We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (4 page)

THE ADDRESS I had for Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana in Laredo was 313 Potrero Court—a suburban brick ranch house at the end of a drab cul-de-sac. A dog growled when I rang the bell, but nobody answered. I found a pay phone and called the local Adventist church, but I don’t speak Spanish, and the man who answered didn’t speak English. I had a tip that Pastor Ntakirutimana was working at a health-food store, but after making the rounds of a few places with names like Casa Ginseng and Fiesta Natural that seemed to specialize in herbal remedies for constipation and impotence, I went back to Potrero Court. There was still nobody at 313. Down the street I found a man spraying his driveway with a garden hose. I told him I was looking for a family of Rwandans, and indicated the house. He said, “I don’t know about that. I only know the people next door here a little.” I thanked him, and he said, “Where’d you say these people were from?” Rwanda, I said. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Colored people?” I said, “They’re from Africa.” He pointed to 313, and told me, “That’s the house. Fancy cars they drive. They moved out about a month ago.

Eliel Ntakirutimana’s new phone number was unlisted, but late at night I got hold of an operator who gave me his address, and in the morning I drove there. The house was on Estate Drive, in an expensive-looking new private community, designed, as in Rwanda, with each home set within a walled compound. An electronic gate controlled access to the subdivision, where most of the plots were still empty prairie. The few houses were wild, vaguely Mediterranean fantasias, whose only common attribute was immensity. The Ntakirutimanas’ stood at the end of the road behind another electronic security fence. A barefoot Rwandan maid led me past an open garage that housed a white Corvette convertible and into a vast kitchen area. She phoned Dr. Ntaki—he had chopped down his name as a professional courtesy to American tongues—and I told him I was hoping to meet his father. He asked how I’d found the house. I told him that, too, and he gave me an appointment in the afternoon at a hospital called Mercy.

While I was still on the phone, the doctor’s wife, Genny, a handsome woman with an easy manner, came home from taking her kids to school. She offered me a cup of coffee—“From Rwanda,” she said proudly. We sat on huge leather couches beside a gigantic television in an alcove of the kitchen, with a view over a patio, a barbecue pavilion, and, on the far shore of a tiled swimming pool, a patch of garden. The distant voices of the Rwandan maid and a Mexican nanny echoed off the marble floors and lofty ceilings of further rooms, and Genny said, “With my father-in-law, we were the last ones to hear anything. He was in Zaire, he was in Zambia, a refugee, and an old man—more than seventy years old. His one great wish was retirement and old age in Rwanda. Then he comes here and suddenly they say he killed people. You know Rwandans. Rwandans go crazy with jealousy. Rwandans don’t like if you are rich or in good health.”

Genny’s own father was a Hutu who had been involved in politics and was killed by rivals in 1973. Her mother was a Tutsi who was saved by chance on the brink of being killed in 1994, and who still lived in Rwanda. “We mixed people don’t hate Tutsi or Hutu,” Genny said. This was an inaccurate generalization—many people of mixed parentage had killed as Hutus, or been killed as Tutsis—but Genny had been living in exile, and she explained, “Most Rwandans who are here in America like my husband have been here so long that they all take positions according to their families. If they say your brother killed, then you take his side.” She did not seem to have her own mind entirely made up about her father-in-law, the pastor. She said, “This is a man who can’t stand to see blood even when you kill a chicken. But anything is possible.”

Just before noon, Dr. Ntaki called with a new plan: we would lunch at the Laredo Country Club. Then the family lawyer, Lazaro Gorza-Gongora, showed up. He was dapper and mild-mannered and very direct. He said that he wasn’t prepared to let the pastor speak to me. “The accusations are outrageous, monstrous, and completely destructive,” he said with disarming tranquillity. “People say whatever they want, and an old man’s last years are in jeopardy.”

