We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (41 page)

This was the highest-level official acknowledgment of reality and responsibility by an international statesman to date, and it was delivered before reporters of
The New York Times, The Washington Post,
the
Los Angeles Times,
and several international television, radio, and wire services. Yet not one of those papers reported it. General Kagame later told me that he’d seen a typescript of the statement and wondered if it was a hoax. When I assured him that Richardson had really said those words, he called it an “important admission” and “something great in the whole situation,” adding, “Maybe somebody should slip it into the Internet or something.”

A few weeks after Richardson’s visit, the UN massacre investigation team arrived in Kinshasa, right on schedule. But it was never able to go about its business. Kabila threw up one hurdle after another, and even after Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed to find a new team leader and to expand the investigation’s scope to cover not only the eight months of the Congo war but the preceding four years—since Rwanda’s
génocidaires
first began filling the eastern Congo with mass graves—Kabila continued to stonewall. A great many African heads of state closed ranks behind him. Their feeling was that after sitting out the Rwandan genocide, the so-called international community had little credibility as moral referees in the war against the
génocidaires.

Such was the mood on much of the continent in the early summer of 1997. In July, Kenya’s aging strongman, Daniel arap Moi, who had broken off relations with Rwanda after the genocide, received General Kagame for a state visit. Two days later, Kenya arrested and turned over to the UN tribunal at Arusha seven of the most-wanted masterminds of the genocide. Moi denounced these former friends of his as “foreign spies and criminals,” and arrests continued. Among those caught were General Gratien Kabiligi of the ex-FAR, who had until recently commanded the Hutu Power forces in the Congo; Georges Ruggiu, the Belgian broadcaster for the genocidal radio RTLM; and Hassan Ngeze, who had published the Hutu Ten Commandments and forecast President Habyarimana’s death in the newspaper
Kangura.

ONCE, WHEN WE were talking about the genocide and the world’s response to it, General Kagame said, “Some people even think we should not be affected. They think we are like animals, when you’ve lost some family, you can be consoled, given some bread and tea—and forget about it.” He chuckled. “Sometimes I think this is contempt for us. I used to quarrel with these Europeans who used to come, giving us sodas, telling us, ‘You should not do this, you should do this, you don’t do this, do this.’ I said, ‘Don’t you have feelings?’ These feelings have affected people.” Kagame aimed a finger at his skinny body and said, “Maybe that’s why I don’t put on a lot of weight—these thoughts keep consuming me.”

In early June of 1997, just after Richardson’s visit to the Congo, I went to Kigali for a day to see Kagame, and ask him about the reported massacres of Rwandan Hutus in the Congo. “I think there is a bit of exaggeration,” he said, “in terms of systematic extermination, systematic killings of refugees, or even possible involvement of high authorities of different countries.” Then he added, “But let’s go back a little bit, if people are not to be hypocrites … . First of all, again, I want to bring out the involvement of some countries in Europe. Remember the
Zone Turquoise
?”

Kagame spent more than an hour describing the resurgence of Hutu Power after the RPF’s victory in 1994, starting with the arrival of French forces during the last weeks of the genocide, and running through the activities of the
génocidaires
in the camps— the rearming, the training, the alliance with Mobutu, the killings and expulsions in North Kivu, the constant attacks against Rwanda, and the campaign to eradicate the Banyamulenge Tutsis from South Kivu. He rattled off the names of towns in the Congo where major battles had been joined during the Alliance’s march to Kinshasa, and described the massive troop involvements of Hutu Power forces. “It becomes extremely difficult for me to imagine that the whole world is so naive as not to see that this was a real problem,” he said. He could only conclude, he added, that “there was some high-level conspiracy” in the international community to protect the killers and, perhaps, to assist them toward an ultimate victory.

But why would any of the major powers have pursued such an insane policy? “To fight off their guilt after the genocide,” Kagame said. “There is a great amount of guilt.”

