired its colonizers to embrace the absurd Hamitic pretext by which they divided the nation against itself. The Belgians could hardly have pretended they were needed to bring order to Rwanda. Instead, they sought out those features of the existing civilization that fit their own ideas of mastery and subjugation and bent them to fit their purposes. Colonization is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs, and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and calipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had “nobler,” more “naturally” aristocratic dimensions than the “coarse” and “bestial” Hutus. On the “nasal index,” for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimeters longer and nearly five millimeters narrower than the median Hutu nose.

Over the years, a number of distinguished European observers became so carried away by their fetishization of Tutsi refinement that they attempted to one-up Speke by proposing, variously, that the Rwandan master race must have originated in Melanesia, the lost city of Atlantis, or—according to one French diplomat—outer space. But the Belgian colonials stuck with the Hamitic myth as their template and, ruling Rwanda more or less as a joint venture with the Roman Catholic Church, they set about radically reengineering Rwandan society along so-called ethnic lines. Monsignor Léon Classe, the first Bishop of Rwanda, was a great advocate of the disenfranchisement of Hutus and the reinforcement of “the traditional hegemony of the well-born Tutsis.” In 1930, he warned that any effort to replace Tutsi chiefs with “uncouth” Hutus “would lead the entire state directly into anarchy and to bitter anti-European communism,” and, he added, “we have no chiefs who are better qualified, more intelligent, more active, more capable of appreciating progress and more fully accepted by the people than the Tutsi.”

Classe’s message was heeded: the traditional hill-by-hill administrative structures which had offered Hutus their last hope for at least local autonomy were systematically dismantled, and Tutsi elites were given nearly unlimited power to exploit Hutus’ labor and levy taxes against them. In 1931, the Belgians and the Church deposed a Mwami they considered overly independent and installed a new one, Mutara Rudahigwa, who had been carefully selected for his compliance. Mutara promptly converted to Catholicism, renouncing his divine status and sparking a popular rush to the baptismal font that soon turned Rwanda into the most Catholicized country in Africa. Then, in 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census in order to issue “ethnic” identity cards, which labeled every Rwandan as either Hutu (eighty-five percent) or Tutsi (fourteen percent) or Twa (one percent). The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and permitted the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system rooted in the myth of Tutsi superiority.

So the offering of the Tutsi herdsmen found favor in the eyes of the colonial lords, and the offering of the Hutu cultivators did not. The Tutsi upper crust, glad for power, and terrified of being subjected to the abuses it was encouraged to inflict against Hutus, accepted priority as its due. The Catholic schools, which dominated the colonial educational system, practiced open discrimination in favor of Tutsis, and Tutsis enjoyed a monopoly on administrative and political jobs, while Hutus watched their already limited opportunities for advancement shrink. Nothing so vividly defined the divide as the Belgian regime of forced labor, which required armies of Hutus to toil en masse as plantation chattel, on road construction, and in forestry crews, and placed Tutsis over them as taskmasters. Decades later, an elderly Tutsi recalled the Belgian colonial order to a reporter with the words “You whip the Hutu or we will whip you.” The brutality did not end with the beatings; exhausted by their communal labor requirements, peasants neglected their fields, and the fecund hills of Rwanda were repeatedly stricken by famine. Beginning in the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Hutus and impoverished rural Tutsis fled north to Uganda and west to the Congo to seek their fortunes as itinerant agricultural laborers.

Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the precolonial state no longer mattered; the Belgians had made “ethnicity” the defining feature of Rwandan existence. Most Hutus and Tutsis still maintained fairly cordial relations; intermarriages went ahead, and the fortunes of “petits Tutsis” in the hills remained quite indistinguishable from those of their Hutu neighbors. But, with every schoolchild reared in the doctrine of racial superiority and inferiority, the idea of a collective national identity was steadily laid to waste, and on either side of the Hutu-Tutsi divide there developed mutually exclusionary discourses based on the competing claims of entitlement and injury.

Tribalism begets tribalism. Belgium itself was a nation divided along “ethnic” lines, in which the Francophone Walloon minority had for centuries dominated the Flemish majority. But following a long “social revolution,” Belgium had entered an age of greater demographic equality. The Flemish priests who began to turn up in Rwanda after World War II identified with the Hutus and encouraged their aspirations for political change. At the same time, Belgium’s colonial administration had been placed under United Nations trusteeship, which meant that it was under pressure to prepare the ground for Rwandan independence. Hutu political activists started calling for majority rule and a “social revolution” of their own. But the political struggle in Rwanda was never really a quest for equality; the issue was only who would dominate the ethnically bipolar state.

In March of 1957, a group of nine Hutu intellectuals published a tract known as the Hutu Manifesto, arguing for “democracy”—not by rejecting the Hamitic myth but by embracing it. If Tutsis were foreign invaders, the argument went, then Rwanda was by rights a nation of the Hutu majority. This was what passed for democratic thought in Rwanda: Hutus had the numbers. The Manifesto firmly rejected getting rid of ethnic identity cards for fear of “preventing the statistical law from establishing the reality of facts,” as if being Hutu or Tutsi automatically signified a person’s politics. Plenty of more moderate views could be heard, but who listens to moderates in times of revolution? As new Hutu parties sprang up, rallying the masses to unite in their “Hutuness,” the enthusiastic Belgians scheduled elections. But before any Rwandans saw a ballot box, hundreds of them were killed.

ON NOVEMBER 1, 1959, in the central Rwandan province of Gitarama, an administrative subchief named Dominique Mbonyumutwa was beaten up by a group of men. Mbonyumutwa was a Hutu political activist, and his attackers were Tutsi political activists, and almost immediately after they finished with him, Mbonyumutwa was said to have died. He wasn’t dead, but the rumor was widely believed; even now, there are Hutus who think that Mbonyumutwa was killed on that night. Looking back, Rwandans will tell you that some such incident was inevitable. But the next time you hear a story like the one that ran on the front page of The New York Times in October of 1997, reporting on “the ageold animosity between the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups,” remember that until Mbonyumutwa’s beating lit the spark in 1959 there had never been systematic political violence recorded between Hutus and Tutsis—anywhere.

Within twenty-four hours of the beating in Gitarama, roving bands of Hutus were attacking Tutsi authorities and burning Tutsi homes. The “social revolution” had begun. In less than a week, the violence spread through most of the country, as Hutus organized themselves, usually in groups of ten led by a man blowing a whistle, to conduct a campaign of pillage, arson, and sporadic murder against Tutsis. The popular uprising was known as “the wind of destruction,” and one of its biggest fans was a Belgian colonel named Guy Logiest, who arrived in Rwanda from the Congo three days after Mbonyumutwa’s beating to supervise the troubles. Rwandans who wondered what Logiest’s attitude toward the violence might be had only to observe his Belgian troops standing around idly as Hutus torched Tutsi homes. As Logiest put it twenty-five years later: “The time was crucial for Rwanda. Its people needed support and protection.”

Were Tutsis not Rwandan people? Four months before the revolution began, the Mwami who had reigned for nearly thirty years, and was still popular with many Hutus, went to Burundi to see a Belgian doctor for treatment of a venereal disease. The doctor gave him an injection, and the Mwami collapsed and died, apparently from allergic shock. But a deep suspicion that he had been poisoned took hold among Rwanda’s Tutsis, further straining their fraying relationship with their erstwhile Belgian sponsors. In early November, when the new Mwami, a politically untested twenty-five-year-old, asked Colonel Logiest for permission to deploy an army against the Hutu revolutionaries, he was turned down. Royalist forces took to the field anyway, but though a few more Hutus than Tutsis were killed in November, the counteroffensive quickly petered out. “We have to take sides,” Colonel Logiest declared as Tutsi homes continued to burn in early 1960, and later he would have no regrets about “being so partial against the Tutsis.”

Logiest, who was virtually running the revolution, saw himself as a champion of democratization, whose task was to rectify the gross wrong of the colonial order he served. “I ask myself what was it that made me act with such resolution,” he would recall. “It was without doubt the will to give the people back their dignity. And it was probably just as much the desire to put down the arrogance and expose the duplicity of a basically oppressive and unjust aristocracy.”

That legitimate grievances lie behind a revolution does not, however, ensure that the revolutionary order will be just. In early 1960, Colonel Logiest staged a coup d’état by executive fiat, replacing Tutsi chiefs with Hutu chiefs. Communal elections were held at midyear, and with Hutus presiding over the polling stations, Hutus won at least ninety percent of the top posts. By then, more than twenty thousand Tutsis had been displaced from their homes, and that number kept growing rapidly as new Hutu leaders organized violence against Tutsis or simply arrested them arbitrarily, to assert their authority and to snatch Tutsi property. Among the stream of Tutsi refugees who began fleeing into exile was the Mwami.

“The revolution is over,” Colonel Logiest announced in October, at the installation of a provisional government led by Grégoire Kayibanda, one of the original authors of the Hutu Manifesto, who gave a speech proclaiming: “Democracy has vanquished feudalism.” Logiest also gave a speech, and apparently he was feeling magnanimous in victory, because he issued this prophetic caution: “It will not be a democracy if it is not equally successful in respecting the rights of minorities…. A country in which justice loses this fundamental quality prepares the worst disorders and its own collapse.” But that was not the spirit of the revolution over which Logiest had presided.

To be sure, nobody in Rwanda in the late 1950s had offered an alternative to a tribal construction of politics. The colonial state and the colonial church had made that almost inconceivable, and although the Belgians switched ethnic sides on the eve of independence, the new order they prepared was merely the old order stood on its head. In January of 1961, the Belgians convened a meeting of Rwanda’s new Hutu leaders, at which the monarchy was officially abolished and Rwanda was declared a republic. The transitional government was nominally based on a power-sharing arrangement between Hutu and Tutsi parties, but a few months later a UN commission reported that the Rwandan revolution had, in fact, “brought about the racial dictatorship of one party” and simply replaced “one type of oppressive regime with another.” The report also warned of the possibility “that some day we will witness violent reactions on the part of the Tutsis.” The Belgians didn’t much care. Rwanda was granted full independence in 1962, and Grégoire Kayibanda was inaugurated as President.

So Hutu dictatorship masqueraded as popular democracy, and Rwanda’s power struggles became an internal affair of the Hutu elite, very much as the feuds among royal Tutsi clans had been in the past. Rwanda’s revolutionaries had become what the writer V. S. Naipaul calls postcolonial “mimic men,” who reproduce the abuses against which they rebelled, while ignoring the fact that their past masters were ultimately banished by those they enchained. President Kayibanda had almost certainly read Louis de Lacger’s famous history of Rwanda. But instead of Lacger’s idea of a Rwandan people unified by “national sentiment,” Kayibanda spoke of Rwanda as “two nations in one state.”

Genesis identifies the first murder as a fratricide. The motive is political—the elimination of a perceived rival. When God asks what happened, Cain offers his notoriously barbed lie: “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” The shock in the story is not the murder, which begins and ends in one sentence, but Cain’s shamelessness and the leniency of God’s punishment. For killing his brother, Cain is condemned to a life as “a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” When he protests, “Whoever finds me will slay me,” God says, “Not so! If anyone slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” Quite literally, Cain gets away with murder; he even receives special protection, but as the legend indicates, the blood-revenge model of justice imposed after his crime was not viable. People soon became so craven that “the earth was filled with violence,” and God regretted his creation so much that he erased it with a flood. In the new age that followed, the law would eventually emerge as the principle of social order. But that was many fratricidal struggles later.

5

“MY STORY FROM birth?” Odette Nyiramilimo said. “Do you really have time for that?”

I said I had time.

She said, “I was born in Kinunu, Gisenyi, in 1956. So I was three when this history of the genocide began. I can’t remember it exactly, but I did see a group of men on the facing hill descending with machetes, and I can still see houses burning. We ran into the bush with our cows and stayed there for two months. So there was milk, but nothing else. Our house was burned to nothing.”

Odette sat straight, perched forward on a white plastic lawn chair with her hands folded on the bare white plastic table between us. Her husband was playing tennis; some of her children were paddling around in the pool. It was Sunday at the Cercle Sportif in Kigali—the smell of chicken on the grill, the sounds of swimmers splashing and the pock of tennis balls, the gaudy brilliance of bougainvilleas spilling down the garden wall. We sat in the shade of a tall tree. Odette wore jeans and a white blouse, and a thin gold chain with a pendant charm at her throat. She spoke quickly and directly for several hours.

“I don’t remember when we rebuilt the house,” she said, “but in ‘sixty-three, when I was in the second year of primary school, I remember seeing my father, well dressed, as if for a festival, in a white cloth wrap. He was out on the road, and I was with the other children, and he said, ‘Goodbye, my children, I’m going to die.’ We cried out, ‘No, no.’ He said, ‘Didn’t you see a jeep go by on the road? It had all your maternal uncles on board, and I won’t wait for them to hunt me down. I’ll wait here to die with them.’ We cried and cried and convinced him not to die then, but the others were all killed.”

This is how Rwandan Tutsis count the years of their lives: in a hopscotch fashion—’fifty—nine, ’sixty, ’sixty-one, ’sixty-three, and so on, through ’ninety-four—sometimes skipping several years, when they knew no terror, sometimes slowing down to name the months and the days.

President Kayibanda was, at best, a dull leader, and by his habit of reclusiveness he suggested that he knew it. Stirring up the Hutu masses to kill Tutsis was the only way he seemed able to keep the spirit of the revolution alive. The pretext for this popular violence was found in the fact that from time to time armed bands of monarchist Tutsis who had fled into exile would stage raids on Rwanda. These guerrillas were the first to be called “cockroaches,” and they used the word themselves to describe their stealth and their belief that they were uncrushable. Their attacks were fitful and feeble, but Hutu retaliation against civilian Tutsis was invariably swift and extensive. It was a rare season in the early years of the republic when Tutsis were not displaced from their homes by arson and murder.

The most dramatic “cockroach” invasion occurred a few days before Christmas in 1963. A band of several hundred Tutsi guerrillas swept into southern Rwanda from a base in Burundi, and advanced to within twelve miles of Kigali before being wiped out by Rwandan forces under Belgian command. Not content with this victory, the government declared a national state of emergency to combat “counterrevolutionaries,” and designated a minister to organize Hutu “self-defense” units, tasked with the “work” of “clearing the bush.” That meant murdering Tutsis and destroying their homes. Writing in Le Monde, a schoolteacher named Vuillemin, employed by the United Nations in Butare, described the massacres in December of 1963 and January of 1964 as “a veritable genocide,” and he accused European aid workers and church leaders in the country of an indifference that amounted to complicity in the state-sponsored slaughter. Between December 24 and 28, 1963, Vuillemin reported, well-organized massacres left as many as fourteen thousand Tutsis dead in the southern province of Gikongoro alone. Although educated Tutsi men were the primary victims, he wrote, “In most cases, women and children were also felled by masu blows or spearing. The victims were most often thrown in the river after being stripped of their clothes.” Many of the Tutsis who survived followed the earlier swarms of refugees into exile; by mid-1964 as many as a quarter million Tutsis had fled the country. The British philosopher Sir Bertrand Russell described the scene in Rwanda that year as “the most horrible and systematic massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.”

After Odette’s uncles were carted off to their deaths, her father hired a truck to take the family to the Congo. But it was a large family—Odette’s father had two wives; she was the seventeenth of his eighteen children; with her grandparents, in-laws, aunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces, the extended family numbered thirty-three people—and the truck was too small. One of her grandmothers just wouldn’t fit. So her father said, “Let’s stay here and die here,” and they stayed.

Odette’s family made up pretty much the entire remaining Tutsi population of Kinunu. They lived in poverty in the mountains with their cows, and they feared for their lives. Protection came to them in the form of a village councillor, who approached Odette’s father and said, “We like you, and we don’t want you to die, so we’ll make you a Hutu.” Odette didn’t recall just how this had worked. “My parents never spoke of it for the rest of their lives,” she told me. “It was a bit humiliating. But my father took the identity card, and for two years he was a Hutu. Then he was called in for having a fraudulent identity card.”

By 1966 the “cockroaches” in exile disbanded their hapless army, weary of seeing Tutsis slaughtered every time they attacked. Kayibanda, confident of his status as the Hutu Mwami, realized that the old colonial model of official discrimination, thwarting the disempowered tribe’s access to education, public employment, and the military, might be a sufficient method of pest control to keep Tutsis in their place. To bolster the proportional power of the majority, census figures were edited so that Tutsis counted for just nine percent of the population, and their opportunities were restricted accordingly. Despite the Hutu monopoly on power, the Hamitic myth remained the basis of the state ideology. So a deep, almost mystical sense of inferiority persisted among Rwanda’s new Hutu elite, and to give extra teeth to the quota system a reverse meritocracy was imposed on Tutsis competing for the few positions available: those with the lowest scores were favored over those who performed best. “I had a sister who was always first in our class and I was more like tenth,” Odette recalled. “But when they read off the names of those who were accepted to secondary school, my name was read and my sister’s wasn’t—because I was less brilliant, less of a threat.”

“THEN IT WAS ’seventy-three,” Odette said. “I had left home, for a teachers college in Cyangugu”—in the southwest—“and one morning, while we were eating before going to mass, they closed the windows and the gates. Then some boys from another school came in the dining hall and circled the tables. I was trembling. I remember I had a piece of bread in my mouth, and I couldn’t swallow it. The boys shouted, ‘Get up, Tutsis. All the Tutsis stand up.’ There was a boy from my hill at home. We went to primary school together, and he said, ‘You, Odette, you sit down, we know you’ve been a Hutu forever.’ Then some other boy came and pulled my hair and said, ‘With this hair we know you’re a Tutsi.’”

Hair was one of the great signifiers for John Hanning Speke. When he identified a king as a member of the Hamitic master race, Speke pronounced him a descendant “from Abyssinia and King David, whose hair was as straight as my own,” and the king, flattered, said, yes, there was a story that his ancestors had “once been half white and half black, with hair on the white side straight, and on the black side frizzly.” Odette was neither tall nor especially skinny, and on the “nasal index” she was probably about average for a Rwandan. But such was Speke’s legacy that a hundred years after he shot himself in a “hunting accident,” a schoolboy in Rwanda tormented Odette because she liked to wear her hair combed back in soft waves. “And,” she went on, “the director of the school, a Belgian woman, said of me, ‘Yes, her, she’s a Tutsi of the first category, take her.’ So we were expelled. Nobody was killed there. Some girls were spat at in the face, and made to walk on their knees, and some were beaten. Then we left on foot.”

All across Rwanda, Tutsi students were being beaten and expelled, and many of them walked home to find their houses burning. The trouble this time had been inspired by events in Burundi, where the political landscape appeared very much like Rwanda’s through a bloody looking glass: in Burundi, a Tutsi military regime held power and Hutus feared for their lives. In the spring of 1972 some Burundian Hutus had attempted a rebellion, which was quickly put down. Then, in the name of restoring “peace and order,” the army conducted a nationwide campaign of extermination against educated Hutus, in which a lot of unschooled Hutus were murdered as well. The genocidal frenzy in Burundi exceeded anything that had preceded it in Rwanda. At least a hundred thousand Burundian Hutus were killed in the spring of 1972, and at least two hundred thousand fled as refugees—many of them to Rwanda.

The influx of Burundian refugees reminded President Kayibanda of the power of ethnic antagonism to galvanize the civic spirit. Rwanda was stagnating in poverty and isolation, and it needed a boost. So Kayibanda asked his army chief, Major General Juvénal Habyarimana, to organize Committees of Public Safety, and Tutsis were once again reminded what majority rule meant in Rwanda. The death toll this time was relatively low—“only,” as Rwandans count these things, in the hundreds—but at least a hundred thousand more Tutsis fled Rwanda as refugees.

When Odette spoke of 1973, she didn’t mention Burundi, or Kayibanda’s political fortunes, or the mass exodus. These circumstances did not figure in her memory. She stuck to her story, which was enough: One morning, while she had her mouth full of bread, her world had once again collapsed because she was Tutsi. “We were six girls, chased out of my school,” she told me. “I had my sack, and we walked.” After three days they had covered fifty miles, and arrived in Kibuye. Odette had relatives there—“a sister of my brother-in-law who had married a Hutu”—and she figured she would stay with them.

“This man had a sharpening business,” she said. “I found him in front of his house at his grinding stone. At first, he ignored me. I thought, Is he drunk? Doesn’t he see who is here? I said, ‘It’s me, Odette.’ He said, ‘Why are you here? It’s school season.’ I said, ‘But we’ve been expelled.’ Then he said, ‘I don’t give shelter to cockroaches.’ That’s what he said. My sister-in-law came along and she embraced me, and”—Odette clapped her hands together over her head and chopped them down in front of her chest—“he separated us roughly.” She looked at her outstretched arms and let them fall. Then she laughed, and said, “In ‘eighty-two, when I first became a doctor, my first job was at the Kibuye hospital, and the first patient I had was this same man, this brother-in-law. I couldn’t face him. I was trembling, and I had to leave the room. My husband was the director of the hospital and I told him, ‘I can’t treat this man.’ He was very sick and I had taken my oath, but—”

IN RWANDA, THE story of a girl who is sent away as a cockroach and comes back as a medicine woman must be, at least in part, a political story. And that was how Odette told it. In 1973, after her brother-in-law rejected her, she kept walking, home to Kinunu. She found her father’s house empty and one of his side houses burned. The family was hiding in the bush, camping among their banana trees, and Odette lived with them there for several months. Then, in July, the man in charge of the pogroms, Major General Habyarimana, ousted Kayibanda, declared himself President of the Second Republic, and called a moratorium on attacks against Tutsis. Rwandans, he said, should live in peace and work together for development. The message was clear: the violence had served its purpose, and Habyarimana was the fulfillment of the revolution.

