Africa is the vast stage of eternal migrations that often alter national and regional borders. Rwanda and Burundi are two rare exceptions, living as they have for centuries turned inward. No metropolis, no place of pilgrimage, no natural resources have attracted immigration. Besides, there is little space for newcomers with their own languages and traditions, such as live in all the neighboring countries, for the Rwandan hills—including even the arid Bugesera—are among the most densely populated areas in the world.
Hence the unfortunate absence of other cultures, other ethnic groups, other African communities in Rwanda when events began to unfold.
Two days after the crash of President Habyarimana’s plane, massacres were already ravaging some of Rwanda’s cities and towns but had not yet begun in Nyamata. A detachment of blue-helmeted UN soldiers in three armored vehicles arrived in the little town, visiting the church, the convent, and the maternity and general hospitals. At each stop they picked up whites—five priests and three nuns in all. Mission accomplished, the convoy turned around and swiftly vanished down the main street.
Valérie Nyirarudodo, a nurse-midwife at the Sainte-Marthe Maternity Hospital, remembers, “They pulled up in front of the gate. They told the three white sisters to pack small bags immediately.
They said, ‘No point anymore in wasting time with good-byes, right now is good-bye.’ The Swiss women asked to bring along their Tutsi colleagues in white caps. The soldiers replied, ‘No, they are Rwandan, their place is here. It is better to leave them with their brothers and sisters.’ The convoy left, followed by a van of singing interahamwe. Of course, soon afterward, the Tutsi sisters were cut just like the others.”
Innocent witnessed the passage of the armored cars: “They caused a big panic among the interahamwe who were already roving in the streets, heating themselves up with sudden bursts of gunfire. Some of them shouted, ‘The whites are here, others will come, they have terrible weapons, it’s all over for us!’ When they saw the convoy disappear in the dust without even a little stop for curiosity or a drink on the main street, they celebrated with some Primus and shot off the cartridges in their guns as a sign of relief. You could see they felt saved. They were rid of the last stumbling block, so to speak.”
At the same time, in Kigali, whites were leaving embassies, offices, monasteries, and universities via road convoys to neighboring countries and an emergency airlift operating out of the Kanombé airport. A very few foreigners sought refuge in guarded villas, but no foreigners were left in Nyamata.
Not one foreigner—priest, service corps volunteer, diplomat, NGO worker—can provide a convincing reason for this immediate and astonishing flight during the opening hours of the killings. In any case, neither danger nor panic can justify such haste. The most telling explanation I have heard so far (food for thought for those who, at every human tragedy, wonder aloud about the usefulness of information and eyewitness testimony) comes from Claudine Kayitesi, a farmer and survivor on the hill of Ntarama, when she says, reversing our proverb: “Whites do
not want to see what they cannot believe, and they could not believe a genocide, because that is a killing that overwhelms everyone, them as much as the others.” So they left.
Incidentally, Claudine, twenty-one years old at the time, gives this remarkable definition of the event: “I think, by the way, that no one will ever line up the truths of this mysterious tragedy and write them down—not the professors in Kigali and Europe, not the intellectuals and politicians. Every explanation will give way on one side or another, like a wobbly table. A genocide is a poisonous bush that grows not from two or three roots but from a tangle of roots that has moldered underground where no one notices it.”
Those three armored cars sent to evacuate the expatriates from Nyamata spirited away the last white eyewitnesses, the priests and nuns who were so influential in this church-going population. A few hours later the first murders began spreading—in a kind of sealed chamber in which the voices of Radio Rwanda and Radio Mille Collines now echoed the more loudly. The announcers had the time of their lives, pepping up speeches, instructions, and comic routines with songs and even taped hymns.
One should pause to consider the leading role of radio during the genocides in both Germany and Rwanda, societies whose cultures were otherwise so different. Neither the Germany of the Third Reich nor the Rwanda of the Second Republic of Habyarimana was in the television era, let alone in the era of the Internet, so radio exerted a decisive influence. But this observation is inconclusive, which is why I will quote from memory—I hope not too inaccurately—a remark made by Serge Daney, a critic and essayist, during the first Gulf War. Contradicting the received wisdom of the time, when media specialists were debating the overwhelming impact on the event of televised images, Daney
maintained, “Radio is far and away the most dangerous of the media. It wields a unique and terrifying power, once the state or its institutional apparatus collapses. It casts off everything that might attenuate or sidetrack the force of words. In a chaotic situation, radio can prove to be the most efficient tool of democracy as well as of revolution or fascism, because it penetrates unhindered to the individual’s deepest core, anywhere and at any moment, immediately, without the necessary and critical distance inherent in the reading of a text or image.”
On the same day that the armored cars came and went, the burgomaster’s squad closed the courthouse, threw open the communal jail, and emptied the Catholic and Protestant churches in Nyamata and Ntarama, except for those occupied by refugees. Freed of the accusing eyes of foreigners, the burgomaster and his henchmen thus distanced the Hutus under their administration from places of morality and conscience. The killings spread from the center of town and out to the hills. Three days later massacres took place in both churches: in each one, more than five thousand died in a single day.
ADALBERT: We were well prepared by the authorities. We felt we were among ourselves. Never again did we think even for a moment that we would be hampered or punished. Ever since the plane crash, the radio had hammered at us, “The foreigners are departing. They had material proof of what we are going to do, and they are leaving Kigali. This time around they are showing no interest in the fate of the Tutsis.” We witnessed that flight of the armored cars along the road with our own eyes. Our ears no longer heard murmurs of reproach. For the first time ever, we did not feel we were under the frowning supervision of whites. Other encouragements followed that assured us of unchecked
freedom to complete the task. So we thought, Good, it’s true, the blue helmets did nothing at Nyamata except an about-face to leave us alone. Why would they come back before it’s all over? At the signal, off we went.
We were certain of killing everyone without drawing evil looks. Without getting a scolding from a white or a priest. We joked about it instead of pressing our advantage. We felt too at ease with an unfamiliar job that had gotten off to a good start. But time and laziness played an ugly trick on us. Basically, we became too sure of ourselves, and we slowed down. That overconfidence is what did us in.