Rwanda, famous land of a thousand hills, is above all a land of one vast village. Four out of five Rwandan families live in the countryside, and nine out of ten draw more or less all their income from the soil. Every doctor, every teacher or shopkeeper, owns a plot of land on his native hill, which he cultivates in his spare time or entrusts to a relative. Even Kigali, spread over an immense area, seems less like a capital city than a collection of villages linked by little valleys and tracts of open ground.
After the genocide, many foreigners wondered how the huge number of Hutu killers recognized their Tutsi victims in the upheaval of the massacres, since Rwandans of both ethnic groups speak the same language with no distinctive differences, live in the same places, and are not always physically recognizable by distinctive characteristics.
The answer is simple. The killers did not have to pick out their victims: they knew them personally. Everyone knows everything in a village.
At the risk of offending historians of the Holocaust with this quick summary of their work, I would say that most of them—in particular Raul Hilberg, in his monumental study The Destruction of the European Jews—see four stages in the unfolding of the event: the first stage brought humiliation and loss of rights; next came designation and marking (armbands, yellow stars, writing on walls); then deportation and concentration; and finally complete
elimination, through famine in the ghettos, shooting in the areas conquered by the German army, and gassing in the six specialized camps. These stages overlapped rather than succeeded one another in rigorous succession, and they were linked by continuous repression in the pogroms, as well as by plundering and expropriations, which were important for ensuring the support of a decisive segment of the population. Although German, French, Polish, Rumanian, and Dutch societies, for example, all had different cultures, their urbanization and industrialization gave rise to the same four stages of genocide in each case.
For an urban society, an urban kind of genocide; for a village society, a village genocide. In rural Rwanda, the course of genocide skipped the second and third stages, which were unnecessary, given the close proximity of the killers and their prey.
This observation is oversimplified, however, for in a way the victims were singled out: the government had been recording the ethnic background of all its citizens—Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa—on identification papers, employment applications, and other documents since 1931. During the genocide, these papers sometimes helped Rwandan militiamen and soldiers at roadblocks and checkpoints in cities and at the borders, but they were not needed by the immense majority of the killers in the countryside.
The inhabitants of the district of Nyamata all agree that those documents played no part in the killing there. The ethnic background of the region’s sixty thousand Tutsis was well known to their neighbors, without exception, even in the case of recently arrived families, civil servants in temporary posts, drifters, and hermits in rickety shacks in the depths of little valleys.
Shortly after the announcement of the attack on President Habyarimana, moreover, the Tutsis gathered themselves together, in a spontaneous protective reflex. First, they moved toward hamlets
with a concentrated Tutsi population—for example, on the hill of Ntarama; then they took refuge in churches; finally, at the start of the slaughter, they fled into marshes and forests.
Another observation helps to explain the reactions of Rwanda’s essentially village society. For twenty years a presidential clan had ruled by requiring absolute allegiance from all leading figures, Hutu and Tutsi alike, and by completely suppressing dissent. This policy drove many intellectuals from Rwanda and undermined the so-called urban petite bourgeoisie, a class that can be the wellspring of careful reflection and protest during periods of grave social instability.
The consequences were dramatic. From the moment the killings began, this petite bourgeoisie—trapped between a clannish dictatorial regime and an omnipresent peasantry, disheartened by the war atmosphere, appalled by the assassinations of respected Hutu and Tutsi figures—could not keep from splitting spectacularly asunder. And the Hutu intelligentsia, far from applying the brakes, rushed for the most part to the front lines of the massacres to affirm its existence in this new era.
As Jean-Baptiste Munyankore, a teacher in Ntarama and a survivor of the marshes, confirms: “The principal and the inspector of schools in my district participated in the killings with nail-studded clubs. Two teachers, colleagues with whom we used to share beers and student evaluations, set their shoulders to the wheel, so to speak. A priest, the burgomaster, the subprefect, a doctor—they all killed with their own hands … They wore pressed cotton trousers, they had no trouble sleeping, they traveled around in vehicles or on light motorcycles … These well-educated people were calm, and they rolled up their sleeves to get a good grip on their machetes. For someone who has spent his life teaching the humanities, as I have, such criminals are a fearful mystery.”
Ignorant of mechanized agriculture and agronomic technology, Rwanda’s peasant society made no attempt to modernize the carnage, ignoring all scientific, medical, and anthropological experimentation, employing no efficient industrial techniques such as gas chambers and no ingenious methods to economize effort. The army did not use helicopters, tanks, or bazookas, while lighter weaponry such as grenades and machine guns came only sporadically into play, and then simply for tactical or psychological support.
In the fields, labor was manual. Therefore, the killings in the marshes were manual, and they proceeded at the pace of a seasonal culture.
Alphonse Hitiyaremye says that at one point, “We hurried things up, because the killing season was coming to a close. It promised to spare us the labor of one harvest, but not two. We knew that for the next season, we would have to take up our machetes again for other, more traditional jobs.” That remark touches on an absurdly simplistic observation about farming, which figured as an implicit theme throughout my interviews. The members of the gang were not alone in insisting that since Hutus obtained better harvests than Tutsis (whose herds, in addition, had the nasty habit of trampling fields), Hutus should till the soil instead of Tutsis. And it also explains the exceptionally small number of mixed marriages over the decades in a region where people worked, ate, and prayed together.
INNOCENT RWILILIZA puts it this way: “I cannot recall a single case of mixed marriage among the farmers born on the hill of Kibungo. In Rwanda, mixed marriage was, in a way, the privilege of city dwellers and the rich, the privilege of Tutsi merchants or Hutu officers and high-level civil servants—for example, a wealthy Hutu marrying a tall, slender, well-educated Tutsi woman, or a rich Tutsi wedding a Hutu woman to gain advantages
from the government. But the farmers saw no advantage and many complications in mixed marriage. Among ourselves, we knew there was no agreement possible, given the division of family fields and the damage from cows. Such land feuds were too dangerous. What mixed couples there were on the hill had arrived from neighboring prefectures already married.”
In the land of philosophy that was Germany, genocide was intended to purify being and thought. In the rural land of Rwanda, genocide was meant to purify the earth, to cleanse it of its cockroach farmers. The Tutsi genocide was thus both a neighborhood genocide and an agricultural genocide. And in spite of its summary organization and archaic tools, it was outstandingly effective. Its yield proved distinctly superior to that of the Jewish and Gypsy genocide, since about 800,000 Tutsis were killed in twelve weeks. In 1942, at the height of the shootings and deportations, the Nazi regime and its zealous administration, its chemical industry, its army and police, equipped with sophisticated matériel and industrial techniques (heavy machine guns, railway infrastructures, index files, carbon monoxide gas trucks, Zyklon B gas chambers … ), never attained so murderous a performance level anywhere in Germany or its fifteen occupied countries.