We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (13 page)

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

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

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

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

9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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