We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

12

IN JULY OF 1995, a year after the installation of Rwanda’s new government, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa visited Kigali and delivered a sermon at a football stadium, begging the assembled multitude: “Please, please, please, our sisters and brothers, please, please, keep quiet. Please, please, stop crying!”

It was an astonishing message to a people whose country had run with blood, particularly from a man who had won a Nobel Peace Prize for refusing to keep quiet. But as he went on to invoke the recent history of blacks wresting power from whites in South Africa, it became clear that Archbishop Tutu had come as much to scold as to console Rwanda for its woes. In South Africa, he said, “They had different languages, they had different races, they had different cultures…. You are all black. You speak one language. And I’m trying to discover what have we got in our heads here?” The crowd laughed, but the laughter ceased when the archbishop went on: “Hey? Hey? Hey? Hey? Do you want to tell me that blacks are stupid? Eh? Are you stupid?”

A rather soft “No” rose from the crowd.

“I can’t hear you. Are you stupid?” Tutu asked again.

“No.”

And a third time, Tutu asked: “Are you stupid?”

The crowd’s response, like the archbishop’s call, had increased in volume each time around, but even the last and loudest “No!” seemed tempered by a sense that, however ironically the question was meant, it remained an insult of a kind to which Rwandans are unaccustomed.

What did being black have to do with anything in Rwanda? That might be an issue in South Africa, but except for a handful of foreign residents, everyone in Rwanda—stupid and smart, foul and fair, majority and minority—is black, and the archbishop’s fixation on the category suggested an alien view of the country’s ordeal that lumped violators and violated together as equal partners in the country’s affliction.

“I come as an African,” Tutu later explained to an assembly of government leaders and diplomats. “I come as one who, willynilly, shares in the shame, in the disgrace, in the failures of Africa because I am an African. And what happens here, what happens in Nigeria, wherever—that becomes part of my experience.”

A member of parliament seated beside me rolled her eyes. Tutu’s insistence on race was meant as an expression of solidarity, but Rwanda wasn’t South Africa, or Nigeria, and Africans had done no more to stop the genocide than anyone else. So it was strange to be told that a crime perpetrated by Rwandans against Rwandans was a crime against African pride and progress, and that the shame of it was a private African affair rather than a shame to all humanity. Stranger still to be told to shut up and stop acting like stupid blacks.

WHEN I GOT depressed in Rwanda, which was often, I liked to go driving. On the road, the country resolved itself in rugged glory, and you could imagine, as the scenes rushed past and the car filled with smells of earth and eucalyptus and charcoal, that the people and their landscape—the people in their landscape—were as they had always been, undisturbed. In the fields people tilled, in the markets they marketed, in schoolyards the girls in bright blue dresses and boys in khaki shorts and safari shirts played and squabbled like children anywhere. Across sweeping valleys, and through high mountain passes, the roadside presented the familiar African parade: brightly clad women with babies bound to their backs and enormous loads on their heads; strapping young men in jeans and Chicago Bulls T-shirts ambling along empty-handed —save, perhaps, for a small radio; elderly gents in suits weaving down red-dirt lanes on ancient bicycles; a girl chasing a chicken, a boy struggling to balance the bloody head of a goat on his shoulder; tiny tots in ragged smocks whacking cows out of your way with long sticks.

Life.

You knew, by the statistics, that most of the people you saw were Hutu, but you had no idea who was who; whether that girl, who stared blankly at your oncoming car and at the last minute winked and broke into a wide grin, was a massacre survivor, or whether she was a killer, or both, or what. If you stopped to buy a cold drink and a brochette of grilled goat, or to ask directions, a small crowd gathered to stare and offer commentary, reminding you of your exoticism. If you drove around in the northwest, and pulled over to admire the volcanoes, peasants came out of their fields to express approval that you had no greater purpose, in that moment, than to regard their place with pleasure. If you traveled southwest through the Nyungwe rain forest preserve and got out to watch the colobus monkeys, people in passing minibuses waved and cheered.

Most of Rwanda was once a forest like Nyungwe, a dark knot of vegetation trailed by low thin clouds. But centuries of use had stripped the forest away, and by the time I came along even the steepest slopes were tilled, grazed, and toiled over, shaded only at their summit by a vestigial crown of tall trees. The intensity with which every patch of available land was worked offered visual evidence of Rwanda’s population density and the attendant competition for resources, and it has been argued that the genocide was driven, in large measure, by basic economic motives: “to the victor go the spoils” and “there isn’t room for both of us”—that sort of thing, as if the killing had been a kind of Darwinian population control mechanism.

No doubt, the promise of material gain and living space did move some killers. But why hasn’t Bangladesh, or any other terribly poor and terribly crowded place of the many one might name, had a genocide? Overpopulation doesn’t explain why hundreds of thousands of people agreed to murder nearly a million of their neighbors in the course of a few weeks. Nothing really explains that. Consider all the factors: the precolonial inequalities; the fanatically thorough and hierarchical centralized administration; the Hamitic myth and the radical polarization under Belgian rule; the killings and expulsions that began with the Hutu revolution of 1959; the economic collapse of the late 1980s; Habyarimana’s refusal to let the Tutsi refugees return; the multiparty confusion; the RPF attack; the war; the extremism of Hutu Power; the propaganda; the practice massacres; the massive importation of arms; the threat to the Habyarimana oligarchy posed by peace through power sharing and integration; the extreme poverty, ignorance, superstition, and fear of a cowed, compliant, cramped—and largely alcoholic—peasantry; the indifference of the outside world. Combine these ingredients and you have such an excellent recipe for a culture of genocide that it’s easy to say that it was just waiting to happen. But the decimation[2] had been utterly gratuitous.

And afterward the world was a different place for anyone who chose to think about it. Rwandans had no choice. This was what interested me most about them: not the dead—what can you really say about a million murdered people whom you didn’t know?—but how those who had to live in their absence would do so. Rwanda had the memories and the habits of a long past, yet the rupture in that past had been so absolute that the country I was driving through was actually a place that had never existed before. Scenes of rural life that appeared eternal to me, and that impressed Joseph, the driver, as empty, were neither of those things. The Rwanda I visited in the years after the genocide was a world in limbo.

I SAID EARLIER that power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality, even if you have to kill a lot of them to make that happen. In this raw sense, power has always been very much the same everywhere; what varies is primarily the quality of the reality it seeks to create: is it based more in truth than in falsehood, which is to say, is it more or less abusive of its subjects? The answer is often a function of how broadly or narrowly the power is based: is it centered in one person, or is it spread out among many different centers that exercise checks on one another? And are its subjects merely subjects or are they also citizens? In principle, narrowly based power is easier to abuse, while more broadly based power requires a truer story at its core and is more likely to protect more of its subjects from abuse. This rule was famously articulated by the British historian Lord Acton in his formula “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

But like most truisms, Acton’s adage is not quite true: to take an example from American history, President Lincoln’s power was more absolute than President Nixon’s, yet Nixon was surely the more fundamentally corrupt of the two. So, when we judge political power, we need to ask not only what its base is but also how the power is exercised, under what circumstances, toward what ends, at what price, and with what success. These are tough judgments to make, generally open to dispute, and for those of us who live in the astonishing overall security provided by the great Western democracies of the late twentieth century, they are the very stuff of public life. Yet we seem to have a hard time taking seriously the notion that places where mass violence and suffering is so widespread that it is casually called “meaningless” might also be places where people engage in meaningful politics.

When I first went to Rwanda, I was reading a book called Civil War, which had been receiving great critical acclaim. Writing from an immediate post-Cold War perspective, the author, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a German, observed, “The most obvious sign of the end of the bipolar world order are the thirty or forty civil wars being waged openly around the globe,” and he set out to inquire what they were all about. This seemed promising until I realized that Enzensberger wasn’t interested in the details of those wars. He treated them all as a single phenomenon and, after a few pages, announced: “What gives today’s civil wars a new and terrifying slant is the fact that they are waged without stakes on either side, that they are wars about nothing at all.”

In the old days, according to Enzensberger—in Spain in the 1930s or the United States in the 1860s—people used to kill and die for ideas, but now “violence has separated itself from ideology,” and people who wage civil wars just kill and die in an anarchic scramble for power. In these wars, he asserted, there is no notion of the future; nihilism rules; “all political thought, from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Marx and Weber, is turned upside down,” and “all that remains is the Hobbesian ur-myth of the war of everyone against everyone else.” That such a view of distant civil wars offers a convenient reason to ignore them may explain its enormous popularity in our times. It would be nice, we may say, if the natives out there settled down, but if they’re just fighting for the hell of it, it’s not my problem.

But it is our problem. By denying the particularity of the peoples who are making history, and the possibility that they might have politics, Enzensberger mistakes his failure to recognize what is at stake in events for the nature of those events. So he sees chaos—what is given off, not what’s giving it off—and his analysis begs the question: when, in fact, there are ideological differences between two warring parties, how are we to judge them? In the case of Rwanda, to embrace the idea that the civil war was a free-for-all—in which everyone is at once equally legitimate and equally illegitimate—is to ally oneself with Hutu Power’s ideology of genocide as self-defense.

Politics, after all, mostly operates in the in-between realm of bad—or, if you’re an optimist, better—versus worse. On any given day in postgenocide Rwanda, you could collect stories of fresh ugliness, and you could also collect stories of remarkable social and political improvement. The more stories I collected, the more I began to realize that life during the genocide, by virtue of its absoluteness, had evoked a simpler range of responses than the challenge of living with its memory. For those who had endured, stories and questions tended to operate in a kind of call-and-response fashion—stories calling up questions, calling up more stories, calling up more questions—and nobody of any depth seemed to expect precise answers. At best they hoped for understandings, ways of thinking about the defiant human condition at the end of this century of unforeseen extremity. Quite often, I felt that these stories were offered to me the way that shipwrecked people, neither drowned nor saved, send messages in bottles: in the hope that, even if the legends they carry can do the teller no good, they may at some other time be of use to somebody, somewhere else.

Even now, as I write, in the early months of 1998, Rwanda’s war against the genocide continues. Perhaps by the time you read this the outcome will be clearer. Rwanda may again have endured incalculable nationwide bloodshed, and Hutu Power may again have prevailed over much, if not all, of the country. There’s also a chance that Rwanda will be a place of steady, grinding struggle, with periods and regions of great terror, and periods and regions of edgy stability, which is more or less how it has been since the genocide. Of course, if you’re some kind of archaeologist who digs this book up in the distant future, five or fifty or five hundred years from now, there’s a chance that Rwanda will be a peaceful land of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; you may be planning your next holiday there, and the stories you find in these pages will offer but a memorial backdrop, the way we now read stories of the genocide of American Indians or of slavery days, or accounts of all the horrible crimes against humanity that marked Europe’s progress, and think, as Conrad’s Marlow said of England, “We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

13

IN THE NINE months I spent in Rwanda in the course of six trips, the only freshly killed person I saw was a young man who had died in a car wreck. Three minutes earlier he had been riding along through his life, then his driver swerved to avoid hitting an old woman crossing the road, and now he lay on his side in high grass, locked in a fetal curl, with his head open. If I had a picture of him and reproduced it here with the caption “Tutsi genocide victim,” or “Hutu victim of the RPF,” you would have no way to perceive the deception. In either case, the appeal to your sympathies and your sense of outrage would be the same.

That is how the story of Rwanda has generally been reported, as the war between the génocidaires and the RPF-installed government drags on. In a typical dispatch, headed “Searching in Vain for Rwanda’s Moral High Ground,” my local paper, The New York Times, described a Hutu refugee maimed in an attack by Tutsi soldiers, and a Tutsi refugee maimed by Hutu Power militias, as “victims in an epic struggle between two rival ethnic groups” in which “no one’s hands are clean.” The impression created by such reports is that because victims on either side of the conflict suffer equally, both sides are equally insupportable. To drive the point home, the Times got a sound bite from Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian who is considered one of Europe’s leading authorities on Rwanda. “It’s not a story of good guys and bad guys,” Reyntjens told the newspaper. “It’s a story of bad guys. Period.”

It was after reading similar newspaper stories that I first decided to go to Rwanda. A year after the genocide, the Rwandese Patriotic Army had been deployed to close a camp for “internally displaced persons” at Kibeho, the hill famous for apparitions of the Virgin Mary. More than eighty thousand Hutus who had fled their homes after the genocide were living at the Kibeho camp, which the French had originally set up during Opération Turquoise. The RPA operation to close the camp had gone awry, and at least two thousand Hutus were reported killed. Once again, a UN battalion had been on hand and had done nothing. I remember a news photograph of a UN soldier holding two dead babies, one in each hand, during the cleanup after the killings.

First the genocide, and now this, I thought: Hutus kill Tutsis, then Tutsis kill Hutus—if that’s really all there is to it, then no wonder we can’t be bothered with it. Was it really so mindless and simple?

The piled-up dead of political violence are a generic staple of our information diet these days, and according to the generic report all massacres are created equal: the dead are innocent, the killers monstrous, the surrounding politics insane or nonexistent. Except for the names and the landscape, it reads like the same story from anywhere in the world: a tribe in power slaughters a disempowered tribe, another cycle in those ancient hatreds, the more things change the more they stay the same. As in accounts of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, we are told that experts knew the fault line was there, the pressure was building, and we are urged to be excited—by fear, distress, compassion, outrage, even simple morbid fascination—and perhaps to send a handout for the survivors. The generic massacre story speaks of “endemic” or “epidemic” violence and of places where people kill “each other,” and the ubiquity of the blight seems to cancel out any appeal to think about the single instance. These stories flash up from the void and, just as abruptly, return there. The anonymous dead and their anonymous killers become their own context. The horror becomes absurd.

I wanted to know more. The killings at the Kibeho camp offered a preview of one way that the UN border camps—particularly the heavily militarized Hutu Power enclaves in Zaire—might eventually be disbanded. Those camps were themselves havens for war criminals and champions of atrocity, and their very existence placed everyone in and around them in mortal danger. Nobody had any idea how to close them peacefully; in fact, nobody really seemed to believe that was possible. The story of Rwanda had been bothering my mind, and I wanted to explore how the killings at the Kibeho camp related and compared to the genocide that preceded them. According to the human rights orthodoxy of our age, such comparisons are taboo. In the words of Amnesty International: “Whatever the scale of atrocities committed by one side, they can never justify similar atrocities by the other.” But what does the word “similar” mean in the context of a genocide? An atrocity is an atrocity and is by definition unjustifiable, isn’t it? The more useful question is whether atrocity is the whole story.

Consider General Sherman’s march through Georgia at the head of the Union Army near the end of the American Civil War, a scorched-earth campaign of murder, rape, arson, and pillage that stands as a textbook case of gross human rights abuses. Historians don’t seem to believe that the atrocities of Sherman’s march fulfilled any otherwise unfulfillable strategic imperative. Yet it’s generally agreed that the preservation of the Union and the consequent abolition of slavery served the national good, so historians regard Sherman’s march as an episode of criminal excess by agents of the state rather than as evidence of the fundamental criminality of the state.

Similarly, in France, during the months immediately following World War II, between ten and fifteen thousand people were killed as fascist collaborators in a nationwide spasm of vigilante justice. Although nobody looks back on those purges as a moment of pride, no national leader has ever publicly regretted them. France, which considers itself the birthplace of human rights, had a venerable legal system, with plenty of policemen, lawyers, and judges. But France had been through a hellish ordeal, and the swift killing of collaborators was widely held to be purifying to the national soul.

The fact that most states are born of violent upheaval does not, of course, mean that disorder leads to order. In writing the history of events that are still unfolding in a state that is still unformed, it is impossible to know which tendencies will prevail and at what price. The safest position is the human rights position, which measures regimes on a strictly negative scale as the sum of their crimes and their abuses: if you damn all offenders and some later mend their ways, you can always take credit for your good influence. Unfortunately, the safest position may not necessarily be the wisest, and I wondered whether there is room—even a need—for exercising political judgment in such matters.

THE CAMP AT Kibeho had been one of dozens of camps for “internally displaced persons”—IDPs—established in the Zone Turquoise. When the French withdrew in late August of 1994, the camps held at least four hundred thousand people, and they were placed under the supervision of the refurbished UNAMIR and an assortment of UN and private international humanitarian agencies. The new government had wanted the camps closed immediately. Rwanda, the government claimed, was safe enough for everyone to go home, and significant concentrations of Hutu Power military and militia members among the IDPs made the camps themselves a major threat to the national security. The relief agencies agreed in principle, but insisted that departure from the camps should be entirely voluntary.

The IDPs, however, were not eager to leave the camps, where they were well fed, and provided with good medical care by the relief agencies, and where rumors that the RPF was exterminating Hutus en masse were being circulated by the génocidaires, who maintained a powerful influence over the population. As in the border camps, interahamwe agents didn’t hesitate to threaten and attack those who wished to leave Kibeho, fearing that a mass desertion of the civilian population would leave them isolated and exposed. The génocidaires also made frequent sorties out of the camps to terrorize and steal from the surrounding communities, attacking Tutsi genocide survivors and Hutus whom they suspected might bear witness against them. Kibeho was the epicenter of such activity. According to Mark Frohardt, who worked with the UN’s Rwanda Emergency Office and later served as deputy chief of the UN’s Human Rights mission in Rwanda, UNAMIR “determined that a disproportionately high percentage of the murders that were taking place in Rwanda, in late November and early December of 1994, had occurred within a twenty-kilometer radius of Kibeho.”

That December, UNAMIR and the RPA ran their only joint operation ever, a one-day sweep of Kibeho in which about fifty “hard-core elements”—that is, génocidaires—were arrested and some weapons were confiscated. Shortly afterward, the RPA began closing the smaller camps. The preferred strategy was one of nonviolent coercion: people were evicted from their shanties, then the shanties were torched. The IDPs got the message, and relief agencies, too, went along with the program, helping to move more than a hundred thousand people home. Follow-up studies by international relief workers, and UN human rights monitors, found that at least ninety-five percent of these IDPs resettled peacefully in their homes. At the same time, many génocidaires fled to other camps, especially to Kibeho, while some IDPs who returned to their villages were arrested on accusations of genocide, and some were alleged to have been killed in acts of revenge or banditry.

By early 1995, a quarter of a million IDPs remained in the camps, of which Kibeho was the largest and home to the largest collection of hard-core génocidaires. The UN and relief agencies, fearing the consequences of coercive closings, offered to come up with an alternative course of action. The government waited. Months went by; but the humanitarians could not agree on a coherent closing plan. In late March, the government announced that time was running out, and in mid-April the RPA was redeployed to do the job: camp by camp, the army sent at least two hundred thousand Hutus home in an orderly fashion.

Kibeho was left for last. Before dawn on April 18, the RPA ringed the camp, which still held at least eighty thousand men, women, and children. Alarmed by the soldiers, and worked into a panic by the resident Hutu Power operatives, the IDPs rushed pell-mell up the hill and gathered in a tight knot around the heavily sandbagged and razor wire-fortified headquarters of Zambatt—UNAMIR’s Zambian contingent. In this stampede, at least eleven children were crushed to death, and hundreds of people were severely burned by overturned cooking pots or badly cut up as they were forced against the UN razor wire.

The RPA tightened its cordon around the throng, and over the next two days, several gates were established around the perimeter. Relief agencies set up registration tables, and about five thousand people from the camp were searched and transported to their homes. But the gates were too few, the registration process was slow, there weren’t enough trucks to speed it up, the génocidaires among the IDPs were putting pressure on the rest not to cooperate, and some foreign relief workers were also advising camp residents to resist evacuation. Little food or water remained in the camp. Most people could barely move; they stood in their own urine and feces. On April 19, some IDPs hurled rocks at the RPA, and some reportedly attempted to grab RPA weapons. Soldiers opened fire, killing several dozen people. In the course of the day members of the Australian medical battalion of UNAMIR, Ausmed, began arriving at the camp to reinforce the Zambians.

Toward evening on April 20, a hard rain began to fall. That night, in the packed camp, some people began hacking at those around them with machetes. There was also sporadic shooting by RPA soldiers and by armed elements within the camp. By morning, at least twenty-one people had been killed, primarily by gunfire, and many more were wounded, primarily by machetes. Children kept getting trampled to death. The RPA kept tightening its cordon. Throughout the next day, people continued to file through the registration points and to leave the camp, mostly on foot, because the rain had made the roads largely impassable. The RPA restricted IDPs’ access to medical and water supplies and periodically fired into the air to drive the crowd toward the registration points. Acts of violence continued within the camp. “At the Zambian company,” an Ausmed officer later recalled, “a group kept running for shelter and hiding in the compound. We helped the Zambians push them back past the wire.”

Late in the morning of April 22, the wet and tormented mass of IDPs at Kibeho once again surged and stampeded against the RPA lines, breaching the cordon at the downhill end of the camp. A stream of IDPs ran through the opening, heading across the valley to the facing hills. RPA troops opened fire, shooting nonstop and indiscriminately into the crowd, and scores of soldiers set out in pursuit of those who had fled, shooting and lobbing grenades at them. The RPA barrage continued for hours; in addition to machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and at least one mortar were fired into the camp.

Barred by their mandate from using force except in self-defense, the UNAMIR peacekeepers in the Zambatt compound took up weapons only to fend off invasion by the crush of IDPs. Many later recalled weeping in distress and confusion as death and mutilation surrounded them. In typical testimony, a member of Ausmed described seeing “through a window a man attacking a woman with a machete,” then IDPs “throwing bricks, etc., at us,” then RPA soldiers firing rifles and tossing grenades at IDPs, then an IDP shooting at the peacekeepers, then “four RPA chase a young girl behind the Casualty Collection Point and shoot her eighteen times,” then a “vehicle-mounted machine gun… mowing down a large crowd of IDPs in long bursts,” then “RPA kill two old women… kick them downhill.”

Another Ausmed man recalled watching RPA soldiers murdering women and children, and said, “They seemed to be enjoying it.” And yet another Ausmed testimony described a couple of RPA soldiers firing into the crowd: “They were jumping around laughing and carrying on. It was like they were in a frenzy.” The same man also said, “It was pretty horrific to see at least four RPA stand around one IDP and empty a magazine each into him. Some of the IDPs stopped, so the RPA threw rocks at them to make them run again so they could shoot at them again. These IDPs were unarmed and frightened.”

By four o’clock that afternoon, when Mark Cuthbert-Brown, a British major who was serving as provost marshal of UNAMIR, arrived at Kibeho by helicopter, the shooting had tapered off to a sporadic background popping and small bursts of automatic fire. From the air, Cuthbert-Brown had seen long files of thousands of IDPs being searched and registered at RPA checkpoints and heading down the road, away from Kibeho. The Australians, the Zambians, and relief workers had been able to go out and begin collecting the dead and wounded, although their access was often blocked by RPA men. Then, after an hour in the camp, Major Cuthbert-Brown heard “a sudden rise in the tempo of firing.” Once again, the IDPs had broken through the RPA cordon and spilled down the hill, and the eariler scenes of atrocity repeated themselves for several hours. Crouched behind sandbags with binoculars, Cuthbert-Brown watched RPA soldiers hunt the IDPs down the valley and across the far hills, while other RPA soldiers continued to process thousands of IDPs for departure.

Shortly after nightfall, the second wave of intensive shooting abated. Cuthbert-Brown took notes:

An Ausmed man said, “We finished up that day disgusted with the RPA and why the UN didn’t send more people in than just a company of Zambians and approximately twenty-five Australians.”

In the night the RPA stopped shooting. “Soon after first light,” Major Cuthbert-Brown wrote in his log, “look over wall… and see bodies strewn around the area.” In the course of the day, tens of thousands of IDPs were marched and trucked out of the devastated camp, as UN teams and relief workers tended to the wounded and counted the dead. By early afternoon, reporters arrived in the camp and Cuthbert-Brown wrote “Media jamboree settles around the graves.” The first death toll to hit the wires was eight thousand, but that was quickly revised down to between two and four thousand—the largest number of them crushed to death in the stampedes, many killed by the RPA, and quite a few hacked, bludgeoned, and even speared to death by interahamwe in their midst. But the numbers were only estimates; the thickness of bodies on the ground in some places made it impossible to navigate the camp, and the RPA obstructed full access.

For the next week, the roadways out of Kibeho were clogged with tens of thousands of bedraggled IDPs marching home. Here and there along the way, groups of civilians gathered to taunt and sometimes to beat the returning IDPs. It was a tense time in Rwanda. “Last year, when nobody in the world tried to stop the genocide, and I saw the first RPF coming to liberate Rwanda, these guys were heroes, I went straight to shake his hand,” Fery Aalam, a Swiss delegate of the Red Cross, told me. “After Kibeho, I don’t know if I’d put out my hand first.”

The Kibeho returnees experienced a slightly higher overall rate of arrests and violence than those from other camps. But many of the Hutu Power loyalists from Kibeho were reported to have fled through the bush, making their way across Rwanda’s borders to the humanitarian archipelago of UN camps. There was no other safe haven left for the génocidaires.

IT WAS ON my fifth day in Rwanda, as I was getting a ride south from Kigali, that I came upon the car wreck in which the young man was killed. There were several injured survivors, and the people I was riding with took them to the hospital in Butare. Some Norwegian Red Cross nurses came out to chat. The nurses were tending to a special emergency wing that had been set up for Kibeho casualties. They had been performing thirty major operations a day, and had discharged a large group of patients that morning. Only the worst cases remained.

“Want to see?” one of the nurses asked, and led the way. Twenty or thirty cots were crowded beneath weak neon light, in a stench of rotting flesh and medicine. “The ones who’re left,” the nurse said, “are all machete cases.” I saw that—multiple amputations, split faces swollen around stitches. “We had some with the brain coming out,” the Norwegian said quite cheerily. “Strange, no? The RPA don’t use machetes. They did this to their own.

I felt woozy and moved out to the hall, where I lay down flat on the cool concrete floor beside an open window. The Norwegian followed me. “Strange country,” she said. I agreed. She said, “This hospital—last year, big massacre. Hutus killing Tutsis, doctors killing doctors, doctors killing patients, patients killing doctors, nurses, everybody. I’m with the Red Cross—so very Swiss, very neutral. I’m new, just arrived for this Kibeho business. But you think about it. With Kibeho, people say it’s starting again. It’s the next genocide. I look around. I talk to people. I see what happened. I think maybe it’s just ending very ugly and slow.”

“How can you tell the difference?” I asked.

“Talk to people. They’re scared. They say, What about the Zaire camps, Burundi, Tanzania? What about revenge? What about justice? OK. When people are scared like that they’re also hopeful. They’re saying they have something to lose—some hope.”

I said, “I can see that you’d be a good nurse.”

“No, really,” she said. “People always say bad things about a government—like with doctors. OK. So, like with doctors, maybe this is because you only need them most when they can’t help you enough.”

She made me laugh. I said, “You mean, like doctors, they kill some, they can’t help some, and they save some.”

“Is that so bad?” she said. “Ask people. In a place like this, pretend to yourself like you’re a journalist. Talk to everybody.”

I told her I was a journalist. “Oh,” she said. “Oh la la. I can’t talk to you. Red Cross rules. Forget everything I said.”

But how could I forget that Norwegian nurse? She was the most optimistic person I ever met in Rwanda.

ONE NIGHT, A few weeks later, I was at a Kigali bistro, sharing a pot of fondue bourguignonne and a pitcher of wine with Annick van Lookeren Campagne and Alexandre Castanias. Annick, who is Dutch, and Alexandre, a Greek, worked as monitors for the UN Human Rights mission in Rwanda. They had both been at Kibeho throughout the catastrophe, and this dinner was the last time they would have together before Annick returned to Holland. That may be why Alexandre spoke about Kibeho. He said it was the first time he did so, and when we finished eating we stayed in the restaurant for hours. We ordered a second pitcher of wine, and sent out for cigarettes, and Alexandre kept standing us rounds of cognac.

The talk about Kibeho had started when Alexandre asked me if I had been to the church at Nyarubuye, to see the memorial there of the unburied dead from the genocide. I hadn’t yet, and although when I did go I didn’t regret it, I gave Alexandre what I thought—and still think—was a good argument against such places. I said that I was resistant to the very idea of leaving bodies like that, forever in their state of violation—on display as monuments to the crime against them, and to the armies that had stopped the killing, as much as to the lives they had lost. Such places contradicted the spirit of the popular Rwandan T-shirt: “Genocide. Bury the dead, not the truth.” I thought that was a good slogan, and I doubted the necessity of seeing the victims in order fully to confront the crime. The aesthetic assault of the macabre creates excitement and emotion, but does the spectacle really serve our understanding of the wrong? Judging from my own response to cruel images and to what I had seen in the hospital ward of Kibeho wounded, I wondered whether people aren’t wired to resist assimilating too much horror. Even as we look at atrocity, we find ways to regard it as unreal. And the more we look, the more we become inured to—not informed by—what we are seeing.

I said these things, and Alexandre said, “I totally disagree. I experienced Kibeho as a movie. It was unreal. Only afterward, looking at my photographs—then it became real.”

When the first wave of shooting began, Alexandre had been at Zambatt, and he said: “I remember there were thousands of people crushing into the parking area. Thousands and thousands of people. I was up on the roof, watching. And I saw this one woman, a fat woman. In thousands and thousands and thousands of people, this one fat woman was the only thing I saw. I didn’t see anyone else. They were just thousands. And this fat woman, pressing along with the crowd—while I watched she was like a person drowning.” Alexandre brought his hands together, making them collapse inward and sink, and he appeared to shrink within his own frame. “One second she was standing, one second she was falling in the people, and I watched this happening. She disappeared. That was when I wanted only to take photographs. That fat woman, one fat woman, when you say the word Kibeho, she is all I really remember. That will be my one real image of Kibeho forever, that fat woman drowning in thousands and thousands of people. I remember she wore a yellow chemise.”

I never saw Alexandre’s photographs, but I told him that his description of that moment, and of his own passage from a sense of unreality during the events to the reality of his pictures, was more disturbing, more vivid, and more informative than anything I believed the photographs themselves could tell. In some ways it was quieter; the moment of shock was less concentrated, but it also involved one more and took one along with it.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you anything if I wasn’t looking.”

“You see and you don’t see,” Annick said. “Mostly you just do things. The pictures come later. When they were crushing on the gate at Zambatt, we were crushing back on it so it didn’t fall, and people started throwing babies over. You just catch them. You do things you’d never want to see a picture of.”

“Like walking over the bodies,” Alexandre said. “I feel very bad about that. It was very unreal and very insane, this decision to walk on dead people. I don’t know. I don’t know what was right or wrong, or if I feel guilty, but I feel bad. It was necessary. It was the only way to get through.”

“We had to pull the live ones out,” Annick said. She and Alexandre had collected hundreds of lost and orphaned children from the body piles, and from every crevice where a small person could hide: from the wheel wells of trucks, from under the hoods.

“I don’t know why but I didn’t care about the people killed by a bullet. I didn’t give a fuck about them,” Alexandre said. “They were dead, and the people wounded by bullets, they meant nothing to me. It was the people who were crushed.”

“Bullets and machetes are supposed to kill,” Annick said. “The people who got crushed were just killed by other people, like them, vulnerable, trying to live.”

“I got a doctor,” Alexandre went on, “I said, ‘They just look like they’re sleeping, I don’t know how to tell if they’re dead.’ He went through and checked twenty or thirty people, and he said, ‘They’re dead. They’re all dead.’ But when I had to walk on them, I felt I might wake them.”

“They were like all the luggage,” Annick said. I was able to picture that: Kibeho was a ghost town, piled deep with the abandoned belongings of displaced persons, smelling of death—and atop the hill, the charred cathedral that had become a crematorium during the genocide. “When we walked on the luggage,” Annick said, “there were probably people underneath. You can’t feel guilty, because it’s useless, and you walked on them to save lives.”

“Walking on them was about being alive,” Alexandre said. “After a while it was just about getting on with life. The dead are dead. There’s nothing you can do. Even with the living, what could we do? We gave them water. It was our only medicine. It was like a miracle. You’d see the face of a boy, fallen and death-like in the crowd, and you drop a few drops of water on him and he is like —aahhh!” Alexandre’s face expanded and he rose a bit in his seat, like a sped-up film of a flower blossoming. “Then you turn around,” he said. “And the next minute everyone we gave water to was dead.”

“Yah,” Annick said.

“Bodies,” Alexandre said.

“That guy with the spear in his throat,” Annick said. “I just left him. And at one time I was laughing and laughing. I couldn’t stop laughing. I was with the wounded, blood everywhere, and a shoulder hanging off from a grenade, or a mouth split open with a machete, and I was just laughing. Me!” she said. “I used to faint with injections, and here I was sewing machete wounds. All I could think was, Do I wrap the bandage this way?”—she whirled a hand in a horizontal orbit—“Or this way?”—vertically.

“Sunday when we drove away, there were people all over the road, bodies, and wounded,” Alexandre said. “In a normal time, for people in much less bad shape, you would stop and do anything. We didn’t stop. We just left them. I feel very bad about that. I don’t know if it’s guilt, but it’s a very bad feeling.”

“Yah,” Annick said. “That was bad, eh? We just drove. It was too many people.”

“Too many people,” Alexandre said. Tears had welled from his eyes, and his nose was running, streaking his lip. He said, “I don’t know how my mind works. I just don’t know. When people are dead, you expect to see more people dead. I remember in 1973 in Athens, we had cars making a blockade, and the tanks came and crushed the cars. I was eleven or twelve and I saw the people. They’re dead, and I expected more and more to see dead people. It becomes normal. We have so many films to see death with bullets, but this is real death, the crushing. At Kibeho, in the second attack, they were just shooting like hell. Shooting like you can’t imagine. The RPA was just shooting and shooting, they didn’t even look where. I was standing out there, it was raining, and all I could think was I want to get out of the rain. I didn’t even think of the shooting, and it was shooting like hell. To get out of the rain—that was all I wanted.”