This was the same conversation in which, at the outset, Kagame told me that Rwanda had had no troops in the Congo, as he had been telling everyone for eight months, and in which he wound up telling me that in fact he had initiated the whole campaign, and his troops had been there all along. The total reversal surprised me more than the information, and I was left to wonder why one of the shrewdest political and military strategists of our times was taking credit for the war at just the moment when he was being heaped with blame for war crimes.

Reviewing the tapes of our conversation, I realized that Kagame’s reasons were clear. He was not denying that many Rwandan Hutus had been killed in the Congo; he told me that when revenge was the motive, such killings should be punished. But he considered the
génocidaires
responsible for the deaths of those they traveled with. “These are not genuine refugees,” he said. “They’re simply fugitives, people running away from justice after killing people in Rwanda—
after killing.
” And they were still killing.

The brief period of calm in Rwanda that followed the mass return from the UN camps at the end of 1996 had quickly broken down, and since February the systematic killing of Tutsis had been steadily on the increase. Much of the northwest was in a state of low-level war. The eastern Congo, too, remained in turmoil, and sizable concentrations of Hutu fighters who had refused every chance for repatriation continued to operate across the area. Kagame was especially concerned about the tens of thousands of
génocidaires
who had fled to the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, and rebel-held areas of Angola.

“Even now, these fellows are crossing our borders, ex-FAR and militias, mixed with maybe some of their family members,” Kagame said. “They are armed with rocket-propelled grenades, with machine guns, they are killing people as they move, and this is nothing to the international community. What is a thing is that Tutsis were killing refugees. There’s something extremely wrong here. This is why I think there’s this terrible guilt on the part of some people, which they are trying to fight off by always painting a picture of Tutsis being on the wrong side and Hutus being victims. But there is no amount of intimidation or distortion that can defeat us on this. It will cause us problems, but we are not going to be defeated.” He sounded angrier than I had ever heard him. “There are a lot of them left,” he said of the
génocidaires,
“and we will have to keep dealing with that situation for as long as it lasts. We are not really tired of dealing with that at all—it’s they who will get tired, not we.”

A grim prospect, but Kagame was trying to explain why the war in the Congo had happened as it had happened—in order, he said, that Rwanda should not “be rubbed off the surface of the earth.” That was how he saw his choice, and it explained the startling coolness of his speech. But although his voice and his manner were as contained as ever, he was clearly indignant to find his troops accused of destroying what he regarded as an army bent on Rwanda’s annihilation. Kagame’s defiance and his sense of injury added up to an Ahab-like wrath. He didn’t just want the world to see things his way; he seemed to believe that the world owed him an apology for failing to accept his reasoning.

Ideally, he told me, an investigation would be the best way to clear up the story of massacres in the Congo. “But,” he said, “because of this background, which I have already described to you, because of this partisan involvement, because of these politically motivated allegations even at the high levels in the international community, you see here that we are dealing with judges who cannot be judged. And yet they are terribly wrong. This is the bad thing about the whole thing. I have lost faith. You see, the experience of Rwanda since 1994 has left me with no faith in these international organizations. Very little faith.

“In fact,” Kagame went on, “I think we should start accusing these people who actually supported the camps, spent a million dollars per day in these camps, gave support to these groups to rebuild themselves into a force, militarized refugees. When in the end these refugees are caught up in the fighting and they die, I think it has more to do with these people than Rwanda, than Congo, than the Alliance. Why shouldn’t we accuse them? This is the guilt they are trying to fight off. This is something they are trying to deflect.”

It was true that the victory of the pan-African alliance Kagame had put together in the Congo had constituted a defeat for the international community. The major powers and their humanitarian representatives had been pushed out of the way, and, he said, “they are angered, and the guilt is exposed by the defeat.” He said, “they have not determined the outcome, so again this is something they cannot stomach.” He said, “Kabila emerges, alliance emerges, something changes, Mobutu goes: things happen, the region is happy about what is happening, different people have had different ways of supporting the process. And they are left out, and everything takes them by surprise. They are extremely annoyed by that, and they can’t take it like that.”

