We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (38 page)

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.