“You shouldn’t feel badly,” Annick said. “We saved a lot of lives. Sometimes it was useless, there was nothing we could do.”

“You know,” Alexandre said, “the RPA—they were taking the wounded and throwing them in the pit latrines. They were alive. You know that?”

“Yah,” Annick said. “That was bad.”

“I don’t want to be judged,” Alexandre said. “I don’t want you to judge me.”

He got up to go to the toilet, and Annick said, “I’m worried about Alexandre.”

“How about you?” I asked.

“They tell me go to a psychiatrist,” she said. “The Human Rights mission. They say I have post-traumatic stress. What will they give me? Prozac? It’s stupid. I don’t want drugs. I’m not the one with the problem in Kibeho.”

LATER, WHEN I did visit Nyarubuye and found myself treading among and on the dead, I remembered my evening with Annick and Alexandre. “You don’t know how to think about it,” Alexandre had said, when he returned to the table, “who is right and who is wrong, who is good and bad, because the people in that camp were many of them guilty of genocide.”

But how do we think about genocide? “I’ll tell you how,” the American officer with his Jack Daniel’s and Coke at the Kigali bar told me. “It’s the passenger pigeon. Have you ever seen a passenger pigeon? No, and you never will. That’s it. Extinction. You will never see a passenger pigeon.” Sergeant Francis, the RPA officer who showed me around at Nyarubuye, understood. “The people who did this,” he said, “thought that whatever happened, nobody would know. It didn’t matter, because they would kill everybody, and there would be nothing to see.”

I kept looking, then, out of defiance. Ninety-five percent of the species of animals and plants that have graced the planet since life began are said to be extinct. So much for providence in the fall of a sparrow. Perhaps even extinction has lost its shock. I saw several hundred dead at Nyarubuye, and the world seemed full of dead. You couldn’t walk for all the dead in the grass. Then you hear the numbers—eight hundred thousand, one million. The mind balks.

For Alexandre, all of Kibeho had come down to one fat woman in a yellow blouse drowned by the thousands and thousands of others. “After the first death there is no other,” wrote Dylan Thomas, in his World War II poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” Or, as Stalin, who presided over the murders of at least ten million people, calculated it: “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” The more the dead pile up, the more the killers become the focus, the dead only of interest as evidence. Yet turn the tables, and it’s clear that there is greater cause for celebration when two lives are saved instead of one. Both Annick and Alexandre said they had stopped counting the dead after a while, although counting was in their job description and tending to the wounded was not.

Still, we imagine it’s a greater crime to kill ten than one, or ten thousand than one thousand. Is it? Thou shalt not kill, says the commandment. No number is specified. The death toll may grow, and with it our horror, but the crime doesn’t grow proportionally. When a man kills four people, he isn’t charged with one count of killing four, but with four counts of killing one and one and one and one. He doesn’t get one bigger sentence, but four compounded sentences, and if there’s a death penalty, you can take his life just once.

Nobody knows how many people were killed at Nyarubuye. Some say a thousand, and some say many more: fifteen hundred, two thousand, three thousand. Big differences. But body counts aren’t the point in a genocide, a crime for which, at the time of my first visit to Rwanda, nobody on earth had ever been brought to trial, much less convicted. What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime. No wonder it’s so difficult to picture. To do so you must accept the principle of the exterminator, and see not people but a people.

At Nyarubuye, tiny skulls of children were scattered here and there, and from a nearby schoolyard the voices of their former classmates at recess carried into the church. Inside the nave, empty and grand, where a dark powder of dried blood marked one’s footprints, a single, representative corpse was left on the floor before the altar. He appeared to be crawling toward the confession booth. His feet had been chopped off, and his hands had been chopped off. This was a favorite torture for Tutsis during the genocide; the idea was to cut the tall people “down to size,” and crowds would gather to taunt, laugh, and cheer as the victim writhed to death. The bones emerged from the dead man’s cuffs like twigs, and he still had a square tuft of hair peeling from his skull, and a perfectly formed, weather-shrunken and weather-greened ear.

“Look at his feet and his hands,” said Sergeant Francis. “How he must have suffered.”

But what of his suffering? The young man in the car wreck had suffered, albeit for an instant, and the people at Kibeho had suffered. What does suffering have to do with genocide, when the idea itself is the crime?

THREE DAYS AFTER the shooting ended at Kibeho, Rwanda’s new President, Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu of the RPF, visited the rubble of the camp, paid his respects to a row of bodies that had been laid out for his viewing, and held a press conference, at which he announced that the official body count from the closing operation was three hundred and thirty-four. This absurdly low number suggested a cover-up, and only made the international outcry over the government’s handling of the camp closing louder. With an especially vigorous nudge from France, the European Union suspended its already limited aid program for Rwanda, and kept it suspended even after an Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Events at Kibeho urged foreign donors to continue to support and work with the new RPF-led regime.

The Kibeho Commission was convened at the initiative of that regime, in an effort to signal that the bloody camp closing was not simply business as usual in Rwanda, and it was composed of diplomats, criminologists, jurists, and military and forensic specialists from eight countries, the UN, and the OAU, as well as a Rwandan cabinet minister. In their final report, the commissioners managed to annoy everybody involved at Kibeho—the government, the UN and the humanitarian community, and the génocidaires—by distributing blame for the catastrophe fairly evenly among all three parties.

In October of 1994, a similar Commission of Experts, set up by the UN Security Council to investigate the slaughter that had followed Habyarimana’s assassination, had found that while “both sides to the armed conflict perpetrated crimes against humanity in Rwanda,” the “concerted, planned, systematic and methodical” acts of “mass extermination perpetrated by Hutu elements against the Tutsi group” in Rwanda “constitute genocide,” and that no evidence had been found “to indicate that Tutsi elements perpetrated acts committed with intent to destroy the Hutu ethnic group as such.” That report marked the first time since the General Assembly passed the Genocide Convention in 1948 that the UN had identified an instance of the crime. So it was striking that the Kibeho Commission’s report concluded: “The tragedy of Kibeho neither resulted from a planned action by Rwandan authorities to kill a certain group of people, nor was it an accident that could not have been prevented.”

The message was clear: the Commission considered the continued existence of the Kibeho camp “an important obstacle to the country’s efforts to recover from the devastating effects of last year’s genocide,” and found that both RPA personnel and “elements among the IDPs” had subjected people in the camp to “arbitrary deprivation of life and serious bodily harm.” If this seems strangely antiseptic language for hacking unarmed children with machetes or shooting them in the back, bear in mind that human rights organizations often describe the entire Rwandan genocide as a single “major human rights violation,” which is exactly the same term these organizations use for the death penalty in the United States. The Commission noted that the RPA was a guerrilla army, inept at crowd control and police work, and in its recommendations it urged the government to develop its capacities for a humane and disciplined response to “situations of social tension and emergency.” It also found that the international humanitarian agencies, riven by political conflicts, had proved incapable of closing Kibeho peacefully, and urged them to get their own houses in order. Finally, the Commission called on the government to conduct an “investigation of individual responsibilities within its armed forces,” but it said nothing about holding the génocidaires among the IDPs to account for their crimes at Kibeho.

AROUND THE TIME that the Kibeho Commission released its report, two RPA officers who had been in command during the camp closing were arrested, and about a year later they were tried before a military court. The verdict was a telling indication of how the new regime understood its predicament. The officers were cleared of any responsibility for having presided over, or allowed, a massacre, but they were found guilty of having failed to use the military means at their disposal to protect civilians in danger, which was, of course, precisely the charge the RPF had made against UNAMIR, and the international community as a whole, during the genocide in 1994.

But from whom should the RPA have protected the IDPs if not from itself? The answer implicit in the Kibeho verdict was that the primary danger had been created by the génocidaires in the midst of the camp and by the international humanitarian organizations that had been content to let them stay there. In other words, the RPA judged itself to have taken the side of the Hutu masses against the Hutu Power leaders who had caused them so much anguish. The court was asking that the killings at Kibeho be thought of as the Norwegian nurse had suggested when I lay on the hospital floor in Butare—not as a measure of the new order, but as the ugly endgame of the old order.

Mark Frohardt, a veteran of “international emergency response” missions in Chad, Sudan, and Somalia, and the deputy chief of the UN’s Human Rights mission in Rwanda, reached a strikingly similar conclusion: “I have no intention of trying to justify the manner in which Kibeho was closed,” Frohardt said at the end of two and a half years in Rwanda. “But I do believe that it is important to understand that the inability of the relief organizations to coordinate a successful operation set the stage for the tragedy that followed. Once the army saw that the efforts of relief agencies to move people out of the camps were ineffective, they knew they were the only institution, or force, in the country capable of closing the camps.” And, he went on, “the principal reason that we failed to empty the camps and that the RPA operation turned into a disaster was… the inability to separate out those who were involved in the genocide, those who are guilty of crimes against humanity, from those who are innocent and who were not involved.”

Frohardt was speaking as a human rights and relief worker to an audience composed primarily of fellow professionals in Washington, and he saw that community’s failure at Kibeho as symptomatic of a more profound failure of its collective human and political imagination. “I have never worked in a postconflict society in which recent events, recent history, had such an unrelenting influence on the current situation,” he said. “Nor have I ever worked in a country where humanitarian and development organizations were so resistant to incorporating the cause and consequence of these events into their analysis of the current situation.” In late 1994, just six months after the genocide, Frohardt recalled, “relief workers in Rwanda were often heard making statements such as ‘Yes, the genocide happened, but it’s time to get over it and move on,’ or ‘Enough has been said about the genocide, let’s get on with rebuilding the country.’”

I heard such comments, too, and constantly. Frohardt wasn’t alone among foreign visitors in recognizing that “everything you do in Rwanda has to be done in the context of the genocide,” but he represented a small minority. For most, it was as if the memory of the genocide was a nuisance or, worse, a political gimmick created by the new government as an alibi to explain away its imperfections. After a while, I took to asking, “If, God forbid, a close family member or friend of yours were murdered—or just died—how long would you take to get over the immediate sense of loss, so that a few days or even a week could go by in which you didn’t feel its grip? And how about if your entire social universe had been wiped out?” Usually I’d get an answer like “OK, sure, but that doesn’t make the genocide an excuse for today’s problems.”

Sometimes, in Rwanda, I would sit in a hotel dining room watching the news on American satellite television. Among the stories that commanded special fascination between 1995 and 1997 were the O. J. Simpson trial and the coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing. O.J., a football player turned advertising personality, was accused of killing his ex-wife and her friend, and millions of people around the world were galvanized by the quest for truth and justice—and the betrayal of that quest—for a couple of years. In Oklahoma City, a hundred and sixty-eight people were blown to their deaths in a federal building by a couple of crackpots who thought the United States government had embedded computerized tracking chips in their bodies, and the families of the victims became TV household familiars. And why not? Their world had been shattered in a single instant of insanity. The Rwandans in the hotel dining room seemed to understand that sympathetically, though sometimes one or another of them would observe, quietly, that these crimes on American television were comfortingly isolated, and that the “survivors,” as victims’ families are known in the West, had not themselves been endangered.

Everyone in the hotel dining room would watch, and discuss the details of the trauma, or the legal proceedings, and wonder how it would all turn out. It was an activity that brought us together. And yet here was a society whose soul had been shredded, where an attempt had been made to extirpate an entire category of humanity, where hardly a person could be found who was not related to someone who had either killed or been killed, and where the threat of another round remained intensely real; and here were young foreigners, who had been sent in the name of humanitarianism, saying that Rwandans should quit making excuses.

A YEAR AFTER Kibeho, in May of 1996, I was talking with General Kagame, who had become Rwanda’s Vice President and Minister of Defense after the war, about how the UN camps that ringed Rwanda’s borders seemed to create more problems than they solved. “I’ll give you an example,” Kagame said. “Perhaps it’s a bad example in that it was tragic. But let’s talk about Kibeho, the famous Kibeho. There were hundreds of thousands of people in these camps. Well, unfortunately, in the process of closing the camps, people were killed—very unfortunately—about eight thousand people, to take the highest number. Still we managed to resettle those hundreds of thousands of people. I’m not saying it should have been the cost. But we insisted. We said, ‘If you don’t want to close them, then we shall close them.’ And that’s what happened, that tragic situation. But the camps were no more, you see, and you could have had more trouble for the whole country by keeping the camps there.”

I was surprised to hear Kagame bringing up Kibeho of his own accord; he might have preferred to forget it. And I was surprised that he used the figure of eight thousand dead. I asked him if he thought that was the accurate number.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “It was much less than that.”

“But that operation went wrong,” I said. “And then nobody was able to stop it, or nobody did stop it.”

“They did stop it,” he said. “It was stopped, certainly. Maybe you would have lost twenty or even thirty thousand if it wasn’t stopped.”

“But there were excesses.”

“Sure, on the part of individuals.”

“On the part of your soldiers.”

“Yes,” Kagame said. “Yes, yes, and it just proves how it was stopped.”

14

I ONCE MET a woman from the southwestern Ugandan town of Mbarara, who had been in secondary school with Paul Kagame in the early 1970s. I asked her what he was like back then. “Skinny,” she said, and then she laughed, because calling Kagame skinny was like calling water wet. You couldn’t see him without wondering if you’d ever seen a skinnier person. He stood an inch or so over six feet, and his trouser legs hung as if empty—the creases flat as blades. His Giacometti-like stick figure looked as if it had been dreamed up by Hutu Power cartoonists at Kangura, with the fine skeletal fingers that you’d expect of a chief of the cockroaches.

One of the popular cultural myths about Tutsis is that they like to drink milk but don’t much like eating, and although I’ve watched any number of Tutsis eat heartily, the myth has some basis, at least as a comment on manners. “Tutsi wives are lousy cooks because their husbands aren’t interested. We just pick a little here and there,” a Tutsi told me. He had made something of an informal study of Tutsi arcana. “You’ve noticed, we’ll invite you to drink, and of course later there’s some food, but we’ll never say, ‘Philip, I’m so hungry, let’s feast.’” I had noticed. The custom was explained to me as a residual trait of aristocratic refinement, like moving slowly or speaking softly, which are also alleged to be Tutsi manners. The idea was that vulgar people, peasants, are driven by appetite and tend to run around and shout unnecessarily in the confusion of their coarse lives, while people of standing show reserve. Hutus often describe Tutsis as “arrogant,” and Tutsis tend to find no cause for apology.

But the Ugandan woman had seen the teenage Kagame differently. When she said he was skinny, she added, “He was a refugee,” suggesting that his build told of misfortune, not aristocracy. She also said that he was a top student, and liked music—“I used to see him hang about the record shop until closing time”—but that was about the limit of her recall. “I didn’t pay much attention to him,” she said. “He was Rwandan.”

This was what mattered in Uganda: he was a foreigner. Uganda’s population, like that of most African countries, is distributed among so many tribal and regional subpopulations that there is no majority group, just larger and smaller minorities. When Kagame was growing up in Uganda, people of Rwandan descent constituted one of the larger groups. Most are believed to have been Hutu by ancestry, but in the Ugandan context the labels Hutu and Tutsi stood for little more than different historical experiences: nearly all Tutsis were political refugees, while Hutus were primarily descendants of precolonial settlers or economic migrants. Despite the widespread assumption that Hutus and Tutsis carry a primordial germ of homicidal animosity for one another, the exiled Rwandans got along peacefully in Uganda, in Kenya, in Tanzania, and—until Hutu Power politics spilled over in the early 1990s—in Zaire. Only in Burundi did refugees find the politics of Hutu and Tutsi inescapable.

“In exile, we saw each other as Rwandans,” Tito Ruteremara, one of the RPF’s founders and political commissars, explained. “Living outside Rwanda, you don’t see each other as Hutu or Tutsi, because you see everyone else as strangers and you are brought together as Rwandans, and because for the Ugandans, a Rwandan is a Rwandan.”

So the refugees understood themselves to be as their neighbors imagined them, and they recognized in this identity not only an oppression or humiliation to be escaped but also a value to be transformed into a cause. Here was “the sentiment of national unity” and “the feeling of forming but one people” that the historian Lacger had observed underlying the colonial polarization. And to the founders of the RPF, Rwanda’s postcolonial Hutu dictators had, in the name of majority rule, done even more than the Belgians to subvert that idea of the nation. The counterrevolution the RPF eventually proposed followed from this straightforward analysis. To salvage the spirit of Rwandanness for all Rwandans, from the skinniest to the fattest, lest the possibility of solidarity be destroyed forever—that was the idea.

IN 1961, KAGAME watched Hutu mobs torching Tutsi compounds around his parents’ home on the hill of Nyaratovu, in Gitarama. He was four years old. He saw a car his father had hired for the family to flee in coming up the road, and he saw that the arsonists saw it, too. They dropped what they were doing and began running toward his house. The car got there first, and the family escaped north to Uganda. “We grew up there,” he told me. “We made friends. The Ugandans were hospitable to us, but we were always being singled out. There were always reminders that we’d never be accepted because we were foreigners.”

Naturalization is rarely an option in Africa; only a few Rwandan refugees ever acquired foreign citizenship, and those who did often obtained it through bribery or forgery. In Uganda, discrimination and hostility toward Rwandans intensified in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s under the devastating dictatorships of Milton Obote and Idi Amin. By then, international aid for Rwandan refugees had largely petered out. In contrast to the outpouring of attention for those who fled Rwanda in 1994 after the genocide, Kagame said, “for more than thirty years we were refugees, and nobody talked about us. People forgot. They said, ‘Go to hell.’ They would say, ‘You Tutsi, we know you are arrogant.’ But what does arrogance have to do with it? It’s a question of people’s rights. Do you deny that I belong to Rwanda, that I am Rwandan?”

Refugee politics in the early 1960s was dominated by the monarchists, and thirty years later Hutu Power propagandists loved to point out that Kagame himself was a nephew of the widow of Mutara Rudahigwa, the Mwami who had died in 1959 after receiving an injection from a Belgian doctor. But as the RPF’s Tito Ruteremara, Kagame’s elder by nearly twenty years, told me: “People of our political generation, whose consciousness was formed in exile, as refugees, despised the monarchists—despised all the old colonial ethnic corruption, with the Hamitic hypothesis and so on.” Kagame agreed: being a Tutsi, or a monarchist, was an ancestral problem, and neither identity seemed likely to do anyone much good.

Political leaders often love to tell about their childhoods, those formative years, happy or sad, whose legend can be retroactively finessed to augur greatness. Not Kagame. He was an intensely private public man; not shy—he spoke his mind with uncommon directness—but entirely without bluster. A neat dresser, married, a father of two, he was said to like dinner parties, dancing, and shooting pool, and he was a regular on the tennis courts at Kigali’s Cercle Sportif; his soldiers revered and adored him and had put his name in many chants and songs. He was certainly the most discussed man in Rwanda, but he did not care, in his public life, to be charming or, in any conventional sense, charismatic. I mean, he gave off very little heat, and yet his coolness was commanding. Even in a crowded room, he cut a solitary figure. He was a tactician; his background was in military intelligence, reconnaissance, and guerrilla warfare; he liked to study and anticipate the moves of others, and to allow his own moves to carry a surprise.

“I have wanted to be original about my own thinking, especially in regard to my own situation here,” he once told me, adding, “Not that I don’t realize that there are other people out there to admire, but it is just not my habit to admire anybody. Even if something has worked, I think there are many other things that could work also. If there’s anything else that has worked, I would certainly pick a bit from that. But if there could be another way of having things work, I would like to discover that. If I could have some original way of thinking, that would be OK with me.”

Except for the phrasing, he sounded like the poet Rilke on love and art, but Kagame was speaking about leadership in governance and in war, and most of all—as always—about being Rwandan. He wanted to find an original way of being Rwandan, and Rwanda clearly needed one. Still, originality is a dangerous enterprise, and Rwanda was a dangerous place. Kagame said he wanted to be “exemplary,” so he was careful about his own example, and perhaps it was his quest for an original response to his truly original circumstances that made him wary of allowing others to imagine the lost world of his childhood. There were influences, of course, but the only one he ever seemed inclined to talk about was his friendship with another Rwandan refugee boy named Fred Rwigyema.

“With Fred,” Kagame told me, “there was something personal on either side. We grew up together almost like brothers. We were so close that people who didn’t know automatically thought we were born of the same family. And even as kids, in primary school, we would discuss the future of the Rwandans. We were refugees in a refugee camp in a grass-thatched house for all this period. Fred and I used to read stories about how people fought to liberate themselves. We had ideas of our rights. So this was always eating up our minds, even as kids.”

In 1976, when they were in secondary school, Rwigyema dropped out to join the Ugandan rebels, led by Yoweri Museveni, who were fighting against Idi Amin from bases in Tanzania. Kagame didn’t see Rwigyema again until 1979, when Amin fled into exile, and Kagame joined his friend in the Museveni faction of the new Ugandan army. In 1981, when the former dictator Milton Obote again seized power in Uganda, Museveni returned to the bush to fight some more. His army consisted of twenty-seven men, including Rwigyema and Kagame.

As more young Rwandan exiles in Uganda joined the rebel forces, Obote cranked up a virulent xenophobic campaign against the Rwandan population. Mass firings and inflammatory speeches were followed, in October of 1982, by a campaign of murder, rape, and pillage, and close to fifty thousand Rwandans were forcibly expelled and sent back to Rwanda. Habyarimana stuck them in camps, where many died, until they were forced back to Uganda in 1984. Two years later, when Museveni took power, at least twenty percent of his army was of Rwandan origin. Rwigyema was near the top of the high command, and Kagame became director of military intelligence.

It was against this backdrop that Habyarimana had declared, in 1986, that there could be no further discussion of a right of return for Rwandan refugees. The RPF was founded the next year as a clandestine movement committed to armed struggle against the Habyarimana regime. Tito Ruteremara led the political wing, and Rwigyema spearheaded the fraternity of Rwandan officers in the Ugandan army who became the core of the RPF’s military force. “We had felt the beginnings of this, fighting in Uganda,” Kagame said. “Fighting there was to serve our purpose, and it was also in line with our thinking—we were fighting injustice—and it was perhaps the safest way to live in Uganda at that time as a Rwandan. But deep in our hearts and minds we knew we belonged in Rwanda, and if they didn’t want to resolve the problem politically, armed struggle would be the alternative.”

I once asked Kagame whether he had ever considered at that point that he could become the Vice President of Rwanda and the commander of its national army. “Not by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “It was not even my ambition. My mind was just obsessed by struggling and fighting to regain my rights as a Rwandan. Whatever that would propel me into was a different matter.”

IN EARLIER GENERATIONS, when Africans spoke of “liberation” they meant freedom from the European empires. For the men and women who formed the RPF, and for at least a half dozen other rebel movements on the continent in the 1980s and 1990s, “liberation” meant climbing out from under the client dictatorships of Cold War neocolonialism. Coming of age in an ostensibly free and independent Africa, they saw their predatory leaders as immature, as sources of shame rather than of pride, unworthy and incapable of serving the destiny of their peoples. The corruption that plagued so much of Africa was not just a matter of graft; the soul was at stake. And to this rising generation, the horror was that the postcolonial agony was being inflicted on Africans by Africans, even when the West or the Soviet Union had a heavy hand in it. Museveni, whose example in rebellion and later in building up Uganda from bloody ruin had stimulated the RPF, once told me that Africa’s failure to achieve respectable independence could no longer be blamed on foreigners: “It was more because of the indigenous forces that were weak and not organized.”

Because Museveni was under intense domestic pressure in the late 1980s to rid his army and government of Rwandans and to strip Rwandan ranchers of much of their land, he has often been accused of organizing the RPF himself. But the mass desertion of Rwandan officers and troops from his army at the time of the invasion in October of 1990 was a surprise and an embarrassment to the Ugandan leader. “I think at one point Museveni even called us treacherous,” Kagame told me. “He thought, ‘These are friends who have betrayed me, and never let me get involved.’ But we didn’t need anybody to influence us, and in fact the Ugandans were very suspicious of us. They didn’t even appreciate our contribution, the sacrifices we had made. We were just Rwandans— and really this served us very well. It gave us a push, and it helped some weak people in Uganda feel that they had solved a problem when we left.”

More astonishing even than the secrecy of the Rwandans within Uganda’s army was the RPF’s intensive international campaign to mobilize support in the Rwandan diaspora. “It was funny,” an Ugandan in Kampala told me. “In the late eighties, a lot of these Rwandans were becoming very involved with their heritage, organizing family gatherings. They would get everybody together and make a tree, listing every other Rwandan they knew: names, ages, professions, addresses, and so on. Later, I realized they were making a database of the entire community, and well beyond Uganda—through all of Africa, Europe, North America. They were always having fund-raisers here for engagements, weddings, christenings. It’s normal, but there was pressure to give a lot, and you couldn’t understand the money involved. At one wedding of two big shots, it was fifty thousand dollars. So you’d ask about the great parties they must be having with so much money, but no—everything was bare bones. Well, we didn’t get it at the time.”

From the start, the RPF leadership was made up of Hutus as well as Tutsis, including defectors from Habyarimana’s inner circles, but its military core was always overwhelmingly Tutsi. “Of course,” Tito Ruteremara said. “Tutsis were the refugees. But the struggle was against the politics in Rwanda, not against the Hutus. We made that understood. We told people the truth—about the dictator, about our politics of liberation and unity with debate—so we grew strong. Inside Rwanda, they were recruiting by force and coercion. For us it was everyone volunteering. Even the old women went to work on plantations to get some money. Even if you were a sick man who could only afford to say a small prayer —that was good.”

The Ugandan who had watched in puzzlement as Rwandans drew family trees and raised funds had a friend whose husband was Rwandan. “The morning of October 1, 1990, this woman’s husband said to her, ’This is going to be a very important day in history.’ He wouldn’t say more, just ‘Mark my words.’ She and her husband were very close, but it wasn’t until she heard on the news that night that Fred Rwigyema had gone over to Rwanda taking his people that she knew what he was talking about.”

Museveni responded to the RPF’s invasion of Rwanda by ordering the Ugandan army to seal the border and block the mass desertion of Rwandans, who were stealing every bit of equipment they could grab. He also contacted Habyarimana to urge negotiations. “We tried to bring peace,” Museveni told me. “But Habyarimana was not willing. He was busy mobilizing Belgium, mobilizing France. Then he started accusing me of starting it all. So then we left the thing to run its course.” Tito Ruteremara laughed when he recalled those first days of the war. “Habyarimana was a very stupid man,” he said. “When he blamed Museveni, he saved us. Now, instead of stopping us from crossing into Rwanda, Museveni closed the border from the other side—so we couldn’t turn back. So Habyarimana actually forced us to keep fighting him, even when we might have felt like we were losing.”

KAGAME FOLLOWED THE initial reports of the RPF invasion from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was enrolled as an Ugandan in an officer training course. On the second day of the war, Fred Rwigyema was killed. A story went around that he was assassinated by two of his officers, who were, in turn, courtmartialed and executed. Later, the RPF took to saying that Rwigyema was killed by enemy fire, and that the two officers were killed in an enemy ambush. However that may be, within ten days of Rwigyema’s death Kagame quit his course in Kansas and flew back to Africa, where he deserted his Ugandan commission and replaced his murdered friend as the RPF field commander. He was a few days shy of his thirty-third birthday.

I once asked if he liked fighting. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I was very annoyed. I was very angry. I will still fight if I have reason to. I will always fight. I have no problem with that.” He was certainly good at it. Military men regard the army he forged from the ragtag remnants of Rwigyema’s original band, and the campaign he ran in 1994, as a work of plain genius. That he had pulled it off with an arsenal composed merely of mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and, primarily, what one American arms specialist described to me as “piece of shit” secondhand Kalashnikovs, has only added to the legend.

“The problem isn’t the equipment,” Kagame told me. “The problem is always the man behind it. Does he understand why he is fighting?” In his view, determined and well-disciplined fighters, motivated by coherent ideas of political improvement, can always best the soldiers of a corrupt regime that stands for nothing but its own power. The RPF treated the army as a sort of field university. Throughout the war, officers and their troops were kept sharp not only by military drill but also by a steady program of political seminars; individuals were encouraged to think and speak for themselves, to discuss and debate the party line even as they were also taught to serve it. “We have tried to encourage collective responsibility,” Kagame explained. “In all my capacities, in the RPF, in the government, in the army, my primary responsibility is to help develop people who can take responsibility indiscriminately.”

In tandem with political discipline, the RPF earned a reputation for strict physical discipline during its years as a guerrilla force. Across much of Africa, a soldier’s uniform and gun had long been regarded—and are still seen—as little more than a license to engage in banditry. During the four years of fighting in Rwanda, marriage and even courtship were forbidden to RPF cadres; thievery was punished with the lash, and officers and soldiers guilty of crimes like murder and rape were liable to be executed. “I don’t see the good in preserving you after you have so offended others,” General Kagame told me. “And people respected it. It brought sanity and discipline. You don’t allow armed people freedom to do what they want. If you are equipped to use force, you must use it rationally. If you are given a chance to use it irrationally you can be a very big danger to society. There’s no question about it. Your objective is to protect society.”

At the end of the war, in July of 1994, even many international aid workers regarded the RPF with awe and spoke with stirring conviction of the righteousness of its cause and conduct. The RPF had hardly gone to war for humanitarian reasons, but it had effectively been the only force on earth to live up to the requirements of the 1948 Genocide Convention. That RPF elements had carried out reprisal killings against alleged génocidaires, and committed atrocities against Hutu civilians, was not in dispute; in 1994, Amnesty International reported that between April and August “hundreds—possibly thousands—of unarmed civilians and captured armed opponents” had been killed by RPF troops. But what most vividly impressed observers in the waning days of the genocide was the overall restraint of this rebel army, even as its soldiers were finding their ancestral villages, and their own families, annihilated.

“The RPF guys had this impressive clarity of purpose about them,” James Orbinski, the Canadian doctor who worked in Kigali during the genocide, told me. “They had ideas of right and wrong that were obviously flexible—I mean they were an army—but basically their ideas and actions were a hell of a lot righter than wronger. Armies always have a style. These guys—their uniforms were always ironed, they were clean-shaven, and their boots were shined. You’d see them walking around behind their lines, two guys holding hands, sober, proud to be there. They fought like hell. But when they came into a place, you didn’t see the usual African looting. I remember when Kigali fell, a guy took a radio from a house, and he was immediately taken out and shot.”

A Hutu businessman told me a different story: “They were very organized, very tight, and they looted like hell. True, it wasn’t just every man for himself. It was mostly quite orderly, with a command structure. But what they needed, or wanted, they took, top to bottom. They came to my shop with trucks, and stripped it. I didn’t like it, but at the time I was happy to keep quiet. I considered it more or less a tax for the liberation—at the time.”

HEROES, SAVIORS, HERALDS of a new order. Kagame’s men—and boys (a lot of them weren’t clean-shaven, just too young for a razor)—were all those things in that moment. But their triumph remained shadowed by the genocide, and their victory was far from complete. The enemy hadn’t been defeated; it had just run away. Everywhere one went, inside Rwanda and in the border camps, to RPF leaders and to Hutu Power leaders, to relief workers and to foreign diplomats, in the hills, in cafés, even inside Rwanda’s packed prisons, one heard that there would be another war, and soon. Such talk had begun immediately after the last war, and I heard it almost every day on each of my visits.

It was strange to be waiting for a war, which is what I felt I was doing along with everyone else during much of the time I spent in Rwanda. The more certain you felt it was coming, the more you dreaded it and the more you wished it would hurry up and get itself over with. It began to feel almost like an appointment. The only way it might be avoided was for a no-nonsense, battle-ready international force to overwhelm and disarm the fugutive Hutu Power army and militias in the UN border camps, and that was never going to happen; instead we were protecting them. So one waited, and wondered what the war would be like, and with time it occurred to me that this anxious expectation was a part of it: if the next war was inevitable, then the last war never ended.

In this climate of emergency and suspense, neither at war nor at peace, the RPF set out to lay the foundations of a new Rwandan state, and to create a new national narrative that could simultaneously confront the genocide and offer a way to move on from it. The Rwanda that the RPF had fought to create—with all Rwandans living peacefully inside the country for the first time since independence—was a radical dream. Now, the existence of a rump Hutu Power state in the UN border camps forced that dream to be deferred, and even before Kibeho, Kagame began saying that if the international community would not sort out the génocidaires in Zaire from the general camp population and send the masses home, he would be prepared to do it himself. “We want people back,” he told me, “because it is their right and it is our responsibility to have them back, whether they support us or not.”

In the meantime, all talk of reconciliation and national unity ran up against the fact that the next war would be a war about the genocide. For, while the RPF and the new government required that the genocide be recognized as, in Kagame’s words, “the defining event in Rwandan history,” Hutu Power still sought to make its crime a success by making it indistinguishable from the continuum of Rwandan history.

KAGAME ONCE TOLD me that after signing the Arusha Accords, in the summer of 1993, he had talked about retiring from the hght—“to go to school, or somewhere, and just have a rest.” But, he said, “after a few weeks it turned into a political problem. Some people came from Kigali and said, ‘You know, everybody’s worried. They think when you mentioned getting out you were planning something.’” Kagame laughed, a high, breathy chuckle. “I said, ‘Look, you are really unfair. When I stay in, I’m a problem. When I say I’m getting out, I’m a problem. If I wanted to be a problem, I would actually be a problem. I don’t have to dance around weeping, you see.’” Of course, the peace never lasted long enough for Kagame to relax. “My business was to fight,” he said. “I fought. The war was over. I said, ‘Let’s share power.’ And it was sincere. Had it not been, I would have taken over everything.”