Dr. Ntaki was a round, loquacious man with strikingly bulging eyes. He wore a malachite-faced Rolex watch and a white dress shirt with a boldly hand-stitched collar. As he drove Gorza-Gongora and me to the country club in a Chevrolet Suburban that had been customized to feel like a living room, complete with a television set, he spoke with great interest about Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s preparations for open-heart surgery. Dr. Ntaki himself presided over the intravenous drips of open-heart patients, and he shared his wife’s view that any charges against his father were the product of typical Rwandan class envy and spite. “They see us as rich and well educated,” he said. “They can’t take it.” He told me that his family owned a spread of five hundred acres in Kibuye—kingly proportions in Rwanda—with coffee and banana plantations, many cattle, “and all those good Rwandan things.” He said, “Here’s a father with three sons who are doctors and two other children who work in international finance. This is in a country that didn’t have a single person with a bachelor’s degree in 1960. Of course everyone resents him and wants to destroy him.”

We ate overlooking the golf course. Dr. Ntaki held forth on Rwandan politics. He didn’t use the word “genocide”; he spoke of “chaos, chaos, chaos,” with every man for himself just trying to save his own skin. And Tutsis had started it, he said, by killing the President. I reminded him that there was no evidence linking Tutsis to the assassination; that, in fact, the genocide had been meticulously planned by the Hutu extremists who set it in motion within an hour of the President’s death. Dr. Ntaki ignored me. “If President Kennedy had been assassinated in this country by a black man,” he said, “the American population would have most certainly killed all the blacks.”

Gorza-Gongora watched me writing this absurd statement in my notebook and broke his silence. “You say ‘extermination,’ you say ‘systematic,’ you say ‘genocide,’” he said to me. “That’s just a theory, and I think you’ve come all the way to Laredo to hold up my client as a clever proof of this theory.”

No, I said, I had come because a man of God was accused of having ordained the murder of half his flock, co-religionists, simply because they had been born as something called Tutsi.

“What’s the evidence?” Gorza-Gongora said. “Eyewitnesses?” He chuckled. “Anybody can say they saw anything.”

Dr. Ntaki went further; he detected a conspiracy: “The witnesses are all government tools. If they don’t say what the new government wants, they’ll be killed.”

Still, Dr. Ntaki said that despite his lawyer’s counsel, his father was concerned for his honor and wished to speak to me.

“The pastor thinks silence looks like guilt,” Gorza-Gongora said. “Silence is peace.”

Leaving the country club, I asked Dr. Ntaki if he ever had doubts about his father’s innocence. He said, “Of course, but—” and, after a second, “Do you have a father? I will defend him with everything I have.”

PASTOR ELIZAPHAN NTAKIRUTIMANA was a man of stern composure. He sat in a wing chair in the doctor’s parlor, clutching a manila folder in his lap, and wearing a gray cap over his gray hair, a gray shirt, black suspenders, black pants, black square-toed shoes, and squarish wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke in Kinyarwanda, the language of his country, and his son translated. He said, “They are saying I killed people. Eight thousand people.” The number was about four times higher than any I had previously heard. The pastor’s voice was full of angry disbelief. “It is all one hundred percent pure lies. I did not kill any people. I never told anybody to kill any people. I could not do such things.”

When the “chaos” began in Kigali, the pastor explained, he didn’t think it would reach Mugonero, and when Tutsis began going to the hospital, he claimed he had to ask them why. After about a week, he said, there were so many refugees that “things started turning a little weird.” So the pastor and his son Gerard held a meeting to address the question “What are we going to do?” But at that moment two policemen showed up to guard the hospital, and he said, “We didn’t have the meeting, because they had done it without our asking.”

Then, on Saturday, April 16, at seven in the morning, the two policemen from the hospital came to Pastor Ntakirutimana’s house. “They gave me letters from the Tutsi pastors there,” he said. “One was addressed to me, another to the mayor. I read mine. The letter they gave me said, ‘You understand they are plotting, they are trying to kill us, can you go to the mayor and ask him to protect us?” Ntakirutimana read this, then went to the mayor, Charles Sikubwabo. “I told him what my message from the Tutsi pastors said, and gave him his letter. The mayor told me, ‘Pastor, there’s no government. I have no power. I can do nothing.’

“I was surprised,” Ntakirutimana went on. “I returned to Mugonero, and I told the policemen to go with a message to the pastors to tell them, ‘Nothing can be done, and the mayor, too, said he can do nothing.’” Then Pastor Ntakirutimana took his wife and some others who “wanted to hide” and drove out of town—to Gishyita, which is where Mayor Sikubwabo lived, and where many of the injured refugees at Mugonero had received their wounds. “Gishyita,” he explained, “had killed its people already, so there was peace.”