“We really danced in the streets when Habyarimana took power,” Odette told me. “At last, a President who said not to kill Tutsis. And after ’seventy-five, at least, we did live in security. But the exclusions were still there.” In fact, Rwanda was more tightly regulated under Habyarimana than ever before. “Development” was his favorite political word and it also happened to be a favorite word of the European and American aid donors whom he milked with great skill. By law, every citizen became a member for life of the President’s party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND), which served as the all-pervasive instrument of his will. People were literally kept in their place by rules that forbade changing residence without government approval, and for Tutsis, of course, the old nine-percent quota rules remained. Members of the armed forces were forbidden to marry Tutsis, and it went without saying that they were not supposed to be Tutsis themselves. Two Tutsis were eventually given seats in Habyarimana’s rubber-stamp parliament, and a token Tutsi was given a ministerial post. If Tutsis thought they deserved better, they hardly complained; Habyarimana and his MRND promised to let them live unmolested, and that was more than they had been able to count on in the past.

The Belgian director of Odette’s old school in Cyangugu would not readmit her, but she found a place in a school that specialized in the sciences, and began preparing for a career in medicine. Once again, the headmistress was a Belgian, but this Belgian took Odette under her wing, keeping her name out of the enrollment books, and hiding her when government inspectors came looking for Tutsis. “It was all trickery,” Odette said, “and the other girls resented it. One night, they came to my dormitory and beat me with sticks.” Odette didn’t dwell on the discomfort. “Those were the good years,” she said. “The headmistress looked after me, I had become a good student—first in my class—and then I was admitted, with some more trickery, to the national medical school in Butare.”

The only thing Odette said about her life as a medical student was: “In Butare once, a professor of internal medicine came up to me and said, ‘What a pretty girl,’ and he started patting my bottom and tried to set up a date even though he was married.”

The memory just popped out of her like that, with no apparent connection to the thought that preceded it or the thought that followed. Then Odette sped ahead, skipping over the years to her graduation and her marriage. Yet, for a moment, that image of her as a young student in an awkward moment of sexual surprise and discomfort hung between us. It seemed to amuse Odette, and it reminded me of all that she wasn’t telling as she recited her life story. She was keeping everything that was not about Hutu and Tutsi to herself. Later, I met Odette several times at parties; she and her husband were gregarious and understandably popular. Together they ran a private maternity and pediatrics practice called the Good Samaritan Clinic. They were known as excellent doctors and fun people—warm, vivacious, good-humored. They had a charmingly affectionate ease with each other, and one saw right away that they were in the midst of full and engaging lives. But when we met in the garden of the Cercle Sportif, Odette spoke as a genocide survivor to a foreign correspondent. Her theme was the threat of annihilation, and the moments of reprieve in her story—the fond memories, funny anecdotes, sparks of wit—came, if at all, in quick beats, like punctuation marks.

This made sense to me. We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us, and, looking back, there are these discrete tracks of memory: the times when our lives are most sharply defined in relation to others’ ideas of us, and the more private times when we are freer to imagine ourselves. My own parents and grandparents came to the United States as refugees from Nazism. They came with stories similar to Odette’s, of being hunted from here to there because they were born as a this and not a that, or because they had chosen to resist the hunters in the service of an opposing political idea. Near the end of their lives, both my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandfather wrote their memoirs, and although their stories and their sensibilities were markedly different, both ended their accounts of their lives right in the middle of those lives, with a full stop at the moment they arrived in America. I don’t know why they stopped there. Perhaps nothing that came afterward ever made them feel so vividly, or terribly, aware and alive. But listening to Odette, it occurred to me that if others have so often made your life their business—made your life into a question, really, and made that question their business—then perhaps you will want to guard the memory of those times when you were freer to imagine yourself as the only times that are truly and inviolably your own.

It was the same with nearly all the Tutsi survivors I met in Rwanda. When I pressed for stories of how they had lived during the long periods between bouts of violence—household stories, village stories, funny stories, or stories of annoyance, stories of school, work, church, a wedding, a funeral, a trip, a party, or a feud—the answer was always opaque: in normal times we lived normally. After a while I stopped asking, because the question seemed pointless and possibly cruel. On the other hand, I found that Hutus often volunteered their memories of life’s engrossing daily dramas before the genocide, and these stories were, just as the Tutsi survivors had said, normal: variations, in a Rwandan vein, of stories you might hear anywhere.

So remembering has its economy, like experience itself, and when Odette mentioned the hand of the professor of internal medicine on her bottom, and grinned, I saw that she had forgotten that economy and wandered in her memories, and I felt that we were both glad of it. A professor had imagined her susceptible and she had imagined that as a married man and her teacher he should know greater restraint. They had each other wrong. But people have the strangest notions as they navigate each other in this life —and in the “good years,” the “normal times,” that isn’t the end of the world.

ODETTE’S HUSBAND, JEAN-BAPTISTE Gasasira, had a Tutsi father and a Hutu mother, but his father had died when Jean-Baptiste was very young, and his mother had succeeded in arranging for him to have Hutu identity papers. “That hadn’t prevented him from being beaten up in ’seventy-three,” Odette said, “but it meant the children had Hutu papers.” She had two sons and a daughter, and might have had more if she and Jean-Baptiste hadn’t been traveling abroad a great deal in the 1980s, to pursue specialized medical studies, “a big opportunity for Tutsis,” which was facilitated by their friendship with the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Education.

When Habyarimana took over, Rwanda was significantly poorer than any of its neighbor states, and by the mid-1980s it was economically better off than any of them. Odette and Jean-Baptiste, who had settled into well-paid jobs at the Central Hospital of Kigali, were living very close to the top of the Rwandan ladder, with government housing and cars and a busy social life among the Kigali elite. “Our best friends were Hutus, ministers and those who were in power from our generation,” Odette recalled. “This was our crowd. But it was a bit hard. Even though Jean-Baptiste was hired as a Hutu, he was seen to have the face and manner of a Tutsi, and we were known as Tutsis.”

The sense of exclusion could be subtle, but with time it became increasingly blunt. In November of 1989, a man came to the maternity ward asking for Dr. Odette. “He was very impatient and insisted we had to talk. He said, ‘You’re needed at the Presidency, at the office of the Secretary-General of Security.’” Odette was terrified; she assumed that she would be interrogated about her habit, during occasional trips to neighboring countries and to Europe, of visiting family members and Rwandan friends living in exile.

Since 1959, the diaspora of exiled Rwandan Tutsis and their children had grown to include about a million people; it was the largest and oldest unresolved African refugee problem. Nearly half of these refugees lived in Uganda, and in the early 1980s a number of young Rwandans there had joined the rebel leader Yoweri Museveni in his fight against the brutal dictatorship of President Milton Obote. By January of 1986, when Museveni claimed victory and was sworn in as President of Uganda, his army included several thousand Rwandan refugees. Habyarimana felt threatened. For years he had pretended to negotiate with refugee groups who demanded the right to return to Rwanda, but, citing the country’s chronic overpopulation, he had always refused to let the exiles come home. Ninety-five percent of Rwanda’s land was under cultivation, and the average family consisted of eight people living as subsistence farmers on less than half an acre. Shortly after Museveni’s victory in Uganda, Habyarimana had simply declared that Rwanda was full: end of discussion. Thereafter, contact with refugees was outlawed, and Odette knew how thorough Habyarimana’s spy network could be. As she drove to the Presidency, she realized that she had no idea what to say if her visits to exiles had been discovered.

“Dr. Odette,” Habyarimana’s security chief said, “they say you’re a good doctor.”

Odette said, “I don’t know.”

“Yes,” he went on. “You’re said to be very intelligent. You studied at these good schools without the right. But what did you say in the hospital corridor recently, after the death of President Habyarimana’s brother?”

Odette didn’t know what he was talking about.

The security chief told her: “You said that demons should take the whole Habyarimana family.”

Odette, who had been trembling with fear, laughed. “I’m a doctor,” she said. “You think I believe in demons?”

The security chief laughed, too. Odette went home, and the next morning, as usual, she went to work. “I started my rounds,” she recalled. “Then a colleague came up to me and said, ‘You’re always going away. Where are you going to go now, to Belgium, or where?’ And he took me to see—my name had been struck from the doors to the wards, and everyone was told I didn’t work there anymore.”

6

TUTSIS WERE NOT alone in their disappointment as the Second Republic calcified into a mature totalitarian order, in which Habyarimana, running unopposed, claimed a comical ninety-nine percent of the vote in the presidential elections. The President’s entourage was drawn overwhelmingly from his home base in the northwest, and southern Hutus felt increasingly alienated. Among the peasant masses, Hutus remained very nearly as downtrodden as Tutsis, and they were put to hard use after Habyarimana revived the despised colonial regime of mandatory communal work details. Of course, everyone turned out, as the ubiquitous MRND-party enforcers required, to chant and dance in adulation of the President at mass pageants of political “animation,” but such mandatory civic cheer could not mask the growing political discontent in much of Rwandan society. While the country as a whole had grown a bit less poor during Habyarimana’s tenure, the great majority of Rwandans remained in circumstances of extreme poverty, and it did not go unnoticed that the omnipotent President and his cronies had grown very rich.

Then again, it had never been otherwise in Rwandan memory, and compared to much of the rest of postcolonial Africa, Rwanda appeared Edenic to foreign-aid donors. Just about everywhere else you turned on the continent, you saw the client dictators of the Cold War powers ruling by pillage and murder, and from the rebels who opposed them you heard the loud anti-imperial rhetoric that makes white development workers feel bitterly misunderstood. Rwanda was tranquil—or, like the volcanoes in the northwest, dormant; it had nice roads, high church attendance, low crime rates, and steadily improving standards of public health and education. If you were a bureaucrat with a foreign-aid budget to unload, and your professional success was to be measured by your ability not to lie or gloss too much when you filed happy statistical reports at the end of each fiscal year, Rwanda was the ticket. Belgium shoveled money into its old stomping ground; France, ever eager to expand its neocolonial African empire—la Francophonie—had begun military assistance to Habyarimana in 1975; Switzerland sent more development aid to Rwanda than to any other country on earth; Washington, Bonn, Ottawa, Tokyo, and the Vatican all counted Kigali as a favorite charity. The hills were thick with young whites working, albeit unwittingly, for the greater glory of Habyarimana.

Then, in 1986, the prices of Rwanda’s chief exports, coffee and tea, crashed on the world market. The only easy profits left were to be had from scamming foreign-aid projects, and the competition was intense among the northwesterners, who had risen to prominence on Habyarimana’s coattails. In criminal syndicates like the Mafia, a person who has become invested in the logic and practices of the gang is said to be owned by it. This concept is organic to Rwanda’s traditional social, political, and economic structures, the tight pyramids of patron-client relationships that are the one thing no change of regime has ever altered. Every hill has its chief, every chief has his deputies and his sub-bosses; the pecking order runs from the smallest social cell to the highest central authority. But if the Mwami—or, now, the President—essentially owned Rwanda, who owned him? Through control of parastatal businesses, of the MRND political apparatus, and of the army, a knot of northwesterners had by the late 1980s turned the Rwandan state into little more than an instrument of their will—and with time the President himself stood more as a product of regional power than as its source.

From Rwanda’s state radio and its generally timid newspapers, one would have been hard pressed to guess that Habyarimana was not entirely the lord and owner of his public face. Yet everyone knew that the President was a man of insignificant lineage, possibly even the grandson of a Zairean or Ugandan immigrant, while his wife, Agathe Kanzinga, was the daughter of big shots. Madame Agathe, a great churchgoer, fond of binge shopping in Paris, was the muscle behind the throne; it was her family and their cronies who had bestowed their aura on Habyarimana, who had spied for him, and who occasionally and with great secrecy had killed for him, and when the national belt began tightening in the late 1980s, it was le clan de Madame that prevailed in profiteering from foreign aid.

BUT THERE IS so much you should know here—all at once. Permit me a quick aside.

In the fall of 1980, the naturalist Dian Fossey, who had spent the past thirteen years in the mountains of northwestern Rwanda studying the habits of mountain gorillas, withdrew to Cornell University to finish a book. Her deal with Cornell required her to teach a course, and I was one of her students. One day, before class, I found her in one of her famously dark moods. She had just caught her cleaning lady removing the hair from her—Fossey’s—comb. I was impressed: a cleaning lady, much less such a diligent one, struck my undergraduate imagination as highly exotic. But Fossey had had a row with the woman; she may even have given her the sack. She told me that her hair and, for that matter, her fingernail clippings were for her to dispose of. Burning was best, though a flush toilet was OK, too. So the cleaning lady was a scapegoat; it was herself whom Fossey was mad at. Leaving her hair lying about like that was bad form: anybody could get hold of it and work a spell on her. I didn’t know at the time that Fossey was popularly known in Rwanda as “the sorceress.” I said, “You really believe that hocus-pocus?” Fossey shot back, “Where I live, if I didn’t I’d be dead.”

Five years passed, and I saw in the newspaper that Dian Fossey had been murdered in Rwanda. Somebody killed her with a machete. Much later, there was a trial in Rwanda, a murky proceeding: a Rwandan defendant was found hanged in his cell before he could testify, and one of Fossey’s American research assistants was tried in absentia, found guilty, and sentenced to death. The case was closed, but suspicions remained that it had not been solved. Many Rwandans still speak of a cousin or in-law of Madame Agathe Habyarimana as the true sponsor of the murder; his motive was said to have something to do with gold and drugsmuggling operations—or perhaps gorilla poaching—in the national park around Fossey’s research station. It was all very murky.

When Odette told me of her talk with Habyarimana’s security chief about the question of demons, I thought of Fossey. Power is terribly complex; if powerful people believe in demons it may be best not to laugh at them. A United Nations press officer in Rwanda gave me a photocopy of a document he had picked up in the wreckage of Habyarimana’s home after the genocide. (Among the President’s possessions, trophy seekers also found a movie version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, with a hagiographic portrait of the Führer on the package.) The document consisted of a prophecy delivered in 1987 by a Catholic visionary, known as Little Pebbles, who claimed direct communication with Our Blessed Mother Virgin Mary, and who foresaw imminent desolation and the end of time. Little Pebbles’ scenario for the coming years involved a Communist attempt on the Vatican, civil war in every country on earth, a series of nuclear explosions, including that of a Russian reactor on the North Pole that would cause a shield of ice to form in the stratosphere, blocking out the sun and leading to the death of a quarter of the world’s population; thereafter, earthquakes would make whole nations disappear, and famine and plague would eliminate many of the people who had bothered to survive so far. Finally, after a total nuclear war and three days of darkness, Little Pebbles promised, “Jesus Christ will return to earth on Easter Sunday, 1992.”

I can’t say that Habyarimana ever read this forecast, only that it found its way into his household, and that it was close in spirit to views that fascinated his powerful wife. A hill called Kibeho, which stands near the center of Rwanda, became famous in the 1980s as a place where the Virgin Mary had the habit of appearing and addressing local visionaries. In Rwanda—the most Christianized country in Africa, where at least sixty-five percent of the population were Catholics and fifteen percent were Protestants—the Kibeho visionaries quickly attracted a strong following. The Catholic Church got up an official “scientific commission of inquiry” into the phenomenon, and declared it to be largely authentic. Kibeho was a big deal. Pilgrims came from all over the world, and Madame Agathe Habyarimana was a frequent visitor. With the encouragement of the Bishop of Kigali, Monsignor Vincent Nsengiyumva (himself an enthusiastic member of the central committee of the MRND), Madame Agathe often brought several Kibeho visionaries along on international trips. These young women had much to report from their colloquies with the Virgin, but among the Marian messages that made the strongest popular impression was the repeated assertion that Rwanda would, before long, be bathed in blood. “There were messages announcing woe for Rwanda,” Monsignor Augustin Misago, who was a member of the church commission on Kibeho, told me. “Visions of the crying Virgin, visions of people killing with machetes, of hills covered with corpses.”

Rwandans often describe themselves as an uncommonly suspicious people, and with some reason. Wherever you go in Rwanda—to a private home, a bar, a government office, or a refugee camp—drinks are served with the bottle caps on, and opened only before the eyes of the drinker. It is a custom that honors the fear of poison. An open bottle, even a bottle with a visibly loose cap, is unacceptable. Glasses, too, are suspect. When, as with the potent banana beer consumed by the peasantry, a drink comes unbottled from a common pot, or when a drink is to be shared, the provider must take the first sip, like a food taster in a medieval court, to prove that it is safe.

Tales of alleged poisoning regularly punctuate Rwanda’s historical lore. Marc Vincent, a pediatrician from Brussels who served with the colonial administration during the early 1950s, found that the locals regarded poisoning and sorcery as the root causes of all fatal illnesses. In his monograph L’enfant au Ruanda-Urundi, Vincent recalled overhearing a very sick ten-year-old boy telling his father, “When I die, you must see who poisoned me.” And an eight-year-old told Vincent, “Yes, death exists, but all those who die here, it’s not ordinary death, it’s sorcery: when you spit on the ground, one takes your saliva, one takes the dust on which you walked. My parents have told me to watch out.” Such attitudes, Vincent reported, pervaded all levels of society: “The natives see poisoners everywhere.”

Even today, deaths are often explained on radio trottoir—sidewalk radio, the ever-warping word of the street—and in the more formal media as the work of invisible poisoners. In the absence of evidence to prove or disprove such rumors, the enduring fear of poison takes on the quality of metaphor. When death is always the work of enemies, and the power of the state considers itself in concert with the occult, distrust and subterfuge become tools of survival, and politics itself becomes a poison.

SO HABYARIMANA WAS shadowed by his wife, and his wife, at least, had forebodings of total destruction. Rwandans seemed to think she should know. On radio trottoir, Madame Agathe was called Kanjogera, after the wicked queen mother of Mwami Musinga, the Lady Macbeth of Rwandan legend. Le clan de Madame, Agathe’s court within the court, was known as the akazu, the little house. The akazu was the core of the concentric webs of political, economic, and military muscle and patronage that came to be known as Hutu Power. When the President crossed the akazu, he was quickly set straight. For instance, Habyarimana once cultivated a protégé from outside the akazu, Colonel Stanislas Mayuya; he liked Mayuya so much that one of the chiefs of the akazu had Mayuya shot dead. The gunman was arrested; then he and the prosecutor on the case were also killed.

Mayuya’s assassination occurred in April of 1988. A strange year followed. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank demanded that Rwanda implement a program of “structural adjustment,” and the government’s budget for 1989 was slashed nearly in half. At the same time, taxes and forced-labor demands increased. Inadequate rains and a mismanagement of resources created pockets of famine. Details of corruption scandals leaked out, and several of Habyarimana’s critics suffered so-called automobile accidents, in which they were run over and killed. To prevent Rwanda’s sterling image from being tarnished in the eyes of international aid donors, the Kigali police launched vice squads to arrest “prostitutes,” a category that included any number of women who had run afoul of the high authorities. The Interior Ministry deputized Catholic militants to vandalize shops that sold condoms. Independent-minded journalists who took note of all this mischief were thrown in jail; they were followed by unemployed idlers whose heads had been shaved in preparation for a “re-education” program.

The more trouble there was, the more new troublemakers emerged. Hutu oppositionists of diverse stripes began finding their voices and lobbying for attention from the Western governments whose aid allocations underwrote about sixty percent of Rwanda’s annual budget. The timing was perfect. Following the breach of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989—the same month that Odette was fired—the victorious Cold War powers of Western Europe and North America began demanding gestures of democratization from their client regimes in Africa. It took a good deal of bullying, but after a meeting with his chief foreign patron, President François Mitterrand of France, Habyarimana suddenly announced, in June of 1990, that it was time to establish a multiparty political system in Rwanda.

Habyarimana’s embrace of reform was conspicuously halfhearted, a capitulation to foreign coercion, and instead of simple relief and enthusiasm, the prospect of an open competition for power provoked widespread alarm in Rwanda. It was universally understood that the northwesterners, who depended on his power and on whom his power increasingly depended, would not readily surrender their percentage. While Habyarimana spoke publicly of a political opening, the akazu tightened its grip on the machinery of the state. As repression quickened in direct proportion to the threat of change, a number of the leading advocates of reform fled into exile.

And then, in the early afternoon of October 1, 1990, a rebel army, calling itself the Rwandese Patriotic Front, invaded northeastern Rwanda from Uganda, declaring war on the Habyarimana regime, and propounding a political program that called for an end to tyranny, corruption, and the ideology of exclusion “which generates refugees.”

EVERY WAR IS unconventional after its own fashion. Hutu Power’s unconventionality did not take long to show. The RPF invasion began with fifty men crossing the border, and although hundreds soon followed, the field of combat was clearly demarcated: a patch of national park in the northeast. If it was the RPF you wanted to fight, all you had to do was go up to the front. But on the night of October 4—three days after the invasion—there was a lot of shooting in and around Kigali. In the morning, the government announced that it had successfully put down a rebel attempt on the capital. This was a lie. There had been no battle. The gunfire was a charade, and its object was simple: to exaggerate Rwanda’s danger and to create the impression that rebel accomplices had infiltrated the country to its core.

The RPF invasion offered the Habyarimana oligarchy its best weapon yet against pluralism: the unifying specter of a common enemy. Following the logic of the state ideology—that identity equals politics and politics equals identity—all Tutsis were considered to be RPF “accomplices,” and Hutus who failed to subscribe to this view were counted as Tutsi-loving traitors. Habyarimana’s crowd didn’t want a border war, but they welcomed nationwide turmoil as a pretext for rounding up “internal enemies.” Lists had already been prepared: educated Tutsis, prosperous Tutsis, and Tutsis who traveled abroad were among the first to be arrested, and prominent Hutus who were, for one reason or another, considered to be out of step with the regime were picked up as well.

Odette’s husband, Jean-Baptiste, received a call from a presidential deputy, who said, “We know you’re a Hutu, but you’re very close to these Tutsis because of your wife. If you love your family, tell these Tutsis to write a letter to the President, confessing their acts of treason with the RPF.” The deputy dictated a sample letter. Jean-Baptiste replied that his friends had nothing to do with the RPF, which was true. Before the RPF struck, almost nobody outside of its ranks had known of its existence. But Habyarimana had repeatedly expressed his fear that the Rwandans in the Ugandan army were plotting against him, and the RPF invasion had, in fact, involved a mass desertion from the Ugandan ranks. As far as Habyarimana and his entourage were concerned, that was proof that anybody they suspected was, by virtue of their suspicion, an enemy agent.