It annoyed Kagame and his RPF colleagues that Rwanda’s new government was routinely described in the international press as his government, and labeled “Tutsi-dominated” or, more pointedly, “minority-dominated.” A moratorium had been imposed on political party activities, but in the spirit of the Arusha Accords the government included many members of the old anti-Hutu Power opposition parties in top posts. What’s more, sixteen of the twenty-two cabinet ministers, including the Prime Minister and the Ministers of Justice and the Interior, were Hutus, while the army, which was quickly doubled in size, to at least forty thousand men, included several thousand former officers and enlisted men from the ranks of Habyarimana’s old army and gendarmerie. As President Pasteur Bizimungu, who was Hutu, told me, to speak of Tutsi domination echoed “the slogans or the way of portraying things of the extremists,” when, for the first time in the hundred years since colonization, “there are authorities in this country, Hutu and Tutsi, who are putting in place policy so that people may share the same fundamental rights and obligations irrespective of their ethnic background—and the extremists don’t feel happy about that.”

Kagame, for whom the office of Vice President was specially invented, did not deny that the RPF formed the backbone of the regime, and that as its chief military and political strategist he was the country’s most powerful political figure. “He who controls the army controls all,” Rwandans liked to say, and following the total destruction of the national infrastructure during the genocide this seemed truer than ever. But Kagame imposed institutional checks on his own power—who else could impose them?—and when he said that he could remove those checks, he was only stating the obvious. He may even have been overstating the case, since it was never clear, after the genocide, that he had complete control of the army, but he was trying to explain what it meant that he had chosen not to be an absolute leader in a country that had no experience of anything else. And he said, “I never had any illusions that these political tasks were going to be simple.”

One of the first acts of the new government was to abolish the system of ethnic identity cards, which had served as death tickets for Tutsis during the genocide. But even without identity cards, everybody seemed to know who his neighbors were. In the aftermath of the genocide, the ethnic categories had become more meaningful and more charged than ever before. Rwanda had no police and no working courts; the great majority of its legal professionals had been killed or had themselves become killers, and while suspected génocidaires were arrested by the thousands, many Rwandans preferred to settle their scores privately, without waiting for the state to be established.

So there were killings; nobody knows how many, but you heard stories of new killings every few days. As a rule, the victims were Hutus, and the killers were unidentified. The RPA claimed to have jailed hundreds of indisciplined soldiers, but military secrecy tended to shroud these affairs. And it was a delicate matter when two soldiers were sentenced to death by an RPA tribunal for reprisal killings, and nobody had yet been brought to trial for crimes during the genocide. Still, from their places of exile, Hutu Power leaders greeted the news of reprisal killings in Rwanda with expressions of outrage that often sounded more like gleeful enthusiasm—as if with each Hutu murdered their own crimes were diminished. Hassan Ngeze had decamped to Nairobi and was again publishing Kangura, and he and countless other “refugee” pamphleteers cranked up a relentless campaign, aimed largely at Western diplomats, journalists, and humanitarians, proclaiming more loudly than ever that the RPF was Rwanda’s true genocidal aggressor.

“This gang made a genocide, then they say Hutu-Tutsi, Hutu-Tutsi, and everything is a genocide to them,” Kagame scoffed, adding, “Johannesburg alone has more crime than the whole country of Rwanda. Nairobi has more. I’m saying we have problems. I’m saying things are ugly. But I’m saying, let’s distinguish. If we take everything to be the same, then we are making a mistake.”

The paradox was not lost on Rwanda’s new leaders that the genocide had brought them greater power and at the same time poisoned their prospects for using it as they had promised. “We were compelled to take on a totally new, different situation—something we had not anticipated,” Kagame said. “The twist was so abrupt, and the magnitude of the problems that arose was so immense, that bringing people together and making the country whole became more difficult. You will find that in the army, about a third of the people, maybe slightly more, have lost their families. At the same time the people who are responsible are not being brought to justice effectively. I imagine this undermines one’s initial dedication and discipline. This is natural, absolutely natural, and it has its own consequences.”

A UNICEF study later posited that five out of six children who had been in Rwanda during the slaughter had, at the very least, witnessed bloodshed, and you may assume that adults had not been better sheltered. Imagine what the totality of such devastation means for a society, and it becomes clear that Hutu Power’s crime was much greater than the murder of nearly a million people. Nobody in Rwanda escaped direct physical or psychic damage. The terror was designed to be total and enduring, a legacy to leave Rwandans spinning and disoriented in the slipstream of their memories for a very long time to come, and in that it was successful.

I FELT TEMPTED, at times, to think of Rwanda after the genocide as an impossible country. Kagame never seemed to afford himself the luxury of such a useless notion. “People are not inherently bad,” he told me. “But they can be made bad. And they can be taught to be good.”

He always sounded so soothingly sane, even when he was describing, with characteristic bluntness, the endless discouragements and continued anguish that surely lay ahead. He spoke of all the woes of his tiny trashed country as a set of problems to be solved, and he seemed to relish the challenge. He was a man of rare scope—a man of action with an acute human and political intelligence. It appeared impossible to discover an angle to the history he was born into and was making that he hadn’t already reckoned. And where others saw defeat, he saw opportunity. He was, after all, a revolutionary; for more than fifteen years, his life had consisted of overthrowing dictators and establishing new states in the harshest of circumstances.

Because he was not an ideologue, Kagame was often called a pragmatist. But that suggests an indifference to principle and, with a soldier’s stark habits of mind, he sought to make a principle of being rational. Reason can be ruthless, and Kagame, who had emerged in ruthless times, was convinced that with reason he could bend all that was twisted in Rwanda straighter, that the country and its people truly could be changed—made saner, and so better—and he meant to prove it. The process might be ugly: against those who preferred violence to reason, Kagame was ready to fight, and, unlike most politicians, when he spoke or took action, he aimed to be understood, not to be loved. So he made himself clear, and he could be remarkably persuasive.

We always met in his office at the Ministry of Defense, a big room with translucent curtains drawn over the windows. He would fold his antenna-thin frame onto a big black leather chair, I would sit to his right on a couch, and he would answer my questions for two or three hours at a stretch with a quietly ferocious concentration. And what he said mattered, because Kagame was truly somebody of consequence. He made things happen.

Several times, when I was sitting with him, I found myself thinking of another famously tall and skinny civil warrior, Abraham Lincoln, who once said, “It is to deny what the history of the world tells us is true to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion as others have so done before them… whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or of enslaving freemen.” Kagame had proven himself quite effective at getting what he wanted, and if Kagame truly wanted to find an original response to his original circumstances, the only course open to him was emancipation. That was certainly how he presented it, and I didn’t doubt that that was what he wanted. But the time always came when I had to leave his office. Kagame would stand, we’d shake hands, a soldier with a side arm would open the door, and then I would step back out into Rwanda.

15

BONAVENTURE NYIBIZI AND his family were evacuated to the RPF zone from the Sainte Famille church in mid-June of 1994. Looking out from the convoy, he saw Kigali as a necropolis: “Just blood and”—he made a shivering sound, like a tire deflating—“pfffhhh-h-hh.”

In the RPF collection camps for survivors, Bonaventure sought news of his family and friends. It didn’t take him long to conclude that “it was unrealistic to hope that somebody had survived.” A sister of his was found alive, but three of her five children had been killed, as were his mother and everyone who lived with her. Most of his wife’s family and friends had also been wiped out. “Sometimes,” he said, “you met someone who you thought had been killed, and you learned that somehow they had managed to stay alive.” But the euphoria of such reunions, which punctuated the survivors’ gloom for months after the genocide, was tempered by the constant tallying of losses. “Mostly,” Bonaventure said, “you didn’t even want to hope.”

Around July 20, Bonaventure returned home, and sank into despair. “Kigali was difficult to believe,” he told me. “The place smelled of death. There were very few people whom you knew from before, and no water or electricity, but the problem for most people was that their houses were destroyed. Most of my house was destroyed. People were finding their furniture and belongings in the homes of neighbors who’d run away, or taking the neighbors’ things. But to me that was not important at all. I was not really interested in doing anything.”

Bonaventure believed that survival was meaningless until one found “a reason to survive again, a reason to look to tomorrow.” This was a widely held view in Rwanda, where depression was epidemic. The so-called survival instinct is often described as an animal urge to preserve oneself. But once the threat of bodily annihilation is relieved, the soul still requires preservation, and a wounded soul becomes the source of its own affliction; it cannot nurse itself directly. So survival can seem a curse, for one of the dominant needs of the needy soul is to be needed. As I came to know survivors, I found that, when it comes to soul preservation, the urge to look after others is often greater than the urge to look after oneself. All across the ghostly countryside, survivors sought each other out, assembling surrogate families and squatting together in abandoned shacks, in schoolyard shanties and burned-out shops, hoping for safety and comfort in hastily assembled households. A shadow world of the severely traumatized and achingly bereft established itself in the ruins. The extent of orphanhood was especially staggering: two years after the genocide, more than a hundred thousand children were looking after one another in homes that lacked any adult presence.

Bonaventure still had his wife and his children, and he began adopting more children. He recovered his car and what remained of his home, and he was receiving back pay from his foreign employer. But even he needed more to live for—a future, as he said. One day, in August, he learned that USAID was sending someone to reestablish its mission in Kigali. Bonaventure picked the man up at the airport and returned to work with a vengeance. “Every day, fourteen hours,” he told me. “I was very tired, but it helped a lot.” Bonaventure came to dread the idleness and disengagement that he associated with his recent victimization. “In most cases,” he said, “with a person who lost his family and friends, when you look—what’s he doing?—actually he’s doing nothing. So there is no hope for him. To keep busy is very, very important.”

EVERYTHING NEEDED DOING—at once. Bonaventure couldn’t imagine how Rwanda would be restored to anything resembling working order, and the international disaster experts who began teeming through on assessment missions agreed that they had never seen a country so laid to waste. When the new government was sworn in, there wasn’t a dollar or a Rwandan franc left in the treasury; not a clean pad of paper, or a staple, much less a working stapler, left in most government offices. Where doors remained, nobody had keys to the locks; if a vehicle had been left behind, the odds were it wouldn’t run. Go to the latrine, it was likely to be stuffed with dead people, and the same went for the well. Electric, phone, and water lines—forget it. All day long in Kigali, there were explosions because somebody had stepped on a land mine or jarred a bit of unexploded ordinance. Hospitals lay in ruins, and the demand for their services was overwhelming. Many of the churches, schools, and other public facilities that hadn’t been used as slaughterhouses had been sacked, and most of the people who had been in charge of them either were dead or had fled. A year’s tea and coffee harvests had been lost, and vandals had left all the tea factories and about seventy percent of the country’s coffee-depulping machines inoperable.

Under the circumstances, one might suppose that the dream of return would have lost some of its allure for the Tutsis of the Rwandan diaspora; that people who had sat in safe homes abroad, receiving the news of the wholesale slaughter of their parents and siblings, their cousins and in-laws, would reckon their prospects for a natural death in exile and stay there. One might suppose that a simple desire not to go mad would inspire such people to renounce forever any hope of again calling Rwanda “home.” Instead, the exiles began rushing back to Rwanda even before the blood had dried. Tens of thousands returned immediately on the heels of the RPF, and hundreds of thousands soon followed. The Tutsi returnees and throngs of fleeing Hutus jockeyed past one another at the frontiers.

The returning Rwandans came from all over Africa and from further afield—from Zurich and Brussels, Milan, Toronto, Los Angeles, and La Paz. Nine months after the RPF liberated Kigali, more than seven hundred and fifty thousand former Tutsi exiles (and almost a million cows) had moved back to Rwanda—nearly a one-to-one replacement of the dead. When Bonaventure remarked that he found few familiar faces on returning to Kigali, he was speaking not only of the missing but also of all the people he’d never seen there before. When Rwandans asked me how long I’d been in Rwanda, I often asked the same of them, and after I’d spent a few months in the country it was not unusual to find that I’d been there longer than the Rwandan I was talking to. When I asked people why they had come, I usually got casual answers—to have a look, to see who was alive, to see what they could do to help out—and almost always I’d be told, “It’s good to be home.”

Once again, strange little Rwanda presented the world with a historically unprecedented, epic phenomenon. Even the RPF leaders, who had been working the refugee diaspora networks for years—consciousness-raising, fund-raising, and recruiting—were astonished by the scale of this return. What possessed these people, a great many of whom had never before set foot in Rwanda, to abandon relatively established and secure lives in order to settle in a graveyard? The legacy of exclusion, the pressures of exile, and the memory of, or longing for, a homeland all played a part. So did a widespread determination to defy the genocide, to stand and be counted in a place where one was meant to have been wiped out. And for many, the sense of belonging was mingled with a straightforward profit motive.

Drawn by empty housing free for the taking and by a demand for goods and services vastly greater than the supply, the returnees rolled into the country hauling loads of dry goods, hardware, medicines, groceries, you name it. If you came with a car, you could immediately claim standing in the transportation industry; if you had a truck, you could become a freight handler; if you had a few thousand dollars you could pretty much pick your niche in a small trade, and with a hundred thousand you might become a captain of industry. There were stories of people who pooled a little cash, hired a vehicle, packed it with cigarettes, candles, beer, fuel, or triple-A batteries, drove to Rwanda, unloaded for a profit of two hundred or three hundred percent, then repeated the process ten or fifteen times, and made themselves rich in the course of a few weeks.

You or I might have done nearly as well if we’d put our enterprising minds to it, and a few foreign carpetbaggers did make out in the Rwandan aftermath. But if fast money was the objective, there was no need for mid-career Rwandan professionals, living in exile with little children whose heads had never been at risk of being chopped off by a neighbor, to move their entire families into the country. The profit motive only explains how return was a viable option and how in the course of a few months minibus taxis were again plying the main routes in Kigali; stores were open for business, public utilities were mostly revived, and new banknotes issued, invalidating the old currency that had been carted off by the fleeing génocidaires. The Rwandan franc had suffered a devaluation of at least two hundred fifty percent between the beginning and end of 1994, but with money flowing across the borders, a nightclub had only to switch on the generator and turn up the music to maintain a packed dance floor. The old dictum that it’s much easier to destroy than to create remained true, but the speed with which much of Rwanda’s basic physical plant was restored to working order was nearly as baffling as the speed with which it had been demolished.

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE not to be moved by the mass return of the “fifty-niners,” and it was impossible not to be troubled by it as well. In 1996 more than seventy percent of the people in Kigali and Butare, and in some rural areas of eastern Rwanda, were said to be newcomers. People who had never left the country—Tutsi and Hutu—often felt displaced in their own homes. Their complaints always came with the caveat “Don’t quote me by name.” Such requests for anonymity can have many meanings. They suggest an atmosphere of intrigue and fear, and a desire to speak truthfully in circumstances where the truth is dangerous. But they can also bracket secretive moments in a longer conversation, moments in which the speaker seems to doubt what he’s saying, or is getting personal, even petty, or is exaggerating wildly, perhaps lying outright, to make a point he knows he cannot fully defend. The recipient of such confidences must try to discern the calculation behind the request. With Rwandans, whose experience had taught them not to underestimate any fear, this could get very tricky. I was especially wary of anonymous remarks that attributed one or another quality to an entire group of people, including the speaker’s own. So when people who were speaking openly suddenly asked not to be quoted and then said terrible things about the Tutsi “fifty-niners,” as if the whole crowd were one person, I was skeptical. But I heard the same stories and attitudes hundreds of times.

A Tutsi survivor said, “They come here, they see us, and they say, ‘How did you survive? Did you collaborate with the interahamwe?’ They think we were fools to have stayed in the country —and maybe we were—so they disdain us. They don’t want to be reminded. It shocks us to the bones.”

An anti-Habyarimana Hutu said, “The Tutsis were in trouble in last year’s massacres, and the army is now dominated by Tutsis. So we thought the survivors would be taken care of, that it would be the first task of the new government. But only those returning from outside are getting homes. And meanwhile, if these people from outside have a problem with a Hutu, they accuse him of committing the genocide they weren’t even here for.”

A Tutsi said, “We survivors find it very difficult to integrate into the present society and—I hate to say it—into the government, too. They have their own style from outside, and they don’t have much trust in us either. When they came they took the country as in a conquest. They thought it was theirs to look after. They said of us Tutsis who were here, ‘The smart ones are dead and those who survived are traumatized.’ The young RPF fighters all had their parents coming from outside the country and they were tired of the austerity of fighting, so they took homes and goods for their families and they didn’t like the survivors getting in the way. And they would say, ‘If they killed everyone and you survived, maybe you collaborated.’ To a woman who was raped twenty times a day, day after day, and now has a baby from that, they would say this. To a Tutsi who was intermarried or a child who was orphaned they would say this. Can you imagine? For us, it was too hard at first, finding that everyone was dead, that we didn’t know anyone. It didn’t occur to us to grab better houses, and now it’s we who are taking care of most of the orphans.”

A Hutu said, “They don’t know the country. They trust only each other. They weren’t here, and they can’t understand. Some of the influence is good. We needed change, fresh ideas. But there are many extremists among them. And many Hutus who were in trouble during last year’s killings are in trouble again under this regime. People who were targeted then for being RPF followers are now accused of being génocidaires. Some are in prison. Some run to another country. Some are killed. It’s the army that controls the government, and inside the army there is not enough control. Truly, if I could afford not to live under plastic sheeting in a camp with génocidaires, I would become a refugee.”

A Tutsi said, “Our women used to do collections to send Tampax to the women with the RPF when they were up in the mountains, and now when we are with our old Hutu friends, some of the people we’re closest to in the world, these people look at us like ‘Why are you always with this Hutu?’ And we say to ourselves, ‘We’ve lived together with Hutus all our lives, and we speak almost the same language, and we saw our families killed by Hutus, but you’re more racist than we are.’ It’s an enemy in their subconscious. Their idea of cohabitation is really very theoretical. For Hutus now, it’s like for us before the RPF came. Even if you live quietly, you can’t say many things, you can’t criticize a politician, you must live in fear. Of course, all the Hutus now have someone in the camps or in prison, and you can’t abandon your brother even if he killed people. So it’s a real problem, whom to trust. But the returnees don’t even want to discuss it.”

Even among the returnees there was a good deal of grumbling about other returnees. They had imagined they were one people engaged in a homecoming, only to discover that they were all kinds of people from all kinds of places. Those who had spent the past three decades in Uganda being called Rwandans were, in fact, deeply Ugandan, and people called Rwandans who had lived in Burundi seemed alien to them. They had no better reason to regard each other as kin than a child of Sicilians born in Argentina would have to feel related to a Milanese who had lived his entire adult life as an immigrant in Sweden. Adapting to life in Zaire under the capricious dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko and in Tanzania under the authoritarian socialism of Julius Nyerere had not been comparable experiences. Some of the returnees had lived in Francophone countries, others in Anglophone countries, and although most still spoke at least some Kinyarwanda, many were more at home in Swahili or some other foreign African language which other returnees didn’t speak.

Hutu Power created a world in which there was just us and them, and Rwanda was still generally regarded from within and without as a bipolar world of Hutus and Tutsis. But an elaborate grid of subcategories lay just beneath the surface. There were Hutus with good records, and suspect Hutus, Hutus in exile and displaced Hutus, Hutus who wanted to work with the RPF, and anti-Power Hutus who were also anti-RPF, and of course all the old frictions between Hutus of the north and those of the south remained. As for Tutsis, there were all the exiled backgrounds and languages, and survivors and returnees regarding each other with mutual suspicion; there were RPF Tutsis, non-RPF Tutsis, and anti-RPF Tutsis; there were urbanites and cattle keepers, whose concerns as survivors or returnees had almost nothing in common. And, of course, there were many more subcategories, which cut across the others and might, at any given moment, be more important. There were clans and families, rich and poor, Catholics, Muslims, Protestants of various stripes, and a host of more private animists, as well as all the normal social cliques and affiliations, including male and female, who were marrying each other at a fantastic clip, now that the war was over and it was allowed in the RPF, and now that so many had lost any other form of family.

It made one’s head spin. Even Rwandans didn’t claim to have it all mapped. For the most part, they stuck with the people they knew from before, and didn’t care so much if they made no new friends so long as they didn’t acquire new enemies. In the long view, it seemed to my American mind that there was some hope in the fact that a country which had been destroyed by a mad wish for every citizen to have exactly the same identity as every other—the identity of a mass murderer, no less—contained more diversity than ever. But that was taking a very long view. Intermarriage rates were at an all-time low, scoring another point for the génocidaires in the new, officially ethnicity-free Rwanda; and not a day went by without a new story going around on radio trottoir of an imminent Hutu Power invasion from Zaire.

“THEY SAY THE war was won but for us too much was lost,” Odette Nyiramilimo told me. After the genocide, she and Jean-Baptiste had adopted ten children, and took it upon themselves to treat child survivors for free at their clinic. “We feel it’s a moral obligation,” she said, “but the children are so traumatized that we hardly know how to help them.”

After the family was evacuated from the Hotel des Milles Collines, Jean-Baptiste had gone to work with an RPF medical unit helping survivors, and Odette had taken their three children to Nairobi, vowing never to return to Rwanda. Then she received news that some of her nephews and nieces had survived. “As soon as I heard that, I knew I had to come back,” she said. “We began to find them and to take them in, but it’s very difficult to satisfy all their needs. One of them—a four-year-old—weighed just seventeen pounds when he was found.” Once she told me, “We were in the car, Jean-Baptiste and I, and our three children, and one of the kids said, ‘I’m so happy just to be all five of us together again.’ We said, ‘Aren’t you happy to live with your cousins?’ But they didn’t say anything.”

Odette looked over at her children in the pool of the Cercle Sportif. When she turned back to me, she said, “This life after a genocide is really a terrible life.” The fluidity and urgency with which she had told the story of her earlier ordeals had given way to a hopscotch, free-associating rhythm as she described life in the aftermath. “When I was still in Nairobi, saying I’d never come back, there was a group of young Rwandan fifty-niners who’d gone to visit Rwanda for the first time,” she said. “They got back to Nairobi and said how beautiful and wonderful it all was, and the only problem in Rwanda was the survivors who want to tell you all their stories forever. That really got to me.”

She said, “The trauma comes back much more as time passes—this year more than last. So how can I look forward to next year? We take refuge a bit in our work, but many people become very depressed. I’m afraid it gets worse. I dream more of my sisters and cry through my dreams.”

Odette had one nephew who survived the genocide in Kinunu, on the hill where she was born in Gisenyi. She had visited him only once, to help bury the dead, who were numerous, and she did not want to go back. “All the Hutus there watched us come, and some wanted to hug me,” she said. “I cried out, ‘Don’t touch me. Where did you put everyone?’ One was married to a cousin of mine. I said, ‘Where’s Thérèse?’ He said, ‘I couldn’t do anything.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘It wasn’t me who did it.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to know you.’ Now whenever the Hutus there see a car coming to my nephew’s, they all hide. People will say I’m an extremist because I can’t accept or tolerate the people who killed my family. So if they’re afraid once in their lives—I was afraid since I was three years old—let them know how it feels.”

She said it was hard to make new friends among the returnees. “They came with all their things. They can laugh, have a party. Among us it’s always tales of genocide, and they don’t like to hear about it. If they see I’m married to a Hutu, that I have some old Hutu friends, they don’t understand. Really, everyone lives for himself now.”

She said, “I was talking to my youngest, Patrick. I said, ‘What are you thinking about?’ He said, ‘Those two guys who came with machetes. It comes back all the time.’ The children don’t go out —you have to push them—they like to stay home. They think about it a lot. My little Patrick, he goes alone into a room, and he looks under the bed for interahamwe. My daughter Arriane was in a very good boarding school in Nairobi, and one night she sat up reliving everything, and she cried. At midnight the dorm monitor came by and they spent nearly the whole night together. Arriane told her what had happened, and the monitor was amazed. She’d had no idea. And this was a Kenyan. Nobody really knows. Nobody wants to know.”

Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. “Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it’s written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.”

ONE DAY IN Kigali, I ran into Edmond Mrugamba, a man I had come to know around town, and he invited me to join him for a visit to the latrine into which his sister and her family had been thrown during the genocide. He had mentioned the story before. I remembered that he made a sound—tcha, tcha, tcha—and chopped his hand in the air to describe his sister’s killing.

Edmond drove a Mercedes, one of the few that remained in Rwanda, and he was wearing a faded denim shirt and jeans and black cowboy boots. He used to work for a German development program in Kigali, and his wife was German; she remained in Berlin with their children after the genocide. As we drove in the direction of the airport, Edmond told me that he was a well-traveled man, and that after many trips in East Africa and Europe, he had always felt that Rwandans were the nicest, most decent people in the world. But now he couldn’t recover that feeling. In 1990, after the first RPF attack, he had been threatened because he was Tutsi; he had gone into exile and had only returned after the new government was installed. Edmond was in his late thirties; his father had been a cattle keeper in Kigali. His oldest brother was killed in the massacres of 1963. “And I don’t speak of my uncles killed in fifty-nine and sixty-one,” he said, “my grandmother burned in the house, my maternal uncle, a nurse, chopped into many pieces. There were many others who were killed, and others luckily went to Uganda.” Edmond himself had lived for eleven years in Burundi before returning under Habyarimana and finding work with the Germans. He showed me a snapshot of himself in full camouflage uniform and floppy khaki bush hat. In 1993, he left Germany for Uganda and outfitted himself to join the RPF—“then my appendix burst, and I had to have an operation.”

Edmond spoke quietly, with great intensity, and his bearded face was expressive in a subtle, wincing way. Despite his ordeals, he told me, he had never imagined the depth of the ugliness, the meanness—“the disease,” he said—that had afflicted Rwanda, and he could not understand how it could have been so well masked. He said, “An animal will kill, but never to completely annihilate a race, a whole collectivity. What does this make us in this world?”

Edmond returned from exile because he had found it intolerable to be living in a strange land thinking that he might be of use in Rwanda. Now he lived alone in a small, dark house with a young boy, a nephew who had been orphaned in the genocide. “And I ask myself sometimes, Is my presence here really of any significance?” he said. “To build a new Rwanda. I dream all the time. I dream of theories of this history of violence. I dream of finding an end to it.”

Near the outskirts of Kigali, we turned onto a red-dirt track that narrowed and descended between high reed fences surrounding modest homes. A blue metal gate leading to his dead sister’s house stood open. The yard was crackly dry bush strewn with rubble. A family of squatters—Tutsis just returned from Burundi—sat in the living room playing Scrabble. Edmond ignored them. He led me around the side of the house to a stand of dried-out banana plants. There were two holes in the ground, about a foot apart and three feet in diameter—neat, deep, machine-dug wells. Edmond grabbed hold of a bush, leaned out over the holes, and said, “You can see the tibias.” I did as he did, and saw the bones.

“Fourteen meters deep,” Edmond said. He told me that his brother-in-law had been a fanatically religious man, and on April 12, 1994, when he was stopped by interahamwe at a roadblock down the street and forced to lead them back to his house, he had persuaded the killers to let him pray. Edmond’s brother-in-law had prayed for half an hour. Then he told the militiamen that he didn’t want his family dismembered, so they invited him to throw his children down the latrine wells alive, and he did. Then Edmond’s sister and his brother-in-law were thrown in on top.

Edmond took his camera out of a plastic bag and took some pictures of the holes in the ground. “People come to Rwanda and talk of reconciliation,” he said. “It’s offensive. Imagine talking to Jews of reconciliation in 1946. Maybe in a long time, but it’s a private matter.” The squatters had come out of the house. They stood together at a short distance, and when they grasped Edmond’s story they began sniffling.

On the way back to town, I asked Edmond if he knew the people living in his sister’s house. “No,” he said. “When I see people who live in a place that isn’t theirs, when there are survivors all around who have lost their homes, I know they’re miserable people. I want nothing to do with them. All I can think about is the people I’ve lost.” He reminded me that one of his brothers had been killed as well as his sister and her family. Then he told me that he knew who his brother’s killer was, and that he sometimes saw the man around Kigali.

“I’d like to talk to him,” Edmond said. “I want him to explain to me what this thing was, how he could do this thing. My surviving sister said, ‘Let’s denounce him.’ I saw what was happening —a wave of arrests all at once—and I said, ‘What good is prison, if he doesn’t feel what I feel? Let him live in fear.’ When the time is right, I want to make him understand that I’m not asking for his arrest, but for him to live forever with what he has done. I’m asking for him to think about it for the rest of his life. It’s a kind of psychological torture.”

Edmond had thought of himself as a Rwandan—he had identified with his people—but after the genocide he lost that mooring. Now, to prove himself his brother’s keeper, he wanted to fix his brother’s killer with the mark of Cain. I couldn’t help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city—and, although we don’t like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children.

16

ONE OF THE few things that the fleeing Hutu Power vandals left in ready-to-use condition was Rwanda’s central prison system, thirteen red-brick fortifications, built to house a total of twelve thousand inmates. During the genocide, the gates were opened so that convicts could be put to work, killing and collecting corpses, but the jails didn’t stay vacant for long. By April of 1995, a year after the killings, at least thirty-three thousand men, women, and children had been arrested for alleged participation in genocide. At the end of that year, the number had climbed to sixty thousand. Some prisons were expanded, new ones were built, and hundreds of smaller community lockups were crammed to overflowing, but the space could not keep up with the demand. By the end of 1997, at least a hundred twenty-five thousand Hutus accused of crimes during the genocide were incarcerated in Rwanda.

A few soldiers usually stood around the periphery of Rwanda’s prisons, but there were no guards on the inside. Prisoners and soldiers both considered themselves safer this way. But the government’s fear of sending soldiers into the prisons did not extend to foreign visitors, and I was always permitted to bring a camera. This puzzled me. Rwanda’s prisons had not elicited favorable press. They were widely viewed as a human rights catastrophe.

Although the tightly packed inmates were all accused of terrible violence, they were generally calm and orderly; fights among them were said to be rare, and killings unheard of. They greeted visitors amiably, often with smiles and with hands extended for a shake. At the women’s prison in Kigali, I found three hundred forty women lying around on the floor, barely clad in the stuffy heat of a few cramped cells and corridors; babies crawled underfoot, and two inmate nuns in crisp white habits said mass in a corner. At Butare prison, old men stood in a downpour with bits of plastic over their heads while young boys, scrunched together in a small cell, sang a chorus of “Alouette.” In the men’s block of Kigali prison, I was conducted past acrobatic and choral groups, a Scout troop, and three men reading Tintin by the captain of the prisoners and his adjutant, who wielded a short baton to clear a path through the tangled ranks of prisoners. The captain kept calling out, “Here’s a journalist from the United States,” and the huddled men, squatting at our feet, clapped mechanically and made little bowing motions. It occurred to me that this was the famous mob mentality of blind obedience to authority which was often described in attempts to explain the genocide.

Rwanda’s conventional hierarchies had reconstituted themselves behind the prison walls; “intellectuals,” civil servants, professionals, clerics, and merchants had the least uncomfortable cells, while the mass of peasants and laborers made do outdoors, crouching in the bony folds of their neighbors’ limbs in unroofed courtyards, and referred all questions to their leaders. Why did they put up with it? Why didn’t they riot? Why were attempted escapes so rare in Rwanda, when the guard system was so weak? A rampaging mob of five thousand prisoners could have easily overrun the walls of Kigali’s central prison and severely destabilized the capital, sparking a major crisis for the government they despised, even a general uprising if there was support for it. Nobody could entirely explain the passivity in the prisons; the best guess was that, having been assured that they would be slaughtered by the RPF, and finding themselves instead receiving regular visits from friendly international relief workers, reporters, and diplomats, the prisoners were simply astonished to be alive and did not care to push their luck.

Between my visits to the prisons, I stopped by to see General Kagame in his office at the Ministry of Defense. I was wondering why the government exposed itself to bad press about the prisons, and how he interpreted the prisoners’ apparent calm acceptance of their horrible conditions. Kagame answered my question with a question of his own: “If a million people died here, who killed them?”

“A lot of people,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Have you found many that admit they participated?”

I hadn’t. In the early days after the genocide, it had been easy for visitors to find perpetrators, in the jails and the refugee camps and also on the streets of Rwanda, who admitted to taking part in the killings, and even boasted about it. Yet by the time I began visiting Rwanda, the criminals had recognized that confession was a tactical error. In the prisons and the border camps, I couldn’t find anyone who would even agree that there had been a genocide. There had been a civil war and, yes, some massacres, but nobody acknowledged seeing anything. Every one of the scores of prisoners I spoke with claimed to have been arbitrarily and unjustly arrested, and of course, in any given case it was entirely possible. But many prisoners also told me they were confident that their “brothers” in the UN border camps would soon come to liberate them.

I once heard Kagame say that he suspected as many as a million people had particpated directly or indirectly in the genocide. His adviser, Claude Dusaidi, who liked to make extreme pronouncements, put the number at three million, which amounted to proclaiming every other Rwandan Hutu guilty. Such claims—impossible to prove or to disprove—struck many Rwandans and foreign observers as acts of intimidation, carefully calculated to place all Hutus under a cloud of suspicion; and this perception was only hardened when a UN-sponsored effort to honor those Hutus, like Paul Rusesabagina, who had protected Tutsis during the genocide was scuttled by infighting among Rwandan cabinet ministers. But Dusaidi insisted that Rwanda’s outrageously packed prisons did not reflect the outrageousness of the crime that had been visited on the country. “Sometimes one person could kill six people, and sometimes three people could kill one person,” Dusaidi said. “Pick any single film of the genocide, and just watch how they kill people. You’ll find a group killing a person. So there are many more killers still walking the streets than we have in prison. The number in prison is a dot.”

