When we read accounts of war experiences or live though periods of war, we are amazed at how bravely people confront their fear and resist the temptation to flee while they still can. Such resistance is fed by courage, hope, and illusion, by blindness and naïveté, and by fatalism as well.
During the Second World War, for example, the refusal of many Jewish communities to recognize the growing threat of extermination and to react before the ghettos and borders were sealed off is astonishing even today. More recently, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Muslims’ blindness to the destructive raids and ethnic cleansing going on all around them—even when neighboring villages went up in flames—and their stubborn insistence on staying put until the inevitable arrival of the militias’ trucks are as incomprehensible as they are admirable. And so it is in Lebanon, in Sierra Leone, and in Chechnya, where people surrounded by ruins cling to their homes and put off any possible escape into exile.
This is why, at the end of the Rwandan genocide, when two million Hutus so suddenly rose as one within a few days in the early summer of 1994 to begin their exodus, we understood that they were fleeing from more than the weapons and vengeance of the RPF troops. Without thinking it through clearly, we sensed that a psychological force much greater than the simple survival instinct was at work to impel that immense throng so powerfully
toward Congo—abandoning houses, properties, professions, habits, all without hesitation or a backward glance.
Two years later those families returned from the refugee camps to their plots of land still bearing their collective guilt. Their sense of shame is haunted today by the dread of suspicion, punishment, and revenge, and it mingles with the Tutsis’ traumatic anguish and infects the atmosphere, aptly described by Sylvie Umubyeyi: “There are those who fear the very hills where they should be working their lands. There are those who fear encountering Hutus on the road. There are Hutus who saved Tutsis but who no longer dare go home to their villages, for fear that no one will believe them. There are people who fear visitors, or the night. There are innocent faces that frighten others and fear they are frightening others, as if they were criminals. There is the fear of threats, the panic of memories.”
After a genocide, the anguish and dread have an agonizing persistence. The silence on the Rwandan hills is indescribable and cannot be compared with the usual mutism in the aftermath of war. Perhaps Cambodia offers a recent parallel. Tutsi survivors manage to surmount this silence only among themselves. But within the community of killers, innocent or guilty, each person plays the role of either a mute or an amnesiac.
In Nyamata I maintain cordial and sometimes even friendly relations with Hutu families. I have conversations with women who are above reproach—with people who have been cleared of all suspicion. I talk with relatives of killers behind their houses, out of sight; I have chatted under the cloak of anonymity in Africa and Europe with exiled former functionaries of the Habyarimana regime. None of those conversations are of particular interest, and some of them are absurd. Bad faith, lying, and denial compete with unease and fear as soon as the subject of the genocide is raised.
It was not difficult to obtain sincere and detailed accounts from soldiers in Vietnam, from torturers for the Argentine dictatorship or in the Algerian war, from militiamen of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, from secret policemen in the Iraqi or Iranian detention camps—sometimes by following the maxim of Oscar Wilde, “Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” But in the wake of a genocide, the evasion of the ordinary killers and their families passes understanding, and it cannot be explained simply by fear of reprisal.
When I went to the regional penitentiary at Rilima, I hoped to attach faces and voices to the killers whom the survivors had mentioned in their accounts. One characteristic of these narratives was that, hidden in the mud beneath the papyrus, the survivors almost never saw the killers, and could describe them only through their movements and shouts during the hunts.
I went to the prison with the expectation that conversations there would be as awkward and useless as they were with Hutu families out on the hills. My intuition was mistaken: from the first, the discussions with the detainees were of a different nature, much more direct and concrete. Subsequent visits confirmed my hunch that only an imprisoned killer, a killer who has not yet lived at liberty, can or will tell his story. Clearly, the freer the Hutus were on their land, the less free they were with their words. Conversely, the thicker the prison walls, the more these narratives were encouraged; the walls protected their authors from victims who might recognize a name and condemn them, from colleagues and neighbors who might accuse them of betrayal, and from children who would feel ashamed of them.
Witness the fact that when Ignace—the first of the gang to be released from the penitentiary, because of his age—returned to his home in Nganwa in January 2003, after our interviews, he
grumbled about his participation in the book and refused to talk about things he had discussed and that we had recorded in the garden at the Rilima prison.
Very quickly, however, it turned out that those prison walls were no guarantee that a killer would speak. Dialogue with a killer must also occur at a particular moment in his life as a prisoner: after the judicial inquiry into his case has been closed and he has been condemned to a more or less long sentence—in other words, when he knows his account can no longer affect the judicial decision and he believes he will not be confronting the outside world for quite a while.
He must also have taken the momentous steps of admitting, however guardedly, to more or less voluntary participation in the massacres, and of agreeing to describe some of his criminal actions. No matter what scheming and trickery he may be up to, that the killer acknowledges involvement is in fact indispensable. If he denies everything or automatically shifts his responsibility onto others, if he rejects the slightest individual initiative, if he disowns intellectual support for the project and denies any interest or pleasure in carrying it out, we are right back with the litanies recited by all the families on the hills: “It wasn’t me, it was the others.” “I wasn’t there, I didn’t see anything.” “If the Tutsis hadn’t run away, it wouldn’t have happened.” “I didn’t want to, but they made me do it.” “If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have done it worse.” “I had nothing to do with it, the proof is, I have always had Tutsi friends …”
Thus the importance of speaking to a group, in this instance a group of pals from Kibungo who were together from the beginning, who accepted and discussed among themselves the conditions of the interviews, who consulted with one another between meetings, and who confronted together their memories as killers.