Jean-Baptiste told his interrogator that he had no contacts with exiles. Odette didn’t know why he was left alone after that; nearly ten thousand people were arrested in October and November of 1990. But all sorts of mistakes were made. For instance, when men were sent to the hospital to arrest Odette they got the wrong person. “I had been given my job back,” she said, “and I had a colleague who had the same name. She was Hutu and she denied that she was me, but she was much taller than I am and they said, ‘There’s only one Tutsi doctor named Odette.’ So she was imprisoned and tortured, and in 1994 she was again mistaken for a Tutsi, and killed.”

Throughout the first weeks of the war, the government called on the population to keep calm. But the fake attack on Kigali, and the mass arrests, sent another message. On October 11, just ten days after the RPF invasion, local officials in the village of Kibilira, in Gisenyi, instructed Hutus that their communal work duty for the month would consist of fighting their Tutsi neighbors, with whom they had lived in peace for at least fifteen years. The Hutus went to work with singing and drumming, and the slaughter lasted three days; some three hundred fifty Tutsis were killed, and three thousand fled their homes. For those whose memories do not extend as far back as Odette’s, the massacre at Kibilira is remembered as the beginning of the genocide.

7

BACK IN 1987, a newspaper called Kanguka began appearing in Rwanda. Kanguka means “Wake Up,” and the paper, edited by a Hutu from the south and backed by a prominent Tutsi businessman, was critical of the Habyarimana establishment. Its originality lay in presenting an analysis of Rwandan life based on economic rather than ethnic conflict. Kanguka’s courageous staff faced constant harassment, but the paper was a hit with the small public who could read it. So in early 1990, Madame Agathe Habyarimana secretly convened several leaders of the akazu with the idea of launching a rival publication. They didn’t know the first thing about newspapers, but they were experts on human weakness—especially vanity and venality—and as their editor they hired a small-time hustler and big-time self-promoter named Hassan Ngeze, a former bus-fare collector who had established himself as an entrepreneur, selling newspapers and drinks outside a gas station in Gisenyi, and from that vantage point had turned himself into a humorous man-on-the-street correspondent for Kanguka.

The paper Ngeze produced, Kangura—“Wake It Up”—billed itself as “the voice that seeks to awake and guide the majority people.” It began as little more than a lampoon of Kanguka, with an identical format that tricked readers into buying it. This ruse was helped along by the fact that just as Kangura appeared, the government seized several numbers of Kanguka. But the paper’s irreverent tone was a bit too much like its opposite’s for the tastes of the akazu, and it annoyed Ngeze’s sponsors that he devoted large portions of the first issues to photo-essays extolling his own virtues. In July of 1990, when Habyarimana’s security force arrested the editor of Kanguka on charges of high treason, they made a show of balance by simultaneously jailing Hassan Ngeze for disturbing the public order. The ploy worked on several levels. Western human rights groups like Amnesty International issued joint appeals for the release of the two editors, bestowing on Ngeze an aura of antiestablishment martyrdom, when the truth was that he was a propagandist of the regime who had disappointed his patrons. At the same time, prison taught Ngeze that his welfare depended on his being a more diligent flunky, and he was an ambitious man who took the lesson to heart.

In October of 1990, as Rwanda’s jails were being packed with alleged RPF accomplices, Ngeze was released to relaunch Kangura. (The editor of Kanguka remained conveniently locked away.) With the war as his backdrop, Ngeze struck a clever balance between his persona as a prison-accredited gadfly of the regime and his secret status as front man for the akazu. Even as he harangued Hutus to unite behind the President in the struggle against the Tutsi menace, he chided the President for failing to lead that struggle with sufficient vigilance. While government officials still felt publicly constrained by international pressure from speaking openly of ethnicity, Ngeze published what he claimed were RPF documents which purportedly “proved” that the rebel movement was part of an ancient Tutsi-supremacist conspiracy to subjugate Hutus in feudal bondage. He ran lists of prominent Tutsis and Hutu accomplices who had “infiltrated” public institutions, accused the government of betraying the revolution, and called for a rigorous campaign of national “self-defense” to protect the “gains” of 1959 and 1973. And he did all of this with his printing costs defrayed by government credit, giving away most of each print run to Rwanda’s mayors to distribute free.

A host of new periodicals had appeared in Rwanda in 1990. All but Kangura served as voices of relative moderation, and all but Kangura are now largely forgotten. More than anybody else, Hassan Ngeze, the Hutu supremacist with the populist touch, plucked from obscurity by the President’s wife to play the court jester, was writing the script for the coming Hutu crusade. It would be foolish to dispute his brilliance as a salesman of fear. When another paper ran a cartoon depicting Ngeze on a couch, being psychoanalyzed by “the democratic press”—

—Ngeze picked it up and ran it in Kangura. He was one of those creatures of destruction who turn everything hurled at them into their own weapon. He was funny and bold, and in one of the most repressed societies on earth, he presented the liberating example of a man who seemed to know no taboos. As a race theorist, Ngeze made John Hanning Speke look like what he was: an amateur. He was the original high-profile archetype of the Rwandan Hutu génocidaire, and his imitators and disciples were soon legion.

Although he was a practicing member of Rwanda’s small Muslim community—the only religious community, according to one Christian leader, that “apparently behaved quite well, and as a group was not active in the genocide, even seeking to save Tutsi Muslims”—Ngeze’s true religion was “Hutuness.” His most famous article, published in December of 1990, was the credo of this newly crystallized faith: “The Hutu Ten Commandments.” In a few swift strokes, Ngeze revived, revised, and reconciled the Hamitic myth and the rhetoric of the Hutu revolution to articulate a doctrine of militant Hutu purity. The first three commandments addressed the stubborn perception, constantly reinforced by the tastes of visiting white men and Hutus with status, that the beauty of Tutsi women surpasses that of Hutu women. According to Ngeze’s protocols, all Tutsi women were Tutsi agents; Hutu men who married, befriended, or employed a Tutsi woman “as a secretary or concubine” were to be considered traitors, and Hutu women, for their part, were commanded to guard against the Tutsi-loving impulses of Hutu men. From sex, Ngeze moved on to matters of business, declaring every Tutsi dishonest—“his only aim is the supremacy of his ethnic group”—and any Hutu who had financial dealings with Tutsis an enemy of his people. The same held for political life; Hutus should control “all strategic positions, political, administrative, economic, military, and security.” Hutus were further commanded to have “unity and solidarity” against “their common Tutsi enemy,” to study and spread “the Hutu ideology” of the revolution of 1959, and to regard as a traitor any Hutu who “persecutes his brother Hutu” for studying or spreading this ideology.

“The Hutu Ten Commandments” were widely circulated and immensely popular. President Habyarimana championed their publication as proof of Rwanda’s “freedom of the press.” Community leaders across Rwanda regarded them as tantamount to law, and read them aloud at public meetings. The message was hardly unfamiliar, but with its whiff of holy war and its unforgiving warnings to lapsed Hutus, even Rwanda’s most unsophisticated peasantry could not fail to grasp that it had hit an altogether new pitch of alarm. The eighth and most often quoted commandment said: “Hutus most stop having mercy on the Tutsis.”

IN DECEMBER OF 1990, the same month that Hassan Ngeze published “The Hutu Ten Commandments,” Kangura also hailed President Mitterrand of France with a full-page portrait, captioned “A friend in need is a friend indeed.” The salutation was apt. Fighting alongside Habyarimana’s Forces Armées Rwandaises, hundreds of superbly equipped French paratroopers had kept the RPF from advancing beyond its first foothold in the northeast. Initially, Belgium and Zaire also sent troops to back up the FAR, but the Zaireans were so given to drinking, looting, and raping that Rwanda soon begged them to go home, and the Belgians withdrew of their own accord. The French remained, and their impact was such that after the first month of fighting Habyarimana pronounced the RPF defeated. In fact, the battered rebel forces merely retreated westward from the open grasslands of northeastern Rwanda to establish a new base on the jagged, rain-forested slopes of the Virunga volcanoes. There—cold, wet, and poorly supplied—the RPF suffered greater losses to pneumonia than to fighting, as they trained a steady trickle of new recruits into a fierce, and fiercely disciplined, guerrilla army that might have swiftly forced Habyarimana to the negotiating table, or brought him to outright defeat, had it not been for France.

A military agreement signed in 1975 between France and Rwanda expressly forbade the involvement of French troops in Rwandan combat, combat training, or police operations. But President Mitterrand liked Habyarimana, and Mitterrand’s son Jean-Christophe, an arms dealer and sometime commissar of African affairs in the French Foreign Ministry, liked him, too. (As military expenditures drained Rwanda’s treasury and the war dragged on, an illegal drug trade developed in Rwanda; army officers set up marijuana plantations, and Jean-Christophe Mitterrand is widely rumored to have profited from the traffic.) France funneled huge shipments of armaments to Rwanda—right through the killings in 1994—and throughout the early 1990s, French officers and troops served as Rwandan auxiliaries, directing everything from air traffic control and the interrogation of RPF prisoners to frontline combat.

In January of 1991, when the RPF took the key northwestern city of Ruhengeri, Habyarimana’s home base, government troops backed by French paratroopers drove them out within twenty-four hours. A few months later, when the United States ambassador to Rwanda suggested that the Habyarimana government should abolish ethnic identity cards, the French ambassador quashed the initiative. Paris regarded Francophone Africa as “chez nous,” a virtual extension of the motherland, and the fact that the RPF had emerged out of Anglophone Uganda inspired the ancient French tribal phobia of an Anglo-Saxon menace. Swaddled in this imperial security blanket, Habyarimana and his ruling clique were free to ignore the RPF for long stretches and to concentrate on their campaign against the unarmed “domestic enemy.”

A few days after the RPF’s overnight occupation of Ruhengeri, in January of 1991, Habyarimana’s FAR faked an attack on one of its own military camps in the northwest. The RPF was blamed and, in retaliation, a local mayor organized massacres of the Bagogwe, a quasi-nomadic Tutsi subgroup that subsisted in extreme poverty; scores were killed, and the mayor had them buried deep in his own yard. More massacres followed; by the end of March hundreds of Tutsis in the northwest had been slaughtered.

“We were really terrorized in that period,” Odette recalled. “We thought we were going to be massacred.” In 1989, when she was fired from the hospital, Odette had been furious at the speed with which people she had trusted as friends turned away from her. A year later, she looked back on that time as the good old days. Like many Rwandan Tutsis, Odette first reacted to the war with indignation toward the refugee rebels for placing those who had stayed in the country in jeopardy. “We always thought those on the outside were well settled and better off,” she told me. “We had come to see our situation here as normal. I used to tell my exiled cousins, ‘Why come back? Stay there, you’re much better off,’ and they said, ‘Odette, even you have adopted the discourse of Habyarimana.’ The RPF had to make us aware that they suffered, living in exile, and we started to realize that we hadn’t thought of these exiles for all this time. Ninety-nine percent of the Tutsis had no idea that the RPF would attack. But we began to discuss it, and realized these were our brothers coming and that the Hutus we’d lived with didn’t regard us as equals. They rejected us.”

When Odette and her husband, Jean-Baptiste, visited the wives of imprisoned Tutsis, Jean-Baptiste got a call from the Secretary-General of Intelligence, whom he considered a good friend. The intelligence chief’s friendly advice was: “If you want to die, keep going to those people.”

For those in jail, like Bonaventure Nyibizi, a staffer at the Kigali mission of the United States Agency for International Development, the expectation of death was even greater. “They were killing prisoners every night, and on October 26, I was going to be killed,” he told me. “But I had cigarettes. The guy came and said, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ and I gave him a cigarette, so he said, ‘Well, we’re killing people for nothing and I’m not going to kill you tonight.’ People were dying every day from torture. They were taken out, and when they came back, they were beaten, bayoneted, and they were dying. I slept with dead people several nights. I think the initial plan was to kill everybody in prison, but the Red Cross started registering people, so it became difficult. The regime wanted to keep a good international image.”

One of Bonaventure’s best friends in prison was a businessman named Froduald Karamira. Bonaventure and Karamira both came from Gitarama, in the south, and both were Tutsi by birth. But early in life, Karamira had acquired Hutu identity papers, and he had benefited accordingly; in 1973, when Bonaventure was expelled from school because he was Tutsi, Karamira, who attended the same seminary, was left unmolested. “But the Habyarimana government didn’t like the Hutus from Gitarama, and Karamira was rich, so they arrested him,” Bonaventure explained. “He was a very nice person in prison, always trying to help people out, buying cigarettes, a place to sleep, blankets. When he got out of prison before me, my wife was pregnant with our first child, and he went straightaway to visit her. After March of 1991, when the government released all of us from prison, I saw him several times. He used to come to my house, or my office. And then one night”—Bonaventure snapped his fingers—“he changed completely. We couldn’t talk anymore because I am Tutsi. This happened with so many people. They changed so quickly that you would say, ‘Is this the same person?’”

In the summer of 1991, the much anticipated multiparty order had begun in Rwanda. Such a leap from totalitarianism to a political free market will be tumultuous even when it is undertaken by sincerely well-intentioned leaders, and in Rwanda the political opening was contrived in conspicuously bad faith. Most of the dozen parties that suddenly began scrapping for attention and influence were simply puppets of Habyarimana’s MRND, created by the President and the akazu to sow confusion and make a mockery of the pluralist enterprise. Only one of the genuine opposition parties had a significant Tutsi membership; the rest were divided between committed reformers and Hutu extremists who swiftly transformed the “democratic debate” into a wedge that further polarized the divided citizenry by presenting Rwandan politics as a simple question of Hutu self-defense. It was us against them——all of us against all of them: anybody who dared to suggest an alternative view was one of them and could prepare for the consequences. And it was Froduald Karamira, the convert to Hutuness, who gave this tidy proposition, and the cacophony of ideological discourse that crackled behind it, the enthusiastic name of Hutu Power.

“I don’t know exactly what happened,” Bonaventure told me. “People say that Habyarimana paid him tens of millions to change, and he did become the head of ElectroGaz”—the national utility company. “All I know is that he became one of the most important extremists, and that is not the way he was before. So much was changing so suddenly, and still it was hard to see—hard to believe—how much it was changing.”

ONE DAY IN January of 1992, soldiers visited Bonaventure’s home in Kigali, while he and his wife were out. “They broke the doors,” Bonaventure said. “They took everything, they tied up the house staff, and I had a son who was nine months old—they left grenades with him. He was there playing with a grenade in the living room, for three hours. Then somebody passed by and noticed, and fortunately my son was not killed.”

So it went—an attack here, a massacre there—as the increasingly well-organized Hutu extremists stockpiled weapons, and Hutu youth militias were recruited and trained for “civil defense.” First among these militias was the interahamwe—“those who attack together”—which had its genesis in soccer fan clubs sponsored by leaders of the MRND and the akazu. The economic collapse of the late 1980s had left tens of thousands of young men without any prospect of a job, wasting in idleness and its attendant resentments, and ripe for recruitment. The interahamwe, and the various copycat groups that were eventually subsumed into it, promoted genocide as a carnival romp. Hutu Power youth leaders, jetting around on motorbikes and sporting pop hairstyles, dark glasses, and flamboyantly colored pajama suits and robes, preached ethnic solidarity and civil defense to increasingly packed rallies, where alcohol usually flowed freely, giant banners splashed with hagiographic portraits of Habyarimana flapped in the breeze, and paramilitary drills were conducted like the latest hot dance moves. The President and his wife often turned out to be cheered at these spectacles, while in private the members of the interahamwe were organized into small neighborhood bands, drew up lists of Tutsis, and went on retreats to practice burning houses, tossing grenades, and hacking dummies up with machetes.

Play first turned to work for the interahamwe in early March of 1992, when the state-owned Radio Rwanda announced the “discovery” of a Tutsi plan to massacre Hutus. This was pure misinformation, but in preemptive “self-defense” militia members and villagers in the Bugesera region, south of Kigali, slaughtered three hundred Tutsis in three days. Similar killings occurred at the same time in Gisenyi, and in August, shortly after Habyarimana—under intense pressure from international donors—signed a cease-fires with the RPF, Tutsis were massacred in Kibuye. That October, the cease-fire was expanded to embrace plans for a new, transitional government that would include the RPF; one week later, Habyarimana delivered a speech dismissing the truce as “nothing but a scrap of paper.”

Still, the foreign-aid money poured into Habyarimana’s coffers, and weapons kept arriving—from France, from Egypt, from apartheid South Africa. Occasionally, when donors expressed concern about the killings of Tutsis, there were arrests, but releases followed swiftly; nobody was brought to trial, much less prosecuted for the massacres. To soothe foreign nerves, the government portrayed the killings as “spontaneous” and “popular” acts of “anger” or “self-protection.” The villagers knew better: massacres were invariably preceded by political “consciousnessraising” meetings at which local leaders, usually with a higher officer of the provincial or national government at their side, described Tutsis as devils—horns, hoofs, tails, and all—and gave the order to kill them, according to the old revolutionary lingo, as a “work” assignment. The local authorities consistently profited from massacres, seizing slain Tutsis’ land and possessions, and sometimes enjoying promotions if they showed special enthusiasm, and the civilian killers, too, were usually rewarded with petty spoils.

In retrospect, the massacres of the early 1990s can be seen as dress rehearsals for what proponents of Hutuness themselves called the “final solution” in 1994. Yet there was nothing inevitable about the horror. With the advent of multipartyism, the President had been compelled by popular pressure to make substantial concessions to reform-minded oppositionists, and it required a dogged uphill effort for Habyarimana’s extremist entourage to prevent Rwanda from slipping toward moderation. Violence was the key to that effort. The interahamwe was bankrolled and supervised by a consortium of akazu leaders, who also ran their own death squads, with names like the Zero Network and the Bullets group. Madame Habyarimana’s three brothers, along with a bevy of colonels and leaders of the northwestern business mafia, were founding members of these outfits, which first rolled into action alongside the interahamwe during the Bugesera massacre in March of 1992. But the most crucial innovation at Bugesera was the use of the national radio to prepare the ground for slaughter, and the ratcheting up of the suggestive message of us against them to the categorically compelling kill or be killed.

Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building. A vigorous totalitarian order requires that the people be invested in the leaders’ scheme, and while genocide may be the most perverse and ambitious means to this end, it is also the most comprehensive. In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history. And strange as it may sound, the ideology—or what Rwandans call “the logic”—of genocide was promoted as a way not to create suffering but to alleviate it. The specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual—always an annoyance to totality—ceases to exist.

The mass of participants in the practice massacres of the early 1990s may have taken little pleasure in obediently murdering their neighbors. Still, few refused, and assertive resistance was extremely rare. Killing Tutsis was a political tradition in postcolonia Rwanda; it brought people together.

IT HAS BECOME a commonplace in the past fifty years to say that the industrialized killing of the Holocaust calls into question the notion of human progress, since art and science can lead straight through the famous gate—stamped with the words “Work Makes You Free”—to Auschwitz. Without all that technology, the argument goes, the Germans couldn’t have killed all those Jews. Yet it was the Germans, not the machinery, who did the killing. Rwanda’s Hutu Power leaders understood this perfectly. If you could swing the people who would swing the machetes, technological underdevelopment was no obstacle to genocide. The people were the weapon, and that meant everybody: the entire Hutu population had to kill the entire Tutsi population. In addition to ensuring obvious numerical advantages, this arrangement eliminated any questions of accountability which might arise. If everybody is implicated, then implication becomes meaningless. Implication in what? A Hutu who thought there was anything to be implicated in would have to be an accomplice of the enemy.

“We the people are obliged to take responsibility ourselves and wipe out this scum,” explained Leon Mugesera, in November of 1992, during the same speech in which he urged Hutus to return the Tutsis to Ethiopia by way of the Nyabarongo River. Mugesera was a doctor, a vice president of the MRND, and a close friend and adviser of Habyarimana. His voice was the voice of power, and most Rwandans can still quote from his famous speech quite accurately; members of the interahamwe often recited favorite phrases as they went forth to kill. The law, Mugesera claimed, mandated death to “accomplices” of the “cockroaches,” and he asked, “What are we waiting for to execute the sentence?” Members of opposition parties, he said, “have no right to live among us,” and as a leader of “the Party” he invoked his duty to spread the alarm and to instruct the people to “defend themselves.” As for the “cockroaches” themselves, he wondered, “What are we waiting for to decimate these families?” He called on those who had prospered under Habyarimana to “finance operations to eliminate these people.” He spoke of 1959, saying it had been a terrible mistake to allow Tutsis to survive. “Destroy them,” he said. “No matter what you do, do not let them get away,” and he said, “Remember that the person whose life you save will certainly not save yours.” He finished with the words “Drive them out. Long live President Habyarimana.”

Mugesera had spoken in the name of the law, but it happened that the Minister of Justice at the time was a man named Stanislas Mbonampeka, who saw things differently. Mbonampeka was a man of parts: he was a well-to-do Hutu from the northwest, the owner of a half share in a toilet paper factory, and he was also an oppositionist, a lawyer and human rights advocate in the top ranks of the Liberal Party, the only opposition party with a sizable Tutsi membership. Mbonampeka studied Mugesera’s speech and issued an arrest warrant against him for inciting hatred. Of course, Mugesera didn’t go to jail—he went to the army for protection, then emigrated to Canada—and Mbonampeka was soon dismissed as Justice Minister. Mbonampeka saw which way the wind was blowing. By early 1993, all of Rwanda’s newborn opposition parties had split into two factions—Power and anti-Power—and Mbonampeka went with Power. Before long, he could be heard on Radio Rwanda, warning the RPF: “Stop fighting this war if you do not want your supporters living inside Rwanda to be exterminated.”