Of course, the fact that guilty people remained free didn’t mean that those in prison were the right people. I asked Kagame if it bothered him that a good many innocent people might be in jail and that the experience might harden them into oppositionists. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a problem. But that was the way to deal with the situation. If we had lost these people through revenge, that would have been an even bigger problem for us. I would rather address the problem of putting them in prison, because that is the best way to do it for the process of justice, and simply because I don’t want them out there, because people would actually kill them.”

IN JULY OF 1995, Rwanda’s National Commission of Triage—a sporadically functioning body charged with identifying prisoners against whom the accusations of genocide were insubstantial—ordered the release of Placide Koloni from the prison at Gitarama. Koloni had held the office of deputy governor before, during, and—until his arrest—after the genocide. This was normal; the majority of provincial and communal officials who had not fled Rwanda, or been jailed as génocidaires, had retained their posts. Koloni had spent five months as a prisoner, and upon his release he returned to his office. Three days later, on the night of July 27, a sentry at a UN military observers’ post staffed by Malian blue-helmets saw some men enter Koloni’s home. A scream was heard, and the house exploded in flames. The blue-helmets watched as the fire burned through the night. Shortly after dawn, they entered the house and found that Koloni, his wife, their two daughters, and a domestic had been killed.

A week later, a Hutu deputy governor in Gikongoro, to the west of Gitarama, and a Catholic priest in Kamonyi parish, not far from Kigali, were shot dead. An edgy mood settled over Rwanda, not because the death toll was especially high, but because the victims were prominent civic leaders. In mid-August, the government was shaken when the Prime Minister, Faustin Twagiramungu, and the Minister of the Interior, Seth Sendashonga, quit in protest over the persistent insecurity in the provinces, for which they blamed the RPA. Both men were Hutus—Twagiramungu, a leader of the anti-Hutu Power opposition under Habyarimana ; Sendashonga, a prominent member of the RPF—and both went into exile.

General Kagame, who never tired of reciting the number of RPA soldiers—four hundred, seven hundred; I lost count after a thousand—who had been thrown in military jails for killings and indiscipline, liked to point out that soldiers were not the only Rwandans frustrated to the point of criminality in the aftermath of the genocide and that Rwanda even has apolitical criminals. “But given the situation you have here,” he said, “ordinary crimes are not going to be looked at as ordinary crimes.” His distinction offered little comfort to frightened Hutus. “When we see how Koloni was killed, we’d rather be in here than out there,” a detainee told me at Gitarama prison, which was known as Rwanda’s worst prison in the summer of 1995.

At Gitarama, more than six thousand men were packed into a space built for seven hundred and fifty. That worked out to four prisoners per square yard: night and day, the prisoners had to stand or to sit between the legs of those who stood, and even in the dry season a scum of condensation, urine, and bits of dropped food covered the floor. The cramped prisoners’ feet and ankles, and sometimes their entire legs, swelled to two or three times normal size. They suffered from an atrophying of their swollen extremities and from rot; infection often followed. Hundreds had required amputations.

When Lieutenant Colonel R. V. Blanchette, a UN military observer from Canada, first learned of the conditions at Gitarama prison, he paid a visit. “I went down in the back with my flashlight,” he told me, “and I saw this guy’s foot. I’d heard it was pretty bad in there, but this was quite ugly—very swollen, and his little toe was missing. I shined my flashlight up to his face, and he reached down and pulled off the next toe.”

A few weeks after Blanchette’s encounter, prisoners at Gitarama told me that conditions were much improved. The Red Cross, which supplied the food and cooking fuel for all of Rwanda’s central prisons, had installed duckboards underfoot and evacuated the worst medical cases. “We had eighty-six deaths in June, and in July only eighteen,” a doctor at the prison clinic told me. The main causes of death, he added, were malaria and AIDS, which was normal for men in Rwanda, and while prison conditions remained grim—atrocious in most of the small community lockups—by mid-1996 mortality rates in the central prisons were reported to be lower than among the Rwandan population at large.

On the day of my visit to Gitarama prison, six thousand four hundred and twenty-four prisoners formed a solid-looking knot, and I had to plan each step I took with care. It was difficult to figure out how the people fitted together—which limbs went with which body, or why a head appeared to have grown three legs without a torso in between. Many of the feet were badly swollen. The bodies were clad in rags.

Yet the faces didn’t correspond to the discomfort in which the bodies were confined. They had a clarity and composure and forthrightness of expression that made the people inside the prison nearly indistinguishable from those outside. Here and there, of course, I would catch the electric glint of insane eyes or a ragged leer of unnerving brutality. But, pressing through the throng, I received the usual welcoming smiles, cheers, and handshakes. In the children’s cell, sixty-three boys, ranging in age from seven to sixteen, sat in rows on the floor, facing a blackboard where an older prisoner—a schoolteacher by profession—was conducting a lesson. They looked like schoolboys anywhere. I asked one why he was in prison. “They say I killed,” he said. “I didn’t.” Other children gave the same reply, with downcast eyes, evasive, as unconvincing as schoolboys anywhere.

Rwanda’s formal arrest procedures were rarely followed, and it was sometimes enough for someone to point a finger and say, “Genocide.” But, according to Luc Cote, a lawyer from Montreal who directed the UN Human Rights office in Butare, “most of the arrests were founded on some type of evidence, and a lot of the time there was a whole lot of evidence,” which meant that while they might be technically incorrect they weren’t necessarily arbitrary. And even if the procedures were followed to the letter, it wasn’t clear what difference it would make, since Rwanda’s courts were closed, and for more than two and a half years nobody was brought to trial.

The government attributed the judicial paralysis to its lack of financial and human resources. Police inspectors, responsible for assembling the dossiers against the accused, were constantly being recruited and trained, but even then most were amateurs who found themselves with hundreds of complex cases, no transportation, no support staff, and quite often threats coming at them from both accusers and accused. Rwanda pleaded for bicycles, motorcycles, and pencils and pens from foreign donors, but these basic necessities were much slower in coming than expressions of “concern” that not enough was being done to protect the rights of the accused.

NOBODY EVER TALKED seriously about conducting tens of thousands of murder trials in Rwanda. Western legal experts liked to say that even the lawyer-crowded United States could not have handled Rwanda’s caseload fairly and expeditiously. “It’s materially impossible to judge all those who participated in the massacres, and politically it’s no good, even though it’s just,” the RPF’s Tito Ruteremara told me. “This was a true genocide, and the only correct response is true justice. But Rwanda has the death penalty, and—well, that would mean a lot more killing.”

In other words, a true genocide and true justice are incompatible. Rwanda’s new leaders were trying to see their way around this problem by describing the genocide as a crime committed by masterminds and slave bodies. Neither party could be regarded as innocent, but if the crime was political, and justice was to serve the political good, then the punishment had to draw a line between the criminal minds and the criminal bodies. “With those who masterminded the genocide, it’s clear-cut,” General Kagame told me. “They must face justice directly. I’m not as worried about these ordinary peasants who took machetes and cut people in pieces like animals.” He explained that “long ago” Rwandan justice was conducted in village hearings, where fines were the preferred penalties. “The guy who did the crime can give some salt or something, and that can bring the people back together,” Kagame said.

Salt for state-sponsored mass murder? Village justice, as Kagame sketched it, sounded hopelessly inadequate. But as the lawyer François Xavier Nkurunziza explained: “When you speak of justice with our peasants, the big idea is compensation. A cattle keeper or cultivator who loses his whole family has lost his whole economic support system. You can kill the man who committed genocide, but that’s not compensation—that’s only fear and anger. This is how our peasants think.” The problem, as Kagame suggested when he spoke of salt, was that after genocide compensation could, at best, be symbolic.

The government discussed easing the burden on the courts by ranking degrees of criminality among the génocidaires, and assigning lesser offenders to public works or reeducation programs. Politically, the RPF was more concerned with what in postwar Germany was called “denazification” than with holding every individual who had committed a crime during the genocide to account. “Actually, we’re trying to see how to get as many ordinary people off the hook as possible,” Gerald Gahima, an RPF political officer who was the Deputy Minister of Justice, explained. “But that’s not justice, is it? It’s not the justice the law provides for. It’s not the justice most people would want. It’s only the best justice we can try for under the circumstances.”

But if the guilty could never be fully punished and survivors could never be properly compensated, the RPF regarded forgiveness as equally impossible—unless, at the very least, the perpetrators of the genocide acknowledged that they had done wrong. With time, the quest for justice became, in large measure, a quest for repentance. Where ministers and parliamentarians had once preached the civic virtue of murdering one’s neighbors, members of the new government now traveled the countryside to spread the gospel of reconciliation through accountability.

Mass reburial ceremonies for genocide victims were a favorite forum for the new message. I attended such a reburial in the summer of 1995, on a hilltop amid the lush, mist-strewn tea plantations of Gisenyi. In this setting of astonishing tranquillity, the newly grown grass was pulled back to disclose a mass grave. The broken bodies within it were exhumed and laid out on a long rack. On the orders of village leaders, the local peasantry had come to see, and to smell the death smell, and President Bizimungu came with a half dozen cabinet ministers and many other officials. Soldiers distributed translucent plastic gloves among the villagers, and put them to work, placing pieces of the corpses in coffins and wrapping the rest in green plastic sheets. There were speeches and benedictions. A soldier explained to me that the President had used his speech to ask the peasantry where they had been when these dead were killed in their community, and exhorted them to make atonement. Then the dead were placed in new mass graves, and covered up again with earth.

WHEN RWANDANS SPOKE of reconstruction and reconciliation, they spoke of the need to overcome or to liberate themselves from “the old mentalities” of colonialism and dictatorship, and from the perfect pecking order of intimidation and obedience that had served as the engine of the genocide. The systems by which the old mentalities had been implanted had names—impunity, cronyism, ethnicity, feudalism, Hamitism—but the mentalities themselves lay deeper within each Rwandan, internalized in the reflexive habits of a lifetime’s experiences and expectations of brutality: us or them; kill or be killed. When Kagame said that people can be made bad, and can be taught to be good, he added, “There are mechanisms within society—education, a form of participation. Something can be achieved.” This view was widely shared, with varying degrees of certainty and skepticism, not only within the RPF but among many of the surviving anti-Habyarimana Hutu leaders, and—on a good day, at least—by much of the Rwandan public.

But where was Rwanda to turn for a model? The justice at Nuremberg was helpfully brought by foreign conquerors, and denazification in Germany was carried out in a context where the group that had been subjected to genocide would no longer be living side by side with the killers. In South Africa, armed struggle had ended, and the post-apartheid Truth Commission could presume that the country’s defeated white masters had accepted the legitimacy of the new order. Rwanda offered no such tidy arrangement. Guerrilla attacks from Hutu Power forces in Zaire escalated steadily throughout 1995, as did attacks on witnesses and survivors of the genocide. “Right now, if you were to give a general amnesty you would be inviting chaos,” said Charles Murigande, chairman of Rwanda’s Presidential Commission on Accountability for the Genocide. “But if we could put our hands on the leaders, even an amnesty would be very well received.”

That was a very big “if.” Just as Habyarimana’s death had made him a martyr for Hutu Power, it also ensured that the killing which was purportedly carried out in “defense” of his name had never carried a signal signature: a Hitler, a Pol Pot, a Stalin. The list of Rwanda’s “Most Wanted” was a hodgepodge of akazu members, military officers, journalists, politicians, businessmen, mayors, civil service functionaries, clerics, schoolteachers, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, and untitled hatchet men—dizzying to keep track of and impossible to rank in a precise hierarchy of command. Some were said to have given orders, loudly or quietly, and others to have transmitted or followed orders, but the plan and its execution had been ingeniously designed to look planless.

Still, Rwandan investigators were able to draw up a list of some four hundred top génocidaires—masterminds and master implementers. But all of them were in exile, beyond Rwanda’s reach. Almost immediately after its installation in 1994, the new government had appealed to the United Nations for help in apprehending fugitive Hutu Power leaders, so that they might stand trial before the nation. Instead, the UN created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which was essentially a subset of the tribunal that had been established for the ugly Balkan war of the early 1990s. “We asked for help to catch these people who ran away and to try them properly in our own courts,” a Rwandan diplomat told me. “But the Security Council just started writing ‘Rwanda’ under the name ‘Yugoslavia’ everywhere.”

The Rwandan government regarded the UN’s decision to keep its resources to itself as an insult. The very existence of the UN court implied that the Rwandan judiciary was incapable of reaching just verdicts, and seemed to dismiss in advance any trials that Rwanda might hold as beneath international standards. “If the international community really wants to fight impunity in Rwanda, they should help Rwanda to punish these people,” Gerald Gahima told me at the Ministry of Justice. “It makes it harder to forgive the ordinary people if we don’t have the leaders here to be tried in Rwandan courts before the Rwandan people according to Rwandan law.” But the UN tribunal would not even sit in Rwanda, where the witnesses and concerned audience were; instead it was headquartered on “neutral territory,” in Arusha, Tanzania. “The tribunal,” Charles Murigande said, “was created essentially to appease the conscience of the international community, which has failed to live up to its conventions on genocide. It wants to look as if it is doing something, which is often worse than doing nothing at all.”

In fact, during its first two years, the UN tribunal didn’t appear to be doing much. It was understaffed and systematically mismanaged, and its prosecutorial strategy appeared directionless and opportunistic. Most of its indictments followed the chance arrest on immigration charges of Rwandan fugitives in various African countries, and in some high-profile cases, like that of Colonel Bagasora, who was captured in Cameroon, the UN fought a Rwandan extradition request to advance its own. In this way, the tribunal ultimately wound up with an impressive sampler of Hutu Power masterminds in its custody. But it quickly became clear that the prosecutors had no intention of trying more than a few dozen cases. This only served to aggravate the feeling in Kigali that the UN court was not designed to serve Rwanda’s national interest, since the message to the vast majority of fugitive génocidaires was that they had nothing to fear: the international community would not help Rwanda get them, nor would it pursue them itself. “It’s a joke,” Kagame’s adviser, Claude Dusaidi, said to me. “This tribunal is now acting as a spoiler.”

The largest concentrations of Rwanda’s most-wanted were settled in Zaire and Kenya—states whose notoriously corrupt Presidents, Mobutu Sese Seko and Daniel arap Moi, had been intimates of Habyarimana and had taken to hosting his widow, Madame Agathe, at their palaces. Mobutu had called Habyarimana his “little brother,” and the slain Rwandan’s remains, which had been spirited across the border amid the mass flight to Goma, were entombed in a mausoleum on the grounds of Mobutu’s primary estate. When I asked Honoré Rakotomanana, a Madagascan who headed the UN’s prosecution team in Rwanda, how he expected to indict anybody from Zaire or Kenya, he said, “There are international treaties to which those countries are signatories.” But in nearly two years, before he was sacked in 1997, Rakotomanana never bothered to send a single investigator to Zaire. Meanwhile, in October 1995, Kenya’s President Moi assailed the tribunal as a “haphazard process,” and announced, “I shall not allow any one of them to enter Kenya to serve summonses and look for people here. No way. If any such characters come here, they will be arrested. We must respect ourselves. We must not be harassed.”

Watching the old-boy network of African strongmen protect its own, Kagame spoke of “a feeling of betrayal, even by our African brothers,” and he added, ominously, “We shall remind them that what happened here can happen elsewhere—it can happen in these other countries—and then I am sure they will run to us. It can happen tomorrow. Things have happened, and they can happen again.”

Even when genocidal leaders were eventually turned over to the tribunal, the problem remained that the UN had forbidden the court to recommend a death penalty. The Nazis at Nuremberg and the Japanese war criminals in Tokyo had faced the death penalty after World War II. Were the crimes committed against humanity in Rwanda lesser offenses than those which prompted the Genocide Convention to be written? According to Kagame, when Rwanda protested that the tribunal should carry the death penalty out of respect for Rwanda’s laws, the UN advised Rwanda to abolish its death penalty. Kagame called this advice “cynical.”

“The Rwandan people know this is the same international community that stood by and watched them get killed,” Gerald Gahima said. And his RPF colleague Tito Ruteremara, noting that Rwandans convicted by the tribunal were expected to serve their sentences in Scandinavia, told me, “It doesn’t fit our definition of justice to think of the authors of the Rwandan genocide sitting in a full-service Swedish prison with a television.” As it turned out, even those Hutu Power leaders who wound up in custody at Arusha found the croissants they were regularly served for breakfast a bit rich. After a while, the tribunal prisoners mounted a protest to demand a normal Rwandan breakfast of gruel.

17

“IN YOUR COUNTRY,” the RPA colonel said, “I think you have many comedians.” We were sitting on his porch, in the cool, drizzling night of the central Rwandan highlands, drinking beer and whiskey and eating boiled potatoes and brochettes of grilled goat. The colonel dragged a chunk of meat off his skewer with his teeth. He chewed on it for a while, then he said, “In my understanding, many of these comedians in America are black. Why do you think that is?”

I suggested that it might have to do with adversity. People who feel up against it sometimes develop a canny take on how the world works—the rawness of it, the absurdities—and sometimes, if they’re funny, they make fun of it.

“Those black guys are funny,” the colonel said.

I said, “The funny ones are.”

He coughed out a one-syllable chuckle and the other guys on the porch, his associates, followed him with some laughter. After a while, the colonel said, “No comedians in Rwanda. Plenty of black people, plenty of adversity—no comedians.”

“You must have jokes,” I said.

He said, “They’re not really funny.”

I asked him to try one on me. “Another time,” he said. There was a woman present, and the colonel poked his chin out in her direction. “Rwandan jokes,” he said, “are not decent.”

I was disappointed. I didn’t expect to have another time with this colonel, and the subject interested me broadly: not just jokes —art of any kind. Next door in the Congo, in Tanzania, in Uganda, there were great artistic traditions: visual arts and music predominated, and a literary culture had developed in postcolonial times. Even Burundi had world-famous drumming ensembles. Rwanda had a few spectacular costume dances, some traditional songs, and an oral literature of poems and tales that followed archaic forms from precolonial times, but no arts to compete with its neighbors. The closest modern Rwanda came to a cultural flowering was in the fascist agitprop of Hutu Power newspapers and radio, and in the ruffian chic of interahamwe pageantry and marching songs. New music was mostly imported, and while some Rwandans had written novels almost nobody read them.

I would have liked to ask the colonel about the poverty of Rwandan art, but I didn’t want to offend him. So the conversation moved on. Then the woman left, and the colonel said, “OK, I’ll tell you a joke.” The setup was simple: a Rwandan kid grew up in the hills, did well in school, went to Paris on a scholarship, and returned with a new set of manners—mod clothes, a grandiose vocabulary, a mincing accent, even a different way of walking, “like a little horse,” the colonel said. One day, the boy’s father, a simple old peasant, said, “Boy, what’s got into you? So you went to France. So what? Look at me. I’ve been screwing your mother for forty-five years, and I don’t walk around town like this.” The colonel’s hands went out, clutching the air in front of him, and he pumped his hips urgently, in the eternal fashion.

I laughed. But the Rwandans on the porch, the colonel’s associates, just nodded gravely. “You see,” the colonel said, “it’s not really a funny joke. It’s about logic. Rwandan jokes are like this, kind of intellectual. For instance, a guy gets what we call a French haircut—shaved on the sides, flat on top—and his friends say, ‘How can you have a French cut? You don’t even speak French.’”

This time the Rwandans laughed, while I nodded. “It’s about logic,” the colonel said again. “It’s a trick. You laugh at the guy with the haircut and you laugh at his friends—back and forth.”

It seemed to me that both jokes did have a logic, as all jokes must, but that what they were about was provincialism and foreign influence. They were about aspirations to the image and offerings of a broader modern world, and the opposing tug of traditional Rwandan insularity and conformity; about being caught between a past that you reject or at least want to escape and a future that you can only imagine in terms of imported styles, whose imposition you also reject and want to escape. They were jokes that seemed well suited to a country undergoing the most catastrophic decolonization process in Africa. I told the colonel as much, in a groping way, and he said, “Maybe this is why we have no comedians.” He sounded quite discouraged.

“But the jokes are funny,” I said.

“No,” he told me, “it’s not funny. It’s going to take us a long time to overcome the old mentalities.”

SOMETIMES IT SEEMED that instead of fine arts, Rwandans had politics: the arts of statecraft, writ large and small, at the highest echelons of government and in the most basic negotiations of daily life. What, after all, was the struggle between proponents of a “new order” and adherents of the “old mentalities” if not a clash between two fundamentally opposed representations of Rwandan reality? After a century in which Rwandans had labored under the mystification and deceit of the Hamitic fable, whose ultimate perversity took the world-upside-down form of genocide, the RPF and its anti-Hutu Power allies described their struggle against annihilation as a revolt of realists. “Honesty” was among their favorite words, and their basic proposition was that greater truth should be the basis of greater power. Under the circumstances, the last best hope for Hutu Power was to assert—in its usual simultaneous onslaught of word and action—that honesty and truth themselves were merely forms of artifice, never the source of power but always its products, and that the only measure of right versus wrong was the bastardized “majority rule” principle of physical might.

With the lines so drawn, the war about the genocide was truly a postmodern war: a battle between those who believed that because the realities we inhabit are constructs of our imaginations, they are all equally true or false, valid or invalid, just or unjust, and those who believed that constructs of reality can—in fact, must—be judged as right or wrong, good or bad. While academic debates about the possibility of objective truth and falsehood are often rarified to the point of absurdity, Rwanda demonstrated that the question is a matter of life and death.

In the summer of 1995, a man sought me out in Kigali, saying he had heard that I was interested in the problems of his country. He had long been privy to the workings of Rwandan politics—first as an associate of Hutu Power, then as an oppositionist—and he was now attached to the new government. He told me that he wanted to be completely honest with me about the affairs of his country, but anonymously. “If you betray my name,” he said, “I will deny everything.”

My visitor was a Hutu, who traveled with a Kalashnikov-toting soldier in tow. “Listen,” he said, “Rwanda had a dictatorship, Rwanda had a genocide, and now Rwanda has a very serious threat on the borders. You don’t have to be RPF to understand what that means. You don’t have to fall into the old thinking—that if you’re not with these guys you’re with those guys.” He went on to explain at length his view that Rwandans can never be trusted. “Foreigners cannot know this place,” he said. “We cheat. We repeat the same little things to you over and over and tell you nothing. Even among ourselves we lie. We have a habit of secrecy and suspicion. You can stay a whole year and you will not know what Rwandans think or what they are doing.”

I told him that this didn’t fully surprise me, because I had the impression that Rwandans often spoke two languages—not just Kinyarwanda and French or English, but one language among themselves and an entirely different language with outsiders. By way of an example, I said that I had talked with a Rwandan lawyer who had described the difficulty of integrating his European training into his Rwandan practice. He loved the Cartesian, Napoleonic legal system, on which Rwanda’s is modeled, but, he said, it didn’t always correspond to Rwandan reality, which was for him an equally complete system of thought. By the same token, when this lawyer spoke with me about Rwanda, he used a language quite different from the language he would speak with fellow Rwandans.

“You talk about this,” my visitor said, “and at the same time you say, ‘A lawyer told me such and such.’ A Rwandan would never tell you what someone else said, and normally, when you told a Rwandan what you heard from somebody, he would immediately change the rhythm of his speech and close himself off to you. He would think that what he said to you might be passed on later. He would be on his guard.” He looked up and studied me for a moment. “You Westerners are so honest,” he said. He seemed depressed by the notion. “You say what you think, and you say what you’ve seen. You say, ‘A lawyer told me.’ Do you think there are many lawyers here?”

I said I’d met several and that the one whom I’d referred to had told me I was free to quote him by name. “Fine,” my visitor said. “But I’m telling you, Rwandans are petty.” I wasn’t entirely sure of the French word that he used for “petty,” which was mesquin. When I asked him to explain it, he described someone who sounded remarkably like Iago—a confidence man, a cheater and betrayer and liar, who tries to tell everyone what he imagines they want to hear in order to maintain his own game and get what he’s after. Colonel Dr. Joseph Karemera, a founding officer of the RPF and Rwanda’s Minister of Health, told me that there is a Kinyarwanda word for such behavior. Having described the legacy of thirty-four years of Hutu ethnic dictatorship as “a very bad mentality,” Karemera said, “We call it ikinamucho—that if you want to do something you are deceitful and not straight. For example, you can come to kill me”—he clutched his throat—“and your mission is successful, but then you cry. That is ikinamucho.”

My visitor liked the word mesquin. He used it repeatedly. I remarked that he didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of his people. “I’m trying to tell you about them without lying,” he said.

Shortly after our meeting, I learned that he had left Rwanda to join the leaders of Hutu Power in exile. I also learned that ikinamucho means “theater.”

DURING HER LAST year in medical school, in the early 1980s, Odette Nyiramilimo’s professor of pediatrics was a doctor named Théodore Sindikubwabo. “I was hugely pregnant when I took my exam with him, and he saw that I was suffering,” Odette recalled. “He took me to his office to drink a Fanta, then he drove me home. These were very human qualities, the genuine responses of a father. But he was a false man. During the First Republic, under President Kayibanda, he was the Minister of Health. When he saw Habyarimana taking power and imprisoning all the ministers, he went straight to Kigali Central Hospital, grabbed a stethoscope, and began practicing pediatrics. Then he became a deputy in the parliament. He loved to be important. He came from the south, he had a big house in Butare, which was anti-Power, and he was a Power man with the MRND—so very useful. He had this mentality like a chameleon. But I never thought he could be a killer.”

Three days after Habyarimana’s assassination, Sindikubwabo was installed as Rwanda’s interim President by Colonel Bagasora’s crisis committee. At that time, Butare was the only province with a Tutsi governor, and while other civic and political leaders led their constituencies to massacre, this governor, Jean-Baptiste Habyalimana, urged restraint. For the first twelve days of the killing, Butare was a haven of virtual calm, and Tutsis fleeing massacres elsewhere flocked to the region. Then, on April 19, 1994, Théodore Sindikubwabo visited Butare. He fired the governor (who was subsequently killed) and held a rally, where he delivered a call to arms that was broadcast throughout the country. The day after Sindikubwabo spoke, soldiers of the Presidential Guard were flown into Butare, buses and trucks carrying militia and arms arrived, and the slaughter began. The killings in Butare included some of the most extensive massacres of the genocide: in just two or three weeks, at least twenty thousand Tutsis were killed in Cyahinda parish and at least thirty-five thousand in Karama parish.

Sindikubwabo’s old villa in Butare had been smashed into a heap of stones by the time I visited it, but he had a nice new one in an exclusive enclave of Bukavu, Zaire, where he lived as president of the government in exile. The property sat just behind the governor’s mansion in Bukavu and commanded a stunning view of the hills of Rwanda across the southern tip of Lake Kivu. Two black Rwandan government Mercedes sedans stood in the drive when I stopped by in late May of 1995, and several young Rwandans hung around the gate. An amiable man in a red sports shirt greeted me and introduced himself as Sindikubwabo’s chief of protocol. He said that the press was always welcome because Rwanda was terribly misunderstood in the world: yes, the country had suffered a genocide, but it was carried out by the RPF, and Hutus had been the victims. “Look at us, in exile,” he said, adding, “Even as we speak, Paul Kagame is killing all the Hutus in Rwanda, systematically.” Then he volunteered the opinion that Sindikubwabo was an innocent man and asked whether I believed in the idea of innocence until guilt is proven. I said that I didn’t know that Sindikubwabo had been charged with any crimes in any courts of law, and he told me that all Rwandan refugees were waiting for the judgment of the international tribunal. “But who is this tribunal?” he asked. “Who is influencing them? Who are they serving? Are they interested in the truth or only in avoiding reality?”

The chief of protocol told me to wait where I was, and after a while André Nkurunziza, Sindikubwabo’s press attaché, took his place. Nkurunziza cut a slightly tattered figure; he had broken teeth and an ancient jacket, and he spoke in an injured, plaintive tone. “This is a government hurt by a media conspiracy that labels it a government of genocide,” he said. “But these are not people who killed anyone. We hear them called planners, but these are only rumors planted by Kigali. Even you, when you go to Kigali, they could pay you money to write what they want.” He put out a hand to touch my forearm soothingly. “I don’t say that they did pay you. It’s just an example.”

Nkurunziza told me that in 1991 he had visited Washington. “They didn’t know there was a war in Rwanda,” he said. “They didn’t know of Rwanda. I said, ‘It’s a little country next to Zaire.’ They said, ‘Where is Zaire?’ Now, how can they say they know what happened in my country last year?”

We were standing in Zaire, looking at Rwanda. I said, “What happened last year?”

“This is a long war,” Nkurunziza said. “And there will be another war. This is what we think here. There will be another war.”

Eventually, I was taken in to Sindikubwabo, who was in his mid-sixties, an old man by Rwandan standards. He sat in a low armchair in his modestly furnished living room. He was said to be ill, and he looked it: gaunt, with pale eyes filmed by cataracts and a strikingly bony, asymmetrical face, divided by a thick scar—the result of a motorbike accident in his youth—that drew his mouth up in a diagonal sneer. He told me that, in keeping with the Arusha Accords, he would welcome “a frank and sincere dialogue about the management of Rwanda” with the RPF. When I asked why anybody should negotiate with the man who was considered to have instigated the massacres at Butare, Sindikubwabo began to laugh, a dry, raspy chuckle that kept up until he was out of breath.

“The moment has not yet come to say who is guilty and who is not guilty,” he said. “The RPF can bring accusations against it doesn’t matter whom, and they can formulate these accusations it doesn’t matter how—reassembling, stitching together, making a montage of the witnesses. It’s easy. You’re a journalist and you don’t know how this is done?” His face began to twitch around his scar. “This becomes a sort of theater piece”—“une comédie,” he said—“that they’re performing right now in Kigali, and it will be sorted out before the tribunal. I come from Butare, and I know what I said in Butare, and the people of Butare also know what I said.”

But he refused to tell me what he had said. Even if I found a tape of the speech, he instructed me, I would have to bring it back to him for an interpretation—“every word, what it means, every phrase, what it means, because to interpret the ideas and thoughts of others, it’s not easy and it’s not fair.” Later, when I repeated his words to Odette, she said, “There was nothing to interpret. He was saying things like ‘Eliminate those who think they know everything. Work on without them.’ I trembled when I heard it.”

Sindikubwabo’s speech was one of the most widely remembered moments of the genocide, because once the killing began in Butare it was clear that no Tutsi in Rwanda was to be spared. But he insisted that he had been misunderstood. “If the mayors of Butare affirm that the massacres began under my order—they are responsible, because it was their responsibility to maintain order in their communities. If they interpreted my message as an order, they executed an order against my words.” I wondered why he hadn’t corrected them, since he was a doctor and had been President while hundreds of thousands of people were being murdered in his country. He said that if the time came he would answer that question before the international tribunal.

Sitting with Sindikubwabo as he offered what sounded like a rehearsal of the defense-by-obfuscation he was preparing for the tribunal, I had the impression that he almost yearned to be indicted, even apprehended, in order to have a final hour in the spotlight. But perhaps he knew that in Zaire he was beyond the reach of the UN tribunal. He maintained that a “truly impartial” investigation could not but vindicate him. By way of an example, he handed me what he regarded as a definitive account of recent Rwandan history, an article clipped from the Executive Intelligence Review, a publication put out by the crypto-fascist American conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche. I scanned it briefly; it appeared to demonstrate that the British royal family, through its Ugandan puppets, and in collusion with several other shadowy outfits including the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, had sponsored the extermination of Rwanda’s Hutu majority.

A PORTRAIT OF President Habyarimana stood behind Sindikubwabo’s chair. The dead leader, buttoned up in military dress and draped with braid, looked much happier than the exiled leader, and it seemed to me that as a dead man he did have the happier position. To his people, Habyarimana was the true President—many people in the UN camps told me so—whereas Sindikubwabo was regarded as a nobody who had filled the job for only a brief, unfortunate moment. “He is President of nothing,” several refugees said. To his enemies, too, Sindikubwabo was a nobody; RPF leaders and genocide survivors saw him as an attendant lord, plucked from the lower echelons of Hutu Power at the moment of crisis precisely because he was content to play the puppet. Sindikubwabo’s own son-in-law was Minister of Agriculture in the new government, and during a mass reburial ceremony in Butare he had denounced his father-in-law as a murderer, and urged Rwandans to avoid ascribing guilt or protecting the guilty on the basis of familial association.

Yet even in his spurned and discredited state, Sindikubwabo remained of use to the Hutu Power machine—as a scapegoat. With time, the leaders of the ex-FAR, who kept their headquarters at the northern end of Lake Kivu, ten miles west of Goma, had distanced themselves from the government in exile and created an assortment of new political front organizations, whose operatives were not known to have distinguished themselves in the genocide and could be presented to the world as “clean.” Chief among these was the Rassemblement Democratique pour la Retour (RDR), whose propaganda, blaming the refugee crisis on the RPF and calling for a blanket amnesty as a precondition for repatriation, won it a great following among relief workers and journalists. Field officers of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees often made a special point of introducing me to RDR leaders when I visited the camps. I couldn’t understand it. They sounded exactly like Sindikubwabo, and yet the humanitarians who promoted them seemed convinced that they were sensible and legitimate voices of the excluded. RDR spokesmen in Zaire, Kenya, and Brussels were frequently cited on the BBC as “leading representatives of the refugees.” That the RDR might be associated with the génocidaires—that it was, in fact, a shadow Hutu Power regime chartered by the ex-FAR command in Goma, and that RDR agents micromanaged the camps, extorting monthly taxes, in cash or a cut of food-aid rations, from every refugee family in Zaire, and intimidating refugees who wanted to go home—was rarely even hinted at.

