An Ordinary Man (8 page)

Empty suit that he was, Habyarimana had managed to stay in power through the depression with the help of the government of
France, and particularly because of the French president, François Mitterrand. These two presidents got along famously and
shared many dinners. Mitterrand even gave our president his own jet airplane. Loads of development money and military assistance
flowed to us from Paris throughout the years. When the RPF launched its attack in 1990 and the Rwandan Army exploded in size
from five thousand soldiers to thirty thousand to counter the threat, France was there to help train the new recruits. In
some cases white French soldiers came quite close to actually fighting the rebels, with some instructors aiming artillery
cannons at RPF positions and stepping back to let Rwandan soldiers press the fire button. As much as twenty tons of armaments
a day were airlifted into Kigali courtesy of Habyarimana’s friends in Paris.

The French love affair with Rwanda was, you might say, also a product of a pervasive national mythology. “France is not France
without greatness, ” Charles de Gaulle had said, and the preservation of that status as a global leader defines much of the
policy thinking in the offices of France’s Foreign Ministry on the Quai D’Orsay in Paris. Maintaining a strong web of economic
and diplomatic interests in their former African colonies is seen as a key part of that strategy. And so in places like the
Ivory Coast, the Central African Republic, and Chad, where the French tricolor flew until the 1960s, France has provided monetary
support, trade links, and frequent military intervention almost from the day that these countries gained their independence.
Its eagerness to play such a father-figure role earned it the nickname “the policeman of Africa.” The French army, in fact,
has executed nearly two dozen military campaigns on the continent since the era of independence—a level of microinvolvement
far out of proportion to any other great power. France never was much of a player in Rwanda during colonial times, but they
now considered us worthy of attention for their own psychologically complicated reasons.

If Rwandans are obsessed with height, then the French are obsessed with tongues. A large part of that mystical
greatness
in the French mentality is centered on the preservation of the pure French language and the repelling of all attempts to marginalize
it in favor of the international tongue of commerce, aviation, and diplomacy that is English. President Habyarimana and the
Hutu elite were considered exemplary guardians of the French language and the kind of cultural values that it represented.
At the urging of his French friends, our presidential “father” instituted new educational guidelines in schools, and new ways
of teaching mathematics and the French language to young people.

The RPF invaders, by contrast, had spent most of their lives exiled in the former British colony of Uganda and were therefore
English speakers, part of what amounted to a representation of the old Anglo-Saxon hordes that had been dogging France for
the last thousand years. And I believe they were not entirely wrong—I believe the English speakers did have their own ambitions
to achieve hegemony in the region and control the entire space between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. So at the Quai D’Orsay
the logic went like this: If the RPF rebels should become strong enough to overthrow Habya-rimana it will spell the loss of
a small but important Francophone ally in Central Africa, which could soon be speaking English as an official language, reviving
unpleasant tribal memories of the Battle of Agincourt and the Hundred Years War. While the French publicly supported peace
talks, they were, in reality, working behind the scenes to preserve Habyarimana’s shaky hold on power.

I am not saying this mentality is logical, but if there is anything that being a Rwandan has taught me, it is that most politics
is an outgrowth of emotions that may or may not have any relation to the rational.

So when I decided not to wear the president’s portrait on my lapel I was putting my thumb in the eye of a very insecure man.
My friends told me later that I had been taking a stupid chance. I should have just worn the stupid thing to make the flunkies
happy and not risked my job or my family’s welfare on a symbolic matter. I knew Habyarimana and the
akazu
didn’t much care for me, anyway. It would have cost me a huge amount of self-respect to have worn that dictator’s face on
my jacket. If this was a risk, it was a calculated one.

I never told my father about my run-in with the president. I didn’t want him to worry about my job—or my life. But if I had
told him, I like to think it would have made him laugh.

While peace talks with the rebels dragged on the programs on RTLM got worse and worse. I do not know how I managed to keep
listening to it. Perhaps it was out of a need to understand exactly where popular opinion was heading. Or perhaps it was just
morbid fascination.

Either way, I began to hear the racial slur “cockroach” so frequently that it lost whatever power it had to shock. I heard
myself being lumped in with those who were considered less than human. The enormously popular singer Simon Bikindi had recorded
a song played over and over on RTLM called “I Hate These Hutus.” He was talking about people like me—those people of the majority
group who didn’t have a taste for racial politics and refused to join in the crude political movement that became known as
Hutu Power. To Bikindi they were nothing but traitors:

I hate these Hutu, these arrogant Hutus, braggarts who scorn
other Hutus, de
ar comrades.

I hate these Hutus, these de-Hutuized Hutus, who have disowned
their ident
ities, dear comrades.

The anger on the airwaves became so common that it didn’t seem particularly out of line when RTLM broadcast the tape of an
address made at a political rally in the northwest town of Gisenyi. The speaker was a government official named Leon Mugesera
and, I have to say, he knew how to whip up a crowd. Copies of this speech had already been circulating around the country
like bootleg treasures, with people commenting favorably that here was a man who really understood the threat to Rwanda. “Do
not let yourselves be invaded, ” he kept exhorting the crowd, and it gradually became clear he was making an allusion to the
ruling party being “invaded” by moderates who wanted to engage in peace negotiations with the predominately Tutsi rebels.
In words that would become widely repeated throughout Rwanda, he also recounts a story of saying to a Tutsi, “I am telling
you that your home is in Ethiopia, that we are going to send you back there quickly, by the Nyabarongo.” Nobody in Rwanda
could have missed what he was really saying: The Tutsis were going to be slaughtered and their bodies thrown into the north-flowing
watercourse.