In the summer of 1995, I found Mbonampeka living in a drab little room at the Protestant Guest House in Goma, Zaire, about a mile from the Rwandan border. “In a war,” he told me, “you can’t be neutral. If you’re not for your country, are you not for its attackers?” Mbonampeka was a large man with a calm and steady demeanor. He wore gold wire-rimmed spectacles, neatly pressed trousers, and a pink-and-white-striped shirt, and he had the absurd title of Minister of Justice in the Rwandan government in exile—a self-appointed body culled largely from officers of the regime that had presided over the genocide. Mbonampeka was not in that government in 1994, but he had operated informally as its agent, pleading the Hutu Power cause both at home and in Europe, and he regarded this as a normal career development.

“I said Mugesera must be arrested because he sets people against each other, which is illegal, and I also said that if the RPF continued to fight we must have civil defense,” Mbonampeka told me. “These positions are consistent. In both cases I was for the defense of my country.” And he added, “Personally, I don’t believe in the genocide. This was not a conventional war. The enemies were everywhere. The Tutsis were not killed as Tutsis, only as sympathizers of the RPF.”

I wondered if it had been difficult to distinguish the Tutsis with RPF sympathies from the rest. Mbonampeka said it wasn’t. “There was no difference between the ethnic and the political,” he told me. “Ninety-nine percent of Tutsis were pro-RPF.”

Even senile grandmothers and infants? Even the fetuses ripped from the wombs of Tutsis, after radio announcers had reminded listeners to take special care to disembowel pregnant victims?

“Think about it,” Mbonampeka said. “Let’s say the Germans attack France, so France defends itself against Germany. They understand that all Germans are the enemy. The Germans kill women and children, so you do, too.”

By regarding the genocide, even as he denied its existence, as an extension of the war between the RPF and the Habyarimana regime, Mbonampeka seemed to be arguing that the systematic state-sponsored extermination of an entire people is a provokable crime—the fault of the victims as well as the perpetrators. But although the genocide coincided with the war, its organization and implementation were quite distinct from the war effort. In fact, the mobilization for the final extermination campaign swung into full gear only when Hutu Power was confronted by the threat of peace.

ON AUGUST 4, 1993, at a conference center in Arusha, Tanzania, President Habyarimana signed a peace agreement with the RPF, officially bringing the war to an end. The so-called Arusha Accords ensured a right of return for Rwanda’s refugee diaspora, promised the integration of the two warring armies into a single national defense force, and established a blueprint for a Broad-Based Transitional Government, composed of representatives of all the national political parties, including the RPF. Habyarimana would remain President, pending elections, but his powers would be basically ceremonial. And, crucially, throughout the peace-implementation period a United Nations peacekeeping force would be deployed in Rwanda.

The RPF had never really expected to win its war on the battlefield; its objective had been to force a political settlement, and at Arusha it appeared to have done that. “You use war when there is no other means, and Arusha opened a means to come and struggle politically,” Tito Ruteremara, one of the RPF leaders who negotiated the Accords, told me. “With Arusha we could go inside Rwanda, and if we had good ideas and a very nice organization, we’d make it. If we failed, it meant that our ideas were no good. The struggle wasn’t ethnic, it was political, and Habyarimana feared us because we were strong. He had never wanted peace, because he saw that we could be politically successful.”

For Habyarimana, it was true that the Arusha Accords amounted to a political suicide note. Hutu Power leaders cried treason, and charged that the President himself had become an “accomplice.” Four days after the signing at Arusha, Radio Television Libres des Milles Collines, a new radio station funded by members and friends of the akazu, and devoted to genocidal propaganda, began broadcasting from Kigali. RTLM was a Kangura of the airwaves; its reach was virtually ubiquitous in radio-saturated Rwanda, and it became wildly popular with its mixture of rousing oratory and songs by such Hutu Power pop stars as Simon Bikindi, whose most famous number was probably “I Hate These Hutus”—a song of “good neighborliness”:

And so on; it is a very long song.

“Anyone who thinks that the war is over as a result of the Arusha Accords is deceiving himself,” Hassan Ngeze warned in Kangura, in January of 1994. Ngeze had railed against Arusha as a sellout from the start, and with the arrival of the blue-helmeted soldiers of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda at the end of 1993, he had a new target. UNAMIR, Ngeze proclaimed, was nothing but a tool “to help the RPF take power by force.” But, he reminded his readers, the record showed that such peacekeepers were generally cowardly, inclined to “watching as spectators” when violence broke out. He predicted that there would be plenty to watch, and he explicitly warned UNAMIR to stay out of the way. “If the RPF has decided to kill us, then let’s kill each other,” he urged. “Let whatever is smoldering erupt…. At such a time, a lot of blood will be spilled.”

8

IN 1991, ODETTE had left her job at the hospital to serve as the doctor for the United States Peace Corps mission in Kigali. Two years later, when Washington suspended the program in Rwanda, Odette put her kids in school in Nairobi, and took a series of short-term Peace Corps postings—in Gabon, Kenya, and Burundi. She liked being in Burundi, because it was easy to get home to see her family, and because Burundi appeared, at last, to have become a country where Hutus and Tutsis were committed to sharing power peacefully. In August of 1993, after nearly thirty years of brutal Tutsi dictatorship, a Hutu was sworn in as Burundi’s first popularly elected president. The transfer of power was smoothly accomplished, and Burundi was celebrated at home and abroad as a beacon of hope for Africa. Then, in November, four months after the new President took office, some Tutsi military men assassinated him. The President’s death triggered a Hutu uprising and a violent crackdown by the Tutsi army that eventually left at least fifty thousand people dead. The violence in Burundi provided great grist for the mills of Rwanda’s Hutu Power purveyors of fear, who trumpeted the news as proof of Tutsi treachery, but it left Odette without a job.

She didn’t want to go back to Kigali. With Habyarimana resisting the implementation of the Arusha Accords, attacks on Tutsis and Hutu oppositionists were becoming ever more frequent, and Odette had only to tune her radio to RTLM to feel that her days there would be numbered. But the Peace Corps wanted to resume operations in Rwanda, and Odette was offered twenty-five dollars an hour—in a country where the average income was less than twenty-five dollars a month—to help prepare the program. She was tired of moving her kids around and being apart from Jean-Baptiste. What’s more, following the Arusha Accords, a contingent of six hundred RPF soldiers had arrived in Kigali. And there was UNAMIR.

“Really,” Odette said, “it was UNAMIR that tricked us into staying. We saw all these blue helmets, and we talked with Dallaire”—Major General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian in command of the UN force. “We thought even if Hutus start to attack us the three thousand men of UNAMIR. should be enough. Dallaire gave us his phone number and his radio number, and said, ‘If anything happens you call me immediately.’ So we trusted them.”

One night in January of 1994, just after she returned to Kigali from Burundi, Odette was driving two visiting cousins back to their hotel when her car was suddenly surrounded by a swarm of shouting interahamwe. She hit the accelerator, and the interahamwe threw two grenades. The explosion blew out all the windows, showering Odette and her passengers with glass, and it took them a few minutes to realize that they were unhurt. “I called Dallaire,” she said, “but nobody came from UNAMIR. I realized then that these people would never protect us.”

DISTRUST OF UNAMIR was the one thing which Hutu Power and those it wanted dead shared as deeply as their distrust of one another. And with good reason. In the months following the , signing of the Arusha Accords, Rwandans had watched UN peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Somalia being humiliated by impotence and defeat. On October 3, 1993, five weeks before UNAMIR arrived in Kigali, eighteen American Rangers serving alongside the UN force in Somalia were killed, and television images of their bodies being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu were beamed around the world. UNAMIR had a much more limited mandate than the Somalian mission: it was prohibited from using force except in self-defense, and even for that it was poorly equipped.

On January 11, 1994, when the issue of Kangura warning UNAMIR to “consider its danger” was fresh off the press, Major General Dallaire sent an urgent fax to the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at UN headquarters in New York. The fax, headed “Request for Protection for Informant,” explained that Dallaire had developed a remarkable intelligence source from within the highest echelons of the interahamwe and that he needed help in guaranteeing the man’s security. The informant, Dallaire wrote, was a former member of the President’s security staff, who was getting paid nearly a thousand dollars a month by the army chief of staff and the president of the MRND to serve as a “top level” interahamwe trainer. A few days earlier, Dallaire’s informant had been in charge of coordinating forty-eight plainclothes commandos, an MRND minister, and several local government officials in a plot to kill opposition leaders and Belgian soldiers during a ceremony at the parliament. “They hoped to provoke the RPF… and provoke a civil war,” the fax said. “Deputies were to be assassinated upon entry or exit from parliament. Belgian troops”—the mainstay of the UNAMIR force—“were to be provoked and if Belgian soldiers resorted to force a number of them were to be killed and thus guarantee Belgian withdrawal from Rwanda.” That plan had been aborted—for the moment—but Dallaire’s informant told him that more than forty interahamwe cells of forty men each were “scattered” around Kigali, after being trained by the Rwandan army in “discipline, weapons, explosives, close combat, and tactics.” The fax continued:

This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that General Dallaire would learn that Kigali—designated a “weapons-free zone” in the Arusha Accords—was a Hutu Power arms bazaar. It was hardly a secret: grenades and Kalashnikov assault rifles were openly displayed and affordably priced in the central city market; planes carrying French, or French-sponsored, arms shipments kept arriving; the government was importing machetes from China in numbers that far exceeded the demand for agricultural use; and many of these weapons were being handed around free to people with no known military function—idle young men in zany interahamwe getups, housewives, office workers—at a time when Rwanda was officially at peace for the first time in three years. But Dallaire’s fax offered a far more precise blueprint of what was to come than any other document that has emerged from the time known as “Before.” Everything his informant told him came true three months later, and it was clearly Dallaire’s judgment at the time that his source should be taken very seriously. He announced his intention to raid an arms cache within thirty-six hours, and wrote, “It is recommended the informant be granted protection and evacuated out of Rwanda.”

Dallaire labeled his fax “most immediate,” and signed off in French: “Peux ce que veux. Allons’y” (“Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Let’s go”). The response from New York was: Let’s not. The chief of UN peacekeeping at the time was Kofi Annan, the Ghanaian who would become Secretary-General. Annan’s deputy, Iqbal Riza, replied to Dallaire the same day, rejecting the “operation contemplated” in his fax—and the extension of protection to the informant—as “beyond the mandate entrusted to UNAMIR.” Instead, Dallaire was instructed to share his information with President Habyarimana, and tell him that the activities of the interahamwe “represent a clear threat to the peace process” and a “clear violation” of the “Kigali weapons-secure area.” Never mind that Dallaire’s informant had explicitly described the plans to exterminate Tutsis and assassinate Belgians as emanating from Habyarimana’s court: the mandate said that peace-treaty violations should be reported to the President, and New York advised Dallaire, “You should assume that he”—Habyarimana—“is not aware of these activities, but insist that he must immediately look into the situation.”

Dallaire was also told to share his information with the ambassadors to Rwanda from Belgium, France, and the United States, but no effort was made at peacekeeping headquarters to alert the United Nations Secretariat or the Security Council of the startling news that an “extermination” was reportedly being planned in Rwanda. Still, in May of 1994, when the extermination of Tutsis was at its peak in Rwanda, Kofi Annan told a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., that UN peacekeepers “have the right to defend themselves, and we define self-defense in a manner that includes preemptive military action to remove those armed elements who are preventing you from doing your work. And yet our commanders in the field, whether in Somalia or Bosnia, have been very reticent about using force.” In the light of Dallaire’s fax, Annan’s failure to mention Rwanda was striking.

“I was responsible,” Iqbal Riza, who wrote the response to Dallaire, later told me, adding, “This is not to say that Mr. Annan was oblivious of what was going on.” The correspondence, he said, was on Annan’s desk within forty-eight hours, and copies would also have been passed on to the office of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was then the Secretary-General. But, according to one of Boutros-Ghali’s closest aides, the Secretariat was unaware of it at the time. “It’s astonishing—an amazing document,” the aide said, when I read him Dallaire’s fax over the phone. “This is all at a level of drama that I don’t remember experiencing except once or twice in the last five years at the UN. It’s just incredible that a fax like that could come in and not be noticed.” In fact, Boutros-Ghali did eventually become aware of the fax, but he made light of it, after the genocide, remarking, “Such situations and alarming reports from the field, though considered with the utmost seriousness by United Nations officials, are not uncommon within the context of peacekeeping operations.”

Riza took a similar view. In hindsight, he told me, “you can see all this very clearly—when you are sitting with your papers before you, with your music on, or whatever, and you can say, ‘Ah, look, there’s this.’ When it’s happening in the heat of the moment, it’s something else.” He described Dallaire’s fax as just one piece of an ongoing daily communication with UNAMIR. “We get hyperbole in many reports,” he said, and then he invoked hindsight himself, saying, “If we had gone to the Security Council three months after Somalia, I can assure you no government would have said, ‘Yes, here are our boys for an offensive action in Rwanda.’”

So General Dallaire, following his orders from New York, advised Habyarimana that he had a leak in his security apparatus, and there—but for the genocide—the matter might have ended. Not surprisingly, Dallaire’s informant stopped informing, and years later, when the Belgian Senate established a commission to sort out the circumstances under which some of its soldiers had wound up slaughtered while on duty for UNAMIR, Kofi Annan refused to testify or to allow General Dallaire to testify. The UN Charter, Annan explained in a letter to the Belgian government, granted UN officials “immunity from legal process in respect of their official acts,” and he did not see how waiving that immunity “was in the interest of the Organization.”

TOWARD THE END of March of 1994, Odette had a dream: “We were fleeing, people shooting left and right, airplanes strafing, everything burning.” She described these images to a friend of hers named Jean, and a few days later Jean called her and said, “I’ve been traumatized since you described that dream. I want you to go with my wife to Nairobi because I feel we’re all going to die this week.”

Odette welcomed the idea of leaving Kigali. She promised Jean she’d be ready to go on April 15, the day her contract with the Peace Corps ended. She remembers telling him, “I, too, am tired of this.”

Similar exchanges were taking place throughout Kigali. Just about every Rwandan I spoke with described the last weeks of March as a time of eerie premonition, but nobody could say exactly what had changed. There were the usual killings of Tutsis and Hutu opposition leaders and the usual frustration with Habyarimana’s failure to implement the peace agreement—the “political deadlock,” which the Belgian Foreign Minister, Willy Klaes, warned the UN Secretary-General in mid-March “could result in an irrepressible explosion of violence.” But Rwandans remember something more, something inchoate.

“We were sensing something bad, the whole country,” Paul Rusesabagina, director of the Hotel des Diplomates in Kigali, told me. “Everybody could see there was something wrong somewhere. But we couldn’t see exactly what it was.” Paul was a Hutu, an independent-minded critic of the Habyarimana regime who described himself as “always in the opposition.” In January of 1994, after he was attacked in his car, he had moved into the hotel for a while, and then he had gone to Europe on vacation with his wife and one-year-old son. When he told me that they had returned to Kigali on March 30, he laughed and his face took on a look of astonishment. “I had to come back for work,” he said. “But you could feel it was wrong.”

Bonaventure Nyibizi told me that he often wondered why he hadn’t left Rwanda in those days. “Probably the main reason was my mother,” he said. “She was getting old and I probably felt it would be difficult to move her without knowing where to go. And we were hoping that things would get better. Also, since I was born, since I was four or five years old, I have seen houses destroyed, I have seen people being killed, every few years, ‘sixtyfour, ’sixty-six, ’sixy-seven, ’seventy-three. So probably I told myself it’s not going to be serious. Yah—but obviously I knew it was going to be serious.”

On April 2, about a week after Odette’s dream of destruction, Bonaventure drove down to Gitarama to visit his mother. On his way home he stopped at a roadside bar, co-owned by Froduald Karamira, his prison friend turned Hutu Power leader. Bonaventure had a beer and spoke for a long time with Karamira’s barman about how Karamira had changed and where the country was going. The barman told Bonaventure that Karamira was saying everyone should follow Hutu Power and Habyarimana, and that later they would get rid of Habyarimana. “I asked him how,” Bonaventure recalled. “I said, ‘You’re giving a lot of power to Habyarimana, how are you hoping to get rid of him?’” Bonaventure laughed and said, “He didn’t want to tell me.”

Hassan Ngeze was telling anybody who would buy his newspaper. In the March issue of Kangura, he ran the banner headline “HABYARIMANA WILL DIE IN MARCH.” An accompanying cartoon depicted the President as a Tutsi-loving RPF accomplice, and the article explained that he would “not be killed by a Tutsi” but by a “Hutu bought by the cockroaches.” Kangura proposed a scenario strikingly similar to the schemes described by the informant in Dallaire’s fax—the President assassinated “during a mass celebration” or “during a meeting with his leaders.” The article opened with the words “Nothing happens that we did not predict,” and ended, “Nobody likes Habyarimana’s life better than he does. The important thing is to tell him how he will be killed.”

9

ON THE EVENING of April 6, 1994, Thomas Kamilindi was in high spirits. His wife, Jacqueline, had baked a cake for a festive dinner at their home in Kigali. It was Thomas’s thirty-third birthday, and that afternoon he had completed his last day of work as a reporter for Radio Rwanda. After ten years at the state-owned station, Thomas, who was a Hutu, had resigned in protest against the lack of political balance in news programming. He was taking a shower when Jacqueline began pounding on the bathroom door. “Hurry up!” she shouted. “The President has been attacked!” Thomas locked the doors of his house and sat by the radio, listening to RTLM. He disliked the Hutu Power station’s violent propaganda, but the way things were going in Rwanda that propaganda often served as a highly accurate political weather forecast. On April 3, RTLM had announced that during the next three days “there will be a little something here in Kigali, and also on April 7 and 8 you will hear the sound of bullets or grenades exploding.” Now the station was saying that President Habyarimana’s plane, returning from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had been shot down over Kigali and had crashed into the grounds of his own palace. The new Hutu President of Burundi and several of Habyarimana’s top advisers had also been on board. There were no survivors.

Thomas, who had well-placed friends, had heard that largescale massacres of Tutsis were being prepared nationwide by the President’s extremist entourage, and that lists of Hutu oppositionists had been drawn up for the first wave of killings. But he had never imagined that Habyarimana himself might be targeted. If Hutu Power had sacrificed him, who was safe?

The radio normally went off the air at 10 p.m., but that night it stayed on. When the bulletins ceased, music began to play, and to Thomas the music, which continued through his sleepless night, confirmed that the worst had been let loose in Rwanda. Early the next morning, RTLM began blaming Habyarimana’s assassination on the Rwandese Patriotic Front and members of UNAMIR. But if Thomas had believed that, he would have been at the microphone, not at the receiver.

Odette and Jean-Baptiste were also listening to RTLM. They’d been drinking whiskey with a visitor, when a friend called to tell them to tune in. It was 8:14 p.m., Odette recalled, and the radio announced that Habyarimana’s plane had been seen falling in flames over Kigali. Jean-Baptiste’s immediate reaction was “We’re leaving. Everyone get in the jeep, or we’ll all be massacred.” His idea was to head south, to Butare, the only province with a Tutsi governor and a stronghold of anti-Power sentiment. When Jean-Baptiste showed such adamance, their visitor said, “OK, me too. I’m getting out of here. Keep your whiskey.” Odette smiled when she told me this. She said, “This man liked his whiskey. He was handicapped, and he’d come over to show off his new television and video player, because my husband is very generous and he had given this guy money to buy it. Being a handicapped man, he used to say, ‘I’m going to die if I don’t have a TV to watch.’ Unfortunately he never got to watch his TV. He was killed that night.”

Odette wiped at her eyes, and said, “That’s a story I’ve always kept inside—about this handicapped guy—because he was so happy with his TV.” She smiled again. “So,” she said. “So. So. So.” It was the only time she wept in telling me her story. She covered her face with one hand, and the fingers of the other tapped a fast pulse against the table. Then she said, “I’m going to get us some sodas.” She came back five minutes later. “Better now,” she said. “I’m sorry. It was this handicapped guy—Dusabi was his name—that upset me. It’s difficult to call this up, but I think of it every day. Every day.”

Then she told me about the rest of that “first” night in April. Jean-Baptiste was impatient to get going. Odette said they had to take her sister, Vénantie, who was one of the few Tutsi deputies in the parliament. But Vénantie kept them waiting. “She was phoning around, phoning everyone,” Odette said. “Finally Jean-Baptiste told her, ‘We’re going to have to leave you.’ Vénantie said, ‘You can’t. How will you feel forever afterward if I’m killed?’ I said, ‘Why won’t you come?’ She said, ‘If Habyarimana’s dead, who’ll kill us? He was the one.’” Then RTLM announced that everybody had to stay in their homes, which was precisely what Jean-Baptiste had feared. He put on his pajamas, and said, “Whoever survives will regret that we stayed for the rest of his life.”

The next day, the family heard shooting in the streets and began to receive news of massacres. “Children called to say, ‘Mother and Father are dead.’ A cousin called with news like that,” Odette said. “We tried to find out how to get to Gitarama, where it was still calm. People always think I’m crazy when I recount this, but I called the governor. He said, ‘Why do you want to come?’” Odette told him her cousin had died in Gitarama and they had to attend the funeral. The governor said, “If they’re dead they won’t be suffering, and if you try to come you might die on the way.”

“ON APRIL 6,” Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager, told me, “I was here at the Diplomates, having a drink on the terrace, when Habyarimana was killed. But my wife and four children were at home—we used to live near the airport—and my wife heard the missile which hit the airplane. She rang and told me, ‘I’ve just heard something I never heard before. Try to get home immediately.’”

A military man who was staying at the hotel saw Paul leaving and advised him to avoid his usual route, because there was already a roadblock set up. Paul still didn’t know what had happened. Driving home, he found the streets deserted, and as soon as he entered his house, the phone rang. It was the Dutchman who managed the Hotel des Mille Collines, which was owned by Sabena, the same Belgian company that ran the Diplomates. “Come back to town immediately,” he told Paul. “Your President’s dead.” Paul rang people he knew at UNAMIR to ask for an escort. “They said, ‘No way. There are roadblocks all over Kigali, and people are being killed on the roads,’” Paul told me. “This was one hour after the President was killed—just one hour.”