This was one of the great mysteries of the war about the genocide: how, time and again, international sympathy placed itself at the ready service of Hutu Power’s lies. It was bewildering enough that the UN border camps should be allowed to constitute a rump genocidal state, with an army that was regularly observed to be receiving large shipments of arms and recruiting young men by the thousands for the next extermination campaign. And it was heartbreaking that the vast majority of the million and a half people in those camps were evidently at no risk of being jailed, much less killed, in Rwanda, but that the propaganda and brute force of the Hutu Power apparatus was effectively holding them hostage, as a human shield. Yet what made the camps almost unbearable to visit was the spectacle of hundreds of international humanitarians being openly exploited as caterers to what was probably the single largest society of fugitive criminals against humanity ever assembled.

Aid agencies provided transportation, meeting places, and office supplies to the RDR and paramilitary groups that masqueraded as community self-help agencies; they fattened the war coffers of the Hutu Power elites by renting trucks and buses from them, and by hiring as refugee employees the candidates advanced through an in-house patronage system managed by the génocidaires. Some aid workers even hired the Hutu Power pop star Simon Bikindi—lyricist of the interahamwe anthem “I Hate These Hutus”—to perform with his band at a party. In the border camps in Tanzania, I met a group of doctors, recently arrived from Europe, who told me how much fun the refugees were. “You can tell by their eyes who the innocent ones are,” said a doctor from —of all places—Sarajevo. And a colleague of hers said, “They wanted to show us a video of Rwanda in 1994, but we decided it would be too upsetting.”

ONCE THE CHOLERA outbreak in Goma had been contained, the camps had ceased to offer a solution to the refugee crisis and became a means of sustaining it; for the longer the camps remained in place, the greater was the inevitability of war, and that meant that rather than protecting people, the camps were placing them directly in harm’s way.

Throughout 1995 and 1996, the Hutu Power forces in exile continued their guerrilla war against Rwanda, with raiders from the camps slipping over the borders to mine a road, blow up a power pylon, or attack genocide survivors and witnesses. In addition, the ex-FAR and interahamwe from the Goma camps fanned out through the surrounding province of North Kivu, which was home to a sizable population of Zaireans of Rwandan ancestry, and began recruiting, training, and arming Zairean Hutus to fight with them for ethnic solidarity on either side of the Rwanda-Zaire border. Reports soon circulated of Hutu Power raiders getting on-the-job training—attacking Tutsi ranchers and pillaging their cattle—in the rich highland pastures of the Masisi region of North Kivu. By mid-1995, as Zairean tribal militias mounted a resistance, Masisi became known as a combat zone. “This is a direct consequence of the camps,” a security officer at UNHCR headquarters in Goma told me, “and there’s nothing we can do but watch.”

Such expressions of helplessness were common among the relief workers who maintained the camps. The UNHCR’s Jacques Franquin, a former theater director from Belgium who supervised camps that held more than four hundred thousand Rwandan Hutus in Tanzania, told me that he knew a number of génocidaires among them. “But don’t ask me to sort them out,” he said. “Don’t ask me to take the criminals out of the camps and put humanitarian workers in danger.” What he meant—and what I heard repeatedly—was that so long as the major powers that sat on the Security Council and funded most humanitarian aid lacked the will to act against Hutu Power, humanitarians could not be blamed for the consequences.

“Food, shelter, water, health, sanitation—we do good aid,” a relief agency boss in Goma told me. “That’s what the international community wants, and that’s what we give it.” But if the faults of the international response did not originate within the relief industry, they quickly took up residence there. Even if not taking sides were a desirable position, it is impossible to act in or on a political situation without having a political effect.

“The humanitarian mind-set is to not think—just to do,” said a French UNHCR officer at the Rwandan camps in Burundi. “We’re like robots, programmed to save some lives. But when the contracts are up, or when it gets too dangerous, we will leave and maybe the people we saved can get killed after all.” Humanitarians didn’t like to be called mercenaries, but “not to think—just to do,” as the UNHCR worker put it, is a mercenary mind-set. As a Swiss delegate for the International Committee of the Red Cross told me, “When humanitarian aid becomes a smoke screen to cover the political effects it actually creates, and states hide behind it, using it as a vehicle for policymaking, then we can be regarded as agents in the conflict.”

ACCORDING TO ITS mandate, the UNHCR provides assistance exclusively to refugees—people who have fled across an international border and can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their homeland—and fugitives fleeing criminal prosecution are explicitly disqualified from protection. The mandate also requires that those who receive UNHCR’s assistance must be able to prove that they are properly entitled to refugee status. But no attempt was ever made to screen the Rwandans in the camps; it was considered far too dangerous. In other words, we—all of us who paid taxes in countries that paid the UNHCR —were feeding people who were expected to try to hurt us (or our agents) if we questioned their right to our charity.

Nobody knows exactly how many people were in the Zaire camps because no thorough census was ever attempted, and piecemeal efforts were programmatically, often violently, sabotaged by the génocidaires, who had a political interest in keeping numbers radically inflated, and liked the extra rations. The birth rate in the camps was close to the limit of human possibility; breeding more Hutus was Hutu Power policy, and the coerced impregnation of any female of reproductive age was regarded as a sort of ethnic public service among the resident interahamwe. At the same time, roughly half a million people had succeeded in returning to Rwanda from Zaire of their own accord in the first year after the genocide. Thereafter, the UNHCR claimed that the camp population stabilized at about a million and a quarter Rwandans, but a number of UNHCR staffers told me that its estimates were at least twenty percent too high.

The one sure statistic about the Zaire camps was that they cost their sponsors at least a million dollars a day. A dollar per person per day may not sound like much, especially when one considers that at least seventy percent of that money went right back into the pockets of the aid teams and their outfitters, in the form of overhead, supplies, equipment, staff housing, salaries, benefits, and other assorted expenses. But even if just twenty-five cents a day was being spent on each refugee, that was nearly twice the per capita income of most Rwandans. The World Bank found that Rwanda after the genocide had become the poorest country on earth, with an average income of eighty dollars a year. Since thousands of people in Rwanda were making thousands of dollars a year, at least ninety-five percent of the population was probably living on an average income closer to sixty dollars a year, or sixteen cents a day.

Under the circumstances, living in a refugee camp was not a bad economic proposition for a Rwandan, especially for one plugged into the Hutu Power patronage network. Food was not only free, but ample; malnutrition rates in the camps were far lower than anywhere else in the region, on a par, in fact, with those of Western Europe. General medical care was also as good as it got in central Africa; Zaireans who lived in Goma spoke enviously of refugee entitlements, and several told me they had pretended to be refugees in order to gain admission to camp clinics. After having all essential living expenses covered by charity, camp residents were free to engage in commerce, and aid agencies frequently provided enticements—like agricultural supplies—to do so. The major camps in Zaire quickly became home to the biggest, best-stocked, and cheapest markets in the region. Zaireans came for miles to shop chez les Rwandais, where at least half the trade appeared to be in humanitarian-aid stuffs—beans, flour, and oil, spilling from sacks and tins stamped with the logos of foreign donors. And, as the interahamwe and ex-FAR stepped up their attacks on the Tutsi herdsmen of North Kivu, the Goma camp markets became famous for incredibly cheap beef.

The camps were cramped, smoky, and smelly, but so were the homes many Rwandans had fled; and unlike most Rwandan villages, the main thoroughfares of the big camps were lined with well-stocked pharmacies, two-story video bars powered by generators, libraries, churches, brothels, photo studios—you name it. Humanitarians showing me around often sounded like proud landlords, saying things like “Great camp,” even as they said, “These poor people,” and asked, “What are we doing?”

The profits from refugee commerce went in many directions, but large slices went straight through the political rackets into the purchase of arms and munitions. Richard McCall, chief of staff of the United States Agency for International Development, described Zaire as “an unfettered corridor for arms shipment” to the génocidaires. The UNHCR, more cautiously, made similar statements, but that never stopped it from asking for more money to keep the camps going.

Officially, the UNHCR’s policy in the border camps was to promote “voluntary repatriation.” At first, this was done by having people sign up a day or two in advance for buses that would take them back to Rwanda. When a number of the people who did that got beaten or killed before their departure date, it was decided simply to station idling buses in the camps every morning, and let those who wanted make a run for them. Not surprisingly, that program, too, was soon judged a failure. “What is voluntary?” General Kagame once asked me. “It normally means that somebody has to think and make a decision. I don’t think that even staying in the camps is a voluntary decision for the innocent people. I believe there is some influence. So how can we speak of them leaving voluntarily?”

In fact, influence against returning to Rwanda often came from within the very humanitarian community that was ostensibly promoting repatriation. “It’s not safe for them to go home,” I was told by one aid worker after another. “They could get arrested.” But what if they deserved to be arrested? “We can’t judge that,” I was told, and then, to finish the discussion, it was usually said, “Anyway, the government in Kigali doesn’t genuinely want them back.” Of course, very few of the people working in the camps had ever spent any time in Rwanda; their organizations did not encourage it. So, with time, there developed among them an epidemic of what diplomats call clientitis: an overly credulous embrace of your clients’ point of view. As soon as I crossed back over the border to Rwanda, I felt that I’d passed through a looking glass. At UNHCR Goma, I would be told that Rwanda was determined to prevent repatriation and that returnees were frequently harassed just to ensure that the rest of the refugees stayed away. But at UNHCR Kigali, I would be regaled with statistics and arguments demonstrating not only that Rwanda wanted the refugees home but that those who had come back were received with all due propriety.

In June of 1995, Zaire’s Prime Minister, Kengo Wa Dondo, visited Goma, and delivered a speech in which he said that if the international community wouldn’t shut down the camps, Zaire would be obliged to send the Rwandans home. That August, Zairean soldiers did move on the camps, and in traditionally roughshod manner—lots of shakedowns, and torched huts—they hustled about fifteen thousand Rwandans across the border in less than a week. That was more than the UNHCR had accomplished in the preceding six months. But the UNHCR opposed forced repatriation—unless, as Gerald Gahima at Rwanda’s Justice Ministry reminded me, you happened to be a Vietnamese boat person in Hong Kong. The UN refugee commissioner herself, Sadako Ogata, persuaded President Mobutu to call off his boys—it was widely rumored that he was paid cash—and the repatriation “deadlock” that she often decried to the Security Council promptly resumed.

Press coverage of the Zairean action stressed the numerous violations of international humanitarian law that the refugees—mostly older people, women, and children, who were unable to run away—had suffered. There were almost no follow-up stories from the Rwandan side of the border, and events there were rather dull: the refugees were smoothly resettled in their communities, arrest rates were below average, and the Kigali office of the UNHCR, impressed by the government’s handling of the matter, proclaimed it an auspicious demonstration of Rwanda’s sincerity in calling its people home.

“THERE’S NO WAY you can stop the international community from coming, given a situation like a genocide,” General Kagame once said to me. “But they may provide the wrong remedies to our problems. On the one hand, they admit that a genocide took place in Rwanda, but they don’t seem to understand that someone was responsible for it, that someone planned and executed it. That’s why we get confused when there are insinuations that we should negotiate. When you ask, ‘With whom?’ they cannot tell you. They can’t quite bring themselves to say that we should negotiate with the people who committed genocide. Of course, in the long run they create a bigger problem, because the genocide can be made to seem less and less visible as a very big crime that people should be hunted for and prosecuted.” What’s more, Kagame said, “there are some directly innocent people in those camps, and this has been a very bad situation for them. At least here in Rwanda, although some incidents may take place, there is some level of sanity. It may not be pleasant, it may not be the best, but it is the best in these circumstances.”

I told him I kept meeting Rwandans who said that Rwandans never tell the truth, that Rwanda has a culture of dishonesty, that to understand Rwanda one has to get inside that realm of mystification. I wondered what he thought.

“Maybe even those who’re saying that are not speaking the truth,” he said, and let out an unusually hearty laugh. Then he said, “I don’t think it’s our culture, especially since I don’t see a lot of honesty in politics in many other countries. But in some other countries, when you try to tell lies you are exposed by strong institutions that work to know what exactly has been happening.” He fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “Personally, I have no problem with telling the truth, and I’m Rwandan, so why don’t people also take me as an example of a Rwandan? People have even told me that perhaps, in politics, sometimes there are certain things you don’t say that I have been saying publicly. The more they tell me that, the more I get convinced I am right.”

In Kagame’s view, lying was not a Rwandan trait but a political tactic, and he thought it a weak one. That didn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep secrets; but secrets, even if they involve deception, aren’t necessarily lies—just truths you don’t tell. In a world where politicians were presumed to be liars, Kagame had found that one could often gain a surprise advantage by not being false. “Sometimes,” he said, “you tell the truth because that is the best way out.”

18

IN THE FOOTHILLS of the Virunga volcanoes, in the Masisi zone of North Kivu, Zaire, on a rise overlooking a lakeside peasant village called Mokoto, there stood the ruin of a monastery which might have been taken for a relic of medieval Europe. But this ruin was new. Until early May of 1996, Mokoto operated very much like an ancient cathedral town. While the villagers lived below, in huts made mostly of mud brick and thatch, Trappist monks on the hill lived in an imposing compound of masonry and fine woodwork, with a large church, a library, a hostel for visitors, a dairy with nearly a thousand cows, a motor-vehicle repair shop, and an electrical plant powered by a waterwheel. The monastery was the chief provider of social services to Mokoto and neighboring villages; the monks ran six schools and a dispensary, and they had designed a waterworks for the villagers, who had previously spent much of their time carrying buckets. In January and February of 1996, when hundreds of people began showing up at the monastery, seeking sanctuary from bands of attackers who had chased them from their homes, Father Dhelo, the Zairean superior at Mokoto, did not hesitate to take them in.

Father Dhelo knew that the displaced people were Tutsis fleeing the attacks of Hutus led by the ex-FAR and interahamwe from the UN camps in Goma, which lay about thirty rugged miles southeast of Mokoto. Since early 1996, as some Western governments began to tire of paying for the camps, rumors had proliferated about aid being shut down or the camps being forced to close, and the resident génocidaires and their Zairean Hutu allies had intensified and expanded their war in North Kivu. The effort now appeared to be to “ethnically cleanse” the mountainous agricultural heartland of North Kivu, with the objective of creating a more permanent Hutu Power base, which was already being informally referred to throughout the region as Hutuland.

Father Dhelo knew all this, and he knew that in 1994 the génocidaires had not hesitated to violate the sanctuary of churches in Rwanda. But when local Hutu leaders threatened to kill him for giving sanctuary to the displaced Tutsis at Mokoto, he refused to be intimidated. “I said to them that if they thought my death could solve the problem and I would die alone, I would be content to die,” Father Dhelo told me. “After that, they didn’t come for me.” Then, in early May, Father Dhelo went away on business.

Close to a thousand Tutsis were camped around the monastery at the time. According to Father Victor Bourdeau, a French monk who had lived at Mokoto for seventeen years, a Hutu mob assembled around the camp on the evening of Wednesday, May 8. Shots were fired in the air, and hundreds of Tutsis took refuge inside the church. On Friday, the monastery received warning that a major attack was planned. There was no safe way to move the Tutsis out, but most of the monks were evacuated; Father Victor was one of six who stayed until Sunday, May 12. That morning, Hutu fighters forced their way into the church, dragged some Tutsis outside, and executed them with machetes. “There was nothing to be done,” Father Victor said. He and his fellow monks fled on a tractor.

When I met the Mokoto monks nine days later, they were displaced people themselves, living in temporary quarters in Goma. Father Victor, a tall, slender man with the anxious look of an ascetic, sat in his khaki cassock on a cot in a small stuffy room. “Everybody in the village was an accomplice, by silence or by looting, and it is impossible to divide the responsibility,” he said. “It’s like in Rwanda—one can’t say all of them are guilty, but to sort it out is impossible.” Father Victor had been in Kigali on April 7, 1994, the day after Habyarimana’s assassination, and he told me, “It was exactly the same scenario.”

MOKOTO’S ISOLATION WAS such that it took three days for news of the monastery massacre to reach Kigali, where I was staying at the time. The story fit the pattern of recent events. In the preceding month and a half, at least ten thousand Tutsis had been chased out of North Kivu and forced to take refuge in Rwanda. The Rwandan government had accused Zaire of complicity in their expulsion, since its troops had often trucked Tutsis to the border, then confiscated or ripped up their Zairean citizenship papers. Zairean officials responded by invoking a much disputed and never enforced nationality law, passed in 1981 in violation of Zaire’s own constitution and a host of international legal conventions, that stripped Zaireans of Rwandan ancestry of their citizenship, rendering them stateless. “These refugees from North Kivu are Zaireans,” General Kagame’s adviser, Claude Dusaidi, told me. “We ask for our citizens to return from the camps, and they send us theirs. They must take them back and give us ours.”

As reports of the Mokoto massacre began to circulate in Kigali, similar expressions of outrage greeted me at every Rwandan government office I visited. If Zaire had it in for ancestral Rwandans, I was asked, why were Zairean Tutsis being singled out while Zairean and Rwandan Hutus killed them with impunity? “It’s really a genocide going on again,” Dusaidi said, “but supported by Zaire against its own citizens.” I was repeatedly reminded that Zaire’s President, Mobutu Sese Seko, had backed Habyarimana’s fight against the RPF, facilitated arms shipments to Rwanda during the genocide, provided bases for the French forces of Opération Turquoise, and abetted the resurgent Hutu Power forces in the border camps. A UN investigative team had just published a report showing that the infamous Colonel Bagasora of the ex-FAR traveled under Zairean military papers to the Seychelles to purchase weaponry and munitions. In the first half of 1996, as the war in North Kivu grew fiercer, attacks against Rwanda by the Hutu Power forces in Zaire had also intensified and infiltrators killed hundreds of genocide survivors in an effort that the organization African Rights described as “killing the evidence.” So it particularly galled Rwandan officials that the international community kept pouring money into Zaire by way of the camps, but did nothing to hold Mobutu accountable for the actions of his genocidal guests.

Mobutu was the longest-ruling despot in Africa. His ascent to power, between 1960 and 1965, had been accomplished with the careful assistance of the CIA and various bands of white mercenaries through the violent suppression of the popularly elected Congolese national movement, and his endurance was due, in large measure, to his genius for turning the misery of his neighbors to his own advantage. During the Cold War, the United States and its allies propped him up as a bulwark against Communist forces in central Africa. Then the wall came down in Berlin, and Mobutu was no longer of use. Promoting democracy was the new dispensation, and when Mobutu failed to produce anything but a violent parody of multiparty reforms, his erstwhile Western patrons cut him loose. His immense country—the size of Western Europe or the United States east of the Mississippi—was loaded with cobalt, diamonds, gold, and uranium, and he was rumored to be one of the wealthiest men in the world. But by the end of 1993, as his unpaid army ran riot, murdering, looting, and raping its way through the land, Zaire was enduring ten thousand percent inflation, and Mobutu, ostracized, and unable to get a visa to the United States or Europe, appeared headed for ruin. Then the Rwandan genocide put him back in the spotlight—this time as the man who had to be dealt with if you wanted to deal with the refugees.

Once again, Western leaders turned to Mobutu as a power broker in regional affairs; emissaries of the United States, the European Union, and the UN Secretariat shuttled in and out of Gbadolite, the vast jungle palace where Mobutu held court and where Habyarimana was entombed. France, ever eager to bail out Hutu Power, broke ranks with the rest of what in Cold War parlance used to be called “the free world,” and unilaterally restored aid to Zaire—which meant, of course, to Mobutu, who shoveled the money directly into his Swiss bank accounts. “That genocide,” a European diplomat told me, “was a gift from God for Mobutu.” The Rwandan officials I spoke with believed that Mobutu, by tolerating and even encouraging the creation of a highly militarized Hutuland in Zaire, was seeking to ensure that this gift would keep giving.

“If anybody thinks Mobutu can continue to fool people, I don’t think it’s going to take very long to show people that we’re not fools,” Colonel Karemera, Rwanda’s Minister of Health, warned. The last battalions of UNAMIR had finally withdrawn from Rwanda in April of 1996, and one month later it seemed that the war everyone had been waiting for was getting underway. “Zaire is just provoking and provoking,” Claude Dusaidi told me at the Ministry of Defense. “If Zaire wants to expel its citizens and give them to us, let Zaire give them with their land.” I heard this line so often from officials in Kigali that I asked Dusaidi, who was famously blunt, if Rwanda was preparing to invade Zaire. “We have enough problems,” he said. “We don’t have to go beyond our borders to get frustrated. But if we wanted North Kivu, we would go take it.”

FOLLOWING THE MASSACRE at the Mokoto monastery, hundreds of Tutsi survivors managed to flee and take refuge in a nearby Zairean village. I wanted to know what was to become of them there. On my way to the border, I stopped at a camp in northwestern Rwanda where thousands of Zairean Tutsis recently expelled from North Kivu were being held. I spoke to about a dozen men, who said that when the Hutu Power attacks began early in 1996, Zaire had sent troops. The Tutsis had expected that the troops would defend them, that Zaire would protect its own people. Instead, most of the soldiers had joined in robbing them, and then forcing them across the border. “They made us pay them for transport to the frontier,” said a man, whose outfit—a pair of heavy-duty cross-country ski boots and an Icelandic sweater—testified to his sudden dependence on handouts.

The Tutsi refugees from Zaire were convinced that Mobutu was behind their troubles. “He’s a very strong man,” said a refugee who had been a Zairean civil servant for decades. “He’s been there thirty years, and every time he has domestic opposition he allows a civil conflict, then puts it down, and says, ‘Voilà, peace.’” The refugees also believed that Mobutu could restore order if he chose to. After all, his full, self-given name, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, has been translated as “the all-powerful warrior who, by his endurance and will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake,” and also as “the cock who leaves no hen alone.” Nobody seemed to doubt that everything that happened in his realm was his doing, by dint of his actions or inactions, and that the end result would be just what he intended.

But Mobutu didn’t want outsiders to see the work in progress. When I arrived at the border, I learned that Zaire was not admitting journalists. “They want to camouflage the total disorder,” said a Rwandan mechanic, returning from a day trip to Goma. “That country is finished. Businesses are pulling out.” But the border guards didn’t know me, and the customs men who grabbed my bag never even looked in it: what they wanted was ransom, a little drinking money, and three dollars sufficed.

Zaire, as a state, had long been considered a phantom construct. Its very name, which Mobutu had conjured up as part of a program of “authenticity,” was a bit of make-believe: “Zaire” was an antique Portuguese bastardization of a local word for river. And Mobutu, who liked to appear on television in clips that showed him walking among the clouds in his trademark leopardskin hat and dark glasses, had gone further, claiming the Adamic power of renaming all of his subjects—or, at least, requiring them to abandon their Christian names and take up African ones. In pursuit of the “authentic” he also nationalized all foreign businesses, put in place a constitution granting himself absolute power, prescribed a national dress code (neckties and suits were outlawed in favor of a snappily modified Mao shirt known as an abacos—short for à bas les costumes, “down with suits”); he replaced crucifixes with his portrait, struck Christmas from the holiday calendar, and purged every vestige of political opposition. “We are resorting to this authenticity,” he once said, “in order to rediscover our soul which colonization had almost erased from our memories and which we are seeking in the tradition of our ancestors.”

Mobutu’s principle, then, was a double negative: to erase the corrupt memory that had erased the genuine national memory, and thus to restore that original chain of memory. The idea was romantic, nostalgic, and fundamentally incoherent. The place Mobutu called Zaire had never been a nation before the rapacious King Leopold II, King of the Belgians, drew its map, and the very word “authenticity”—an import from the French existentialism that had been the vogue during Mobutu’s youth—was blatantly at odds with his professed Africanism. One is reminded of Pol Pot, who returned to Cambodia after studying in Paris, changed his country’s name to Kampuchea, chucked out the calendar, proclaimed “Year Zero,” and slaughtered a million or more of his countrymen to eradicate Western influences.

Mobutu, to magnify his own grandeur, systematically reduced Zaire to rot, and—despite the defiantly determined spirit of the great mass of Zaireans, who went on procreating, schooling, praying, trading, and debating with some eloquence their prospects for political emancipation—an alarming number of Western commentators took cynical solace in the conviction that this state of affairs was about as authentic as Africa gets. Leave the natives to their own devices, the thinking went, and—Voilà!—Zaire. It was almost as if we wanted Zaire to be the Heart of Darkness; perhaps the notion suited our understanding of the natural order of nations.

Of course, Mobutu was never more than a capricious puppet of his Western patrons, and ultimately even the idea of authenticity was abandoned to decay, as he shed any pretext of ideology in favor of absolute gangsterism. Zaireans—who used to be obliged to gather and chant Mobutist slogans like “It is better to die of hunger than to be rich and a slave to colonialism!”—watched Mobutu grow richer while they grew hungrier. With time, some even dared to modify Mobutu’s pet mantra about the “Three Z’s”—Zaire the country, Zaire the river, and Zaire the currency —by privately adding a fourth Z: Zaire the Zero.

All that remained of the state were the chief, his cronies, and his troops—a vampire elite, presiding over nearly a million square miles of decay. The so-called eleventh commandment of Mobutism was “Débrouillez—vous”—“Fend for yourselves”—and for at least a generation it had been the only absolute law of the land. Foreign visitors to Zaire were forever marveling that the place managed to survive at all. How did the center hold? A better question might have been whether there was a center. Having allowed his country to unravel, Mobutu liked to pretend that he alone kept it together, and as the war in North Kivu began to heat up, what worried many Zaireans and foreign diplomats even more than Zaire under Mobutu was the thought of Zaire after Mobutu.

“Tribal war and disaster,” my cabdriver said as we tooled into Goma, traveling in the oncoming lane of a divided boulevard because it was the side with shallower potholes. “In the end we’ll all pay for it.” A tour of the humanitarian agencies produced no better news. A convoy of three trucks belonging to CARE had been shot up the week before by machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades on the road near one of the UN camps. Thirteen Zaireans had been killed, and I found several Western aid workers with lakefront houses checking on the condition of their inflatable Zodiac boats, in case—or in hope—of an evacuation.

Everyone had stories of fighting in the hills, but little concrete information. At UNHCR headquarters, I found the repatriation officer sitting before a spanking clean desk. “Forget repatriation,” he told me; he was applying for a new post.

ONE WEEK AFTER the killings at Mokoto, I drove into the combat zone of North Kivu. The road ran west from Goma across the lava field, skirting the giant Mugunga refugee camp, where about a hundred and fifty thousand Rwandans lived in a sea of shanties draped with UN-issue blue plastic sheeting. A few miles on lay Lac Vert, the ex-FAR headquarters. The paved road ended in the town of Sake, a derelict settlement crammed with about thirty thousand people of the Hunde tribe, who had been chased out of the hills by Hutu fighters. Hundes, like Hutus, were mostly subsistence farmers, and the two groups’ rivalry was entirely economic and political. “Morphologically, we are the same,” one Zairean Hutu observed, employing the vocabulary of European “race science” to assert that there was no ethnic animus in the Hutu-Hunde conflict.

Beyond Sake, a dirt road rose sharply through the dense vegetation of the rain-soaked volcanic massif. We soon came to a clearing, and my driver gave me the name of a village. But there was no village, only plots of land where a village once stood, some charred beams, bits of smashed crockery, and sometimes a few bright flowers in a row that implied a human hand. We drove for an hour without seeing anyone—past the sacked homes of Hundes and the abandoned homes of Hutus, many of whom were said to have taken refuge with the Rwandans in the camps. Masisi was known as the breadbasket of Zaire, a zone so fertile, so temperate, and so moist that some crops would yield four harvests a year. Now the devastation appeared complete, except for occasional carefully tilled fields of vegetables, their greenery iridescent beneath low dark clouds that sporadically dumped a few minutes of bright rain.

Along steep, rutted switchbacks, the irregular hills tilted at obscure angles, opening at times into deep ravines with tumbling cataracts, then closing in with a forest of eucalyptus. It was a landscape well worth fighting for, but I couldn’t understand the endless procession of desolated villages. When you expel people and conquer territory, don’t you occupy it? Weren’t these hills supposed to be packed with Hutus? Or was the land just being prepared for the day when the money ran out in the camps? When at last we came to a village with a few people—Hutus and Zairean soldiers—my driver didn’t think it advisable to stop and ask what their long-term strategy was.

At the top of the escarpment the forests fell back and the vast alpine pastures of Tutsi herdsmen opened out, rolling over the domes of the hills and folding into the valleys. But there weren’t any Tutsis, and there weren’t any cattle. After four hours on the deserted road, we had covered about fifty miles and reached Kitchanga, a village where the Tutsis who fled from the Mokoto monastery had found temporary refuge. A large crowd stood outside a shack to buy pieces of a freshly butchered cow. The cow had also come from Mokoto—“escued,” villagers said, from the monastery’s dairy; there was suddenly so much beef in town that ten dollars could buy almost thirty pounds of it.

But ten dollars wasn’t enough to buy a Tutsi his life: the going rate for transport to the border was between twelve and fifteen dollars. Eight hundred of the Tutsis who had been attacked at Mokoto were now packed into a sodden and steaming thatch schoolhouse in Kitchanga, and they were too poor to pay for their own “ethnic cleansing.”

A FEW DAYS before I arrived in Kitchanga, a relief team from Doctors Without Borders had driven up to the Mokoto monastery and found the road blocked by two charred, naked corpses; the hands, feet, and genitals had been cut off, the chests had been opened, and the hearts had been removed. The relief workers counted ten corpses and smelled many more; they estimated the dead to number at least a hundred. While they were at the monastery, some wounded Tutsis came out of the bush where they had been hiding. One was a naked boy who had contrived to cover only the back of his neck. When he let the covering fall away, they saw that his head had been cut almost halfway off, exposing his spine and a patch of cranium. A doctor had sewed the boy back together, and I saw him walking tentatively around an emergency field hospital at Kitchanga.

A barefoot man in a tattered raincoat and shorts at the village school, who identified himself as “the captain of the Mokoto refugees,” said that many of the attackers had come from the UN camps. It was easy to identify them, he said, because “they spoke excellent Kinyarwanda and were well dressed,” while “we Zaireans are hill people, and feel more at home in Swahili.” He explained that some of his people had been able to flee when “the attackers, seeing others pillage, forgot killing to steal, and only came back later.” The Mokoto survivors had straggled into Kitchanga empty-handed, and a few old men were wrapped only in blankets because their attackers had stripped them naked, intending to kill them. No one could count on being so lucky again. The captain told me that the Hutu Power militias at Mokoto had chanted, “Kill, kill, kill,” and “This is how we fled our country.” Unlike the Zairean Tutsi refugees I had met in Rwanda, who said their only hope was to return to Zaire, the captain of the Mokoto Tutsis had given up. When he told me, “We want to go home,” he meant Rwanda. “We have no nationality here,” he said.

The Mwami of Kitchanga, the hereditary Hunde chief, a stout man in a brown velvet shirt, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a white baseball cap, agreed. “Truly,” he said, “the Hutus want to exterminate all the Tutsis.” His own people, too, were having a hard time protecting themselves: their fighters included boys of six and seven, and their arsenal consisted largely of spears, bows and arrows, and homemade rifles that fired nails. “It’s not an automatic,” the Mwami said of such a gun, “but it kills.” Kitchanga, which was formerly home to a mixed population of about two thousand people, was now an exclusively Hunde stronghold whose ranks had been swollen by an influx of thirty-six thousand displaced people. The Red Cross and the UN estimated that about half the population of Masisi, some three hundred thousand people, were displaced from their homes. Even the Mwami was living in temporary housing; his estate five miles out of town had been destroyed. I found him drinking banana beer in his “office”—a gazebo made of UN plastic sheeting—and he told me that Kitchanga was a very hospitable place, but that by giving shelter to Tutsis, it was making itself a magnet for a Hutu attack. He wanted the Tutsis out of there.

The Tutsis had to be evacuated or they would be killed. The problem was that the way to the Rwandan border ran through Hutuland and past the camps. The word in Kitchanga was that the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency, had promised to come with a convoy of trucks, accompanied by hired Zairean soldiers for security, to take the Tutsis away. But nobody really trusted that this would happen.

DURING THE NIGHT in Kitchanga, I heard the distant pop of gunfire, and in the morning heavy fighting between Hutus and Hundes was reported north of the village. I was told to return to Goma. As I left, three fat pillars of smoke were rising across the valley where Hunde fighters were sacking a Hutu village. Along the road, displaced Hundes were marching toward Kitchanga—women with armchairs bound to their backs, men toting troughs for brewing banana beer, and a slender young man with a spear in one hand and a double bed on his head.