As Kagame understood it, “The African and the Western worlds are so many worlds apart.” Yet he seemed to recognize that a defeat for the international community could not be translated into a victory for anybody. He had spent his life in central Africa, not fighting against what used to be called the “civilized world,” but fighting to join it. Yet he had concluded that that world was trying to use “the refugee issue” to destroy his progress. “That really is their purpose,” he said. “It’s not so much the human rights concerns, it’s more political. It’s ‘Let’s kill this development, this dangerous development of these Africans trying to do things their own way.’”

22

THE FIRST IN-FLIGHT movie on my second-to-last trip to Rwanda, in February of 1997, was
A Time to Kill.
It is set in Mississippi, in the atmosphere Faulkner celebrated as “miasmic.” A couple of worthless white-trash rednecks are out drinking and driving. They abduct a young black girl, rape her, torture her, and leave her corpse in a field. They get caught and thrown in jail. The girl’s father doesn’t trust the local judiciary to do adequate justice, so he waits for the men to be brought in chains to the courthouse, steps out of the shadows with a shotgun, and blows them away. He is arrested for first-degree murder and put on trial. His culpability is never in question, but a clever young white lawyer—risking his reputation, his marriage, his life and that of his children—appeals to the jury’s sentiment, and the girl’s father is set free. That was the movie. It was pitched as a tale of racial and social healing. Triumph for the protagonists, and catharsis for the audience, came with the acquittal of the vigilante killer, whose action was understood by a jury of his peers to have achieved a higher degree of justice than he could have expected from the law.

The second in-flight movie was
Sleepers.
It is set in New York, in the tough midtown neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Four kids play a prank that results in the accidental death of a passerby. They are sent to a reform school, where they are repeatedly gangraped by the wardens. Then they are released. Years pass. One day, two of the original quartet encounter the warden who had been their chief tormentor in reform school, so they draw their handguns and blow him away. They are arrested. To the viewer, their culpability is never in question. But in court they deny everything; they say they were in church at the time of the murder. This alibi requires the cooperative testimony of a priest, who is also an alumnus of the terrible reform school. The priest is a man of great honesty. Before testifying, he swears on the Bible that he will tell the truth. Then he lies. The men are acquitted and released. It was another tale of the triumph of justice over the law; the priest’s lie was understood to have been an act of service to a higher truth.

Both movies had been quite popular in America—seen by many millions of citizens. Apparently, the questions they raised struck a chord with their audiences: What about you? Can you condemn these vigilante killers after such violations? Can you grieve for the scum they killed? Might not you do the same? These are fine issues to ponder. Still, I was troubled by the premise the two movies shared: that the law and the courts were so incapable of fairly adjudicating the cases in question that it wasn’t worth bothering with them. Perhaps I was taking my in-flight entertainment too seriously, but I was thinking of Rwanda.

Six weeks earlier, in mid-December of 1996, shortly after the mass return from the border camps, Rwanda had finally begun holding genocide trials. This was a historic event: never before had anybody on earth been brought to court for the extraordinary crime of genocide. Yet the trials received sparse international attention. Even the government seemed reluctant to make much fanfare about them, since the courts were crude and inexperienced and had little prospect of meeting Western standards of due process. At one of the first trials, in the eastern province of Kibungo, a witness with machete scars across his scalp identified the defendant as his attacker. The defendant dismissed the charge as nonsense, saying that if he had struck a man such a blow he would have made sure that his victim did not live to talk about it. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. So it went. Defense counsel was rarely available, and trials rarely lasted more than a day. Most ended with sentences of death or life imprisonment, but there were some lighter sentences and there were acquittals, which was the only way to determine that the judiciary exercised any independence.