Nobody, at that moment, was entirely sure who was in charge of the decapitated government, but the roadblocks, the confident tone of the RTLM announcers, and the reports of killing in the streets left little doubt that Hutu Power was conducting a coup d’état. And it was. Although Habyarimana’s assassins have never been positively identified, suspicion has focused on the extremists in his own entourage—notably the semiretired Colonel Théoneste Bagasora, an intimate of Madame Habyarimana, and a charter member of the akazu and its death squads, who had said in January of 1993 that he was preparing the apocalypse. But regardless of who killed Habyarimana, the fact remains that the organizers of the genocide were primed to exploit his death instantaneously. (While Rwanda’s Hutu Power elite spent the night cranking up the genocidal engines, in Burundi, whose President had also been killed, the army and the United Nations broadcast calls for calm, and this time Burundi did not explode.)

In the early evening of April 6, Colonel Bagasora had taken dinner as the guest of the Bangladeshi battalion of UNAMIR. An hour after the President’s death, he was presiding over a meeting of a self-anointed “crisis committee,” a mostly military gathering at which Hutu Power ratified its own coup and, because General Dallaire and the special representative of the UN Secretary-General were in attendance, paid lip service to continuing the Arusha process. The meeting broke up around midnight. By then the capital was already crawling with soldiers, interahamwe, and members of the elite Presidential Guard, equipped with lists of people to kill. The assassins’ first priority was to eliminate Hutu opposition leaders, including the Hutu Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, whose house was one of many that were surrounded at daybreak on April 7. A contingent of ten Belgian UNAMIR soldiers arrived on the scene, but the Prime Minister fled over her garden wall and was killed nearby. Before the Belgians could leave, a Rwandan officer drove up and ordered them to surrender their arms and to come with him. The Belgians, outnumbered, were taken to Camp Kigali, the military base in the center of town, where they were held for several hours, then tortured, murdered, and mutilated.

After that, the wholesale extermination of Tutsis got underway, and the UN troops offered little resistance to the killers. Foreign governments rushed to shut down their embassies and evacuate their nationals. Rwandans who pleaded for rescue were abandoned, except for a few special cases like Madame Agathe Habyarimana, who was spirited to Paris on a French military transport. The RPF, which had remained prepared for combat throughout the stalled peace-implementation period, resumed its war less than twenty-four hours after Habyarimana’s death, simultaneously moving its troops out of their Kigali barracks to secure an area of high ground around the parliament, and launching a major offensive from the “demilitarized zone” in the northeast. The government army fought back fiercely, allowing the people to get on with their murderous work. “You cockroaches must know you are made of flesh,” a broadcaster gloated over RTLM. “We won’t let you kill. We will kill you.”

With the encouragement of such messages and of leaders at every level of society, the slaughter of Tutsis and the assassination of Hutu oppositionists spread from region to region. Following the militias’ example, Hutus young and old rose to the task. Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their homes, and colleagues hacked colleagues to death in their workplaces. Doctors killed their patients, and schoolteachers killed their pupils. Within days, the Tutsi populations of many villages were all but eliminated, and in Kigali prisoners were released in work gangs to collect the corpses that lined the roadsides. Throughout Rwanda, mass rape and looting accompanied the slaughter. Drunken militia bands, fortified with assorted drugs from ransacked pharmacies, were bused from massacre to massacre. Radio announcers reminded listeners not to take pity on women and children. As an added incentive to the killers, Tutsis’ belongings were parceled out in advance—the radio, the couch, the goat, the opportunity to rape a young girl. A councilwoman in one Kigali neighborhood was reported to have offered fifty Rwandan francs apiece (about thirty cents at the time) for severed Tutsi heads, a practice known as “selling cabbages.”

On the morning of April 9, Paul Rusesabagina, who had been trapped in his house by the twenty-four-hour-a-day curfew, saw someone climbing over the wall into his garden. If these people have come for me, he thought, let me die alone before my children and my wife and all the people here are killed. He went out into his yard, and learned that Colonel Bagasora’s “crisis committee” had just appointed a new “interim government,” composed entirely of loyal Hutu Power puppets. This government wanted to make the Hotel des Diplomates its headquarters, but all the rooms at the hotel were locked and the keys were in a safe in Paul’s office. Twenty soldiers had been sent for him. Paul gathered his family, and the friends and neighbors who had taken refuge at his house, about thirty people in all, and they drove off with their escort. They found themselves in a stricken city—“horrible,” Paul said, “our neighbors were all dead”—and they hadn’t gone a mile when their escort suddenly pulled over and stopped.

“Mister,” one of the soldiers said, “do you know that all the managers of businesses have been killed? We’ve killed them all. But you’re lucky. We’re not killing you today, because they sent us to look for you and get you for the government.” Remembering this speech, Paul laughed, a few hard breathy gasps. “I’m telling you,” he said. “I was sweating. I started negotiating, telling them, ‘Listen, killing won’t gain you anything. There’s no profit from that. If I give you some money, you profit, you go and get what you need. But if you kill someone—this old man, for instance, he’s now sixty years old, he has finished his life in this world—what are you gaining from that?’” Parked on the roadside, Paul negotiated in this vein for at least an hour, and before he was allowed to proceed he had given up more than five hundred dollars.

In 1993, when Sabena had named Paul director-general of the Diplomates, he was the first Rwandan ever to have risen so high in the corporate ranks of the Belgian company. But on April 12, 1994—three days after he moved into the hotel with the new, genocidal government—when the Dutchman who managed the Hotel des Mille Collines called Paul to say that, as a European, he had arranged to be evacuated, it was understood that, as a Rwandan, Paul would be left behind. The Dutchman asked Paul, who had worked at the Mille Collines from 1984 to 1993, to take care of the hotel in his absence. At the same time, the Hutu Power government at the Hotel des Diplomates suddenly decided to flee Kigali, where combat with the RPF was intensifying, and install itself at Gitarama. A heavily armored convoy was being prepared for the journey. Paul loaded his family and friends into a hotel van, and when the government convoy began to move, he pulled out behind it, following as if he was a part of it until it rolled past the Mille Collines, where he swung into the driveway of his new home.

It was a strange scene at the Mille Collines, Kigali’s premier hotel, an icon of international business-class prestige, where the staff dressed in livery and a night’s lodging cost a hundred twenty-five dollars—about half the average Rwandan annual income. The guests included a few officers of the Forces Armées Rwandaises and of UNAMIR, and hundreds of local sanctuary seekers—mostly well-off or well-connected Tutsis and Hutu oppositionists and their families, who were officially slated for death but who had, through connections, bribery, or sheer luck, made it to the hotel alive, hoping that the UN presence would protect them.

A few foreign journalists were still at the hotel when Paul arrived, but they were evacuated two days later. Josh Hammer, a Newsweek correspondent who spent twenty-four hours in Kigali on April 13 and 14, recalled standing at a window of the Mille Collines with some of the hotel’s Tutsi refugees, watching a gang of interahamwe running down the street outside: “You could literally see the blood dripping off their clubs and machetes.” When Hammer went out with colleagues to explore the city, they couldn’t go more than two or three blocks before being turned around by interahamwe. At military roadblocks, he said, “They’d let you through, and wave to you, then you’d hear two or three shots and you’d come back and there’d be fresh bodies.” On the day of Hammer’s visit, a Red Cross truck, loaded with injured Tutsis bound for a hospital, was stopped at an interahamwe roadblock, and all the Tutsis were taken out and slaughtered “on the spot.” The distant pounding of RPF artillery shook the air, and when Hammer went to the Mille Collines’ rooftop restaurant, government soldiers blocked the doors. “It looked like the whole military command was in there, plotting strategy and genocide,” he said.

So the journalists left for the airport with a UNAMIR convoy, and Paul remained to take care of a hotel filled with the condemned. Except for the mostly symbolic protection provided by a resident handful of UN soldiers, the Mille Collines was physically undefended. Hutu Power leaders and officers of the FAR came and went freely, interahamwe bands ringed the hotel grounds, the six outside telephone lines of the hotel switchboard were cut off, and as the number of refugees packed into the rooms and corridors came close to a thousand, it was periodically announced that they would all be massacred. “Sometimes,” Paul told me, “I felt myself dead.”

“Dead?” I said. “Already dead?”

Paul considered for a moment. Then he said, “Yeah.”

ON THE MORNING before Paul moved into the Mille Collines, Odette and Jean-Baptiste attempted to leave Kigali. They had been paying three hundred dollars a day in protection money to a trio of neighborhood policemen, and they were nearly out of cash. Odette had signed over several thousand dollars of traveler’s checks, but the cops were suspicious of this form of payment. Odette feared that they might discover her sister, Vénantie, when the money ran out. Vénantie had hidden for three days in a chicken coop that belonged to some nuns who lived next door, then she’d come out, saying she’d rather die. Odette had already learned that at least one of her sisters had been killed in the north, and she understood, too, that most of the Tutsis in Kigali had been massacred. Her friend Jean, who had asked her to take his wife to Nairobi, had gone there by himself to find a house for his family, and his wife had been killed along with their four children. Garbage trucks were plying the streets, picking up corpses.

But the killing hadn’t yet reached the south. Odette and Jean-Baptiste thought that if they could get there they might be safe, only the Nyabarongo River stood in the way, and there was no hope of getting over the bridge just south of Kigali. They decided to try their luck in the papyrus marshes that lined the riverbank —to cross by boat and continue on foot through the bush. In exchange for an escort to the river, they signed over their jeep, their television, their stereo, and other household goods to their police protectors. The police even went and found Odette’s nephew and his wife and baby, who were hiding somewhere in Kigali, and put them in a school for safety. But the nephew was killed the next day, along with all the other men in the school.

The night before leaving Kigali, Odette went to her neighbors, the nuns, and told the Sister Superior of her plan. The nun drew Odette aside and gave her more than three hundred dollars. “A lot of money,” Odette told me. “And she was a Hutu.” Odette gave some of the money to each of her children, who were fourteen, thirteen, and seven years old, and she tucked slips of paper into the children’s shoes with the addresses and phone numbers of family and friends, and with her and Jean-Baptiste’s bank account numbers—in case, Odette had to tell them, they got separated or killed.

The family rose at four in the morning. The police never showed up. They had taken the last of Odette’s traveler’s checks and vanished. So Jean-Baptiste drove. At that early hour, the roadblocks were mostly abandoned. Vénantie, who was well known as a parliamentarian, disguised herself in the car as a Muslim with scarves wrapped around her face. At a small village near the river, where the mayor was a friend of Jean-Baptiste’s, they arranged for a local police escort—two men in front, one behind, for about thirty dollars a man—and set out on foot, carrying a little water and biscuits and a kilo of sugar through papyrus that grew higher than their heads. At the water’s edge they saw a boat on the far bank and called to the boatman, but the boatman said, “No, you’re Tutsis.”

The marshes were teeming with Tutsis, hiding or trying to cross the river, and lurking among the papyrus, there were also many interahamwe. When Odette heard her daughter crying out, “No, don’t kill us, we have money, I have money, don’t kill me,” she realized the children had been caught.

“We ran over,” Odette told me. “Jean-Baptiste said, ‘See, I’m just a Hutu fleeing the RPF,’ and we threw all our money and everything we had at them. As they divided it up, we ran away, back toward the village where we’d left the jeep. Then another group of interahamwe came and spotted my sister. While we were running, they were calling from hill to hill, ‘There’s a deputy with them, you’ve got to get her.’ My sister was older than me and heavier, and we were very tired. We drank from a bottle of fruit syrup, and it gave us strength, but my sister was panting. She had a little pistol with her and Jean-Baptiste was running fast with the kids, and I said, ‘Wait, Jean-Baptiste, if we’re going to die we should die together.’ Then a group of interahamwe pounced on us, and they put grenades to our necks. That was when I heard the shots. I never could look. I never saw my sister’s corpse. They shot her with her own pistol.”

Odette was speaking quickly and she kept right on going: “Oh, I forgot to say that during the crisis before April, Jean-Baptiste had bought two Chinese grenades very cheaply here in the market. I didn’t like it. I was always afraid they’d blow up.” But the grenades had come in handy. When the interahamwe had caught the children, and again when they caught the whole family and Vénantie was shot, Jean-Baptiste brandished the grenades, telling the killers they would die along with his family. “So they didn’t kill us,” Odette said. “Instead, they took us to the village for interrogation, and the mayor, whom we knew, brought some rice and made it look like we were prisoners to protect us.”

By then it was late in the afternoon, and it began to rain—the sort of blinding, deafening, open-spigot rain that dumps over Rwanda on April afternoons—and Jean-Baptiste led the family through it in a crouching run to their jeep. Interahamwe mobbed the car. Jean-Baptiste drove through them and headed for Kigali. He drove fast, stopping for nothing, and twelve hours after leaving their house the family returned to it. That night, they listened to Radio Muhabura, the RPF station, where the names of Tutsis who had been reported killed were read each day on the air. Partway through the roll call of the dead, they heard their own names.

THOMAS KAMILINDI HAD remained locked in his house for a week. He worked his phone, collecting news from around the country and filing reports for a French radio service. Then, on April 12, he got a call from Radio Rwanda saying that Eliezer Niyitigeka wanted to see him. Niyitigeka, a former radio colleague, had just been appointed Minister of Information in the Hutu Power government, replacing an oppositionist who had been killed. Thomas walked to the station, which was near his house, and Niyitigeka told him that he had to come back to work. Thomas reminded him that he’d quit as a matter of conscience, and the minister said, “OK, Thomas, let the soldiers decide.” Thomas hedged: he wouldn’t take a job under threat but would wait for an official letter of employment. Niyitigeka agreed, and Thomas returned home to learn from his wife, Jacqueline, that, while he was gone, two soldiers from the Presidential Guard had appeared, carrying a list with his name on it.

Thomas wasn’t surprised to learn that he was on an assassins’ list. At Radio Rwanda, he had refused to speak the language of Hutu Power and had led two strikes; he was a member of the Social Democratic Party, which had ties to the RPF, and he was from the south, from Butare. Considering these factors, Thomas was determined to seek a safer refuge than his home. The next morning, three soldiers came to his door. He invited them to have a seat, but the leader of the contingent said, “We don’t sit when we’re working.” The soldier said, “Come with us.” Thomas said he wasn’t budging until he knew where he was going. “You come with us or your family will have trouble,” the soldier said.

Thomas left with the soldiers and walked up the hill, past the deserted American Embassy and along the Boulevard de la Révolution. At the corner, in front of the Soras Insurance Building, across from the Ministry of Defense, a knot of soldiers stood around a newly erected bunker. The soldiers scolded Thomas for describing their activities in his reports to the international media. He was ordered to sit on the street. When he refused, the soldiers beat him. They beat him hard and slapped him repeatedly, shouting insults and questions. Then someone kicked him in the stomach, and he sat down. “OK, Thomas,” one of the men said. “Write a letter to your wife and say what you like, because you’re going to die.”

A jeep drove up, and the soldiers in it got out and kicked Thomas some more. Then he was given pen and paper, and he wrote, “Listen, Jacqueline, they’re going to kill me. I don’t know why. They say I’m an accomplice of the RPF. That’s why I’m going to die, and here’s my testament.” Thomas wrote his will, and handed it over.

One of the soldiers said, “OK, let’s finish this,” and stood back, readying his rifle.

“I didn’t look,” Thomas recalled, when he told me of his ordeal. “I really believed they would shoot me. Then another vehicle came up, and suddenly I saw a major with a foot up on the armored car, and he said, ‘Thomas?’ When he called me I came out of a sort of dream. I said, ‘They’re doing me in.’ He told them to stop, and he told a sergeant to take me home.”

Thomas is spry, compact, and bright-eyed. His face and hands are as expressive as his speech. He is a radio man, a raconteur, and however bleak his tale, the telling gave him pleasure. After all, he and his family were still alive. His was what passed for a happy story in Rwanda. Still, I had the impression, with him more than with others, that as he told it he was seeing the events he described afresh; that as he stared into the past the outcome was not yet obvious, and that when he looked at me, with his clear eyes a touch hazy, he was still seeing the scenes he described, perhaps even hoping to understand them. For the story made no sense: the major who had spared his life may have recognized Thomas, but to Thomas the major was a stranger. Later, he learned his name: Major Turkunkiko. What was Thomas to Major Turkunkiko that he should have been allowed to live? It wasn’t unusual for one or two people to survive large massacres. When you “clear the bush,” a few weeds always escape the blade—a man told me that his niece was macheted, then stoned, then dumped in a latrine, only to get up each time and stagger away—but Thomas had been deliberately reprieved, and he could not say why. He shot me a look of comic astonishment—eyebrows high, forehead furrowed, a quirky smile working his mouth—to say that his survival was far more mysterious than his peril had been.

Thomas told me that he had been trained as a Boy Scout “to look at danger, and study it, but not to be afraid,” and I was struck that each of his encounters with Hutu Power had followed a pattern: when the minister ordered him back to work, when the soldiers came for him, and when they told him to sit on the street, Thomas always refused before complying. The killers were accustomed to encountering fear, and Thomas had always acted as if there must be some misunderstanding for anyone to feel the need to threaten him.

Such subtleties should have been irrelevant. An accomplice was an accomplice; there could be no exceptions, and efficiency was essential. During the genocide, the work of the killers was not regarded as a crime in Rwanda; it was effectively the law of the land, and every citizen was responsible for its administration. That way, if a person who should be killed was let go by one party he could expect to be caught and killed by somebody else.

I met with Thomas on a soft summer evening in Kigali—the hour of sudden equatorial dusk when flocks of crows and lone buzzards reel, screaming, between the trees and the rooftops. Walking back to my hotel, I passed the corner where Thomas had expected to be killed. The Soras Insurance Building’s plate-glass portico was a tattered web of bullet holes.

“If I don’t kill that rat he’ll die,” says Clov in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. But those who commit genocide have chosen to make nature their enemy, not their ally.

ON THE MORNING of April 12, at the same time that the Presidential Guard first came for Thomas at his house, Bonaventure Nyibizi learned that his family was to be killed that afternoon. They had been hiding in and around his house, spending some nights crouched in ditches. Many of their neighbors had been killed, and he told me, “I remember that already on April 10 there was a communique on the radio from the provincial administration calling all the drivers with big trucks, because only four days after the genocide started there were such a lot of dead people here that it was necessary to bring the trucks.”

Bonaventure did not doubt that his family’s luck had run out at home. “So we decided that instead of being killed by a machete, we’d choose to be killed by a grenade or by being shot,” he said. “We took my car and drove outside my compound. We were able to make it up to the church of Sainte Famille. It was at most half a mile, and it was very difficult to drive because there were a lot of roadblocks. But we drove there, and on April 15 they came for us. They killed about a hundred fifty people in Sainte Famille that day, and they were looking for me all the time.”

The Catholic cathedral of Sainte Famille, an immensity of brick, stands right off one of Kigali’s main arteries, a few hundred yards downhill from the Hotel des Mille Collines. Because of its prominence, and its consequent visibility to the few international observers who were still circulating in Kigali, Sainte Famille was one of half a dozen places in the city—and fewer than a dozen in all of Rwanda—where Tutsis who sought refuge in 1994 were never exterminated en masse. Instead, the killing in such places was incremental, and for those who were spared the terror was constant. Sainte Famille was initially protected by policemen, but, as usual, their resistance to the neighborhood interahamwe and to the soldiers who came hunting for Tutsis quickly collapsed. In the beginning, the killers who staked out the church contented themselves with attacking new refugees as they arrived. The massacre on April 15 was the first massive incursion into Sainte Famille, and it was quite carefully organized by the interahamwe and the Presidential Guard.

Only males were killed on that day, picked out individually from the throng of several thousand in the church and its outbuildings. The killers had lists, and many of them were neighbors of the victims and could recognize them on sight. A young man who had worked for Bonaventure as a domestic was killed. “But I was lucky,” Bonaventure said. “I went inside a small room with my family, and just as I went in and closed the door, Sainte Famille filled with military and militia and police. They started asking for me, but fortunately they did not break down the door where I was. I stayed there with the kids and my wife. There were about twenty people altogether in that small, small place.” Bonaventure had a three-month-old daughter with him, and he said, “Keeping her quiet was the hardest.”

I asked him what the priests had done when the killing began. “Nothing,” he said. “One of them was good, but he was threatened himself, so he went into hiding on April 13, and the other one in charge was very comfortable with the militia. This is the famous Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka. He was very close to the military and the militia, and he was going around with them. He was not actually denouncing anybody at first, but he would do nothing for the people.”

After the massacre, a junior priest, named Paulin, did help to install Bonaventure in a safer hiding place—the back office of a church garage—where he stayed, alone with a friend, from April 15 until June 20. “He was a Hutu, this priest, but he was kind,” Bonaventure said. “Sometimes he would open the door so that our wives could bring us water or food. Rumors went around that I had been killed, so all I had to do was stay hidden.”

WALKING HOME FROM his aborted execution, Thomas Kamilindi was told by the sergeant who escorted him that he was still condemned to die. “They’re going to kill you today if you don’t leave,” the sergeant said. Thomas had no idea where to go. He wrote a new will, and gave it to his wife, saying, “I’m leaving, I don’t know where, maybe someday this paper can help you.”

When he stepped outside again, it was raining. He began walking, and wound up at the radio station. “I was afraid,” he said, “because the radio was practically a military camp.” But nobody seemed to mind him there. “I watched television until the evening. I called my wife, and told her I was at the radio, and I spent the night under a table on a mat. I had nothing to eat, but I slept well.” Thomas could not imagine how he would have survived if he were a Tutsi. In the morning, he told the editor-in-chief of the radio that he had nearly been killed. “Do the morning news, and perhaps they’ll think you’re with us,” the editor said.