On my return to Goma, I learned that it was true that the International Organization for Migration had planned an evacuation convoy to rescue the Tutsis in Kitchanga, but the plan had been scrapped. The IOM mandate did not permit it to assist “internally displaced” people in crossing international borders. The UNHCR and dozens of other humanitarian organizations that had the lucrative catering contracts for the camps in Goma all had similar limitations in their mandates, which prevented them from saving the Mokoto survivors. Most aid organizations prohibited themselves from transporting anybody anywhere, and could provide relief only on the spot; many refused to conduct operations that involved armed security, lest their “neutrality” should be compromised; still others maintained that it would violate their humanitarian principles to further the aims of “ethnic cleansing” by removing Tutsis just because Hutus threatened them. Individual aid workers I spoke with agreed that it was more humane to “ethnically cleanse” people than to leave them to be murdered. But it became clear that their organizations’ first commitment was not to protecting people but to protecting their mandates. “Everything is lies here,” Father Victor, the Mokoto monk, told me in Goma. “All these organizations—they will give blankets, food, yes. But save lives? No, they can’t.”

Twelve days after the Mokoto massacre, Rwanda’s ambassador to the United Nations called on the Security Council to “take immediate action to prevent genocide in eastern Zaire.” Rwanda’s request referred specifically to Mokoto and to the Tutsis who remained at Kitchanga. The Zairean mission to the UN countered that the conflict in North Kivu was “a completely internal situation” and was therefore none of the Security Council’s business. The government of Zaire denied any problem pertaining to “Kinyarwanda-speaking Zairean nationals,” maintaining, absurdly, that “of the languages spoken in Zaire, Kinyarwanda is not one of them.” Zaire also advised the Council that “the word ‘genocide’ is not a part of Zaire’s political landscape.” The Security Council did nothing; it didn’t even register one of its boilerplate “expressions of concern.”

When I returned to Kigali, I learned that some Tutsi businessmen in North Kivu were organizing an evacuation to rescue the Mokoto survivors at Kitchanga, and at the end of May more than a thousand of them were brought to the Rwandan border. Throughout June and July, Tutsi refugees continued to arrive in Rwanda, and as the fighting spread in eastern Zaire, Tutsis from much farther north began fleeing to Uganda. By late August, the eradication of Tutsis from North Kivu was believed to be nearly complete.

19

ON MY RETURN to Kigali from visiting the survivors of the Mokoto massacre in May of 1996, I had asked Kagame what he thought would become of the Tutsi refugees who were being expelled from Zaire into Rwanda. “Perhaps, if the young men have to fight, we shall train them,” he said. A year later, he told me that the training had already been under way. Kagame had concluded that he could not fully dismantle the threat of the Hutu Power camps in Zaire unless “the kind of support they were getting from the Zairean government and the international community” was also brought to an end.

The world powers made it clear in 1994 that they did not care to fight genocide in central Africa, but they had yet to come up with a convincing explanation of why they were content to feed it. The false promise of protection represented by the camps placed Hutu civilians, as well as Tutsis and everyone else in the region, in mortal peril, and it was no comfort that this state of affairs was not brought about by a malevolent international policy in central Africa but by the lack of any coherent policy. In Washington, where 1996 was a presidential election year, one Clinton administration official was reported to have told a meeting of the National Security Council that the main policy concern in Rwanda and Zaire was that “we don’t want to look like chumps.” In Kigali, where the main concern was the threat of a Hutu Power invasion, Colonel Joseph Karemera, Rwanda’s Minister of Health, asked me, “When the people receiving humanitarian assistance in those camps come and kill us, what will the international community do—send more humanitarian assistance?” Sometimes, Karemera said, he couldn’t help feeling that “this international community is looking at us like we’re from a different generation of human evolution.”

In July of 1996, General Kagame visited Washington and explained once again that if the international community could not handle the monster it was incubating in the camps, he would. It was assumed that Kagame was bluffing; the thought of Rwanda invading Zaire was a bit like Liechtenstein taking on Germany or France. Mobutu sponsored invasions of his neighbors, not the other way around, and Mobutu was still Washington’s hope for the region. “Occasionally,” an American diplomat explained to me, “you have to dance with the devil to do the Lord’s work.” And in this, at least, Paris agreed. France remained Hutu Power’s biggest advocate. The attitude toward Kagame’s warnings among the Africa hands at the Quai d’Orsay seemed to be: let him try. (In 1995, the new French President, Jacques Chirac, had refused to invite Rwanda’s new President, Pasteur Bizimungu, to an annual conference of Francophone African leaders in Biarritz, which opened with Chirac presiding over a moment of silence to honor the memory of President Habyarimana—and not the dead of the genocide that had been committed in Habyarimana’s name.)

Shortly after Kagame’s visit to Washington, Burundi’s army moved to close all the camps for Rwandans on its territory. The UNHCR protested, but when Burundi refused to back down the refugee agency began to cooperate. Soon the refugees were jockeying to get on the trucks that shuttled back and forth across the border. In the course of a few weeks, two hundred thousand people were sent home, and the UN even took to describing the repatriation as voluntary. The Rwandan government broadcast the message that the returnees were to be welcomed in their communities and that they should get their homes back—and, as a rule, that was what happened. UN observers told me that arrest rates were lower than anticipated; in some cases notorious génocidaires were even denounced by fellow returnees.

I spent several days watching the convoys rolling in from Burundi. When I asked returnees if the repatriation was forced, they all said no. But when I asked why they had suddenly volunteered to come home, they said they’d had no choice. The answer was almost always the same: “Everybody was coming. We left together, so we returned together.” One man, a bricklayer, who stood barefoot in ragged clothing amid his six children, said, “There are superiors”—he turned his eyes skyward—“who concern themselves with politics and affairs of humanity, and there are the simple people like us”—his eyes rolled down to stare at his feet—“who know nothing of politics and merely work with our hands to eat and live.” The mass return from Burundi made it clearer than ever that the only obstacle to a comparable repatriation from Zaire was Hutu Power’s ability to intimidate not only the camp populations but also the entire international community.

“I think we’ve learned a lot about the hypocrisy and double standards on the part of the people who claim they want to make this world a better place,” General Kagame told me. “They turn it into a political problem, and say we cannot have the refugees back unless we forgive these fellows who committed the genocide.” Kagame was indignant. “I say to them, ‘We told you to separate those groups. You have failed. If you—the whole world put together—are unable to do this, how can you expect us to do much better? You hold us to a standard that has never existed on this earth. You want us to wake up one morning and have everything right—people walking hand in hand with one another, forgetting about the genocide, things moving smoothly. It sounds nice to talk about it.’”

At first, Kagame told me, he had assumed that dealing with “people who had committed serious crimes against humanity” would be “the responsibility of the entire international community.” He still thought it should be. “But that hasn’t happened,” he said. “So what remains is to turn around and fight another war.

SHORTLY AFTER THE RPF took Kigali in 1994, Kagame’s old associate, President Museveni of Uganda, had introduced him to a Zairean named Laurent Desire Kabila, who had been an anti-Mobutu rebel throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and who hoped to revive that struggle. Kagame, Museveni, and Kabila began establishing networks with Zaireans and other Africans who regarded Mobutu as a menace to stability and progress on the continent. “We used to say to the Zaireans, ‘We know you are brewing trouble for us, but we shall brew trouble for you,’” Kagame told me. “We said, ‘You need peace, we need peace, let’s work together, but if you do not work with us—well.’”

Of course, there was no peace and no prospect of it, and by the middle of 1996, Kagame started assembling a seed force to mount a rebellion in Zaire. Zairean Tutsis, faced with the immediate threat of elimination, were ripe for recruitment, and they offered the added convenience of appearing and speaking enough like Rwandans so that if RPA soldiers mingled with them it would be difficult to tell them apart. But soldiers and political cadres were sought from throughout Zaire, and Kigali soon became the clandestine hub for all sorts of anti-Mobutists eager for armed struggle in Zaire.

After the destruction of the Tutsi communities of North Kivu, Kagame assumed that South Kivu would be the next target of the Mobutist–Hutu Power alliance, and he was not mistaken. About four hundred thousand Zairean Tutsis lived in South Kivu; they were known as the Banyamulenge—the people of Mulenge—because Mulenge was the place where their ancestors first settled after migrating from Rwanda in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Since the establishment of the UN camps for Rwandan Hutus in 1994, the Banyamulenge had fallen prey to extensive cattle raids and to a mounting campaign of harassment and hostile propaganda. Before long Zairean officials were speaking openly of the Banyamulenge as “snakes” and taking measures to strip them of their land; local radio stations and newspapers sounded more and more like the Hutu Power media of Rwanda.

Programmatic violence against the Banyamulenge began in early September of 1996. Hutu Power and Mobutist forces, working together with locally recruited militias, sacked Tutsi homes, businesses, and churches and attacked their residents—arresting or executing some and expelling others to Rwanda. When Banyamulenge were lynched in the streets, government officials expressed approval. Although the UN and humanitarian agencies had teams throughout the area, there was no international outcry. But unlike the Tutsis of North Kivu, who went to their deaths and into exile without resistance, many Banyamulenge were armed and they fought back when attacked, inflicting substantial damage on their attackers. At the same time, hundreds of newly trained and well-equipped resistance fighters began to filter into Zaire from Rwanda. As the fighting intensified and spread, aid workers fled from much of South Kivu, abandoning those they had purported to protect to their own devices.

Then, on October 8, Lwasi Ngabo Lwabanji, deputy governor of South Kivu, proclaimed that all Banyamulenge residents of the province had one week to get out. He didn’t say where they should go, only that those who remained would be considered to be rebels in a state of war with Zaire. No doubt Lwasi was a bit overexcited; even in Zaire, deputy governors did not customarily declare war. But the spirit of his ultimatum was firmly in line with official Zairean attitudes and practices. Although Mobutu himself had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was undergoing treatment in Switzerland, he had been running Zaire as an absentee landlord for so long that his court continued to function as ever. Two days after Lwasi’s decree, a government spokesman in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, announced, “It’s true that we all want the Banyamulenge to leave.”

Kagame had been preparing for just such a moment. “We were ready to hit them,” he later told me, “hit them very hard—and handle three things: first to save the Banyamulenge and not let them die, empower them to fight, and even fight for them; then to dismantle the camps, return the refugees to Rwanda, and destroy the ex-FAR and militias; and, third, to change the situation in Zaire.” He was only waiting for the sort of massive provocation from Zaire that he presumed was inevitable. “And of course,” he said, “this stupid Zairean deputy governor gave us the opportunity.”

So tiny Rwanda hit enormous Zaire; the Banyamulenge rose up; RPA commandos and Laurent Kabila’s rebel seed force—the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo/Zaire (ADFL)—swept into South Kivu and began pushing north; Mobutu’s famously cowardly army fled ragtag; aid workers were evacuated, and the camps were dispersed. On November 2,1996, three and a half weeks after Deputy Governor Lwasi had declared civil war, the ADFL and the RPA marched into Goma, and Kabila proclaimed an area of at least a thousand square miles to be “liberated territory.” (While the Rwandan government was openly enthusiastic about these developments, it categorically denied that any RPA troops had entered Zaire until early June of 1997, several weeks after the ADFL forces took Kinshasa and drove Mobutu from power, at which point Kagame told me, “Everywhere it was our forces, our troops—they’ve been walking for the last eight months.”)

Thousands of Rwandans from the camps returned to Rwanda during the first weeks of fighting in Zaire, but by early November the great mass of them—at least three-quarters of a million people, from both North and South Kivu—were assembled on the vast lava field in and around the Mugunga camp, about ten miles west of Goma. They had been herded there by the ex-FAR and the interahamwe, by the pressure of the advancing Alliance, and even, incredibly, by some UNHCR officers, who had directed them away from Rwanda and toward Mugunga before themselves fleeing the country. After capturing Goma, Kabila declared a cease-fire, and called on the international humanitarian community to come and get the refugees out of his way so that he could continue his advance westward. Of course, Mugunga was completely inaccessible, behind a powerfully armed front line composed of tens of thousands of Hutu Power and Mobutist fighters. And that was precisely the point that Kabila and his Rwandan sponsors were trying to make: to get the refugees out of harm’s way, you had to be prepared to fight. What was needed was not a relief mission, but a rescue mission, because the noncombatants at Mugunga weren’t so much refugees as hostages, being held as a human shield.

It was another very strange time. During the first nine and a half months of 1996, the fact that the Mobutist–Hutu Power alliance in eastern Zaire was slaughtering thousands of people and forcing hundreds of thousands more from their homes did not seem to excite the international press. During that period, exactly one dispatch on the subject, reported from Rwanda, appeared in my local paper, The New York Times, and in its competition, The Washington Post, coverage had been limited to two freelance “opinion” pieces. Perhaps the idea that people called refugees not only suffer and require aid but also are capable of systematic crimes against humanity, and may require direct confrontation by military force, was considered too technical or confusing in an age of radically reduced foreign coverage. But, in early November, the prospect of three-quarters of a million refugees dying en masse, under siege or in battle on the lava fields, once more drew a pack of hundreds of reporters to the Rwanda-Zaire border. Goma was again the world’s leading international story—and nothing was happening.

Nobody could get to Mugunga, and nobody knew what condition the people gathered there were in. Relief agency press officers assured reporters that the refugees had to be suffering from mass starvation and cholera. Possible death tolls were invented and announced—tens of thousands of dead, perhaps a hundred thousand. It was terribly upsetting to be sitting at a lakefront hotel in the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi, surrounded by reporters, and to think that just a dozen miles to the west, out of sight and out of reach, people were dying the most preventable sorts of deaths at a record-breaking clip. And it made one feel even worse to wonder if maybe the situation over there wasn’t really so bad. If you asked the relief agency press officers when, in history, previously well-fed people had starved to death in a few weeks, you either got no answer or you were told that most of the people at Mugunga were women and children.

From New York, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, pronounced that “genocide by starvation” was taking place at Mugunga. Boutros-Ghali had no evidence that anybody was even hungry, and he certainly could not say who was committing this alleged genocide, since refugees could only be hungry because they were being blocked from leaving, and the only people blocking them were other so-called refugees. Still, with reports of famine and mass death among the invisible refugees filling the television news, the Security Council started to draw up plans to deploy a humanitarian, military intervention force to Goma, ostensibly to liberate the refugee masses at Mugunga. This sounded promising, until it emerged that the proposed force might be proscribed by its mandate from doing the one thing that it was needed to do, which was to use force to confront, to disarm, or, if necessary, to overwhelm the Hutu Power army and militias.

AT NINE IN the morning on November 15, 1996, I sat in a house on a hill in Gisenyi overlooking Goma, taking notes from the BBC radio news:

I also wrote my impressions of this news:

Then I switched stations to Radio Star, the rebel “voice of the liberated Congo” from Goma, and took more notes:

This time, my impressions were briefer: “Huh? Can it be?”

I ran out the door, drove to the border and across, into Goma, where I turned onto the Mugunga road, heading west toward the camp, and found myself inching along against a stream of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans heading east, trudging steadily home. Over the preceding days, it turned out, the ADFL and the RPA had again taken the offensive, encircling Mugunga, and attacking it from the rear, in such a way as to draw the armed elements away from the border while pushing the refugee masses homeward. The main evidence of the battle lay nearly twenty miles beyond the camp itself—a line of blown-up trucks, buses, and cars that had been headed toward the Zairean interior. Fluttering around them on the road were heaps of papers, including much of the archive of the ex-FAR high command: receipts for arms shipments from dealers all over Europe, charters for the creation of political front organizations among the refugees, tax collection tables for the camps, accounts of financial transactions with humanitarian agencies, correspondence with Mobutu and his generals—even meticulously handwritten lists of Tutsis in North Kivu.

As the return got under way, it was widely reported that the ex-FAR and the interahamwe had retreated deeper into Zaire with the remnants of Mobutu’s army, allowing the so-called ordinary refugees to head home. The reality was not so perfect: among those who fled west into Zaire’s jungles—perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand people, perhaps twice as many; nobody knows—there were many noncombatants; and inside Rwanda, it quickly became clear that a great number of people with crimes to answer for had melted into the flood of returnees. But the immediate threat to Rwanda of a renewed total war had been removed, and—hap—pily—it appeared that the refugees had not starved in the process.

All along the road to Mugunga and in the rat-infested wreckage of the camp itself, I found aid workers shaking their heads and marveling at the fact that most of the refugees still had at least a few days’ rations and the strength to walk as much as fifteen or twenty miles a day at a brisk clip, carrying impressive loads under a fierce sun. In just four days, some six hundred thousand Rwandans marched back across the border from Goma. By the end of November, the total number of returnees was said to be around seven hundred thousand, and thousands more kept straggling in. Although the Rwandan government continued to issue adamant denials of military involvement in Zaire, General Kagame himself was less guarded. “Because we are not necessarily unhappy about what’s happened—and, on top of that, what has happened is what we would have wished to have happened—I’m sure people would be right to suspect our involvement,” he told me. What’s more, he added, “We have the satisfaction that, on our part, we have always tried to do what we thought was right. There can never be greater satisfaction for me than this. I think it’s a good lesson for some of us. We can achieve a lot by ourselves for ourselves, and we’ve got to keep struggling to do that. If people can help, that’s all well and good. If they can’t, we should not just disappear from the surface of this earth.”

DURING THE DAYS I spent on the road amid the returning six hundred thousand, I was repeatedly visited by an image—remembered or imagined from various paintings and movies—of the Napoleonic armies straggling home from Russia: limping hussars and frozen horses, blood on the snow, the sky a blackness, mad eyes fixed forward. The weather was kinder in Africa, and the people on the road were mostly in good health, but that recurrent image of another time and place made me wonder why we in the West today have so little respect for other people’s wars. The great homeward trundling of these Rwandans marked the rout, at least for the moment, of an immense army dedicated to genocide, yet the world had succored that army for years in the name of humanitarianism.

“To you we were just dots in the mass,” one returnee observed, after I had spent the first days of the migration driving through the boiling swarm on the road from Mugunga. They had always sworn, in the camps, that they would go home as they had left—en masse, as one. To be dots in the mass was precisely the point: it was impossible to know who was who. They came at a rate of twelve thousand an hour (two hundred a minute), a human battering ram aimed at the frontier. But this wasn’t quite the triumphant invasion long promised by the extremist Hutu leaders; rather, it was a retreat from exile conducted in near-silence. At one point, through the men and women and children pouring over fifty miles of blacktop, pushing bicycles, wheelbarrows, motorbikes, even automobiles, dragging wooden crates like sleds, balancing enormous bundles on their heads, toting babies in slings and cradling them in their arms, carrying steamer trunks and empty beer bottles, and sometimes carrying nothing but the burden of their pasts, there came four men shouldering a blanket-draped figure on a stretcher. As they pushed through the knotted thousands, one kept saying, “A cadaver, a cadaver.” What made this man singular was his need to declare himself. Except for the knock of cooking pots, the swish of bare feet and rubber sandals, and the bleat of a stray goat or a lost child, the homecoming throng, as a rule, was ominously mute.

Back in Rwanda, thousands stood for hours along the roads watching the influx with the same wordless intensity. Never before in modern memory had a people who slaughtered another people, or in whose name the slaughter was carried out, been expected to live with the remainder of the people that was slaughtered, completely intermingled, in the same tiny communities, as one cohesive national society.

20

“A CERTAIN GIRUMUHATSE is back,” an old woman in the highlands of central Rwanda told me a few weeks after the mass return from Goma. She spoke in Kinyarwanda, and as she spoke her right hand described a graceful chopping motion against the side of her neck. Her full statement was translated like this: “A certain Girumuhatse is back, a man who beat me during the war with a stick, and from whom I received a machete blow also. This man threw me in a ditch after killing off my whole family. I was wounded. He’s now at his house again. I saw him yesterday at the community office after he registered. I told him, ‘Behold, I am risen from the dead,’ and he replied, ‘It was a human hell,’ and he asked my pardon. He said, ‘It was the fault of the authorities who led us in these acts, seeking their own gains.’ He said he regretted it, and he asked my pardon.”

The woman gave her name as Laurencie Nyirabeza. She was born in 1930, in the community of Taba, a few minutes’ walk from where we met in the shade of an empty hilltop market above a small commercial center—two short rows of derelict concrete and adobe storefronts on either side of a sandy red-dirt road. Twice a week, on market days, the center was teeming; otherwise, it had the air of a ghost town. The rusting hull of a burned-out bus lay on the road’s shoulder and thick bushes sprouted from the prominent ruins of a large home that had belonged to Tutsis, killed in 1994.

Most of Taba’s Tutsis were killed then. Those who remained, like Nyirabeza, were quite alone, and nearly all had lost their homes. With no means to rebuild, and afraid to stay amid neighbors whose conduct during the killings they remembered too well, many survivors had moved to this center to squat in the stores left vacant by dead Tutsis or by Hutus who had fled to Zaire. Now they feared eviction. In the preceding two weeks, more than two thousand people had returned to Taba from the camps in Zaire, and among them was the man, Girumuhatse, who Laurencie Nyirabeza said had massacred her family and left her, too, for dead.

Nyirabeza was a small woman with eyes set deep in a face that thrust forward. She wore her hair combed straight up from the slope of her forehead in a crown nearly six inches high. The effect was at once imposing and witty, which was in keeping with her manner. More than a dozen survivors had responded to my invitation to meet in the market, but most said nothing. The voices of those who did speak rarely rose above a furtive murmur, and whenever a stranger approached, they fell silent. Nyirabeza was different. She did not whisper or shrink. She seemed to feel she had little left to lose. Even as she told me about Girumuhatse, her lips occasionally twitched in a smile, and more than once the other survivors responded to her speech with edgy laughter. Nyirabeza described herself as “a simple peasant”; her schooling had ended after the third grade. But she had a way with words—spirited and wry, and barbed with the indignation of her injury. Still, she said she had been shocked speechless when Girumuhatse, her former neighbor, with whom she used to share food and drink, claimed that his acts were not his fault. Girumuhatse had killed ten members of her family, she told me, mostly her children and grandchildren.

“This man who is responsible for his acts,” Nyirabeza said, “lives now with all his family and gets his property back, while I remain alone, without a child, without a husband.” Then she said—and this was one time there was a ripple of laughter—“Maybe he will continue these acts of extermination.” She scoffed at Girumuhatse’s request for her pardon. “If he can bring back my children whom he killed and rebuild my house,” she said, “maybe.” There was more laughter from the survivors.

Then a man said wearily, “We’ll live together as usual,” and Nyirabeza walked away. A moment later a woman began weeping, hiding her face in her dress. Another woman, very old and leaning on a long, thin staff, held out her hands and flapped them up and away from her body. “We’re just like birds,” she said with a distant smile. “Flying around, blown around.”

As I walked back down the hill, I found Nyirabeza crouched on a stone, staring out over the valley. She did not look up when I said goodbye. A young civil servant, a survivor himself, who had been helping me as a translator, told me that people generally don’t like to visit the center. “It’s sad,” he said, “and the survivors there ask for things.”

It was true that the survivors made heavy demands. At one point Nyirabeza had said, “I wait only for justice.”

I WAS SURPRISED when Laurencie Nyirabeza said that Girumuhatse had not denied attacking her. In my time in Rwanda, I had never encountered anyone who admitted to having taken part in the genocide. I wanted to hear what Girumuhatse had to say for himself, and two days later I returned to Taba with a Frenchspeaking Rwandan named Bosco, an unemployed florist who had agreed to come along as a translator. We stopped first to see Nyirabeza, because she had suggested that Girumuhatse might still want to kill her. But she refused to be intimidated; she sent a young woman with us to point out Girumuhatse’s place—an adobe compound that stood at the edge of a steep hill planted with bananas, about a hundred yards from the abandoned shop where Nyirabeza was living.

A man sat in the doorway. He had just returned from Zaire with his family, and said he had lived in this house in 1994, when, as he put it, “there were many killings.” On his return, he found a family of Tutsi survivors living there. He knew that government policy allowed returnees fifteen days to evict squatters, but the survivors had nowhere to go, so the two families were living together. The young man said his name was Emanuel Habyarimana. I asked if there were any other men around who had come back from Zaire. He said, “None living in these houses here.”

As Bosco and I walked back to the road, a pack of children crowded around us, and we asked them if they knew Girumuhatse. They laughed and said he lived in the house where we’d just been visiting and was probably inside. “No,” a girl said. “That’s him down there.” She pointed into the valley at a figure climbing toward us along a path. Bosco quickly produced a few banknotes and dispatched the kids to buy themselves sodas.

For a moment, the man appeared to be trying to get away. He cut off into a field, but Bosco hailed him and waved, and he turned back up the path, moving with a long, swinging gait. He wore a sort of soiled canvas lab coat, open over a thin blue shirt, and shabby brown pants and sandals cut from old tires. His eyes were narrow and heavily bloodshot, and his mouth was bunched up tight. He stood freely before us, but he had the aspect of someone cornered. His chest heaved, and although the day was cool, sweat kept beading at his temples and trickling down his forehead.

Bosco struck up a conversation. The man said that Emanuel, whom we’d just met, was his son, and that it was good to be back. We talked about life in the camps, and I said that when I’d visited Zaire, every Rwandan I spoke with had denied the genocide, and insisted instead that since the end of the war all the Hutus in Rwanda were being systematically killed. For instance, according to one rumor circulating in the Zairean camps, women who returned to Rwanda had their breasts cut off, and men were put in the equivalent of doghouses with floors of wet plaster that would then harden around their feet. The man said, “It sometimes happens that some people tell lies and others tell the truth. There were a lot of dead here.”

He introduced himself as Jean Girumuhatse. I told him that his name was familiar to me because it was said in the community that he had killed a whole family. “It’s true,” Girumuhatse said. “They say I killed because I was the leader of the roadblock right here.” He pointed to the road where it passed closest to his house. “Right now, all is well,” he told me. “But then, at that time, we were called on by the state to kill. You were told you had the duty to do this or you’d be imprisoned or killed. We were just pawns in this. We were just tools.”

Girumuhatse, who said he was forty-six years old, could not recall any specific cases of Hutus who had been executed simply for declining to kill; apparently, the threat—kill or be killed—had been enough to ensure his participation in murder. But Girumuhatse had run a roadblock, and to be the chief of a roadblock was to be not a pawn but a mid-level figure in the local chain of command—a mover of pawns. Girumuhatse said he had no choice, and at the same time, he told me, “In most cases with the killing it’s my responsibility, because I was the leader, and now that I’m back I will tell all to the authorities.”

WHEN THE MASS repatriation from Zaire began on November 15, 1996, the government of Rwanda ordered a moratorium on arrests of suspected genocide perpetrators. In a month of extraordinary developments, this was surely the most unexpected. But just as in 1994 the radio had rallied the masses to kill, so once again the radio explained how things stood. Everyone heard, for instance, that President Pasteur Bizimungu had gone to the border to welcome the returnees as brothers and sisters. A version of the President’s message was repeatedly broadcast on Radio Rwanda, and throughout the country his words were being studied for guidance.

After calling the mass return “a tremendous joy for all Rwandans,” the President said, “The Rwandan people were able to live together peacefully for six hundred years and there is no reason why they can’t live together in peace again.” And he addressed the killers directly: “Let me appeal to those who have chosen the murderous and confrontational path, by reminding them that they, too, are Rwandans. I am calling upon you to abandon your genocidal and destructive ways, join hands with other Rwandans, and put that energy to better use.” Then he said, “Once again welcome home.”

But why should survivors be asked to live next door to killers—or even, as happened in Girumuhatse’s house, under the same roof? Why put off confronting the problem? To keep things calm, General Kagame told me. “You don’t necessarily just go for everyone you might think you should go for,” he said. “Maybe you create an atmosphere where things are stabilized first, then you go for those you must go for. Others you can even ignore for the sake of gradually leading a kind of peaceful coexistence.” Kagame recognized that this was asking a lot of his people; and, following the return, there were numerous reports of soldiers rescuing alleged killers from angry mobs and placing them in “protective custody.” It would not be easy to balance the demands for justice and the desire for order, Kagame told me. “In between these two intentions there are prcblems, there are the feelings of people.”

AS SOON AS Girumuhatse told me he was a killer, he stopped sweating. His breath came more easily. His eyes even looked clearer, and he seemed eager to keep talking. A storm had blown in, dumping rain, so we moved into my jeep, which was parked right where Girumuhatse’s roadblock had stood during the genocide. As we settled in, he announced that one reason he had been under pressure during the genocide was that he had been told to kill his wife, a Tutsi.

“I was able to save my wife because I was the leader,” he said, adding that he had feared for his own life, too. “I had to do it or I’d be killed,” he said. “So I feel a bit innocent. Killing didn’t come from my heart. If it was really my wish to kill, I couldn’t now come back.” Girumuhatse’s voice was unnervingly cozy beneath the thrum of the rain. Did he feel at least a bit guilty? He remained unmoved when he told me, “I knew many of the people that I ordered killed.” I asked how many deaths he had ordered. He was slow in answering. “I know of six people who were killed before my eyes by my orders.”

“Did you never kill with your own hands?”

“It’s possible I did,” Girumuhatse said. “Because if I didn’t they’d have killed my wife.”

“Possible?” I said. “Or true?”

Bosco, the translator, said, “You know what he means,” and didn’t translate the question.

Girumuhatse reiterated his wish to explain everything to the authorities. As he understood it, he was being allowed to recover his property and his health—“and then they will call me.” He wasn’t afraid. If he told all, he believed, he would get “a limited punishment.” He said, “The authorities understand that many just followed orders.”

Girumuhatse had the government’s policy almost right. Three months earlier, after nearly a year of debate, Rwanda’s parliament had adopted a special genocide law, which categorized responsibility for the crime according to the perpetrator’s position in the criminal hierarchy, and offered sentence reductions for lower-level criminals who confessed. Although all murderers were liable to the death penalty under Rwanda’s standard penal code, the genocide law reserved execution only for the elites defined in Category One: “Planners, organizers, instigators, supervisors, and leaders… at the national, prefectural, communal, sector, or cell level,” as well as “notorious murderers who, by virtue of the zeal or excessive malice with which they committed atrocities, distinguished themselves” and perpetrators of “acts of sexual torture.” For the vast remainder of rank-and-file killers and their accomplices—the followers—the maximum penalty of life imprisonment could be whittled down, with a valid confession and guilty plea, to as little as seven years. Penalties for nonlethal assault and property crimes were comparably reducible.

Girumuhatse had absorbed the spirit of the new law. “If it can end that way, and after being punished I can return to my home and recover my life, I would accept that,” he told me. “If this vengeance can end in this country and wrongdoers can be punished, that would be best.” What he didn’t seem to grasp was that his leadership position during the genocide placed him firmly in Category One, where the death penalty could not be staved off with a confession.

Even as Girumuhatse prepared to tell all, he laid the blame for his crimes on the former mayor of Taba, Jean Paul Akayesu, who was remembered as a famously avid hunter of Tutsis and who had installed Girumuhatse as the roadblock leader. In 1995, Akayesu was arrested in Zambia, and in 1997 he was brought to trial for genocide before the International Tribunal for Rwanda, where, after countless delays in the proceedings, a verdict was expected in the summer of 1998. In court, Akayesu himself blamed his political superiors for any killings of innocent Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

The genocide “was like a dream,” Girumuhatse told me. “It came from the regime like a nightmare.” Now, it seemed, he had not so much waked up as entered a new dream, in which his confession and his pat enthusiasm for Rwanda’s reform—“The new regime is quite good. There are no dead. We were surprised by the welcome. There is a new order”—did not require any fundamental change of politics or heart. He remained a middleman, aspiring to be a model citizen and to reap the rewards. When the authorities said kill, he killed, and when the authorities said confess, he confessed.

BETWEEN VISITS TO Taba, I talked to an aid worker in Kigali who had just returned from western Tanzania, where close to five hundred thousand Rwandan Hutus still remained in refugee camps. (A month later, in mid-December of 1996, Tanzania closed the camps and repatriated the Rwandans, bringing the total number of returnees to nearly a million and a half in six months.) During his visit to the camps, the aid worker had heard that children there had a game of making clay figures and placing them in the road to be run over by passing vehicles. The clay figures represented Tutsis, and each time one was crushed the children cheered, because they believed they had just caused a Tutsi to die in Rwanda. The aid worker told me this story as a sort of parable. It make him wonder whether it wasn’t Rwanda’s inevitable destiny to endure another round of mass butchery.

That possibility was all too obvious. Rwanda’s government since the genocide had staked its credibility on proving that systematic murder between Hutus and Tutsis was avoidable. The mass return from the camps, which the government presented as a triumph, was the great test of that claim. Yet Kagame, as always, regarded the victory as incomplete. “Yes, people have come back,” he said. “That’s one problem solved, and it has created another problem, which we also have to solve.” He then proceeded to name a lot of problems—housing, justice, the economy, education, the demobilization of thousands of ex-FAR soldiers returning from exile, and, above all, “this issue of ethnicity.”

A few months earlier, shortly before the fighting began in South Kivu, Kagame had told me two stories about men in his army. One soldier, he said, had recently written a letter, “telling me how he was left alone in his family, and how he knew that some people killed his family during the genocide, and how he has chosen not to hold anybody else responsible for that. Instead, he has decided to take his own life because he doesn’t see what his life means anymore.” The letter was found after the soldier’s suicide. As Kagame understood it, “he had somebody in mind to kill but instead of doing that he decided to kill himself.” The second story was about an officer who killed three people and wounded two in a bar. Some soldiers were about to kill him for his crimes, but he said, “Let me tell you what the problem is and then you can kill me.” So the soldiers arrested the officer, and he explained, “I’ve been seeing killers who’ve been allowed to live and just roam around and nobody takes action against them. Well, I decided I cannot take any more of that, so I killed them. Now, go ahead and do whatever you want with me.”

Kagame said, “Imagine what is going on in the mind of that person. I don’t know. He could have gone to a market and shot a hundred people. He could have killed anybody—such a person who does not even fear being killed. It means there’s some level of insanity that has been created.” He said, “People think this is a matter that we should have got over and forgotten, and—no, no, no, no, we are dealing with human beings here.”

