We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (20 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked him to tell me.

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

I asked him how he figured that.

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

I said I had.

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

Part Two

… so here the Archangel paused
Betwixt the world destroyed and world restored …

—JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost

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?”