“So I did the six-thirty a.m. broadcast,” Thomas told me, “but I couldn’t go on like that.” He called around to various embassies, and found that they had all been evacuated. Then he tried the Hotel des Mille Collines: “The guy at the reception recognized my voice, and said, ‘Thomas! You’re still alive. That’s incredible. We thought you were dead.’ He said, ‘If you can get here, you might be OK.’” It was forbidden to go around in a vehicle without escort or papers, so Thomas persuaded a soldier to drive him. He arrived at the hotel without money, but he was given a room. “If people came, we said we’d worry about money later,” a hotel staffer told me. That night as Thomas settled in, his phone rang. It was an army major, Augustin Cyiza, who was also staying in the hotel. Cyiza was sympathetic to the refugees—he eventually deserted the FAR to join the RPF—but Thomas didn’t know that at the time. He went to Cyiza’s room assuming that he would be killed, or at least arrested. Instead the two men drank beer and talked late into the night, and the next day Cyiza went out and returned with Thomas’s wife and daughter.

Beer saved many lives at the Hotel des Mille Collines. Recognizing that the price of drinks could only go up in the embattled city, the caretaker manager Paul Rusesabagina worked through diverse middlemen to keep the hotel cellars well stocked. This trade, by which he also arranged for enough sweet potatoes and rice to keep his guests from starvation, required extensive dealings with the military command, and Paul took advantage of the contacts. “I was using drinks to corrupt people,” he told me, and laughed, because the people he was corrupting were Hutu Power leaders, and what he meant by corrupting them was feeding them liquor so they wouldn’t kill the refugees under his roof. “I gave drinks and sometimes I even gave money,” he said. Major General Augustin Bizimungu, the commander of the FAR, was one of many regular, unsavory visitors to the hotel whom Paul kept well lubricated. “Everybody came,” Paul said. “I had what they wanted. That was not my problem. My problem was that nobody should be taken out of my hotel.”

Paul is a mild-mannered man, sturdily built and rather ordinary-looking—a bourgeois hotel manager, after all—and that is how he seemed to regard himself as well, as an ordinary person who did nothing extraordinary in refusing to cave in to the insanity that swirled around him. “People became fools. I don’t know why,” he said to me. “I kept telling them, ‘I don’t agree with what you’re doing,’ just as openly as I’m telling you now. I’m a man who’s used to saying no when I have to. That’s all I did—what I felt like doing. Because I never agree with killers. I didn’t agree with them. I refused, and I told them so.” Many Rwandans didn’t agree with the genocide, of course, but many overcame their disagreements and killed, while many more simply saved their own skins. Paul sought to save everybody he could, and if that meant negotiating with everybody who wanted to kill them—so be it.

Shortly before dawn one morning, Lieutenant Apollinaire Hakizimana from military intelligence walked up to the reception desk, rang Paul in his room, and said, “I want you to get everybody out of this hotel within thirty minutes.” Paul had been asleep, and he woke up negotiating. “I said, ‘Mister, do you know that these people are refugees? What security do you guarantee? Where are they going? How are they going? Who’s taking them?’” Lieutenant Hakizimana said, “Did you hear what I said? We want everybody out, and within half an hour.” Paul said, “I’m still in bed. Give me thirty minutes. I’ll take my shower, and then get everybody out.” Paul quickly sent for several of the refugees he trusted most, who were well connected with the regime—including François Xavier Nsanzuwera, the former Attorney General of Rwanda, a Hutu who had once investigated Hakizimana as a leader of Hutu Power death squads. Together, Paul and his friends began working the phone, calling General Bizimungu, various colonels, and anyone else they could think of who might pull rank on the lieutenant. Before the half hour was out, an army jeep arrived at the hotel with orders for Hakizimana to leave.

“They got that boy out,” Paul said. Then he paused for a moment in his memories, and his perspective zoomed out, so that I pictured him peering through his window at the Mille Collines as he said, “And what was around us—around the hotel compound? Soldiers, interahamwe—armed with guns, machetes, everything.” Paul seemed determined to register his own proper size. He hadn’t said, “I got that boy out”—he’d said they did—and by showing me the ranks of killers massed at the hotel gate, he was underscoring the point.

In discussions of us-against-them scenarios of popular violence, the fashion these days is to speak of mass hatred. But while hatred can be animating, it appeals to weakness. The “authors” of the genocide, as Rwandans call them, understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong, it is necessary to appeal to their desire for strength—and the gray force that really drives people is power. Hatred and power are both, in their different ways, passions. The difference is that hatred is purely negative, while power is essentially positive: you surrender to hatred, but you aspire to power. In Rwanda, the orgy of misbegotten power that led to genocide was carried out in the name of Hutuness, and when Paul, a Hutu, set out to defy the killers, he did so by appealing to their passion for power: “they” were the ones who had chosen to take life away and he grasped that that meant they could also choose to extend the gift of retaining it.

AFTER HEARING THE announcement of their own deaths on the radio, Odette and her family stayed in their house. “We never turned on the light and never answered the phone except with a prearranged signal for people who knew us—ring once, hang up, call again.” Two weeks went by like that. Then Paul called from the Mille Collines. He was an old friend, and he was just checking around—to see who was alive, whom he might save. “He said he’d send Froduald Karamira to pick us up,” Odette recalled. “I said, ‘No, I don’t want to see him. If he comes he will kill us.’ But that was Paul. He maintained contact with people like that right to the end.” Paul made no apologies. “Of course I talked to Karamira,” he told me. “I talked to him because everybody was coming to the Mille Collines. I had many contacts and I had my stock of drinks, and I was sending them to get people and bring them to the Mille Collines. It wasn’t only Odette and Jean-Baptiste and their children who were saved in that way. There were so many others.”

On April 27, a lieutenant showed up at Odette’s house to shuttle the family to the hotel in his jeep. Even an army officer could be stopped and have his passengers taken from him by the interahamwe, so it was decided to make three separate trips. Odette went first. “In the streets,” she said, “there were barriers, machetes, corpses. But I wouldn’t look. I didn’t see a corpse in that whole time, except in the river. When we were there in the marshes, my son said, ‘What’s that, Mother?’ and I said it was statues that had fallen into the river and were floating past. I don’t know where that came from. My son said, ‘No, it’s corpses.’”

When the lieutenant and Odette reached the hotel and found the gate surrounded—not to protect those inside, of course, but to prevent new refugees from entering—she held out a handful of malaria pills and aspirin, and said she was a doctor coming to treat the manager’s children. “Normally,” she told me, “I don’t drink, but when I walked into the hotel, I said, ‘Give me a beer.’ I had a little beer, and got completely drunk from it.”

The lieutenant went to fetch Odette’s children, and as he drove with them toward the hotel, they were stopped. The militia at the roadblock asked the children, “If your parents aren’t dead, or Tutsi, why aren’t you with them?” Odette’s son didn’t hesitate. He said, “My father’s manning a roadblock, and my mother’s at the hospital.” But the killers weren’t convinced. Two hours passed in edgy discussion. Then a car pulled up carrying Georges Rutaganda, the first vice president of the interahamwe and a member of the MRND central committee. Rutaganda recognized the children from earlier times—when he and people like Odette and Jean-Baptiste had moved in the same social universe—and for a moment, apparently, his atrophied soul stirred him to magnanimity. According to Odette: “He told the interahamwe who were hassling those kids, ‘Don’t you listen to the radio? The French said if we don’t stop killing children they’ll stop arming and helping us.’ Then he said, ‘You kids, get in that car and go.’”

So Rutaganda had violated the eighth “Hutu commandment” and showed mercy to Odette’s children, but she felt no warmth for the man. Many people who participated in the killing—as public officials, as soldiers or militia members, or as ordinary citizen butchers—also protected some Tutsis, whether out of personal sympathy or for financial or sexual profit. It was not uncommon for a man or a woman who regularly went forth to kill to keep a few favorite Tutsis hidden in his or her home. Later, such people sometimes pleaded that they took some lives in order not to attract attention to their efforts to save others. To their minds, it seemed, their acts of decency exonerated the guilt of their crimes. But to survivors, the fact that a killer sometimes spared lives only proved that he could not possibly be judged innocent, since it demonstrated plainly that he knew murder was wrong.

“That the person who cut off my sister’s head should have his sentence reduced? No!” Odette said to me. “Even this Mr. Rutaganda, who saved my children, should be hanged in a public place, and I will go there.” The children were in tears when they reached the hotel. The lieutenant himself was crying. It took a good deal of persuading, on Odette’s part, before he made the final trip and brought Jean-Baptiste and their adopted mulatto child to the hotel. “Mulattoes,” Odette explained, “were seen as the children of Tutsis and Belgians.”

10

PAUL RUSESABAGINA REMEMBERED that in 1987 the Hôtel des Mille Collines had acquired its first fax machine, and an auxiliary telephone line had been installed to support it. In mid-April of 1994, when the government cut outside service to and from the hotel’s main switchboard, Paul discovered that—“miraculously,” as he said—the old fax line still had a dial tone. Paul regarded this line as the greatest weapon in his campaign for the protection of his guests. “We could ring the King of Belgium,” Paul told me. “I could get through to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France immediately. We sent many faxes to Bill Clinton himself at the White House.” As a rule, he said, he would stay up until four in the morning—“sending faxes, calling, ringing the whole world.”

The Hutu Power leaders in Kigali knew Paul had a phone, but, he said, “they never had my number, so they didn’t know how to cut it off, and they had other problems to think about.” Paul guarded his phone carefully, but not absolutely; refugees with useful foreign contacts were given access to it. Odette sent regular faxes to her former employers at Peace Corps headquarters in Washington, and on April 29, Thomas Kamilindi used the hotel phone to give an interview to a French radio station. “I described how we lived, with no water—drinking the swimming pool—and how it was with the killing, and how the RPF was advancing,” Thomas told me. The interview was broadcast, and the next morning, Major Cyiza told Thomas, “You fucked up. They’ve decided to kill you. Get out of here if you can.”

Thomas had nowhere to go. He moved into a friend’s room, and that afternoon he got word that a soldier had arrived at the hotel to assassinate him. Using the house phone, Thomas asked his wife to find out the soldier’s name. It was Jean-Baptiste Iradukunda. “He had been a friend since childhood,” Thomas told me, “so I called him and said, ‘OK, I’m coming,’ and I went. He explained that the military command wanted me dead. I asked who decided this, their names, and who had sent him. He hesitated. Then he said, in effect, ‘I don’t know who’s going to kill you. I can’t do it. But I’m leaving the hotel and they’ll send someone for sure to kill you.’”

“Nobody else came for me,” he said. “The situation normalized. I went out in the corridor again after a while, and we stayed put.”

When I asked Paul about Thomas’s trouble, he laughed. “That interview wasn’t good for the refugees,” he said, and he added, “They wanted to take him out, but I refused.”

I asked Paul how that had worked, why his refusal was heeded.

He said, “I don’t know,” and again he laughed. “I don’t know how it was, but I refused so many things.”

MEANWHILE, ALL ACROSS Rwanda: murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder…

Take the best estimate: eight hundred thousand killed in a hundred days. That’s three hundred and thirty-three and a third murders an hour—or five and a half lives terminated every minute. Consider also that most of these killings actually occurred in the first three or four weeks, and add to the death toll the uncounted legions who were maimed but did not die of their wounds, and the systematic and serial rape of Tutsi women—and then you can grasp what it meant that the Hotel des Mille Collines was the only place in Rwanda where as many as a thousand people who were supposed to be killed gathered in concentration and, as Paul said very quietly, “Nobody was killed. Nobody was taken away. Nobody was beaten.”

Down the hill from the hotel, in his hideaway at the church of Sainte Famille, Bonaventure had a radio, and listening to RTLM, he heard how well the killing was going. He heard the radio announcers’ gentle encouragements to leave no grave half full, and the more urgent calls for people to go here or go there because more hands were needed to complete this or that job. He heard the speeches of potentates from the Hutu Power government, as they traveled around the country, calling on the people to redouble their efforts. And he wondered how long it would be before the slow but steady massacre of refugees in the church where he was hiding caught up with him. On April 29, RTLM proclaimed that May 5 was “cleanup” day for the final elimination of all Tutsis in Kigali.

James Orbinski, a Canadian physician who was one of about fifteen international relief workers still stationed in Kigali, described the city as “literally a no-man’s-land.” He said, “The only thing alive was the wind, except at the roadblocks, and the roadblocks were everywhere. The interahamwe were terrifying, bloodthirsty, drunk—they did a lot of dancing at roadblocks. People were carrying family to hospitals and orphanages. It would take them days to go two or three miles.” And getting to a hospital was no guarantee of safety. When Orbinski visited the hospital where Odette and Jean-Baptiste had worked, he found it littered with bodies. He went to an orphanage, hoping to evacuate the children, and met a Rwandan officer who said, “These people are POWs, and as far as I’m concerned they’re insects, and they’ll be crushed like insects.”

By the end of April, the city was divided across its main valley: to the east, where Orbinski was based, the RPF had control, and to the west, the city belonged to the government. UNAMIR and the few emergency workers like Orbinski spent hours each day in negotiation, trying to arrange exchanges of prisoners, refugees, and the wounded across the front lines. Their effectiveness was extremely limited. “I went to Sainte Famille every day, bringing medical supplies, making lists,” Orbinski told me. “I’d go back the next day—twenty people killed, forty people killed.”

When Paul recalled how he had used his telephone at the Mille Collines to focus international attention on the plight of his guests, he said, “But, you know, Sainte Famille also had a working phone line, and that priest, Father Wenceslas, never used it. My goodness.”

It was true that the phone worked at the church. Even Bonaventure Nyibizi, in his hiding place, had been aware of it, and one day in mid-May he had been able to sneak out and get access to it. “I called Washington—the USAID mission,” he told me. “They said, ‘You know what the situation is. Whenever you have a chance to leave, contact the nearest mission.’” Hardly a message of hope; but for Bonaventure, to make contact, and to know that others knew he was alive and where, was a comfort.

Why didn’t Father Wenceslas make similar calls? Why hadn’t more people acted as Paul had? “That’s a mystery,” Paul said. “Everybody could have done it. But, for instance, Wenceslas himself wore a pistol, yet he was a priest. I can’t say that he killed anyone. I never saw him killing. But I saw him with a pistol. One day he came to my room. He was talking about what was happening in the country, how people were shooting from Sainte Famille—from his church!—soldiers with armored cars. He said he gave them drinks because they’ve killed people. I said, ‘Mister, I don’t agree with that.’ And my wife said, ‘Priest, instead of carrying your Bible, why do you carry a pistol? Why don’t you put this pistol down and take up your Bible? A priest should not be seen in blue jeans and a T-shirt with a pistol.’”

Later, Odette told me the same story, and she said that Father Wenceslas had replied, “Everything has its time. This is the time for a pistol, not a Bible.”

Paul remembered the exchange differently. By his account, Father Wenceslas had said, “They’ve already killed fifty-nine priests. I don’t want to be the sixtieth.” Paul’s response was: “If someone comes and shoots you now, do you think that with a pistol you won’t die?”

After the genocide, Wenceslas fled with the help of French missionaries to a village in southern France, where he was assigned to active pastoral duty. In July of 1995, he was arrested and charged under French law with crimes of genocide in Kigali, but his case quickly snagged on legal technicalities. After two weeks in a French jail, he was released to resume his ministry. In January of 1998, France’s Supreme Court ruled that he could be prosecuted after all. He stood charged, among other things, with providing killers with lists of Tutsi refugees at his church, flushing refugees out of hiding to be killed, attending massacres without interfering, sabotaging UNAMIR’s efforts to evacuate refugees from the church, and coercing refugee girls to have sex with him. In 1995, he was asked by two interviewers—a Rwandan whose mother and sisters had been refugees at Sainte Famille and a French journalist—whether he regretted his actions during the genocide. “I didn’t have a choice,” Wenceslas replied. “It was necessary to appear pro-militia. If I had had a different attitude, we would have all disappeared.”

THE LAST RECORDED apparition of the Virgin Mary at the hilltop shrine of Kibeho occurred on May 15, 1994, at a time when the few surviving Tutsis in the parish were still being hunted. In the preceding month, thousands of Tutsis had been killed in Kibeho. The largest massacre there had occurred in the cathedral, and it lasted several days, until the killers got tired of working by hand and set the building ablaze, immolating the living and the dead. During the days before the fire, Father Pierre Ngoga, a local priest, had sought to defend the refugees and paid for it with his life, while another local priest, Father Thadée Rusingizandekwe, was described by survivors as one of the leaders of several interahamwe attacks. Clad, like the militia members, in a drapery of banana leaves, Father Thadée reportedly carried a rifle and shot into the crowd.

With the church leadership so divided, the May 15 apparition offered a theological resolution to the question of genocide. The exact words attributed to the Holy Mother by the visionary Valentine Nyiramukiza have been lost. But the message was broadcast on Radio Rwanda at the time, and a number of Rwandan priests and journalists—including Thomas Kamilindi, who heard it at the Hotel des Mille Collines—told me that the Virgin was reported to have said that President Habyarimana was with her in heaven, and that her words were widely interpreted as an expression of divine support for the genocide.

The Bishop of Gikongoro, Monsignor Augustin Misago, who wrote a book about the Kibeho apparitions, told me that Valentine’s suggestion that “the killing of Tutsis was approved in heaven” struck him as “impossible—a message prepared by the politicians.” But then, the messages sent by church leaders frequently carried a political edge during the killings. In fact, Bishop Misago was often described as a Hutu Power sympathizer; he had been publicly accused of barring Tutsis from places of refuge, criticizing fellow members of the clergy who helped “cockroaches,” and asking a Vatican emissary who visited Rwanda in June 1994 to tell the Pope “to find a place for Tutsi priests because the Rwandan people do not want them anymore.” What’s more, on May 4 of that year, shortly before the last Marian apparition at Kibeho, the bishop appeared there himself with a team of policemen, and told a group of ninety Tutsi schoolchildren, who were being held in preparation for slaughter, not to worry, because the police would protect them. Three days later, the police helped to massacre eighty-two of the children.

Bishop Misago was a large, imposing man. A portrait of him —dressed, as I found him, in a long, purple-buttoned white robe—hung near a much smaller portrait of the Pope on the wall of the room where he received me at the bishopric. Minutes after I arrived, a major thunderstorm broke. The room grew darker, the bishop’s robe appeared to grow brighter, and his voice rose to a shout against the din of rain on the corrugated-metal roofing. He seemed glad to shout. He was not at all happy about my visit—I had come without an appointment, carrying a notebook—and his conversation was accompanied by a lot of wild gesticulations, in between which he leafed constantly through a tiny pocket calendar without looking at it. He also had the unfortunate habit of laughing a loud, nervous, “Ha-ha-ha!” whenever he mentioned an awkward situation like a massacre.

“What could I do?” he said, when I asked him about the eighty-two dead Tutsi schoolchildren at Kibeho. He told me that he had gone to Kibeho with the commander of the Gikongoro police and an intelligence officer “to see how to restore order and unity.” He said he had no choice but to work with such authorities. “I don’t have an army. What could I do by myself? Nothing. That’s elementary logic.” He had found that the Tutsi students at Kibeho were inadequately protected, and he said, “The conclusion was that the number of police should be augmented. Before, there had been five. Now, they sent about twenty.”

The bishop laughed, and went on: “We returned to Gikongoro, confident that the situation would be better. The unfortunate thing was that among those policemen there were some accomplices of the interahamwe. I couldn’t have known that. These decisions were made in the army. So the director of the school came to Gikongoro to explain the situation and to ask that the police team be changed, and when he got home he discovered that the massacre had happened. You see? Ha-ha-ha! First we were badly informed, and then we were powerless to fix the situation. So, you are also an adult and able to judge that one does not imagine that a person will kill children.”

In fact, it seemed to me that in the fourth week of the genocide no adult in Rwanda could have imagined that the police were reliable protectors of Tutsis. The bishop insisted that he had been helpless. “You—you Westerners—left and abandoned us all,” he said. “Even the Papal Nuncio left on April 10. It’s not just the poor Bishop of Gikongoro.”

“But you were still a man of influence,” I said.

“No, no, no,” the bishop said. “That’s an illusion.” He laughed his nervous laugh. “When men become like devils, and you don’t have an army, what can you do? All paths were dangerous. So how could I influence? Even the Church—we are not like extraterrestrials who can foresee things. We could have been victims of a lack of information. When one is poorly informed, one hesitates to take a position. And there was powerful official misinformation. As a journalist, when you are not sure, you don’t publish it—you go verify it. The global accusations against the Church are not scientific. That’s ideological propaganda.”

The bishop wasn’t really denying that he’d committed a major blunder at Kibeho. But he didn’t seem to think it was a crime, and although he said he was “embarrassed” to have been taken in by official propaganda, he gave no sign of remorse. He wanted to be thought of as a victim of the same deception that had resulted in eighty-two children being slaughtered. If I understood him correctly, he was saying that he had been a profoundly ignorant man who was duped by demons. Perhaps. But it was curious that he treated my questions about his traffic with those demons as an attack on the institution of the Roman Catholic Church, and when I did ask him about the Church, his response hardly seemed to qualify as a defense.

“To my knowledge,” he said, “no official of the Church publicly declared anything that was happening to be unacceptable. Monsignor Vincent Nsengiyumva, the old Archbishop of Kigali, is the best example. He made no secret of his friendship with President Habyarimana. Of course, the other bishops and the other clergy disapproved. But, you know, profane society in the West likes very much to make exposes with journalism, film, and TV, while we are in the habit of doing things in secret and quietly without beating the drum or sounding the trumpet. If you spoke out, one could have said that you’d become a heretic.”

It was true that for many Rwandans to go against Hutu Power would have felt like heresy. But Bishop Misago seemed to have second thoughts about his outburst. A few minutes later, he said, “I was tired when you arrived. I was going to lie down. I was a bit tired and a bit agitated, so that may have colored my answers. And then, you ask such questions.”