I heard many such stories, of the temptations of revenge, the release of revenge, the dissatisfactions of revenge. Obviously, many survivors did not share Kagame’s view that it was possible to rehabilitate a human being who had followed the logic of the genocide. So after the return from Zaire, I asked him whether he still believed that killers could be successfully reintegrated into society. “I think you can’t give up on that—on such a person,” he said. “They can learn. I’m sure that every individual, somewhere in his plans, wants some peace, wants to progress in some way, even if he is an ordinary peasant. So if we can present the past to them and say, ‘This was the past that caused all these problems for you, and this is the way to avoid that,’ I think it changes their minds quite a bit. And I think some people can even benefit from being forgiven, being given another chance.”

Kagame also said, “We have no alternative.”

DRIVING BACK TO Taba a few days after we met Girumuhatse, Bosco asked me if I’d heard about the girl who’d been burnt alive in Kigali, recently. I hadn’t, so he told me. There was a girl—a woman, really—about Bosco’s age, an acquaintance of his. She was at a disco, and a guy came on to her. She turned him down. He said she’d be sorry. She laughed. He persisted. She told him to go away, to quit bothering her; she said he was crazy. He went away, then came back with a jug of petrol and a match. Four people were killed. The rejected suitor himself wound up hospitalized with burns. When he was asked why he killed four people, he said it was nothing to him after what he’d done in 1994—he could kill as many as he liked.

Bosco was surprised that I, a journalist, hadn’t heard this story before. I think I responded rather dully, less as a journalist than as a consumer of American journalism, where the tabloid curiosity of psycho killers who go berserk in public spaces poses only a distant sense of random menace to the public at large—like lightning, drunk drivers, or falling chunks of tall buildings. A great-grandmother of mine was finished off in her ninety-sixth year by a potted geranium plunging from a window ledge, and although it could happen to me, too, I don’t consider it a nearer danger because it happened to her. But Bosco’s story was different. In Rwanda, he was telling me, a person who says, “The genocide made me do it,” leaves everyone in the entire society with a sense of total jeopardy.

Laurencie Nyirabeza’s granddaughter, Chantalle Mukagasana, told me much the same thing. I had wanted to hear Nyirabeza’s reaction to Girumuhatse’s account of himself, but she was in a quiet mood when I returned to Taba, and Chantalle, a lank thirty-three-year-old who was widowed during the genocide and lost four of her five children—Marie, Marthe, Marianne, and Jonathan—filled the silence. “Even if he confesses, he’s an impostor,” she said of Girumuhatse. “He’s lying if he says he just followed orders.” According to Chantalle, the man was an unreserved Tutsi killer. She said he had overseen the murder of his wife’s parents, “just to have the pleasure of watching them killed,” and when he found his Tutsi wife feeding her brother, Girumuhatse had tried to kill his brother-in-law, too.

Nyirabeza had accused Girumuhatse of killing ten members of her immediate family. Chantalle held him personally responsible for the massacre of twenty-seven members of her extended household. He had been the leader, she said, and he also partook in the massacre, using a small hoe. Chantalle had escaped with her one-month-old daughter, Alphonsine, on her back, only because on the morning of the killings she had seen Girumuhatse murder a cousin of hers named Oswald with a machete. After that, Chantalle sought refuge at the nearby home of her godmother, a Hutu. While she was there, she heard Girumuhatse come and ask for tea—to give him strength, he said, to kill Chantalle’s father. She also said that her godmother’s son, who was one of Girumuhatse’s accomplices, “went behind the house to sharpen his machete, but his mother forbade him to kill me.” Later, the godmother told Chantalle that her son had killed Chantalle’s mother. And now the godmother and her son had come back from Zaire.

All the killing Chantalle described had happened within a few days in one small cluster of houses, on the hill that was under Girumuhatse’s command. She laughed when I told her that Girumuhatse said he only saw six people killed on his orders. “Oh, if I could confront him,” she said at one point, but in another moment she said, “Even if I denounced him, what can it change?”

After the genocide, Chantalle said, “I had to find my own clothes alone, and I had to find my food alone, and now these people return and are given food and humanitarian aid.” It was true; while the international community had spent more than a billion dollars in the camps, devastated Rwanda had gone begging for a few hundred million, and the tens of thousands of survivors, squatting in the ruins, had been systematically ignored. Once, Chantalle told me, someone had handed out hoes to Taba’s survivors. “That’s all,” she said. “Period.”

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to give survivors what they really wanted—their lost world as it was in the time they called “Before.” But did it have to be that those who were most damaged by the genocide remained the most neglected in the aftermath? Bonaventure Nyibizi was especially worried about young survivors becoming extremists themselves. “Let’s say we have a hundred thousand young people who lost their families and have no hope, no future. In a country like this if you tell them, ‘Go and kill your neighbor because he killed your father and your seven brothers and sister,’ they’ll take the machete and do it. Why? Because they’re not looking at the future with optimism. If you say the country must move toward reconciliation, but at the same time it forgets these people, what happens? When they are walking on the street we don’t realize their problems, but perhaps they have seen their mothers being raped, or their sisters being raped. It will require a lot to make sure that these people can come back to society and look at the future and say, ‘Yes, let us try.’”

That effort wasn’t being made. The government had no program for survivors. “Nobody wants to help them,” Kagame’s adviser, Claude Dusaidi, told me. He meant no foreign donors, no aid agencies. “We say, ‘Give us the money, we’ll do it.’ Nobody is interested.” Bonaventure, who was later appointed Minister of Commerce, explained the lack of foreign help as a consequence of Rwanda’s lack of investment opportunities. “You cannot count on the international community unless you’re rich, and we are not,” he said. “We don’t have oil, so it doesn’t matter that we have blood, or that we are human beings.” For his part, Dusaidi had concluded that the international community didn’t want to recognize that the genocide had really taken place. “They wish we would forget it. But the only way we are going to get to forget it is to help the survivors to resume normal life. Then maybe you can establish the process of forgetting.”

A surprising phrase—“the process of forgetting.” Since the Holocaust, discussions of genocide have become almost inextricably bound up in a discourse about the obligations of memory. But in Rwanda—where Pacifique Kabarisa, who worked for the organization African Rights, told me that many genocide survivors “regret that they weren’t killed”—forgetting was longed for as a symptom of minimal recovery, the capacity to get on with life. “Before this return,” Chantalle told me, “we were beginning to forget, but now it’s as if you had a wound that was healing and then someone came and reopened it.”

There could be no complete closing of the wound for the generation that suffered it. Instead, while survivors charged that the government should—and could—do more for them, and while foreigners impatient for reconciliation accused the government of using the genocide as an excuse for its shortcomings, Rwanda’s new leaders were asking their countrymen to be stoical. “We cannot bring things to a halt just because we want to emphasize justice and make sure everyone who was involved at every level is held accountable,” Kagame told me. It was essential, he said, to maintain a forward momentum, not “to fall back and say, ‘Well, these Hutus killed, so they must be killed, and these Tutsis were the victims, so they must now get the better of what there is in this situation.’” After a moment, he added, “I think there has got to be some serious thinking on the question of being rational.”

Within a few weeks of the mass return from Zaire, the moratorium on arrests was rescinded to allow for the detention of suspects who fit Category One of the genocide law, and the moratorium was soon abandoned altogether. Yet Gerald Gahima, Deputy Minister of Justice, told me that most killers would probably remain at large. In Taba alone, where the return from the camps had been relatively light, the judicial police inspector said that at least sixty Category One suspects had come back. The inspector had Girumuhatse’s name on his list, but he didn’t know much about him. “It’s said he killed people,” he told me, and he read off some names of Girumuhatse’s alleged victims, including the same Oswald whose murder Chantalle said she had witnessed, and one of her uncles whom she’d named.

Jonathan Nyandwi, one of six hundred and forty genocide prisoners at the community lockup in Taba, was better informed. He used to keep a bar near Girumuhatse’s roadblock, and although he professed at first not to know whether Girumuhatse was a killer, when I mentioned Oswald, he said, “He was my godson,” and “He was killed by one Jean Girumuhatse.” Nyandwi confirmed that Chantalle’s father had met the same fate, but he disputed her claim that Girumuhatse had killed his own wife’s parents. According to him, Girumuhatse had only tried to kill his wife’s brother, Evariste.

I found Evariste a few days later. He said that his parents had been killed by “accomplices of Girumuhatse” and that he himself had fled during the attack. Later, he had sought refuge with his sister, Girumuhatse’s wife. “The moment I arrived, Girumuhatse cried out and called others,” Evariste recalled. “They took me, stripped me, and began to beat me with sticks, and my sister began crying like a madwoman, saying, ‘You can’t kill my brother like that!’” Girumuhatse, he said, “tried to take me to the roadblock of my neighborhood, so I could be killed in my place. I was totally nude, and they were leading me toward a mass grave to throw me in.” Somehow, Evariste had slipped free, and managed to escape into the night.

Evariste believed that Girumuhatse had killed more than seventy people. He hadn’t seen the man since his return, but he had seen Girumuhatse’s wife and their son Emanuel—his sister and nephew—and he told me that both of them feared Girumuhatse and wanted him arrested. Yet Evariste, a Tutsi and a town councillor, was afraid to denounce the man who had tried to kill him. “I’m sure that there could be death for my sister and her children,” he explained, and he told me that since Girumuhatse’s return his own nights were again filled with fear. “People can’t say out loud that they want revenge,” Evariste said. “But truly many people have the wish.”

THE MORNING AFTER I met Evariste, I found the streets of Kigali lined with people carrying hoes and machetes. It was a day of public work service; everywhere vacant lots were being transformed into brickyards, a first step toward constructing homes for people displaced by the return. At one such site, I saw General Kagame in a crowd of ragged laborers, spading mud into a wooden brick frame. “This is soldier’s work, too,” he told me. A few feet away, a man was down on his knees, swinging a big machete, chopping up straw to mix into the mud. He had just come back from Zaire, and he said he was rather astonished, after hearing “Monsieur le Vice-Président” demonized in the camps, to see him there. “But it’s normal,” he added, “because every authority who wants to work for the country must set the example for the people.”

The speed with which the doctrines of genocide had been displaced by the order to live together was exhilarating, but it also served as an eerie reminder that Rwanda’s old balance of authority and compliance remained perfectly intact. The system was useful for the overwhelming demands of the moment; you put in a new message, and—presto!—revolutionary change. But wasn’t it only a change of complexion? Shortly before I came across Kagame making bricks, I had told the story of Girumuhatse to Gerald Gahima, at the Justice Ministry. At first, he had been inclined to favor the man for confessing, but as the details piled up he became increasingly glum.

“For values to change,” Gahima said, “there has to be an acknowledgment of guilt, a genuine desire for atonement, a willingness to make amends, the humility to accept your mistakes and seek forgiveness. But everyone says it’s not us, it’s our brothers, our sisters. At the end of the day, no one has done wrong. In a situation where there has been such gross injustice and nobody is willing to seek forgiveness, how can values change?”

It was a good question, and I wanted to give Girumuhatse one more chance to help me answer it. He received Bosco and me in a tiny parlor at his home, and this time his son Emanuel joined us. On my first visit, Emanuel had steered me away, saying there were no other men around who had returned from Zaire, and later his uncle, Evariste, had told me that he wanted his father arrested. I wondered if Emanuel knew what his uncle had said, and I was pleased when he sat down in a position that placed him out of his father’s line of sight but where I could watch him directly, on a ledge, a bit behind and above Girumuhatse.

When I asked Girumuhatse about the young man named Oswald, whom many people said he had killed, Emanuel began to grin so widely that he had to suck in his lips and bite them to contain himself. All Girumuhatse would say about Oswald was “He was killed during the war.” Emanuel rolled his eyes, and when I asked by name about Chantalle’s father he kept grinning. Chantalle’s father was also killed, Girumuhatse said, and he would not elaborate.

Girumuhatse was suffering from a nasty cough, and he sat doubled forward over his knees on a low stool, staring unhappily at the floor. When he told me that he had commanded people from about fifty families during the killings, Emanuel let out a little snort. “Did you direct all of that?” he said in a mocking tone. “Just you?”

Finally, I asked Girumuhatse if it was true that he had tried to kill his wife’s brother. Only then did I realize that Emanuel understood French, because his expressions lurched out of control. But Bosco refused to relay the question; Girumuhatse, he said, was shutting down with embarrassment. A few minutes later, Emanuel stepped outside, and at that point Girumuhatse told me he had tried to save his wife’s brother, explaining, “I tried to take him to his neighborhood to protect him, so that he wouldn’t be killed here before my eyes.”

When I got up to leave, Girumuhatse walked outside with me. “I’m glad to have spoken,” he said. “To tell the truth is normal and good.”

21

UNSOUND OF BODY—his prostate cancer spreading—in his final days as President of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko was incontinent. Trophy seekers who scoured the military camp where he played out his endgame in Kinshasa found little of greater interest than the Big Man’s diapers. It was said that Mobutu’s mental grip was also rather weak. Several people who boasted impeccable access to the gossip of the old court assured me that by the end he was barking mad—pharmaceutically and characterologically unmoored, sometimes maundering and sometimes vivid with rage—and steadfast only in his delusion that he was on the brink of battering Laurent Kabila’s rebel Alliance, which had in fact conquered his immense land almost to his doorstep in just seven months.

And yet, Mobutu’s last completed act as President suggested that, at least in broad terms, he grasped what was happening. On May 11, 1997, he ordered that the remains of Rwanda’s assassinated Hutu Power President, Juvénal Habyarimana, be exhumed from their mausoleum on his estate at Gbadolite and brought to Kinshasa aboard a transport plane. Mobutu was said to fear that Kabila’s cohort might rip Habyarimana from his rest and make mischief with him, and he wanted the Rwandan disposed of. Through four days and four nights, the dead President of Rwanda remained in the plane, on the tarmac at Kinshasa, while the dying President of Zaire made his satraps scurry, one last time, to figure out what to do with the ghoulish cargo. The verdict was cremation, not a normal Congolese rite. Improvising a little over the body of a man who had been a practicing Catholic, Mobutu’s fixers impressed a Hindu priest into service, and Habyarimana went up in smoke. The next morning, Mobutu, too, had flown away—to Togo, then Morocco, where he soon died—and within twenty-four hours of his departure the first soldiers of the RPA marched into the capital of Zaire at the head of Kabila’s Alliance.

IN FRETTING OVER Habyarimana’s last rites, Mobutu had really staged a funeral for a generation of African leadership of which he—the Dinosaur, as he had long been known—was the paragon: the client dictator of Cold War neocolonialism, monomaniacal, perfectly corrupt, and absolutely ruinous to his nation. Six months earlier, when the Rwandan-backed rebel Alliance first captured Goma, I had driven directly to Mobutu’s lakeside palace at the edge of town. The gates stood open and unguarded. The Zairean flag lay in a lump in the driveway. Munitions abandoned by Mobutu’s Special Presidential Division littered the grounds—heaps of assault rifles and cases marked “TNT” packed with sixty-millimeter mortar rounds. Five mint black Mercedes sedans, a shiny Land Rover, and two ambulances were parked by the garage. Inside, the house was a garish assemblage of mirrored ceilings, malachite-and-pearl-inlaid furniture, chandeliers, giant televisions, and elaborate hi-fis. Upstairs, the twin master bathrooms were equipped with jacuzzis.

Goma was largely a shantytown. Its poverty was extreme. One day I stopped by the house of an acquaintance who had gone away, leaving his dogs. Their snouts stuck out beneath the locked gate. I was feeding them some United Nations high-protein biscuits when three men came around the corner and asked for some, too. I held out the box to the first man, who was clad in rags, and said, “Take a few.” His hands shot out, and I felt the box fly from my grip as if it were spring-loaded. The man’s companions immediately pounced on him, tussling, cramming biscuits into their mouths, snatching biscuits out of one another’s mouths, and along what had seemed a deserted street people came running to join the fray.

Mobutu’s Jacuzzis were lined with bath oils and perfumes in bottles of Alice in Wonderland magnitude; they must have held about a gallon apiece. Most were quite full. But one appeared to have enjoyed regular use: a vat of Chanel’s Egoïste.

He bathed in the stuff.

That was Zaire, and in the spirit of Louis XTV’s “L’état c’est moi,” Mobutu was fond of boasting, “There was no Zaire before me, and there will be no Zaire after me.” In the event, Kabila—who used to call Zaire “le Nowhere”—made Mobutu’s word good; on May 17, 1997, he declared himself President, and restored to the country the name Mobutu had scrapped: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The speed with which he had swept to victory owed much to the fact that, as a rule, the Zairean army had preferred to flee than to fight, raping and looting its way through town after town ahead of the rebel advance. The only forces that truly made a stand for Mobutu were tens of thousands of fugitive fighters of Rwanda’s Hutu Power and a couple of dozen French-recruited Serbian mercenaries.

Kabila, too, had required foreign help to accomplish his march so efficiently, and not only from Rwanda. Behind his Alliance there had formed a pan-African alliance representing the political or military enthusiasm of at least ten governments across the continent. After the initial rebel victories in North and South Kivu, as Congolese recruits flocked to Kabila’s cause, support also poured in from neighboring states—Angola, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia—and from as far afield as Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

Had the war in the Congo happened in Europe, it would probably have been called a world war, and to Africans the world was at stake. For this was the war about the Rwandan genocide. As Uganda’s President Museveni told me shortly after Kabila was sworn in: “The big mistake of Mobutu was to involve himself in Rwanda. So it’s really Mobutu who initiated the program of his own removal. Had he not involved himself in Rwanda, I think he could have stayed, just like that, as he had been doing for the last thirty-two years—just do nothing to develop Zaire, but stay in what they call power, by controlling the radio station, and so on.”

Mobutu had certainly been warned, and not only by those who dethroned him. In the study of his abandoned palace in Goma, I found a long memorandum about the Rwanda conflict addressed to Mobutu by one of his counselors. From its contents it appeared to have been written in 1991, not long after the RPF first invaded Rwanda, at a time when Mobutu was presiding over the negotiation of a series of short-lived cease-fires. The memo described Habyarimana’s court as “composed for the most part of intransigent extremists and fanatics,” and predicted that the RPF rebels would “in one manner or another realize their final objective, which is to take power in Rwanda.” The memo urged Mobutu to serve as “a moral umbrella” and “the Spiritual Father of the negotiation process” without alienating the RPF or Uganda’s President Museveni, and above all to protect the “primordial interests of Zaire” regardless of who should prevail in Rwanda.

Standing there—as a looter, really—in Mobutu’s “liberated” study, reading this banal document that had been rendered remarkable only by the enormity of intervening events, I was struck again to think how completely the world was changed by the genocide in Rwanda. It wasn’t necessarily a nicer or a better world, just a few years and a million deaths ago, before the genocide. But in central Africa it was a world in which the very worst was still unknown.

In 1994, during the height of the extermination campaign in Rwanda, as Paris airlifted arms to Mobutu’s intermediaries in eastern Zaire for direct transfer across the border to the génocidaires, France’s President François Mitterrand said—as the newspaper Le Figaro later reported it—“In such countries, genocide is not too important.” By their actions and inactions, at the time and in the years that followed, the rest of the major powers indicated that they agreed. Evidently, it did not occur to them that such a country as Rwanda can refuse to accept the insignificance of its annihilation; nor had anybody imagined that other Africans could take Rwanda’s peril seriously enough to act.

The memory of the genocide, combined with Mobutu’s sponsorship of its full-scale renewal, had “global repercussions, wider than Rwanda,” Museveni told me, “and here in Africa we were determined to resist it.” Just as Mobutu was what Museveni called an “agent” of his Western puppeteers, so the Rwandan génocidaires, who had once again threatened to reduce the entire region to blood, owed their sustenance to the mindless dispensation of Western charity. The West might later wring its hands over the criminal irresponsibility of its policies, but the nebulosity known as the international community is ultimately accountable to nobody. Time and again in central Africa, false promises of international protection were followed by the swift abandonment of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the face of extreme violence. Against such reckless impunity, the Congolese rebellion offered Africa the opportunity to unite against its greatest homegrown political evil and to supplant the West as the arbiter of its own political destiny.

I OFTEN FOUND it helpful to think of central Africa in the mid-1990s as comparable to late medieval Europe—plagued by serial wars of tribe and religion, corrupt despots, predatory elites and a superstitious peasantry, festering with disease, stagnating in poverty, and laden with promise. Of course, a key process that had helped European peoples pull toward greater prosperity and saner governance was colonialism, which allowed for the exporting of their aggressions and the importing of wealth. Ex-colonies don’t enjoy such opportunities as they tumble into the family of modern nation-states; whatever forms of government they come up with, in their struggles to build sustaining political traditions, are likely to be transitional.

Long before Rwanda became a case study in international negligence, Museveni once said, “A little neglect would not be so bad. The more orphaned we are, the better for Africa. We will have to rely on ourselves.” And the extent to which the Congolese revolution took the outside world by surprise exposed a stubborn misconception that had dominated Western attitudes toward post-Cold War Africa—that Africans generate humanitarian catastrophes but don’t really make meaningful politics.

Appeasement had been the wrong policy toward Nazi Germany, and so it had been in Goma, too. Yet the very vacuum of responsible international engagement at Goma had created an unprecedented need and opportunity for Africans to fix their own problems. Although Kabila’s foreign backers were openly skeptical about his capacities to serve as more than a temporary leader of the Congo—and even in that role he would quickly disappointment them—the Alliance’s swift sweep to victory inspired Uganda’s President Museveni, speaking at Kabila’s inauguration, to proclaim that the war had “liberated not only the Congo but also all of Africa.”

As the political godfather of the new central African leadership, Museveni was listened to closely. He called for national and international solidarity, and for economic order and physical security as the basis for political development. Hearing him, one could almost forget that central Africa’s prospects remained terribly bleak. What was left of much of the region looked a lot like this:

This passage from Museveni’s autobiography described Uganda in 1986, when he installed himself as President after more than a decade of armed struggle. When I told him I thought I was reading about the Congo—or, for that matter, much of Rwanda after 1994—he said, “Same situation, exactly.”

Uganda’s annual economic growth in the early 1990s averaged close to five percent, and in 1996 it exceeded eight percent. Decent roads laced the country. There were good state schools, improved medical care, an independent judiciary, a rather feisty parliament, a boisterous and often contrarian press, and a small but growing middle class. Insecurity remained, especially in the rebellion-plagued north and west of the country. But Uganda, a decade after the ravages of Idi Amin and Obote, set a standard of promise that had to make anyone who called the Congo or Rwanda “impossible” or “hopeless” think again.

MUSEVENI WAS A heavy-handed manager, technocratic, pragmatic, accustomed to having things very nearly his way. He was a man of enormous energy, not only as a politician but also as a cattle breeder, and he possessed a frontiersman’s inventiveness. On the morning that I visited him, the state-owned New Vision newspaper announced: “Yoweri Museveni has disclosed that a local grass species he recently introduced to Egyptian researchers has been processed into a highly effective toothpaste which has been called Nile Toothpaste.”

The item about the toothpaste unfolded as a classic Musevenian parable of African self-reliance. As a child in the bush, Museveni had learned to chew a grass called muteete and found that it left his teeth perfectly clean and smooth. Then, at a British colonial secondary school, he was introduced to Colgate, to cure him of his bumpkin ways. “But,” he said, “when you use this Colgate and you pass the tongue over your teeth you feel these ‘roadblocks.’” The white man’s toothpaste was inferior. As President, he remembered the muteete, and modern science confirmed his memory. The grass, he said, possessed “the best toothpaste agents ever found.” Nile Toothpaste would soon be on the market, and Uganda would collect royalties. Museveni urged his compatriots to pursue similarly market-oriented research. He thought banana juice might make a hit in the soft-drink industry. He noted that Ugandan flower exports to Europe were soaring, and exporters elsewhere were running scared. The message was clear: seek the value in a devalued Africa; we are on a roll.

Uganda’s capital, Kampala, was just an hour’s flight north of Kigali, near the shore of Lake Victoria, yet it seemed another world entirely: a boom town with an air of promise. Of course, it was easy to find people who complained about the government, but the problem that animated them most—whether the regime was moving toward becoming a liberal democracy too slowly, too quickly, or not at all—was the sort of problem that Rwandans, whose chief preoccupation was their physical security, could only yearn to discuss without fear.

Museveni received me in a pavilion on the immaculate grounds of State House, at the end of Kampala’s Victoria Avenue. He sat behind a desk on a plastic lawn chair, wearing an untucked brown plaid short-sleeved shirt, corduroys, and sandals. Tea was served. On a shelf beneath his desk were a book on the Israeli war in Sinai, the Washington journalist Bob Woodward’s book The Choice, about Bill Clinton’s election campaign, and a volume called Selected Readings on the Uses of Palm Oil. Museveni appeared tired; he did not try to hide his need to yawn. Even in the official portrait photographs that hung in most shops and offices around the capital, his round face and nearly shaved pate had an uncharismatic, everyman look that was part of his appeal. His speech, like his writing, was lucid, blunt, and low on bombast.

Toward the end of the war in the Congo, when Kabila’s victory appeared inevitable, The New York Times ran an editorial headed “Tyranny or Democracy in Zaire?”—as if those were the only two political possibilities, and whatever was not one must be the other. Museveni, like many of his contemporaries among the leaders of what might be called post-postcolonial Africa, sought a middle ground on which to build the foundations for a sustainable democratic order. Because he refused to allow multiparty politics in Uganda, many Western pundits were inclined to join with his Ugandan critics in withholding admiration for his successes. But he argued that until corruption was brought under control, until a middle class with strong political and economic interests developed, and until there was a coherent national public debate, political parties were bound to devolve into tribal factions or financial rackets, and to remain an affair of elites struggling for power, if not a cause of actual civil war.

Museveni called his regime a “no-party democracy,” based on “movement politics,” and he explained that parties are “uniideological,” whereas a movement like his National Resistance Movement or the Rwandese Patriotic Front is “multi-ideological,” open to a polyphony of sensibilities and interests. “Socialists are in our movement, capitalists are in our movement, feudalists—like the kings here in Uganda—are members of our movement,” he said. The movement was officially open to everyone, and “anybody who wants” could stand for election. Although Museveni, like most African leaders of his generation, was often described as a former Marxist guerrilla, he was a staunch promoter of free enterprise, and he had come to favor the formation of political groupings along class lines, in order to produce “horizontal polarization,” as opposed to the “vertical polarization” of tribalism or regionalism. “That’s why we say, in the short run, let political competition not be based on groups, let it be based on individuals,” he told me, adding, “We are not likely to have healthy groups. We are likely to have unhealthy groups. So why take this risk?”

Museveni’s complaint was with what might be called cosmetic democracy, in which elections held for elections’ sake at the behest of “donor governments” sustain feeble or corrupt powers in politically damaged societies. “If I have got a heart problem and I try to appear healthy, then I will just die,” Museveni told me. We were speaking of the way that the West, having won the Cold War and lost its simple template for distinguishing bad guys from good guys around the world, had found a new political religion in promoting multiparty elections (at least in economically dependent countries where Chinese is not widely spoken). Museveni described this policy as “not only meddling but meddling on the basis of ignorance and, of course, some arrogance also.” He said, “These people seem to say that the developed parts of the world and the undeveloped parts of the world can all be managed uniformly. Politically this is their line, and I think this is really rubbish—to be charitable. It’s not possible to manage radically different societies exactly in a uniform way. Yes, there are some essentials which should be common, like universal suffrage, one person one vote, by secret ballot, a free press, separation of powers. These should be common factors, but not the exact form. The form should be according to situations.”

IT ANNOYED MUSEVENI and Kagame equally that Rwanda’s RPF-led government was widely viewed as a puppet regime of Uganda’s, and that Kabila had in turn been tagged by opponents as a pawn of “Rwando-Ugandan” imperialism. “They were puppets of the French,” Museveni said of his Rwandan and Congolese critics, “so they think that everybody else is looking for puppets or masters.” He considered it obvious that other countries in the region should look to Uganda’s example. “When Martin Luther published his criticism of the papists, it spread because it struck a chord in different places,” he said. “And when the French Revolution happened there were already local republican elements in different European countries. So when there were changes in Uganda against the dictatorship of Idi Amin—yes, there was some attraction to those ideas.”

That Museveni should present himself in the light of early modern European history was a measure of his determined optimism. He was a student of how the great democracies emerged from political turmoil, and he recognized that it did not happen quickly, or elegantly, or without staggering setbacks and agonizing contradictions along the way. I often heard it said, even by Museveni’s admirers, that he was, alas, no Jeffersonian democrat. But the traditions and particular circumstances which produced Jefferson are unlikely to be found afresh in Africa, and it’s doubtful that those who yearn for such a man again would be prepared to tolerate the fact that Jefferson’s leisure to think and write as grandly as he did was financed in large measure by his unrepentant ownership of slaves.

Still, in addition to the stories of Luther and the French Revolution, Museveni had no doubt also read about the American Revolution, which required eight years of fighting, four more years to get the Constitution ratified, and another two years before elections were held—a total of thirteen years after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, with “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” not only the causes of the anticolonial struggle but also the divine, and universal, legitimacy of waging such struggles by force of arms. The story would appeal to Museveni. The Yankee general who had led the Revolutionary army in from the bush won America’s first two presidential elections.

Museveni got himself elected for the first time in 1996, a decade after taking power, and could run for another five-year term in 2001. But until Uganda experienced a smooth transfer of power to an elected successor, “no-party democracy” could not be said to have met the ultimate test of its institutions. In the meantime, nearly everything depended on the goodwill and the capacities of the leader—but not, Museveni assured me, on the wishes of the international community. The Euro-American architects of the old postcolonial order were welcome to work with Africa, he said, but on Africa’s terms, as joint-venture investors both of capital and of technical expertise. “I really don’t think the Europeans have the capacity to impose their will again. I don’t think that America or anybody will dominate Africa anymore,” he told me. “They may cause destabilization, but they cannot reverse the situation if the indigenous forces are organized. By the sheer force of Africa we shall be independent of all foreign manipulation.”

A FEW WEEKS after Mobutu’s abdication, Bill Richardson, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, flew to the Congo to see President Kabila. His presence, he told me, reflected a “renewed U.S. interest in Africa,” sparked by the awareness that the countries that had formed the alliance behind Kabila’s Alliance constituted a “regional strategic and economic power bloc, through shared experience,” that “needs to be dealt with seriously.” He spoke of the attraction of market economies, and “a lot of improvement” in social and political conditions, and he expressed admiration for both Kagame and Museveni.

But Richardson had come to the Congo not only to offer American help but also to threaten to withhold it. Since midway through the war, international aid workers, human rights activists, and journalists in the eastern and northern Congo had been reporting that Rwandan Hutus who fled into the jungle after the breakup of the UN border camps were being killed, piecemeal and in massacres, by Kabila’s forces. The UN wanted to send a human rights investigation team, and Kabila was stonewalling. Richardson’s message was: Let the team come, or face international isolation and forget about the foreign aid you desperately need.

Kabila’s people were understandably prickly about the question of massacres. On the one hand, they denied the charges; on the other hand, they insisted that any killings of Hutus had to be placed in the proper context. A great many Rwandans from the camps who had remained in the Congo were not only fugitive génocidaires but active-duty fighters for Mobutu. Even during the pitch of battle, these combatants had, as always, kept themselves surrounded by their families and followers—women, children, and the elderly, whom they used as a human shield and who suffered accordingly. What’s more, the Hutu Power fighters themselves were reported to have committed massacres of Congolese villagers and of their own cohorts as they retreated westward. (I saw the aftermath of such a massacre at the Mugunga camp during the mass return in November of 1996: two dozen women, girls, and babies, chopped to death and left to rot in the middle of the camp—“because they came from another camp, looking for food,” according to a Mugunga resident, who seemed to think such killing unremarkable.)

At times, the UNHCR had managed to establish temporary camps for tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutus as they fled westward. One of the largest was at the village of Tingi-Tingi, in the eastern Congo. On television, it looked like any camp for wardispossessed refugees, but offscreen it was also a major Hutu Power military installation. Disgusted aid workers and bush pilots later told me that the ex-FAR and interahamwe maintained a regime of terror in the camp, killing noncombatants seemingly at random. The same forces controlled the airfield, where, mingled in among genuine aid agency flights, planes plastered with the logos of aid organizations regularly landed arms and took off carrying prominent génocidaires to Nairobi. Of course, much of the aid that did get through was appropriated and consumed by Hutu Power forces.

In mid-April of 1997, the front page of The New York Times carried an unusually ambivalent article about the refugee crisis in the Congo, which described a camp for Rwandan Hutus near the city of Kisangani: “While thousands of small children in the camps have distended bellies and limbs like twigs and seem near death by starvation, there are also a considerable number of strapping young men who look fit and healthy and well-fed.”

“When we get food, I eat first,” a “husky thirty-five-year-old father of three starving children” told the Times, and “aid workers said his situation was not uncommon.”

It was strange to read such a story, and at the same time to hear that Emma Bonino, the European Union’s Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, was accusing Kabila’s troops of committing genocide against the refugees, in part by obstructing “humanitarian access.” Even as she spoke, the UN was flying daily planeloads of Rwandan Hutus—many of them fit young men—to Kigali, for repatriation and resettlement, in a program sanctioned by Rwandan and Alliance officials. At least fifty thousand former camp residents were brought back to Rwanda in this fashion, while as many made their way over the borders to areas of Angola held by Mobutist-backed rebels, to the Central African Republic, and to the other Congo—the Republic of the Congo—where they were once again accommodated in camps, which were once again heavily militarized.