His final exhortation to the crowd could have served as a summary of the simpleminded philosophy of those who were screaming
for Hutu Power the loudest: “Know that the person whose throat you do not cut will be the one who cuts yours.” He was preaching
an ideology—and an identity—based on nothing more than a belief in the murderous intentions of the enemy.

I think that was the most seductive part of the movement. There is something living deep within us all that welcomes, even
relishes, the role of victimhood for ourselves. There is no cause in the world more righteously embraced than our own when
we feel someone has wronged us. Perhaps it is a psychological leftover from early childhood, when we felt the primeval terror
of the world around us and yearned for the intervention of a mother/protector to keep us safe. Perhaps it makes it easier
to explain away our personal failures when the work of an enemy can be blamed. Perhaps we just get tired of long explanations
and like the cleanliness of an easy solution. It is for wiser people than me to say. Whatever its allure, this primitive ideology
of Hutu Power swept through Rwanda in 1993 and early 1994 with the speed of flame through dry grass.

The grand purpose, as I have said, was not really to avenge the slights committed by the Tutsi royal court sixty years earlier.
That was merely the cover story, the cheap trick that could rouse a mob into supporting the strong men. And
that
was the true purpose of all the revolutionary rhetoric: It was all about Habyarimana and the rest of the elite trying to keep
a grip on the reins of government. It seemed almost irrelevant to point out that Hutus had been in a position of undisturbed
power for thirty-five years and that the Tutsi were in a position to affect very little of Rwanda’s current miserable situation—even
if they had wanted to. It was a revolution, all right, but there was nobody to overthrow.

The Hutu government wanted all the anger in Rwanda pointed toward any target but itself. RTLM was officially a private venture
with an independent editorial voice, but the extent to which it was an arm of the government was kept a secret from most Rwandans.
Few people knew, for example, that the station’s largest shareholder was actually President Habyarimana himself. The other
financiers had close ties to the
akazu.
They included hundreds of people, including two cabinet ministers and two bank presidents. The station was officially in competition
with the government station, but was allowed to broadcast on their FM 101 frequency in the mornings. Like most radio stations,
RTLM had an emergency power source in case of blackouts, but this one was not a generator on the back lot. It was apparently
an electrical line that led straight into the house across the street, which happened to be the official residence of none
other than President Habyari-mana.

I have mentioned those talk radio “debates” on RTLM that were really just shouting matches between two people who only disagreed
about the best way to make the Tutsis suffer. You might wonder how any audience could stand to listen to such obvious garbage.
How could the Tutsis—and those who loved them—not have made a protest or at least fled the country when they heard such irrational
anger growing stronger and stronger? Could they have not read the signs and understood that hateful words would soon turn
into knives?

Two factors must be taken into account. The first is the great respect we Rwandans have for formal education. If a man here
has an advanced degree he is automatically treated as an authority on his subject. RTLM understood this and hired many professors
and other “experts” to help spread the hate. The head and cofounder, in fact, was a former Ph.D. professor of—what else?—history.

The other thing you have to understand was that the message crept into our national consciousness very slowly. It did not
happen all at once. We did not wake up one morning to hear it pouring out of the radio at full strength. It started with a
sneering comment, the casual use of the term “cockroach, ” the almost humorous suggestion that Tutsis should be airmailed
back to Ethiopia. Stripping the humanity from an entire group takes time. It is an attitude that requires cultivation, a series
of small steps, daily tending. I suppose it is like the famous example of the frog who will immediately leap out of a pot
of boiling water if you toss him into it, but put it in cold water and turn up the heat gradually, and he will die in boiling
water without being aware of what happened.

RTLM was not the only media outlet turning up the heat while the rebel army inched across the countryside. Mugesera’s throat-cutting
speech was played on Radio Rwanda. And in 1990 a new newspaper called
Kangura
(
Wake It Up
) started publishing. It was essentially RTLM in print—populist, funny, and completely obsessed with “the Tutsi question.”
Its publisher was Hassan Ngeze, a former soft-drink vendor from Gisenyi who most people considered a loudmouth and a boor.
He bragged about fictional deeds in his past, exaggerated the circulation numbers of
Kangura,
and obtained many of his scoops from his connections in government ministries. But he had an amazing talent for crystallizing
people’s dark thoughts and splashing them on the pages in an entertaining way. And just as RTLM was bankrolled by wealthy
people close to the president, this rag was secretly funded by members of the
akazu
.

By August 1993, the rebel army had scored several convincing military victories in the north and put Habayrimana in a position
where he was forced by France, the United States and other Western countries into signing a peace treaty known as the Arusha
Accords. He surely must have recognized it as his political obituary. It laid the foundations for a power-sharing government.
Habyarimana would be allowed to stay on as president, but only in a ceremonial sense. And in a special insult to all those
who hated the Tutsi, a battalion of six hundred RPF soldiers was allowed to occupy the grounds of the parliament building
in preparation for the formation of the transitional government.
Kangura
portrayed these troops as the point of a spear aimed straight at the heart of the Hutu majority. The paper also made a curious
prediction: President Habyarimana would not live out the year. He would be assassinated, said the paper, by a rebel hit squad.
It would then be the duty of every good and patriotic Hutu to seek revenge. Otherwise, the rebel army would start killing
innocents.