Pastor Ntakirutimana said that he hadn’t returned to Mugonero until April 27. “Everybody was buried,” he told me, “I never saw anything.” After that, he said, “I never went anywhere. I stayed at my office. Only, one day I went to Rwamatamu because I heard that pastors had also died there, and I wanted to see if I could find even a kid of theirs to save. But I found nothing to save. They were Tutsis.”

The pastor made himself out as a great patron of Tutsis. He said he had given them jobs and shelter, and promoted them within the Adventist hierarchy. He lifted his chin and said, “As long as I live, in my whole life, there is nobody I tried to help more than Tutsis.” He could not understand how Tutsis could be so ungrateful as to make accusations against him. “It looks as if there is no justice anymore,” he said.

The name Ntakirutimana means “nothing is greater than God,” and the pastor told me, “I think I’m closer to God than I have ever been in my life.” He said, “When I see what happened in Rwanda, I’m very sad about it because politics is bad. A lot of people died.” He didn’t sound sad; he sounded tired, harassed, indignant. “Hatred is the result of sin, and when Jesus Christ comes, he’s the only one who’s going to take it away,” he said, and once more, he added, “Everything was chaos.”

“They say you organized it,” I reminded him.

He said, “Never, never, never, never.”

I asked him whether he remembered the precise language of the letter addressed to him by the seven Tutsi pastors who were killed at Mugonero. He opened the folder in his lap. “Here,” he said, and held out the handwritten original and a translation. His daughter-in-law, Genny, took the documents to make me copies on the fax machine. Dr. Ntaki wanted a drink, and fetched a bottle of scotch. The lawyer, Gorza-Gongora, told me, “I was always against this meeting with you.” Genny brought me the letter. It was dated April 15, 1994.

Our dear leader, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana,

How are you! We wish you to be strong in all these problems we are facing. We wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. We therefore request you to intervene on our behalf and talk with the Mayor. We believe that, with the help of God who entrusted you the leadership of this flock, which is going to be destroyed, your intervention will be highly appreciated, the same way as the Jews were saved by Esther.

We give honor to you.

The letter was signed by Pastors Ezekiel Semugeshi, Isaka Rucondo, Seth Rwanyabuto, Eliezer Seromba, Seth Sebihe, Jerome Gakwaya, and Ezekias Zigirinshuti.

Dr. Ntaki walked me out to my car. In the driveway, he stopped and said, “If my father committed crimes, even though I am his son, I say he should be prosecuted. But I don’t believe any of it.”

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after we met, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana was in his car, driving south on Interstate 35 toward Mexico. To the FBI agents who were tailing him, his driving appeared erratic—he would speed up, slow down, change lanes, and again accelerate abruptly. A few miles from the border, they pulled him over and took him into custody. The arrest went almost entirely unnoticed in the American press. A few days later, in the Ivory Coast, the pastor’s son Dr. Gerard was also arrested, and he was quickly transferred to the UN tribunal. But the pastor had a United States green card and the rights that came with it, and he retained Ramsey Clark, a former Attorney General, who specialized in defending politically repugnant cases, to fight his extradition. Clark argued, speciously, that it would be unconstitutional for the United States to surrender the pastor—or anybody else—to the tribunal, and Judge Marcel Notzon, who presided over the case in federal district court, agreed. On December 17, 1997, after fourteen months in a Laredo jail, Pastor Ntakirutimana was released unconditionally, and he remained a free man for nine weeks before FBI agents arrested him a second time, pending an appeal of Judge Notzon’s decision.

When I heard that Pastor Ntakirutimana had been returned to his family in time for Christmas, I went back through my notes from Mugonero. I had forgotten that after my meetings with survivors, my translator, Arcene, asked me to go with him to the hospital chapel, where there had been a lot of killing; he wanted to pay homage to the dead, who were buried nearby in mass graves. We stood in silence in the empty chapel with its cement pews. On the floor below the altar sat four memorial coffins, draped in white sheets, painted with black crosses. “The people who did this,” Arcene said, “didn’t understand the idea of a country. What is a country? What is a human being? They had no understanding.”

Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.