On the other hand, many Rwandan Hutus were clearly disappearing in the Congo, and many of the killings that were being attributed to Kabila’s backers appeared to have occurred in noncombat situations. Several appalling death-squad-style massacres were reported in detail. These killings dominated the international coverage of the Congo war and its aftermath, and the blame was directed primarily at Tutsi troops from the Congo and from Rwanda. Not long after the Times article about killer refugees at Kisangani appeared, the camp it was reported from was attacked and disbanded by a mixture of Alliance forces and local Zaireans. Stories circulated that thousands of its residents had been massacred—but nobody could be sure exactly what had happened because Kabila’s forces barred access to investigators.

AMBASSADOR RICHARDSON EMERGED from his meeting with good news: Kabila had promised to give the UN human rights probe unlimited access. In high spirits, Richardson flew on to visit a camp for Rwandan Hutus at Kisangani, not far from where some of the largest refugee massacres were reported to have occurred. The people in the camp were mostly women and children who had been straggling through the jungle for months, and they were in bad shape, some barely alive—crumpled skin clinging to skeletons. After a leisurely tour, Richardson stood near the camp gate, surrounded by camp residents, and read a prepared statement, which described the “humanitarian crisis in the Congo” as “a tragedy that dates back to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.” What’s more, he said:

This was the highest-level official acknowledgment of reality and responsibility by an international statesman to date, and it was delivered before reporters of The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and several international television, radio, and wire services. Yet not one of those papers reported it. General Kagame later told me that he’d seen a typescript of the statement and wondered if it was a hoax. When I assured him that Richardson had really said those words, he called it an “important admission” and “something great in the whole situation,” adding, “Maybe somebody should slip it into the Internet or something.”

A few weeks after Richardson’s visit, the UN massacre investigation team arrived in Kinshasa, right on schedule. But it was never able to go about its business. Kabila threw up one hurdle after another, and even after Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed to find a new team leader and to expand the investigation’s scope to cover not only the eight months of the Congo war but the preceding four years—since Rwanda’s génocidaires first began filling the eastern Congo with mass graves—Kabila continued to stonewall. A great many African heads of state closed ranks behind him. Their feeling was that after sitting out the Rwandan genocide, the so-called international community had little credibility as moral referees in the war against the génocidaires.

Such was the mood on much of the continent in the early summer of 1997. In July, Kenya’s aging strongman, Daniel arap Moi, who had broken off relations with Rwanda after the genocide, received General Kagame for a state visit. Two days later, Kenya arrested and turned over to the UN tribunal at Arusha seven of the most-wanted masterminds of the genocide. Moi denounced these former friends of his as “foreign spies and criminals,” and arrests continued. Among those caught were General Gratien Kabiligi of the ex-FAR, who had until recently commanded the Hutu Power forces in the Congo; Georges Ruggiu, the Belgian broadcaster for the genocidal radio RTLM; and Hassan Ngeze, who had published the Hutu Ten Commandments and forecast President Habyarimana’s death in the newspaper Kangura.

ONCE, WHEN WE were talking about the genocide and the world’s response to it, General Kagame said, “Some people even think we should not be affected. They think we are like animals, when you’ve lost some family, you can be consoled, given some bread and tea—and forget about it.” He chuckled. “Sometimes I think this is contempt for us. I used to quarrel with these Europeans who used to come, giving us sodas, telling us, ‘You should not do this, you should do this, you don’t do this, do this.’ I said, ‘Don’t you have feelings?’ These feelings have affected people.” Kagame aimed a finger at his skinny body and said, “Maybe that’s why I don’t put on a lot of weight—these thoughts keep consuming me.”

In early June of 1997, just after Richardson’s visit to the Congo, I went to Kigali for a day to see Kagame, and ask him about the reported massacres of Rwandan Hutus in the Congo. “I think there is a bit of exaggeration,” he said, “in terms of systematic extermination, systematic killings of refugees, or even possible involvement of high authorities of different countries.” Then he added, “But let’s go back a little bit, if people are not to be hypocrites…. First of all, again, I want to bring out the involvement of some countries in Europe. Remember the Zone Turquoise?”

Kagame spent more than an hour describing the resurgence of Hutu Power after the RPF’s victory in 1994, starting with the arrival of French forces during the last weeks of the genocide, and running through the activities of the génocidaires in the camps— the rearming, the training, the alliance with Mobutu, the killings and expulsions in North Kivu, the constant attacks against Rwanda, and the campaign to eradicate the Banyamulenge Tutsis from South Kivu. He rattled off the names of towns in the Congo where major battles had been joined during the Alliance’s march to Kinshasa, and described the massive troop involvements of Hutu Power forces. “It becomes extremely difficult for me to imagine that the whole world is so naive as not to see that this was a real problem,” he said. He could only conclude, he added, that “there was some high-level conspiracy” in the international community to protect the killers and, perhaps, to assist them toward an ultimate victory.

But why would any of the major powers have pursued such an insane policy? “To fight off their guilt after the genocide,” Kagame said. “There is a great amount of guilt.”

This was the same conversation in which, at the outset, Kagame told me that Rwanda had had no troops in the Congo, as he had been telling everyone for eight months, and in which he wound up telling me that in fact he had initiated the whole campaign, and his troops had been there all along. The total reversal surprised me more than the information, and I was left to wonder why one of the shrewdest political and military strategists of our times was taking credit for the war at just the moment when he was being heaped with blame for war crimes.

Reviewing the tapes of our conversation, I realized that Kagame’s reasons were clear. He was not denying that many Rwandan Hutus had been killed in the Congo; he told me that when revenge was the motive, such killings should be punished. But he considered the génocidaires responsible for the deaths of those they traveled with. “These are not genuine refugees,” he said. “They’re simply fugitives, people running away from justice after killing people in Rwanda—after killing.” And they were still killing.

The brief period of calm in Rwanda that followed the mass return from the UN camps at the end of 1996 had quickly broken down, and since February the systematic killing of Tutsis had been steadily on the increase. Much of the northwest was in a state of low-level war. The eastern Congo, too, remained in turmoil, and sizable concentrations of Hutu fighters who had refused every chance for repatriation continued to operate across the area. Kagame was especially concerned about the tens of thousands of génocidaires who had fled to the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, and rebel-held areas of Angola.

“Even now, these fellows are crossing our borders, ex-FAR and militias, mixed with maybe some of their family members,” Kagame said. “They are armed with rocket-propelled grenades, with machine guns, they are killing people as they move, and this is nothing to the international community. What is a thing is that Tutsis were killing refugees. There’s something extremely wrong here. This is why I think there’s this terrible guilt on the part of some people, which they are trying to fight off by always painting a picture of Tutsis being on the wrong side and Hutus being victims. But there is no amount of intimidation or distortion that can defeat us on this. It will cause us problems, but we are not going to be defeated.” He sounded angrier than I had ever heard him. “There are a lot of them left,” he said of the génocidaires, “and we will have to keep dealing with that situation for as long as it lasts. We are not really tired of dealing with that at all—it’s they who will get tired, not we.”

A grim prospect, but Kagame was trying to explain why the war in the Congo had happened as it had happened—in order, he said, that Rwanda should not “be rubbed off the surface of the earth.” That was how he saw his choice, and it explained the startling coolness of his speech. But although his voice and his manner were as contained as ever, he was clearly indignant to find his troops accused of destroying what he regarded as an army bent on Rwanda’s annihilation. Kagame’s defiance and his sense of injury added up to an Ahab-like wrath. He didn’t just want the world to see things his way; he seemed to believe that the world owed him an apology for failing to accept his reasoning.

Ideally, he told me, an investigation would be the best way to clear up the story of massacres in the Congo. “But,” he said, “because of this background, which I have already described to you, because of this partisan involvement, because of these politically motivated allegations even at the high levels in the international community, you see here that we are dealing with judges who cannot be judged. And yet they are terribly wrong. This is the bad thing about the whole thing. I have lost faith. You see, the experience of Rwanda since 1994 has left me with no faith in these international organizations. Very little faith.

“In fact,” Kagame went on, “I think we should start accusing these people who actually supported the camps, spent a million dollars per day in these camps, gave support to these groups to rebuild themselves into a force, militarized refugees. When in the end these refugees are caught up in the fighting and they die, I think it has more to do with these people than Rwanda, than Congo, than the Alliance. Why shouldn’t we accuse them? This is the guilt they are trying to fight off. This is something they are trying to deflect.”

It was true that the victory of the pan-African alliance Kagame had put together in the Congo had constituted a defeat for the international community. The major powers and their humanitarian representatives had been pushed out of the way, and, he said, “they are angered, and the guilt is exposed by the defeat.” He said, “they have not determined the outcome, so again this is something they cannot stomach.” He said, “Kabila emerges, alliance emerges, something changes, Mobutu goes: things happen, the region is happy about what is happening, different people have had different ways of supporting the process. And they are left out, and everything takes them by surprise. They are extremely annoyed by that, and they can’t take it like that.”

As Kagame understood it, “The African and the Western worlds are so many worlds apart.” Yet he seemed to recognize that a defeat for the international community could not be translated into a victory for anybody. He had spent his life in central Africa, not fighting against what used to be called the “civilized world,” but fighting to join it. Yet he had concluded that that world was trying to use “the refugee issue” to destroy his progress. “That really is their purpose,” he said. “It’s not so much the human rights concerns, it’s more political. It’s ‘Let’s kill this development, this dangerous development of these Africans trying to do things their own way.’”

22

THE FIRST IN-FLIGHT movie on my second-to-last trip to Rwanda, in February of 1997, was A Time to Kill. It is set in Mississippi, in the atmosphere Faulkner celebrated as “miasmic.” A couple of worthless white-trash rednecks are out drinking and driving. They abduct a young black girl, rape her, torture her, and leave her corpse in a field. They get caught and thrown in jail. The girl’s father doesn’t trust the local judiciary to do adequate justice, so he waits for the men to be brought in chains to the courthouse, steps out of the shadows with a shotgun, and blows them away. He is arrested for first-degree murder and put on trial. His culpability is never in question, but a clever young white lawyer—risking his reputation, his marriage, his life and that of his children—appeals to the jury’s sentiment, and the girl’s father is set free. That was the movie. It was pitched as a tale of racial and social healing. Triumph for the protagonists, and catharsis for the audience, came with the acquittal of the vigilante killer, whose action was understood by a jury of his peers to have achieved a higher degree of justice than he could have expected from the law.

The second in-flight movie was Sleepers. It is set in New York, in the tough midtown neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Four kids play a prank that results in the accidental death of a passerby. They are sent to a reform school, where they are repeatedly gangraped by the wardens. Then they are released. Years pass. One day, two of the original quartet encounter the warden who had been their chief tormentor in reform school, so they draw their handguns and blow him away. They are arrested. To the viewer, their culpability is never in question. But in court they deny everything; they say they were in church at the time of the murder. This alibi requires the cooperative testimony of a priest, who is also an alumnus of the terrible reform school. The priest is a man of great honesty. Before testifying, he swears on the Bible that he will tell the truth. Then he lies. The men are acquitted and released. It was another tale of the triumph of justice over the law; the priest’s lie was understood to have been an act of service to a higher truth.

Both movies had been quite popular in America—seen by many millions of citizens. Apparently, the questions they raised struck a chord with their audiences: What about you? Can you condemn these vigilante killers after such violations? Can you grieve for the scum they killed? Might not you do the same? These are fine issues to ponder. Still, I was troubled by the premise the two movies shared: that the law and the courts were so incapable of fairly adjudicating the cases in question that it wasn’t worth bothering with them. Perhaps I was taking my in-flight entertainment too seriously, but I was thinking of Rwanda.

Six weeks earlier, in mid-December of 1996, shortly after the mass return from the border camps, Rwanda had finally begun holding genocide trials. This was a historic event: never before had anybody on earth been brought to court for the extraordinary crime of genocide. Yet the trials received sparse international attention. Even the government seemed reluctant to make much fanfare about them, since the courts were crude and inexperienced and had little prospect of meeting Western standards of due process. At one of the first trials, in the eastern province of Kibungo, a witness with machete scars across his scalp identified the defendant as his attacker. The defendant dismissed the charge as nonsense, saying that if he had struck a man such a blow he would have made sure that his victim did not live to talk about it. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. So it went. Defense counsel was rarely available, and trials rarely lasted more than a day. Most ended with sentences of death or life imprisonment, but there were some lighter sentences and there were acquittals, which was the only way to determine that the judiciary exercised any independence.

In late January of 1997, the highest-ranking génocidaire in Rwandan custody—Froduald Karamira, who had been Bonaventure Nyibizi’s friend in prison before becoming an extremist and giving Hutu Power its name—was brought to court in Kigali. Karamira had been arrested in Ethiopia; he was the only suspect Rwanda had succeeded in extraditing from abroad. For his trial, he appeared in a prisoner’s suit—pink shorts and a pink short-sleeved shirt—and many Rwandans later told me that seeing this once immensely powerful man so humbled had been cathartic in itself. The proceedings were broadcast from loudspeakers to a crowd outside the courthouse, and on the radio to a fixated national audience. The case was quite well prepared: tapes and transcripts of Karamira’s bloodthirsty propaganda speeches were brought in as evidence, and witnesses and survivors of his numerous crimes described how he had rallied the masses to kill and ordered the massacre of his next-door neighbors. When Karamira took the stand, he denounced his trial as a charade and the government as illegitimate, because Hutu Power was excluded from the ruling coalition, and he denied that Tutsis had been systematically exterminated in 1994. “I am accused of genocide,” he said, “but what does that mean?” He remained defiant even when he said, “If my death will bring reconciliation, if my death will make some people happy, then I’m not afraid to die.”

I HAD WANTED to be in Rwanda for Karamira’s trial, but it was over in three days, and I arrived two weeks later, just after he was sentenced to death. More trials were scheduled, of course, but none in Kigali, and I was advised against traveling outside the city. Around the same time that the trials had begun, bands of ex-FAR and interahamwe—many of them just returned from Zaire—had resumed their terror campaign. Tutsis were the primary victims, but Hutus who were known to have behaved humanely toward Tutsis in 1994, or who cooperated with the new government, were also targeted. The mood of tentative relief that had attended the breakup of the camps quickly ebbed, and Rwandans were beginning to wonder whether their country hadn’t been invaded after all.

In January, in the northwestern province of Ruhengeri, three Spanish aid workers and a Canadian priest were shot to death—the first killings of Westerners since the genocide. The government blamed Hutu insurgents for these murders, but no conclusive investigations were ever conducted. Then, in early February, three Rwandans and two international field workers from the UN Human Rights mission were massacred in an ambush staged by interahamwe in the southwestern province of Cyangugu. The UN team had been on its way to a meeting, organized by the government, to urge villagers to resist the pressure to collaborate with génocidaires. One of the dead Rwandans was a genocide survivor, and one of the internationals was a Cambodian survivor of Pol Pot’s killing fields. The Cambodian’s head had been completely removed from his body. After that, most of Rwanda was treated as a “no-go” zone by foreigners.

Rwandans, too, advised me against travel. Even when I wanted to go back to Taba—just a half hour’s drive south from Kigali along good roads—to see what had become of Laurencie Nyirabeza and the killer Jean Girumuhatse, I was told that nobody would hesitate to call me a fool if I got killed. The night before I flew into Kigali, a minibus taxi had been stopped by a tree placed across the main road twenty miles north of the city. The vehicle was quickly surrounded by armed men, who made the passengers get out and separate—Tutsis here, Hutus there—then opened fire on the Tutsis, killing many of them. At a bar in Kigali, I listened to a mixed group of Hutus and Tutsis discussing the incident. What seemed to disturb them most was that none of the Hutu minibus passengers, all of whom were left unharmed, had voluntarily come forward to identify themselves and report the attack.

Similar acts of terror continued, on an almost daily basis, throughout 1997 and the early months of 1998. In a good week, only one or two people might be killed, and in some weeks hundreds were killed. On at least half a dozen occasions, bands of more than a thousand well-coordinated Hutu Power fighters engaged the RPA in pitched battles for several days before retreating and melting back into the villages of the northwest, where they made their bases. As in the old UN border camps, the génocidaires lived indistinguishably intermingled with civilians, and thousands of unarmed Hutus were reported killed by RPA troops. The RPA was sensitive enough to these charges that it arrested hundreds of its own soldiers for committing atrocities against civilians, while Hutu Power’s policy was to slaughter civilians who failed to join them in committing atrocities.

That was the choice in Rwanda’s new-old war. In their wake the génocidaires left leaflets, warning that those who resisted them would be decapitated. Other leaflets told Tutsis, “You will all perish,” and, “Good-bye! Your days are numbered.” Hutus, for their part, were called upon, in the spirit of John Hanning Speke’s Hamitic hypothesis, to drive all Tutsis “back to Abyssinia,” and advised, “Whoever collaborates with the enemy, works for him, or gives him information, is also the enemy. We will systematically eliminate them.”

One day, I stopped by the Justice Ministry to see Gerald Gahima. “How’s justice?” I asked. He shook his head. For months, government ministers had been traveling around the country, from prison to prison, distributing copies of the special genocide law, and explaining its offer of sentence reductions for the vast majority of prisoners, if they wished to confess. But prisoners refused to come forward. “It’s deliberate sabotage,” Gahima said. “Their leaders have them brainwashed. They still wish to maintain that there was no genocide in this country, when the fact of the matter is the genocide is still going on.”

I wondered if the government regretted having the people home from the camps. “Never,” Gahima told me. “The international community would have kept feeding them until we were all dead. So now just some of us die. We cannot be happy. We can only fight to live in peace.” He smiled, a bit wearily, and said, “We have no exit strategy.”

AFTER ONLY A few days in Kigali, I experienced the sense of total exhaustion that on previous trips had taken weeks, sometimes months, to overwhelm me. I booked a seat on the next flight out, and spent my days on a friend’s porch, surrounded by bird-of-paradise flowers, listening to songbirds, watching the towering clouds over the valley collide and shred, and I escaped into a hundred-year-old novel about a dentist in San Francisco. The book was McTeague, by Frank Norris, and its final pages told of two men, once the brotherly best of friends, who meet and fight in the alkaline desolation of a lonely desert; one kills the other, but in their struggle, the dead man has handcuffed their wrists together.

I put the book down and went to have a beer with a Rwandan friend. I told him the story I had just read, that ultimate image: one man dead, the other locked to the body—in the desert.

“But, Philip,” my friend said, “let’s not be idiots. Where there are handcuffs, there’s a key.”

I reminded him that there was no key to unlock the vast desert in which the surviving man was stranded. I used Gahima’s phrase, “No exit strategy.”

“Novels are nice,” my friend said. “They stop.” He waggled his fingers to make quotation marks in the air. “They say, ‘The End.’ Very nice. A marvelous invention. Here we have stories, but never ‘The End.’” He drank some beer. Then he said, “I’ve thought a lot lately about Jack the Ripper, because the Tutsis now say, ‘Jack is in.’ They don’t say it, but that’s the thought since this return from Zaire. They don’t tell you that they haven’t slept all night because there are assassins in the wall. But think of what happens in the conscience of a Tutsi who expects the arrival of his killer.”

I thought about it, and what came to mind was the letter that Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, the former Adventist church president of Kibuye, gave me in Laredo, Texas—the letter he had received on April 15, 1994, from the seven Tutsi pastors who were among the refugees at Mugonero hospital telling him they would be killed on the morrow, and saying, “your intervention will be highly appreciated, the same way as the Jews were saved by Esther.”

Esther was the wife of Ahasuerus, a Persian emperor, whose dominion stretched from India to Ethiopia, two and a half thousand years before the massacre at Mugonero. The essence of the story is well known to readers of the Bible: how Esther marries Ahasuerus without telling him that she is an orphaned Jew, raised by her uncle, Mordechai; how Ahasuerus’s chief deputy, Haman, despises Mordechai because the Jew refuses to bow down before him; how Haman persuades Ahasuerus to issue a decree calling on his subjects throughout his realm “to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate all Jews, young and old, women and children, in one day… and to plunder their goods”; how Esther reveals her identity to her husband, and pleads with him to spare her people; and how the wicked Haman is ultimately hanged on the very gallows he had built for Mordechai. But there is a final, less widely remembered chapter to this heartening story of genocide averted: when Ahasuerus rescinds his earlier order of extermination, Esther has him add a clause allowing Jews “to gather and defend their lives, to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, with their children and women, and to plunder their goods.” In all, the Bible reports, Jews and their allies slew some seventy-five thousand eight hundred “enemies” before peace was restored to the empire with a day of “feasting and gladness.”

The Tutsi pastors at Mugonero would have known their Scripture. Did they, as they waited to be slaughtered, yearn not only to be spared but also to see the enemies of Rwanda’s peace liquidated? The hopes for redemption that stories like Esther’s have inspired among persecuted peoples invariably carry a faith in the restorative power of avenging justice. “Pharaoh’s army got drownded—oh, Mary, don’t you weep,” recalled the old American slave song, just as Homer sang of the sack of Troy and Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors at Ithaca.

By the late twentieth century, of course, we liked to imagine that there were better ways to make righteousness prevail against the wicked in what used to be called “international society” and today goes by the more inclusive term “humanity.” My friend felt that the rest of humanity had betrayed Rwanda in 1994, but he had not lost his faith in the idea of humanity.

“I think of your country,” he told me. “You say all men are created equal. It’s not true and you know it. It’s just the only acceptable political truth. Even here in this tiny country with one language, we aren’t one people, but we must pretend until we become one. That’s a big problem. I know so many people who lost everyone. A young man will come to me for advice. He’ll say, ‘I saw one who did it. I was sixteen then, but I’m twenty now. I have a gun. Will you turn me in if I settle the matter?’ I’ll have to say, ‘I, too, lost much family, but I didn’t know them. I was in exile—in Zaire, in Burundi. Those I lost—it’s a little abstract—I didn’t know them, there wasn’t the love.’ So if this soldier asks my advice, what do I tell him? It’s a terrible business. I’ll take my time. I’ll take him for a walk. I’ll caress him to calm him. I’ll try to find his superior officer and brief him, and say, ‘Watch this little one.’ But seriously, eh? This isn’t going away in one year or two years or five years or ten years—this horror that we saw. It’s intrinsic.”

I didn’t say anything, and after a while my friend said, “We better find the keys to those handcuffs.”

IN MID-DECEMBER OF 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright delivered a speech to the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa in which she said, “We, the international community, should have been more active in the early stages of the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994, and called them what they were—genocide.” Albright, who would be making a brief visit to Rwanda during her tour of Africa, also condemned the use of humanitarian aid “to sustain armed camps or to support genocidal killers.” Simple words—but politicians tend to dislike having to say such things; that same month, in New York, I heard a senior emissary of the UNHCR sum up the experience of the Hutu Power controlled camps in Zaire with the formulation, “Yes, mistakes were made, but we are not responsible.” Albright’s “apology,” as it came to be known, marked a significant break with the habits of shame and defensiveness that often conspired to deny the basic facts of the Rwandan genocide their rightful place in international memory.

Three months later, President Clinton followed Albright to Africa, and on March 25, 1998, he became the first Western head of state to visit Rwanda since the genocide. His stop there was brief—he never left the airport—but it was highly charged. After listening for several hours to the stories of genocide survivors, Clinton forcefully reiterated Albright’s apologies for refusing to intervene during the slaughter, and for supporting the killers in the camps. “During the ninety days that began on April 6, 1994, Rwanda experienced the most intensive slaughter in this bloodfilled century,” Clinton said, adding, “It is important that the world know that these killings were not spontaneous or accidental… they were most certainly not the result of ancient tribal struggles…. These events grew from a policy aimed at the systematic destruction of a people.” And this mattered not only to Rwanda but also to the world, he explained, because “each bloodletting hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable.”

Clinton’s regrets about the past were more convincing than his assurances for the future. When he said, “Never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence” of genocide, there was no reason to believe that the world was a safer place than it had been in April of 1994. If Rwanda’s experience could be said to carry any lessons for the world, it was that endangered peoples who depend on the international community for physical protection stand defenseless. On the morning of Albright’s visit to Rwanda in December, Hutu Power terrorists, shouting “Kill the cockroaches,” had hacked, bludgeoned, and shot to death more than three hundred Tutsis at an encampment in the northwest, and in the days before Clinton’s arrival in Kigali, as many as fifty Tutsis were killed in similar massacres. Against such a backdrop, Clinton’s pledge to “work as partners with Rwanda to end this violence” sounded deliberately vague.

Still, in Rwanda, where expectations of the great powers had been bitterly diminished to very nearly zero, Clinton’s account of the political organization of the genocide and his praise for the government’s “efforts to create a single nation in which all citizens can live freely and securely” were understood as the sharpest international rebuke yet to the ongoing bid by the génocidaires to equate ethnicity with politics and to prove that equation by murder. It was a measure of Rwanda’s sense of isolation that his remarks were heralded as extraordinary. After all, Clinton was simply proclaiming the obvious. But he had been under no political pressure to pay attention to Rwanda; he might more easily have continued to ignore the place and said nothing. Instead, having chosen to sit out the genocide, he was making what was—even at so late a date—a dramatic intervention in the war about the genocide. As the voice of the greatest power on earth, he had come to Kigali to set the record straight.

“It was very startling to us,” a Hutu friend told me over the phone from Kigali. “Here was a politician who had nothing at stake, and who told the truth at his own expense.” And a Tutsi I called told me, “What he said to us is that we are not just forgotten savages. Maybe you have to live somewhere far away like the White House to see Rwanda like that. Life here remains terrible. But your Mr. Clinton made us feel less alone.” He laughed. “It should be surprising that somebody who didn’t really seem to mind seeing your people get killed can make you feel like that. But it’s hard to surprise a Rwandan anymore.”

I CANNOT COUNT the times, since I first began visiting Rwanda three years ago, that I’ve been asked, “Is there any hope for that place?” In response, I like to quote the hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina. When he told me that the genocide had left him “disappointed,” Paul added, “With my countrymen—Rwandans—you never know what they will become tomorrow.” Although he didn’t mean it that way, this struck me as one of the most optimistic things a Rwandan could say after the genocide, not unlike General Kagame’s claim that people “can be made bad, and they can be taught to be good.”

But hope is a force more easy to name and declare one’s allegiance to than to enact. So I’ll leave you to decide if there is hope for Rwanda with one more story. On April 30, 1997—almost a year ago as I write—Rwandan television showed footage of a man who confessed to having been among a party of génocidaires who had killed seventeen schoolgirls and a sixty-two-year-old Belgian nun at a boarding school in Gisenyi two nights earlier. It was the second such attack on a school in a month; the first time, sixteen students were killed and twenty injured in Kibuye.

The prisoner on television explained that the massacre was part of a Hutu Power “liberation” campaign. His band of a hundred fifty militants was composed largely of ex-FAR and interahamwe. During their attack on the school in Gisenyi, as in the earlier attack on the school in Kibuye, the students, teenage girls who had been roused from their sleep, were ordered to separate themselves—Hutus from Tutsis. But the students had refused. At both schools, the girls said they were simply Rwandans, so they were beaten and shot indiscriminately.

Rwandans have no need—no room in their corpse-crowded imaginations—for more martyrs. None of us does. But mightn’t we all take some courage from the example of those brave Hutu girls who could have chosen to live, but chose instead to call themselves Rwandans?

May 1995—April 1998

IN THE SOUTHERN hill town of Gikongoro, the electricity had failed for the night; the Guest House bar was lit by a half dozen candles, and the eyes of the three soldiers who invited me to drink glowed the color of blood oranges. A single glass of beer was passed, from which I was the last to sip—a ritual signifying that I was not to be poisoned. The soldiers were too drunk for conversation, but a civilian among their party, a man in a shiny black training suit, appeared determined to demonstrate his sobriety. He sat stiffly straight with his arms folded over his chest and his eyes fixed in a hard squint, aloof and appraising. He asked my name in stern, robotic English, each syllable precise and abrupt. I told him, “Philip.”

“Ah.” He clutched my hand. “Like in Charles Dickens.”

“That’s Pip,” I said.

“Great Expectations,” he pronounced. He dropped my hand. His lips bunched up tightly, and he considered me with his humorless stare. Then he said, “I am a pygmy from the jungle. But I learned English from an Anglican bishop.”

He didn’t say his name. The soldier beside me, who had been leaning forward, propped on the upturned barrel of his machine gun, fell suddenly into his own lap, asleep, then jerked awake and smiled and drank some more. The pygmy took no notice. “I have a principle,” he announced. “I believe in the principle of Homo sapiens. You get me?”

I took a guess. “You mean that all humanity is one?”

“That is my theory,” the pygmy said. “That is my principle. But I have a problem. I must marry a white woman.”

“Why not?” I said. Then, after a moment, I said, “But why, if we’re all the same? Who cares what color your wife is?”

“She must be a white woman,” the pygmy said. “Only a white woman can understand my universal principle of Homo sapiens. I must not marry a Negro.” The unalloyed disgust with which he spoke this last word inclined me to agree, for the future wife’s sake. “This is my problem,” he went on. “How am I to attain this goal? You have the opportunity. I have not.” He looked around the dark, nearly empty room and held out an empty hand. A sour look came over him, an atmosphere of accustomed disappointment, and he said, “How am I to meet the white woman? How do I find the white wife?”

The question was not entirely rhetorical. I had entered the bar with a Dutch woman, then lost track of her—she had gone to bed—but she had made an impression; I believe the pygmy wanted me to fix him up. “I have an idea,” he said. “The Netherlands. The bishop, my teacher, had traveled through all the world. To me, the Netherlands is just imagination. But it is real to me.”

I’M TELLING YOU this here, at the outset, because this is a book about how people imagine themselves and one another—a book about how we imagine our world. In Rwanda, a year before I met the pygmy, the government had adopted a new policy, according to which everyone in the country’s Hutu majority group was called upon to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. The government, and an astounding number of its subjects, imagined that by exterminating the Tutsi people they could make the world a better place, and the mass killing had followed.

All at once, as it seemed, something we could have only imagined was upon us—and we could still only imagine it. This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real. During the months of killing in 1994, as I followed the news from Rwanda, and later, when I read that the United Nations had decided, for the first time in its history, that it needed to use the word “genocide” to describe what had happened, I was repeatedly reminded of the moment, near the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, when the narrator Marlow is back in Europe, and his aunt, finding him depleted, fusses over his health. “It was not my strength that needed nursing,” Marlow says, “it was my imagination that wanted soothing.”

I took Marlow’s condition on returning from Africa as my point of departure. I wanted to know how Rwandans understood what had happened in their country, and how they were getting on in the aftermath. The word “genocide” and the images of the nameless and numberless dead left too much to the imagination.

I BEGAN VISITING Rwanda in May of 1995, and I hadn’t been there long before I met the pygmy in Gikongoro. I wouldn’t have guessed that he was a pygmy: he was nearly five and a half feet tall. By declaring himself, he seemed to be setting himself apart from the matter of Hutu and Tutsi, and relating to me as a fellow outsider—an observer at large. Still, although he never said a word about the genocide, I came away with the impression that that was the true subject of our exchange. It may have been possible to talk of something else in Rwanda, but I never had a conversation of substance there in which the genocide did not figure, at least quietly, as the point of reference from which all other understandings and misunderstandings stemmed.

So the pygmy spoke of Homo sapiens, and I heard a subtext. Pygmies were Rwanda’s first inhabitants, a forest people, who were generally looked down upon by Hutu and Tutsi alike as a vestigial, aboriginal lot. In the precolonial monarchy, pygmies served as court jesters, and because Rwanda’s kings were Tutsis, the memory of this ancestral role meant that during the genocide pygmies were sometimes put to death as royalist tools, while elsewhere they were enlisted by Hutu militias as rapists—to add an extra dash of tribal mockery to the violation of Tutsi women.

Quite likely, the Anglican bishop who had instructed the man I met in the Guest House bar would have regarded the education of such an original savage as a special trophy challenge to the missionary dogma that we are all God’s children. But perhaps the pygmy had learned his lessons too well. Clearly, in his experience, the oneness of humanity was not a fact but, as he kept saying, a theory, a principle—a proposition of the white priest. He had taken this proposition to heart as an invitation, only to discover that it had forbidding limits. In the name of universalism, he had learned to despise the people and the jungle he came from, and to love himself for disdaining that inheritance. Now he had conceived that a white wife was the missing link required to prove his theory, and the improbability of such a match was sorely testing his faith.

I sought to ease the pygmy’s frustration by suggesting that even for white men surrounded by white women—even in the Netherlands—finding a sympathetic mate can prove a great challenge. “I am talking about the African,” he said. “The African is sick.” He managed, for the first time, a twisted little smile.

“There is a novel,” he went on. “The book is Wuthering Heights. You get me? This is my larger theory. It doesn’t matter if you are white or yellow or green or a black African Negro. The concept is Homo sapiens. The European is at an advanced technological stage, and the African is at a stage of technology that is more primitive. But all humanity must unite together in the struggle against nature. This is the principle of Wuthering Heights. This is the mission of Homo sapiens. Do you agree?”

I said, “I hear you.”

“Humanity’s struggle to conquer nature,” the pygmy said fondly. “It is the only hope. It is the only way for peace and reconciliation—all humanity one against nature.”

He sat back in his chair, with his arms crossed over his chest, and went silent. After a while, I said, “But humanity is part of nature, too.”

“Exactly,” the pygmy said. “That is exactly the problem.”

Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was lowtech—performed largely by machete—it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred days. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.