Two paths lead to the penitentiary in Rilima. One is a sandy track linking the villages of Nyamata, lying prostrate in the heat. The other is a footpath that cuts across the savanna; it allows families from the three hills to walk to the prison in seven to ten hours, depending on the weight of the bundles they bring on visiting days.
The beige-brick penitentiary rises like a fortress on a hill overlooking Lake Kidogo and, in the distance, the marshes of the Nyabarongo River, which reappears in the landscape after a detour. Everywhere else lie vast desert wastes of arid soil and brush, dotted here and there by green oases of stoic corn and beans. Rilima reigns over the driest part of the Bugesera.
In Dans le nu de la vie, I wrote: “The outside wall of the prison, without barbed wire or watchtowers, sits atop a small hill. An orange iron gate lets authorized prisoners slip in and out. From fifty meters away, one is struck both by the orchestral din of competing rhythms and songs and by a suffocating stench of sweat, backed up by the reek of cooking and garbage. One look through the opening in the gate gives an idea of the indescribable promiscuity of life within those walls.”
Two years later, nothing had changed. The population was still around seven thousand five hundred prisoners in premises built to house a third of that number. The detainees slept five hundred to a block in metal bunk beds, usually on mattresses of
blankets and cardboard. About five hundred slept in the prison yard, sheltering under plastic tarps.
Despite this overpopulation, however, prison conditions have improved so much—thanks to international funding, the politics of national reconciliation, and the daily intervention of the Red Cross—that they are now superior to the public hygiene of the villages on the surrounding desert plateaus, especially during droughts and malaria epidemics. The Rwandan government supplies cornmeal and cassava flour, beans, firewood, and two hours of electricity each day. The Red Cross furnishes the rest: oil, cleaning supplies, bedding, medicines, and impeccably cut prison uniforms of a striking pink.
Reveille is at five-thirty. Those who begin the day with prayer awaken one another a half-hour earlier. At six it’s time for water duty: a constant back-and-forth of men fetching cans of water on their backs from the lake, some forty thousand liters for drinking and washing. The sole meal of the day is served, block by block, from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, supplemented by extras obtained from the prisoners’ families and on the black market.
During this time, work squads go off to the penitentiary’s 173 acres, to local construction sites, and to workshops for clock and watch making, mechanics, metalwork, and hairdressing. The labor, which is optional and unpaid, provides only modest advantages, except at the prison kitchens, which fatten up the lucky kitchen staff as well as the legal advisers, supervisors, and preachers who draw their salaries directly from the cooking pots. The clergy of many churches share the afternoons for religious services and divide up Sunday in two-hour slices.
All inmates are allowed to receive visitors twice a week. But after the hours of walking and of waiting outside the prison walls, the families may speak with the prisoners for a few moments at
most, and the hubbub—of exclamations, commands, and hastily delivered food—is quite depressing. Most prisoners have had only one or two visits since their incarceration began. This lack of connection with the outside world increases their isolation.
The guys in the Kibungo gang are in good physical and psychological shape, adequately fed and cared for. They must put up with the crowding and lack of privacy, but they suffer no hardship or deprivation that might affect their behavior toward us.
Following Innocent’s advice, I contact first the two people with the most influence in the group: Jean-Baptiste Murangira, the former civil servant from Ntarama who today heads an association of repentant killers, and Adalbert Munzigura, yesterday the interahamwe boss in Kibungo, today a prison security captain and still leader of the gang. After these two give their approval, we meet with the others to explain the project and discuss the rules with them.
For our part, we promise to divulge nothing in our interviews to any judges, lawyers, or prison officials, to any of the gang’s drinking buddies in Nyamata, to any relatives of victims, or to any of the gang’s own families, and to publish our findings only after their trials, definitive verdicts, and sentencing, so that their accounts may neither help nor hinder them.
Their collective collaboration is rewarded with supplies of sugar, salt, soap, sodas, and medicines from a list they draw up. Another highly valued token of our appreciation is the news we bring them of their families, whom we visit briefly in the afternoons to pass on their messages.
For their part, the men are free to withdraw from the project at any time, temporarily or permanently, without repercussions on their colleagues. As it turns out, none will choose to leave.
They must all follow the same procedure when they don’t
want to answer certain questions: if they find a question unpleasant or embarrassing, they are to remain silent or briefly state their unwillingness to reply, explaining their refusal if at all possible. But they must promise not to lie or to say just anything.
That last rule, seemingly so simple and approved at the outset, quickly becomes the subject of exhausting, sometimes tense discussion, because the men cannot help using, for Innocent and me, the defense mechanism they created to protect themselves from the judicial system, their families, or their own consciences: mixing lies, more or less spontaneous or tactical, into their accounts. This forces me to break off the interviews with two of the gang and exclude them from the group, because their insistence on elaborating impossible stories, refusing to face facts, and hiding behind foolish nihilism gets us nowhere.
After an initial period of misunderstandings and uncertainty, however, the others gradually adapt to “zigzagging with the truth” only through silence, and in the end they “zigzag” less and less. Each one zigzags in his own way, though; some of them go off in a great curve that seems to go on forever, while others merely take a short sharp turn on occasion, as we shall see.
For example, Pio or Alphonse, who tend to follow the gang’s lead, observe the rules faithfully once they are on their own. Léopord refuses outright to play the trump card of silence and answers all my questions. Adalbert is unpredictable; one day he says anything at all, another time he speaks with perfect frankness. Sometimes Élie feels the need to pour out his heart, and sometimes he doesn’t. Ignace and Jean-Baptiste always play things close to the vest …
In spite of our rules, the accounts presented here certainly contain a few lies, one or two that I know of and others I may not have discovered yet. For example, the circumstances surrounding Jean-Baptiste’s first murder do not jibe with his description.
A Hutu farm woman who witnessed it says that Jean-Baptiste was not singled out and forced to kill his first victim as he claims, but was on the contrary quite willing, so much so that he went on to cut down an elderly couple near the cabaret he mentions. After some hesitation, I chose to leave Jean-Baptiste’s version alone, because despite its deliberate falseness, it does reflect a more essential truth about the frenzy of the mob mentality and the blackmail used against the husbands of Tutsi wives. And there are exceptions to every rule.
The Rwandan government was cooperative: the minister of the interior granted us permission to visit the prison and conduct interviews there without restrictions.
The warden of the penitentiary set three conditions: First, the meetings had to take place outside the inner enclosure housing the sleeping blocks and the prison yard, to avoid drawing crowds of onlookers. Second, because of his death sentence, the interviews with Joseph-Désiré Bitero had to be conducted under the surveillance of an armed guard sitting ten meters away. This had no effect on the interviews because at that distance the guard—who couldn’t have cared less—could not hear our conversation, and anyway he didn’t understand French, which Joseph-Désiré Bitero, a former teacher, spoke fluently. Third, the interviews were to be suspended on Sunday, the day of rest.