Clearly, Bishop Misago hadn’t behaved as wickedly as Father Wenceslas. Still, it surprised me that a man with his reputation had stayed in Rwanda after the genocide. A number of priests had been arrested for their conduct in 1994, and an official at the Ministry of Justice in Kigali told me that a strong case could be made for arresting Misago. But, he added, “the Vatican is too strong, and too unapologetic for us to go taking on bishops. Haven’t you heard of infallibility?”

DURING ONE OF his visits to the Hotel des Mille Collines, Father Wenceslas had invited Paul Rusesabagina to join him for a drink at the Sainte Famille church. But Paul never left the hotel, and for that, even Wenceslas should have been grateful, since he had delivered his own mother to Paul for safekeeping at the hotel. In fact, a number of men affiliated with the Hutu Power regime had installed their Tutsi wives at the Mille Collines, and while their presence there surely contributed to the hotel’s overall safety, Paul felt that it reflected shamefully on the men. “Wenceslas knew himself that he wasn’t even able to protect his mother,” Paul said. “And he was so arrogant that when he brought her, he told me, ‘Paul, I bring you my cockroach.’ Do you understand? He was talking about his mother. She was a Tutsi.”

Wenceslas, Paul told me, was “just a—how do you call it? —a bastard. He didn’t know his father.” But what does that explain? Lots of people who behaved as badly or worse than Wenceslas had fathers, and would never have called their mothers cockroaches, while many people who were ill at ease with their origins didn’t run criminally amok. I wasn’t interested in what made Wenceslas weak; I wanted to know what had made Paul strong—and he couldn’t tell me. “I wasn’t really strong,” he said. “I wasn’t. But maybe I used different means that other people didn’t want to use.” Only later—“when people were talking about that time”—did it occur to him that he had been exceptional. “During the genocide, I didn’t know,” he told me. “I thought so many people did as I did, because I know that if they’d wanted they could have done so.”

Paul believed in free will. He understood his actions during the genocide in the same way that he understood those of others, as choices. He didn’t seem to think that he could be called righteous, except when measured against the criminality of others, and he rejected that scale. Paul had devoted all his diverse energies to avoiding death—his own and others’—but what he feared even more than a violent end was living or dying as what he called a “fool.” Regarded in this light, the option of kill or be killed translated into the questions: kill for what? be killed as a what?—and posed no great challenge.

The riddle to Paul was that so many of his countrymen had chosen to embrace inhumanity. “It was more than a surprise,” he told me. “It was a disappointment. I was disappointed by most of my friends, who immediately changed with that genocide. I used to see them just as gentlemen, and when I saw them with the killers I was disappointed. I still have some friends that I trust. But the genocide changed so many things—within myself, my own behavior. I used to go out, feel free. I could go and have a drink with anyone. I could trust. But now I tend not to do so.”

So Paul had a rare conscience, and knew the loneliness that came with it, but there was nothing false about his modesty regarding his efforts on behalf of the refugees at the Mille Collines. He hadn’t saved them, and he couldn’t have saved them—not ultimately. Armed with nothing but a liquor cabinet, a phone line, an internationally famous address, and his spirit of resistance, he had merely been able to work for their protection until the time came when they were saved by someone else.

THE FIRST MAJOR evacuation from the hotel was attemped by UNAMIR on May 3. Trucks arrived to take sixty-two refugees, who had been offered asylum in Belgium, including Thomas, Odette and Jean-Baptiste, and their families, to the airport. But as the refugees boarded the trucks, government spies milled through the parking lot, making lists of the evacuees, and the call went out on RTLM to stop the convoy. About a mile from the hotel, a rapidly growing mob of interahamwe and soldiers halted the trucks at a roadblock. The refugees were forced to climb down; some were beaten and kicked. Interahamwe with radios tuned to RTLM listened as the names of well-known evacuees were read, then sought those people out for special abuse. The former Attorney General, François Xavier Nsanzuwera, got the worst of it. With UNAMIR officers looking on, he was knocked to the pavement with a rifle butt. As he lay there, bleeding from the head, several shots were fired at him. The shots missed. But the mob grew more excited and began demanding the right to massacre the evacuees. Rwandan military officers held them off, at the same time refusing to allow the convoy to budge. I’ve heard many accounts of the hours the evacuees spent at the roadblock and not one clear explanation of why, in the end, the convoy was allowed to retreat back to the hotel, but it was, and Odette spent the evening with a sewing kit, stitching wounds.

Twelve days later, an officer from military intelligence turned up at the hotel and informed Paul that everybody in it would be killed that night. There was no question of relying on UNAMIR for help. Once again, Paul rallied all of his connections, in the government and abroad, and called on every refugee with plausible contacts to do the same. Paul remembers speaking with the director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, and telling him “Mister, if you want these people to be saved, they will be saved. But if you want them to die, they will die today, and you French people will pay in one way or another for the people who are killed in this hotel today.” Almost immediately after this conversation, General Bizimungu of the FAR high command and General Dallaire of UNAMIR came to Paul to assure him that the hotel would not be touched.

Paul made the effort, but the life-and-death decision lay, as always, with the killers and, tellingly in this case, with their French patrons. That night a single bullet crashed through a window of the Mille Collines, as if to say that the hand of death was only temporarily stayed. But by then, the battle for Kigali was raging, and the hotel and several other high-profile houses of “refuge,” such as the church of Sainte Famille, had become bargaining chips. The RPF was holding thousands of government prisoners in a stadium across town, and the RPF command proposed the kind of deal that Hutu Power understood: you kill those, and we’ll kill these. An exchange was negotiated across the front lines. UNAMIR helped to mediate the arrangement, and provided transportation, and it was widely reported at the time that the UN had saved the refugees. But the truth lies elsewhere: they were saved by the RPF’s threat to kill others.

The evacuation proceeded slowly, truckload by truckload, day by day. There were many days when no trucks moved, and even as some refugees were being trucked to safety, massacres continued at Sainte Famille and elsewhere in Kigali. On June 17, when only a handful of refugees remained at the Mille Collines, Paul went to the Hotel des Diplomates, in search of liquor for General Bizimungu. When he returned to the Mille Collines, he found that a mob of interahamwe had broken into the suite where he was staying with his family. His wife and children hid in the bathroom, while the militia tore up the living room. Paul ran into some of the invaders in the corridor. “They asked me, ‘Where’s the manager?’ I was in a T-shirt and jeans and they think a manager is always in a tie. I said, ‘The manager? You haven’t met him?’ They said, ‘No, where is he?’ I said, ‘He’s gone that way,’ and I went the other way. I met some more of them on the stairs, and they asked, ‘Where’s the manager?’” Paul laughed. Once again, he sent them off in the other direction. Then he went looking for General Bizimungu, who was waiting for his liquor handout. The general instructed one of his sergeants to chase the militia out. As Paul remembered it, Bizimungu said, “Go up there and tell those militia that if they kill someone, I’ll kill them. Even if they beat someone, I’ll kill them. And if they stay in this hotel for the next five minutes, I’ll shoot.”

The next day, Paul and his family joined a UNAMIR convoy to the RPF zone. He had done what he could. But had the RPF not been pounding Hutu Power from across the valley, there would have been no convoy—and probably no survivors.

11

THE NIGHTS WERE eerily quiet in Rwanda. After the birds fell silent, there were hardly even any animal sounds. I couldn’t understand it. Then I noticed the absence of dogs. What kind of country has no dogs? I started to keep watch in the markets, in the streets, in the countryside, in churchyards, schoolyards, farmyards, graveyards, junkyards, and the flowering yards of fine villas. Once, far out in the hills, I thought I spotted a boy leading a dog on a tether down a dirt lane. But it was a goat at the end of the rope. Village life without dogs? Children without dogs? Poverty without dogs? There were plenty of cats—the first pets to disappear in a famine, but famine was not Rwanda’s problem—and I began to wonder whether, in Rwanda, cats had won their eternal war with dog-kind.

During my first three months in the country, between May and August of 1995, I kept a list of the dogs I saw: A Belgian lady at the Hotel des Mille Collines had a pair of toy poodles that trotted beside her on her morning strolls through the garden around the swimming pool; the French landlady of a Dutch aid worker I knew had a fat golden retriever; a team of American and Belgian sappers had some German shepherds who assisted them in land-mine removal; and once I saw a scrawny bitch gnawing a fish skeleton behind a restaurant in the northwestern town of Gisenyi, but that dog might have just slipped over the border from Zaire a few hundred yards away, and after a moment a cook spotted her and chased her away with loud cries and a whack of a long wooden spoon. Studying this list, you might conclude that dog ownership corresponded to skin color: white people had dogs and Africans did not. But Africans are generally as fond of dogs as the rest of humanity, so the impressive doglessness of Rwanda perplexed me.

I made inquiries, and I learned that right through the genocide dogs had been plentiful in Rwanda. The words people used to describe the dog population back then were “many” and “normal.” But as the RPF fighters had advanced through the country, moving down from the northeast, they had shot all the dogs.

What did the RPF have against dogs? Everyone I asked gave the same answer: the dogs were eating the dead. “It’s on film,” someone told me, and I have since seen more Rwandan dogs on video monitors than I ever saw in Rwanda—crouched in the distinctive red dirt of the country, over the distinctive body piles of that time, in the distinctive feeding position of their kind.

I was told about an Englishwoman from a medical relief organization who got very upset when she saw RPF men shooting the dogs that were feeding off a hallful of corpses at the great cathedral center and bishopric of Kabgayi, which had served as a death camp in central Rwanda. “You can’t shoot dogs,” the Englishwoman told the soldiers. She was wrong. Even the blue-helmeted soldiers of UNAMIR were shooting dogs on sight in the late summer of 1994. After months, during which Rwandans had been left to wonder whether the UN troops knew how to shoot, because they never used their excellent weapons to stop the extermination of civilians, it turned out that the peacekeepers were very good shots.

The genocide had been tolerated by the so-called international community, but I was told that the UN regarded the corpse-eating dogs as a health problem.

ON DECEMBER 11, 1946, the General Assembly of the United Nations declared genocide a crime under international law. On December 9, 1948, the General Assembly went further, adopting Resolution 260A(III), the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which obliged “Contracting Parties” to “undertake to prevent and to punish… acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Just as a state’s police swear to prevent and punish murder, so the signers of the Genocide Convention swore to police a brave new world order. The rhetoric of moral utopia is a peculiar response to genocide. But those were heady days, just after the trials at Nuremberg, when the full scale of the Nazi extermination of Jews all over Europe had been recognized as a fact of which nobody could any longer claim ignorance. The authors and signers of the Genocide Convention knew perfectly well that they had not fought World War II to stop the Holocaust but rather—and often, as in the case of the United States, reluctantly—to contain fascist aggression. What made those victorious powers, which dominated the UN then even more than they do now, imagine that they would act differently in the future?

Rwanda is landlocked and dirt-poor, a bit larger than Vermont and a bit less populous than Chicago, a place so dwarfed by neighboring Congo, Uganda, and Tanzania that for the sake of legibility its name has to be printed on most maps outside the lines of its frontiers. As far as the political, military, and economic interests of the world’s powers go, it might as well be Mars. In fact, Mars is probably of greater strategic concern. But Rwanda, unlike Mars, is populated by human beings, and when Rwanda had a genocide, the world’s powers left Rwanda to it.

On April 14, 1994, one week after the murder of the ten Belgian blue-helmets, Belgium withdrew from UNAMIR—precisely as Hutu Power had intended it to do. Belgian soldiers, aggrieved by the cowardice and waste of their mission, shredded their UN berets on the tarmac at Kigali airport. A week later, on April 21, 1994, the UNAMIR commander, Major General Dallaire, declared that with just five thousand well-equipped soldiers and a free hand to fight Hutu Power, he could bring the genocide to a rapid halt. No military analyst whom I’ve heard of has ever questioned his judgment, and a great many have confirmed it. The radio transmitter of RTLM would have been an obvious, and easy, first target. Yet, on the same day, the UN Security Council passed a resolution that slashed the UNAMIR force by ninety percent, ordering the retreat of all but two hundred seventy troops and leaving them with a mandate that allowed them to do little more than hunker down behind their sandbags and watch.

The desertion of Rwanda by the UN force was Hutu Power’s greatest diplomatic victory to date, and it can be credited almost single-handedly to the United States. With the memory of the Somalia debacle still very fresh, the White House had just finished drafting a document called Presidential Decision Directive 25, which amounted to a checklist of reasons to avoid American involvement in UN peacekeeping missions. It hardly mattered that Dallaire’s call for an expanded force and mandate would not have required American troops, or that the mission was not properly peacekeeping, but genocide prevention. PDD 25 also contained what Washington policymakers call “language” urging that the United States should persuade others not to undertake the missions that it wished to avoid. In fact, the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, opposed leaving even the skeleton crew of two hundred seventy in Rwanda. Albright went on to become Secretary of State, largely because of her reputation as a “daughter of Munich,” a Czech refugee from Nazism with no tolerance for appeasement and with a taste for projecting U.S. force abroad to bring rogue dictators and criminal states to heel. Her name is rarely associated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman.

A week after UNAMIR was slashed, when the ambassadors of Czechoslovakia, New Zealand, and Spain, sickened by the barrage of irrefutable evidence of genocide in Rwanda, began pushing for the return of UN troops, the United States demanded control of the mission. But there was no mission to control. The Security Council, where Rwanda conveniently occupied a temporary seat in 1994, could not even bring itself to pass a resolution that contained the word “genocide.” In this proud fashion, April gave way to May. As Rwanda’s genocidal leaders stepped up efforts for a full national mobilization to extirpate the last surviving Tutsis, the Security Council prepared, on May 13, to vote once again on restoring UNAMIR’s strength. Ambassador Albright got the vote postponed by four days. The Security Council then agreed to dispatch five thousand five hundred troops for UNAMIR, only—at American insistence—very slowly.

So May became June. By then, a consortium of eight fed-up African nations had proclaimed their readiness to send an intervention force to Rwanda, provided that Washington would send fifty armored personnel carriers. The Clinton administration agreed, but instead of lending the armor to the courageous Africans, it decided to lease it to the UN—where Washington was billions of dollars in arrears on membership dues—for a price of fifteen million dollars, transportation and spare parts included.

IN MAY OF 1994, I happened to be in Washington to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, an immensely popular tourist attraction adjacent to the National Mall. The ticket line formed two hours before opening time. Waiting amid the crowd, I tried to read a local newspaper. But I couldn’t get past a photograph on the front page: bodies swirling in water, dead bodies, bloated and colorless, bodies so numerous that they jammed against each other and clogged the stream. The caption explained that these were the corpses of genocide victims in Rwanda. Looking up from the paper, I saw a group of museum staffers arriving for work. On their maroon blazers, several wore the lapel buttons that sold for a dollar each in the museum shop, inscribed with the slogans “Remember” and “Never Again.” The museum was just a year old; at its inaugural ceremony, President Clinton had described it as “an investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead.” Apparently, all he meant was that the victims of future exterminations could now die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated, but at the time, his meaning seemed to carry a bolder promise.

By early June, the Secretary-General of the UN—and even, in an odd moment, the French Foreign Minister—had taken to describing the slaughter in Rwanda as “genocide.” But the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights still favored the phrase “possible genocide,” while the Clinton administration actually forbade unqualified use of the g-word. The official formulation approved by the White House was: “acts of genocide may have occurred.” When Christine Shelley, a State Department spokeswoman, tried to defend this semantic squirm at a press briefing on June 10, she was asked how many acts of genocide it takes to make a genocide. She said she wasn’t in “a position to answer,” adding dimly, “There are formulations that we are using that we are trying to be consistent in our use of.” Pressed to define an act of genocide, Shelley recited the definition of the crime from the Genocide Convention of 1948, which the United States only got around to signing in 1989, fourteen years after Rwanda itself had done so. A State Department transcript of the briefing records the ensuing exchange:

Shelley was a bit more to the point when she rejected the denomination of genocide, because, she said, “there are obligations which arise in connection with the use of the term.” She meant that if it was a genocide, the Convention of 1948 required the contracting parties to act. Washington didn’t want to act. So Washington pretended that it wasn’t a genocide. Still, assuming that the above exchange took about two minutes, an average of eleven Tutsis were exterminated in Rwanda while it transpired.

The press and many members of Congress were sufficiently revolted by the administration’s shameless evasions on Rwanda that even as Shelley was spinning in Washington, Secretary of State Warren Christopher told reporters in Istanbul: “If there’s any particular magic in calling it a genocide, I have no hesitancy in saying that.” Clinton’s brain trust then produced an inventive new reading of the Genocide Convention. Instead of obliging signatory states to prevent genocide, the White House determined, the Convention merely “enables” such preventive action. This was rubbish, of course, but by neutering the word “genocide” the new spin allowed American officials to use it without anxiety. Meanwhile, the armored personnel carriers for the all-African intervention force sat on a runway in Germany while the UN pleaded for a five-million-dollar reduction of the rental charge. When the White House finally agreed to the discount, transport planes were not available. Desperate to have something to show for the constant American protestations of concern about Rwanda, administration officials took to telling reporters that Washington was contributing to a public-health initiative in Uganda to clean up more than ten thousand Rwandan corpses from the shores of Lake Victoria.

THE HARDER WASHINGTON tried to keep its hands clean of Rwanda, the dirtier they got. At the same time, France was chafing for an opportunity to rescue its investment of military and political prestige in Rwanda. That meant salvaging Habyarimana’s Hutu Power heirs from the increasingly likely prospect of a total defeat at the hands of the dreaded Anglophone RPF. Communications between Paris and Kigali remained constant, cordial, and often downright conspiratorial. Hawkish French diplomats and Africa hands generally adopted the official position of Rwanda’s genocidal government: that far from being a matter of policy the massacres of Tutsis were the result of mass popular outrage following Habyarimana’s assassination; that the “population” had “risen as a single man” to defend itself; that the government and army wanted only to restore order; that the killing was an extension of the war with the RPF; that the RPF started it and was the greater offender—in short, that Rwandans were simply killing each other as they were wont to do, for primordial tribal reasons, since time immemorial.

Such mystification aside, the genocide remained a fact, and although France had rarely hesitated in the past to conduct unilateral, partisan military invasions to prop up its African clients, the genocide made such a move awkward. The French press was crowding the French political and military establishment with exposés of its blatant complicity in the preparation and implementation of the butchery. Then, in mid-June, the French government hit on the idea of billing a military expedition into Rwanda as a “humanitarian” mission and carrying it out under the UN flag, with some rented Senegalese troops along for the ride to create an aura of multilateralism. When asked what he thought of such a scheme, UNAMIR’s indignant General Dallaire told the Independent of London, “I flat out refuse to answer that question—no way.” Many African leaders outside the Francophone bloc, like South Africa’s President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, openly questioned French motives, and the RPF pronounced Paris’s plan unacceptable. On the nights of June 16 and 18, arms shipments for the Hutu Power regime were landed, with French connivance, in the eastern Zairean city of Goma and shuttled over the border to Rwanda. But on June 22, the Security Council—eager to be relieved of its shame, and apparently blind to the extra shame it was bringing upon itself—endorsed the “impartial” French deployment, giving it a two-month mandate with the permission to use aggressive force that had systematically been denied to UNAMIR.

The next day, the first French troops of Opération Turquoise rolled from Goma into northwestern Rwanda, where they were welcomed by enthralled bands of interahamwe—singing, waving French tricolor flags, and carrying signs with slogans like “Welcome French Hutus”—while a disc jockey at RTLM advised Hutu women to gussy themselves up for the white men, taunting, “Now that the Tutsi girls are all dead, it’s your chance.”

The timing of Opération Turquoise was striking. By late May, the massacre of Tutsis had slowed down because most of them had already been massacred. The hunt continued, of course, especially in the western provinces of Kibuye and Cyangugu, but Gérard Prunier, a political scientist who was part of the task force that worked out France’s intervention scheme, has written that the great worry in Paris as plans for the mobilization got underway in mid-June was whether its troops would find any large concentrations of Tutsis to rescue before the television cameras. In much of Rwanda, Hutu Power’s message to the masses had been changed from an order to kill to an order to flee before the RPF advance. On April 28—long ago, in the compressed time frame of the Rwandan apocalypse—a quarter of a million Hutus, bolting before the RPF advance, had streamed over a bridge into Tanzania from the eastern province of Kibungo. This was the largest and speediest mass flight across an international border in modern history, and although it included whole formations of interahamwe, military units, town councils, and the civilian throngs who had strewn the church at Nyarubuye and the rest of Kibungo with corpses, those who fled were indiscriminately received with open arms by UN and humanitarian agencies and accommodated as refugees in giant camps.

Before France even began talking of a “humanitarian” military expedition, the RPF controlled eastern Rwanda, and its forces were moving steadily westward in a broad pincer movement to the north and south of Kigali. As they progressed, the full extent of the extermination of Tutsis in the areas they conquered was broadcast to the world. While Rwandan government leaders and RTLM claimed that the RPF was killing every Hutu it found alive, and French military spokesmen promoted the idea of a “two-way genocide” and called the RPF the Khmer Noir, the dominant impression in the international press was of an astonishingly disciplined and correct rebel army, determined to restore order. And for Tutsis and most Hutus of good conscience the best hope for salvation was to reach, or be reached by, the RPF zone.

The RPF, which consisted at that time of about twenty thousand fighters, was forcing a national army more than twice its size, backed by militias and a great mass of civilians mobilized for “self-defense,” to retreat. For anybody concerned about the welfare of Hutu Power, as so many in France were, the obvious question would seem to have been: What went wrong? The simplest answer was that Rwanda’s Hutu Power regime was sapping its frontline military effort in favor of completing the genocide, just as the Germans had done in the final months of World War II. But a subtler dynamic was at work in Rwanda as well. From the start of the war with the RPF in 1990, Hutu extremists had promoted their genocidal aspirations with the world-upside-down rhetoric of Hutu victimization. Now Hutu Power had presided over one of the most outrageous crimes in a century of seemingly relentless mass political murder, and the only way to get away with it was to continue to play the victim. In yielding Rwanda to the RPF and leading vast flocks into exile, the Hutu Power leaders could retain control of their subjects, establish a rump “refugee” state in UN-sponsored camps, and pretend that their worst fears had been justified.

France promised the Security Council that its objective in Rwanda “naturally excludes any interference in the development of the balance of military forces between the parties involved in the conflict.” But within a week of their arrival, French troops occupied nearly a quarter of the country, sweeping across southwestern Rwanda to stand face to face with the RPF. At that point, France suddenly reinterpreted its “humanitarian” venture and declared its intention to turn the entire territory it had conquered into a “safe zone.” The RPF was not alone in asking: safe for whom? France’s own ex-President, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, accused the French command of “protecting some of those who had carried out the massacres.”

The RPF didn’t waste much time in argument. It launched an all-out offensive to limit the Zone Turquoise. On July 2 it captured Butare, and on July 4 it took Kigali, scuttling Hutu Power’s earlier plans to mark that day with a funeral for President Habyarimana and a celebration of the total eradication of Tutsis from the capital.

OPÉRATION TURQUOISE WAS eventually credited with rescuing at least ten thousand Tutsis in western Rwanda, but thousands more continued to be killed in the French-occupied zone. Hutu Power brigades draped their vehicles with French flags to lure Tutsis from hiding to their deaths; and even when real French troops found survivors, they often told them to wait for transport, then went away and returned to find that those they had “saved” were corpses. From the moment they arrived, and wherever they went, the French forces supported and preserved the same local political leaders who had presided over the genocide. While the United States still had not managed to deliver the armored personnel carriers promised to UNAMIR’s African volunteers, the French had arrived in Zaire decked for battle, with an awesome array of artillery and armor, and a fleet of twenty military aircraft that was instantly the most imposing flying power in central Africa. And just as they embraced the Hutu Power military regime and its militias as the legitimate authorities of a state under rebel siege, they openly regarded the RPF as the enemy—at least until the fall of Butare. Then the French softened their tone. They didn’t exactly back down, but the sneering animosity with which Turquoise spokesmen referred to the rebels suddenly gave way to something like grudging respect, and rumors began to circulate that the RPF had scored a direct military victory against France. Several years later, I asked Major General Paul Kagame, who had led the RPF to victory, whether there was any truth to this theory.

“Something like that,” Kagame told me. “It occurred during our approach to Butare. I received from General Dallaire of UNAMIR a message from the French general in Goma telling me that we should not enter Butare. They were trying to tell me there would be a fight.” Kagame told Dallaire that he “could not tolerate such a provocation and such arrogance on the part of the French.” Then, he recalled, “I told the troops to change course, to move to Butare now. They arrived in the evening. I told them just to surround the town and stay put. I didn’t want them to get involved in a firefight at night. So they took positions and waited until morning. When our troops entered, they found that the French had secretly moved out to Gikongoro”—to the west. “But then, through Dallaire, they asked permission to return for some Catholic sisters and some orphans they wanted to take away. I cleared it. The French came back, but they didn’t know that we had already secured the route from Gikongoro to Butare. We had set a long ambush, nearly two companies along the road.”

The French convoy consisted of about twenty-five vehicles, and as it left Butare, Kagame’s forces sprang their trap and ordered the French to submit each vehicle to inspection. “Our interest was to make sure none of these people they were taking were FAR or militias. The French refused. Their jeeps were mounted with machine guns, so they turned them on our troops as a sign of hostility. When the soldiers in the ambush realized there was going to be a confrontation, they came out, and a few fellows who had rocket-propelled grenade launchers targeted the jeeps. When the French soldiers saw that, they were all instructed to point their guns upward. And they did. They allowed our soldiers to carry out the inspection.” In one of the last vehicles, Kagame said, two government soldiers were found. One ran away, and was shot dead, and Kagame added, “Maybe they killed the other one, too.” At the sound of shooting, the French vehicles that had been cleared to go ahead turned on the road and began firing from afar, but the exchange lasted less than a minute.

Kagame recalled another incident when his men had French troops in custody and tense negotiations had to be carried out through General Dallaire. On that occasion, Kagame said, “They threatened to come in with helicopters and bomb our troops and positions. I told them that I thought the matter was going to be discussed and resolved peacefully, but that if they wanted to fight, I had no problem with that.” In the end, he said, the French pleaded for their men back, and he let them go. Kagame, who grew up in Uganda as a Rwandan refugee and spoke English, told me that he couldn’t comprehend France’s support for the génocidaires—as even English-speaking Rwandans call the adherents of Hutu Power—and he scoffed at French fears of an Anglophone conquest of Rwanda. “If they wanted people here to speak French, they shouldn’t have helped to kill people here who spoke French.”

Kagame’s feelings about UNAMIR were more nuanced. He said that he appreciated General Dallaire as a man, but not “the helmet he wore,” and that he had told Dallaire so directly. “UNAMIR was here, armed—they had armored personnel carriers, tanks, all sorts of weapons—and people got killed while they were watching. I said I would never allow that. I told him, ‘In such a situation, I would take sides. Even if I were serving the UN, I would take the side of protecting people.’ I actually remember telling him that it is a bit of a disgrace for a general to be in a situation where people are being killed, defenseless, and he is equipped—he has soldiers, he has arms—and he cannot protect them.”

Dallaire himself seemed to agree. Two and a half years after the genocide, he said, “The day I take my uniform off will be the day that I will also respond to my soul, and to the traumas… particularly of millions of Rwandans.” Even among the French troops who served in Opération Turquoise, some souls became troubled. “We have been deceived,” Sergeant Major Thierry Prungnaud told a reporter at a collection site for emaciated and machete-scarred Tutsi survivors in early July of 1994. “This is not what we were led to believe. We were told that Tutsis were killing Hutus. We thought the Hutus were the good guys and the victims.” But individual discomfort aside, the signal achievement of the Opération Turquoise was to permit the slaughter of Tutsis to continue for an extra month, and to secure safe passage for the genocidal command to cross, with a lot of its weaponry, into Zaire.

AS THE RPF entered Butare and Kigali in early July, more than a million Hutus took to their heels, following their leaders to the west. What moved them was the fear that the RPF would treat them as Hutu Power had treated its “enemies.” That fear has often been described as fear of reprisal, but for those in the crowd who had indeed helped exterminate Tutsis, the fear should properly be called fear of justice or at least of punishment. Of course, to fear justice one must first believe that one has done wrong. To the génocidaires, the prospect of an imminent RPF victory proved that they were the victims, and Hutu Power’s propaganda engines tried to make the most of that feeling.

“The fifty thousand bodies that can be found in Lake Victoria, which threaten Lake Victoria with pollution—they come from massacres which only the RPF could have committed,” declared the RTLM announcer Georges Ruggiu, in a typical broadcast on June 30. Ruggiu, a white, Italian-born Belgian citizen, who had found his calling in life as a Hutu Power misinformation propagandist, went on to suggest, absurdly, that only five thousand people could still be found alive in the RPF zone. The next morning, July 1, was Rwanda’s independence day, and Ruggiu wished his listeners “a good national holiday, even if it is probably a holiday where they must still work and fight.” Instead, hundreds of thousands of Ruggiu’s listeners were fleeing. RTLM itself was forced to shut down for a few days while it moved its studio northwest from Kigali. Broadcasts like Ruggiu’s had done a good job of convincing even those without blood on their hands that staying behind was not an option. But flight was often blind—a function of family ties, or mass panic, rather than of reason or individual choice. In many cases, whole communities were herded onto the road and marched along by force of arms, with their mayors and deputy mayors at the front of the pack, and soldiers and interahamwe at the rear, hustling them onward.

Those who fled south entered the Zone Turquoise, while to the north a million and a half people flooded toward Gisenyi and the border with Goma, Zaire. As they went, they grabbed every bit of portable property they could lay hands on and every wheeled vehicle that still rolled to carry themselves and their cargo. What they could not take with them, the Hutu Power mobs systematically looted and laid to waste: government offices, factories, schools, electrical pylons, homes, shops, tea and coffee plantations. They tore away roofing and ripped out windows, slashed water lines and ate or carted off all they could that was edible.

Thousands of children were abandoned along the route of flight, lost in the shuffle, and often deliberately left behind, and who will claim to know why—out of some fantasy that it was safer for the children? or because the parents could move more swiftly unburdened? out of shame or out of shamelessness? Priests led whole congregations into the unknown. Army battalions rolled through the crowd, and businessmen and bureaucrats drove their cars heaped with their household wares, their wives and cousins, their children and grandmothers—and their radios, of course, tuned to RTLM. When tension gripped the crowd, stampedes occurred, and people were crushed to death by the dozens.

The frontline troops of the RPF followed the mob into the Hutu Power heartland of the northwest, securing control of the country from the routed government forces. On July 12, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross pronounced that a million people had been killed in the genocide. On July 13, the rebels captured Ruhengeri, Habyarimana’s old home base, and during the two days that followed an estimated half million Hutus crossed the border into Goma. On July 15, the United States withdrew diplomatic recognition from Rwanda’s Hutu Power government and shut down its Washington embassy. On July 16, the Hutu Power President and most of his cabinet fled into the Zone Turquoise. France had promised to arrest them, but on July 17 they moved on with the entourage of Colonel Bagasora to Zaire, where the influx of Rwandans was now said to be a million strong. At the same time, in Kigali, the RPF declared that it would form a new national government, guided by the power-sharing principles of the Arusha Accords and without regard for ethnicity. On July 18, following an intensive artillery battle, the RPF captured Gisenyi and began securing the northwestern border with Zaire. On July 19, the new government—a coalition between the RPF and surviving members of the anti-Hutu Power opposition parties—was sworn in at Kigali, and in New York the UN ambassador of the ousted genocidal regime was forced to give up his seat on the Security Council. Thereafter, Rwanda’s national army would be known as the Rwandese Patriotic Army, the exiled Forces Armées Rwandaises would be known as the ex-FAR, and the RPF would be the name only of the former rebel movement’s political structure, which formed the backbone of the new regime. On July 20, the ex-FAR and interahamwe began raiding emergency shipments of relief food and supplies that were being airlifted into Zaire for the refugees. That same day, in Goma, the first cases of cholera were reported in the teeming new camps. And with that the genocide began to be old news.

THE WORLD THAT had “stood around with its hands in its pockets,” as General Kagame put it, during the extermination of Tutsis, responded to the mass flight of Hutus into Zaire with passionate intensity. Goma in the late summer of 1994 presented one of the most bewildering human spectacles of the century, and the suffering on display there made for what cameramen unabashedly call “great TV.”

Goma sits on the northern shore of Lake Kivu at the base of a range of towering volcanoes, and north and west of town a vast and inhospitable plain of hardened black lava covered by rough and scraggly bush stretches for miles. The rock is jagged and sharp, lacerating even to the toughened soles of habitually barefoot Rwandan peasants, and yet it is a crumbly rock, and everything that comes near it is quickly coated in a coal-like dust. It was on this bed of brimstone that the Rwandan hordes settled down in six camps more populous than any city in the region—a hundred twenty thousand here, a hundred fifty thousand there, two hundred thousand down the road—and all at once they began dying like flies. More than thirty thousand died in the three or four weeks before the cholera epidemic was contained. A man would be staggering along the road, and then he’d sit, and while the cameras rolled, he would crumple up, tip over, and be gone. And not just men but women and little children—simply because they’d had a sip of water in which somebody had pissed, or shat, or dumped a body. The dead were rolled up in straw mats and deposited along the roadside for collection: mile after mile of neatly bundled bodies. Bulldozers had to be brought in to dig mass graves and plow the bodies under. Picture it: a million people, shifting through the smoke of cooking fires on a vast black field, and behind them—it so happened—the huge dark cone of the Nyaragongo volcano had come to life, burbling with flame that made the night sky red and smoke that further clouded the day.

This scene was broadcast to the world around the clock, and it came across in one of two ways. In the sloppy version, you heard, or read, that there had been a genocide, and then you heard and saw, or read, that a million refugees had wound up in this nearly perfect scene of hell on earth, and you thought genocide plus refugees equals refugees from genocide, and your heart was wrenched. Or else you got the story straight—these were people who had killed or who had been terrified into following the killers into exile—and you heard, or read, or could not but infer, that this nearly perfect scene of hell on earth was some sort of divine retribution, that the cholera was like a biblical plague, that the horror had been equalized, and it was all much more than you could stomach, never mind comprehend, and your heart was wrenched. By this process of compression and imagination, the imponderable sprawl of febrile humanity at Goma blotted out the memory of the graveyard at its back, and an epidemic that came out of bad water and killed tens of thousands eclipsed a genocide that had come out of a hundred years of insane identity politics and resulted in nearly a million murders.

“If it bleeds, it leads,” the old newsroom saw has it, and in Rwanda the blood was beginning to dry. The story was in Goma, and it was no longer just a sad, confusing, ugly African story. It was our story, too—the whole world was there to save the Africans from their sad, confusing, ugly story. Planes churned in and out of the Goma airfield twenty-four hours a day, bringing plastic sheeting to build refugee tents, bringing food by the ton, bringing well-digging equipment, medical supplies, fleets of white four-wheel-drive Land Cruisers, office equipment, lime to bury the dead, and nurses, doctors, logisticians, social workers, security officers, and press officers—in the largest, most rapid, and most expensive deployment by the international humanitarian-aid industry in the twentieth century. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees led the charge, and behind it came an array of more than a hundred relief agencies frantic to get in on the astonishingly dramatic—and yes, lucrative—action. Almost overnight, Goma became the capital of a new, semiautonomous archipelago of refugee camps, organized with ever-increasing efficiency under the pale blue flag of the UNHCR. Beneath that flag, however, the UN had little control.

Zairean troops had claimed to be disarming Rwandans as they came over the border, and great piles of machetes and guns did accumulate beside the immigration shacks, but sitting in a car, amid the torrent of humanity sweeping through Goma, an American military officer telephoned Washington and dictated a list of the astonishing array of artillery, armor, and light weaponry that was being carried past him by the ex-FAR. Presided over by this largely intact army, and by the interahamwe, the camps were rapidly organized into perfect replicas of the Hutu Power state—same community groupings, same leaders, same rigid hierarchy, same propaganda, same violence. In this regime, the humanitarians were treated rather like the service staff at a seedy mafia-occupied hotel: they were there to provide—food, medicine, housewares, an aura of respectability; if at times they were pandered to, it was only because they were being set up to be cheated; if they needed to be browbeaten, a mob quickly surrounded them; and if they were essentially the dupes of their criminal guests, they were not unwitting about it and, with time, their service effectively made them accessories to the Hutu Power syndicate.

None of this was especially subtle or secretive. By late August, when the French finally withdrew from the Zone Turquoise, another half million Hutus—including many Hutu Power loyalists —had moved on to Burundi or, through Bukavu, Zaire, to a network of camps that stretched along the south end of Lake Kivu. Although Goma still had the roughest camps, the ex-FAR and interahamwe quickly established a presence wherever the UN set up a refuge. International humanitarian law forbids the establishment of refugee camps within fifty miles of the inhabitants’ home country, but all of the camps for Rwandans were closer to home than that, and most lay just a few miles from the Rwandan border in Tanzania, Burundi, and Zaire. Nearly a third of Rwanda’s Hutu population was in these camps. Of course, that meant that twothirds—more than four million people—had chosen to stay in Rwanda, and the cholera and general horror of Goma inspired a number of refugees to reflect that they might have been better off if they, too, had stayed behind. But those who spoke of returning were often denounced as RPF accomplices, and some were killed by the camp militias. After all, if all the innocent refugees left, only the guilty would remain, and Hutu Power’s monopoly on international pity might be shaken.

A reporter who was sent into Goma directly from Bosnia told me that he knew what Hutu Power was and that he looked up at the volcano and prayed, “God, if that thing erupts right now, and buries the killers, I will believe that you are just and I will go to church again every day of my life.” Many humanitarian-aid workers told me they had similarly anguished thoughts, but that didn’t stop most of them from settling in. It bothered them that the camp leaders might be war criminals, not refugees in any conventional sense of the word, but fugitives. It was unpleasant to hear those leaders say that the refugees would never return except as they had come, en masse, and that when they went back they would finish the job they had started with the Tutsis. And it was really disturbing that within weeks of their arrival, even before the cholera had been brought entirely under control, armed bands from the camps began waging a guerrilla war of bloody cross-border raids on Rwanda. Some humanitarian agencies found the extreme politicization and militarization of the camps so distasteful that in November 1994 they pulled out of Goma. But others eagerly filled the empty places.

In the first months after the genocide, there was much discussion at the UN of assembling an international force to disarm the militants in the camps and to separate out the political and criminal elements from the subject masses. For months on end, one high-level international diplomat after another issued alarming statements about violence among the refugees in Zaire, warning that Hutu Power planned a massive invasion of Rwanda and calling for a force to bring order to the camps. But although all the major powers were paying heavily to keep the camps running, when the Secretary-General asked for volunteers for such a force, not a single country was willing to provide troops.

The border camps turned the Rwandan crisis into a regional crisis. It remained, as it had always been, a political crisis, but the so-called international community preferred to treat it as a humanitarian crisis, as if the woe had appeared without any human rhyme or reason, like a flood or an earthquake. In fact, the Rwandan catastrophe was widely understood as a kind of natural disaster—Hutus and Tutsis simply doing what their natures dictated, and killing each other. If so many people had fled in such horrible circumstances, the thinking went, they must have been fleeing something even more horrible. So the génocidaires scored another extraordinary public-relations victory through the deft manipulation of mass anguish, and—of all things—an appeal to the world’s conscience.

IN SEPTEMBER OF 1997, shortly before Secretary-General Kofi Annan muzzled him against testifying before the Belgian Senate, General Dallaire, formerly of UNAMIR, went on Canadian television and said of his tour in Rwanda: “I’m fully responsible for the decisions of the ten Belgian soldiers dying, of others dying, of several of my soldiers being injured and falling sick because we ran out of medical supplies, of fifty-six Red Cross people being killed, of two million people becoming displaced and refugees, and about a million Rwandans being killed—because the mission failed, and I consider myself intimately involved with that responsibility.”

Dallaire refused to “pass the buck” to the UN system. Instead he passed it on to the member states of the Security Council and of the General Assembly. If, in the face of genocide, governments fear placing their soldiers at risk, he said, “then don’t send soldiers, send Boy Scouts”—which is basically what the world did in the refugee camps. Dallaire was in uniform as he faced the camera; his graying hair was closely cropped; he held his square jaw firmly outthrust; his chest was dappled with decorations. But he spoke with some agitation, and his carefully measured phrases did nothing to mask his sense of injury or his fury.

He said: “I haven’t even started my real mourning of the apathy and the absolute detachment of the international community, and particularly of the Western world, from the plight of Rwandans. Because, fundamentally, to be very candid and soldierly, who the hell cared about Rwanda? I mean, face it. Essentially, how many people really still remember the genocide in Rwanda? We know the genocide of the Second World War because the whole outfit was involved. But who really is involved in the Rwandan genocide? Who comprehends that more people were killed, injured, and displaced in three and a half months in Rwanda than in the whole of the Yugoslavian campaign in which we poured sixty thousand troops and the whole of the Western world was there, and we’re pouring billions in there, still trying to solve the problem. How much is really being done to solve the Rwandan problem? Who is grieving for Rwanda and really living it and living with the consequences? I mean, there are hundreds of Rwandans whom I knew personally whom I found slaughtered with their families complete—and bodies up to here—villages totally wiped out… and we made all that information available daily and the international community kept watching.”

The utopian premise of the Genocide Convention had been that a moral imperative to prevent efforts to exterminate whole peoples should be the overriding interest animating the action of an international community of autonomous states. This is a radical notion, fundamentally at odds, as so much of the internationalist experiment has proven to be, with the principle of sovereignty. States have never acted for purely disinterested humanitarian reasons; the novel idea was that the protection of humanity was in every state’s interest, and it was well understood in the aftermath of World War II that action against genocide would require a willingness to use force and to risk the lives of one’s own. The belief was that the price to the world of such a risk would not be as great as the price of inaction. But whose world were the drafters of the Genocide Convention—and the refugee conventions, which soon followed—thinking of?

I first traveled to Rwanda via Brussels on May 8, 1995. The European papers were full of commemorative articles marking the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day. The Herald Tribune had reprinted its entire front page from May 8, 1945, and the articles impressed me with their fighting spirit: smash the Germans, conquer, then bring justice, then reconstruct. The European Wall Street Journal carried news of a poll which found that, fifty years after the fact, sixty-five percent of Germans believed that it was a good thing their country had been defeated. And I wondered: Can we imagine such an outcome for any of the wars of today?

Rwanda had presented the world with the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler’s war against the Jews, and the world sent blankets, beans, and bandages to camps controlled by the killers, apparently hoping that everybody would behave nicely in the future.

The West’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.

ON TELEVISION, MAJOR General Dallaire was politic. He blamed no governments by name. He said, “The real question is: What does the international community really want the UN to do?” He said, “The UN simply wasn’t given the tools.” And he said, “We did not want to take on the Rwandan armed forces and the interahamwe.”

Listening to him, I was reminded of a conversation I had with an American military intelligence officer who was having a supper of Jack Daniel’s and Coca-Cola at a Kigali bar.

“I hear you’re interested in genocide,” the American said. “Do you know what genocide is?”

I asked him to tell me.

“A cheese sandwich,” he said. “Write it down. Genocide is a cheese sandwich.”

I asked him how he figured that.

“What does anyone care about a cheese sandwich?” he said. “Genocide, genocide, genocide. Cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich. Who gives a shit? Crimes against humanity. Where’s humanity? Who’s humanity? You? Me? Did you see a crime committed against you? Hey, just a million Rwandans. Did you ever hear about the Genocide Convention?”

I said I had.

“That convention,” the American at the bar said, “makes a nice wrapping for a cheese sandwich.”