We are driving through the immense and flourishing forest of Nyungwe in western Rwanda. It’s an August morning in 1994, and the only road into this area is jammed with an endless column of Hutus fleeing from the cities of Butare and Gikongoro toward the border town of Cyangugu. There they will gather to cross the river lying between them and the camps of Congo.
A few kilometers back, some forest rangers told us that rather than go farther into exile, tens of thousands of Hutu refugees have scattered deep into the woods, preferring to shelter in huts of branches and live in the old way, hunting and gathering. Out of curiosity, we turn off the paved road onto a path and enter a half-light troubled only by the deep notes of yellow-beaked cuckoos, their clamor answered by the vibrant cries of warblers.
In a clearing at the end of the path, we come upon about a dozen men crouching around a fire as rising coils of smoke melt into the mist. Sabou, the interpreter who has been with me for weeks now, alerts me immediately: “Watch out, they are interahamwe.” Sabou is neither Hutu nor Tutsi, but a young Congolese from the nearby city of Bukavu who speaks fluent Kinyarwanda. I don’t understand his warning at first, thinking he means “Hutus,” which seems obvious, but what he is thinking is, “killers.”
The men wear ragged shorts or pants and most of them are shirtless. Some have fashioned garments of leaves for camouflage
or protection from downpours. Under their watchful eye, colobus monkeys brought down by their arrows are roasting on spits, their black and white skins tossed aside. Bows and machetes lie next to the men, but no firearms, no baggage.
The men greet us politely, inviting us to sit down and wait for some roast meat. They ask us about the situation at the border. We chat warily about their journey from home and their life as hunters but never about their previous activities, naturally. Sabou, ordinarily an exuberant soul, remains noticeably subdued.
Suddenly, several of the men rise, machetes in hand, and surround us. The atmosphere has changed completely without my realizing it. Thanks to the sixth sense and sangfroid of Sabou, who has anticipated the confrontation and keeps talking to the men, we manage to retreat, slowly and carefully, and to get inside our car before the first blows rain down. We back away at top speed as the men slam their machetes on the the car, furious to see their prizes escape: car, clothes, money, and a sack of bananas.
The scene took enough time—or seemed “slowed down” enough—for us to observe its berserk violence in detail. Afterward we could remember everything about those faces grotesquely frozen in hatred, and those shouts, those eyes alight with madness and death.
People who travel through war zones tell us that the gaze of someone who is about to kill lodges more deeply in the memory than a death itself, and that they have been more shocked by scenes of execution—even when faked—than by the carnage during attacks and bombardments.
Those men in the clearing were not from the Bugesera, but they might just as well have been. Yet during my visits to Rilima, the faces of the men from Kibungo have never shown the slightest
sign that might recall that explosive scene. I mention it here because I wonder now if, unconsciously, I didn’t go to the penitentiary, among other reasons, expecting to find those same expressions of unfathomable hatred, to compare them to my memories and establish a link with the past. Whatever the nature of my action, I believe I went to Rilima above all to see the killers, the fathers and brothers of those mute and mistrustful Hutus stubbornly holed up on their plots of land—and to talk with them, if possible, even if it meant raising questions in the minds of readers of this book.
For example, is it ethical, not to talk to such killers, but to encourage them to speak for themselves? More to the point: is it ethical to publish interviews with prisoners who have been deprived of their physical liberty and thus of freedom of expression?
At other times, in other countries, I have met people incarcerated because of war: enemy prisoners, individuals suspected of treason, of collaboration, of crime, of rape, or those born into the wrong ethnic group or with the wrong name. I have heard a great many “compromised” conversations or confessions. I have systematically refused to publish accounts of them or sometimes—such was the pressure exerted by the jailers—even to listen to them, so as not to be a party to the prisoners’ humiliation.
So why did I make an exception in Nyamata? Offhand, I can list many reasons, among them the complete indifference of the prison authorities in Rilima, which ensured their discretion during and after our visits; the strong bonds, sometimes of friendship, which I continue to enjoy with the survivors; the unbearable, intolerable silence of the Hutus I have met outside the prison and the gloomy unease that weighs on the hills; the specific character of the genocide, which belies every preconception you may have
about it; and the power of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was written after she had listened to the words of a prisoner—indeed, on the eve of his sentencing.
The most honest answer is that perhaps I became swept up in the project, that the whole question simply faded away during the interviews, and that when I returned to Paris the question no longer worried me, for it was immediately replaced by other, more pressing ones.
A leader of killers on the hill of Kibungo, of refugees in the Congolese camp, and of a security force and a choral group in prison, Adalbert is the one with whom the interviews must begin. The first day he sits down on the bench, full of energy, and at the opening question starts talking about a battle. The Tutsis against the Hutus: attacks all over the place, advances, retreats, flanking movements by men with machetes, reinforcements armed with guns on the opposite flank, heroic fighting to hold a strategic house, fields abandoned during the struggle …
We listen to him incredulously; Innocent grows ever more frustrated, while I try to guess what Adalbert is up to. When I tell him he can’t fob that nonsense off on me because I have visited Rwanda many times since the genocide, Adalbert shows no disappointment or irritation, but in reply to a new question, he simply picks up his epic right where he left off.
Does he want to show hostility to the book project? Is he making sport of us? Not in the least. Is he relating what he wishes to be his truth, not giving a hoot what we think? Perhaps, but there’s more to it than that. When doubt eats away at him, perhaps he creates an imaginary world into which he escapes alone or with his pals. Two weeks pass before he begins talking more realistically.
The next person to take his seat beneath the acacia branches is Alphonse, who launches without hesitation into a description of his first killing spree. He is precise as to gestures, dialogue, facts, deeds. But he talks with the ready fluency of a sportsman returning from a turkey shoot. His bonhomie and the wealth of details he gives us are as intriguing as Adalbert’s flights of fancy.
As for Fulgence, he pauses constantly, sometimes in the middle of a phrase, looking from side to side as if each question were bringing him to a crossroads with no signpost …
In fact all of them, each in his own way, behave bizarrely during their initial sessions, as though they were emerging from some sort of imaginary bubble.
The episodes that turned their lives upside down might well explain their retreat into this bubble. After all, these men had seemed destined for nothing beyond choosing a wife to share a rural existence on a hill in a little country in the heart of Africa, a life lived in uneasy tolerance of their neighbors, without television or any influx of immigration to connect them to the vast outside world. From one day to the next, they let themselves be swept up in a whirlwind of phenomenal carnage; then their first trip took place in a panicked exodus of two million compatriots, and their first visit abroad was to refugee camps where they remained for more than two years with no prospects for the future. Finally, without even seeing their homes again, some of them were thrown into prison with seven thousand confederates and no link to the outside world except radio.
Yet the serenity they display places them at such a level of unreality and aberration that it cannot be attributed solely to the violent upheavals of their lives, or to the walls that protect them, shielding them from accusing eyes as well as from the alcoholism, mistrust, and fear that reign over their three hills. Not one of
them presents the slightest symptom of psychic distress. Not one of them shows signs of any disturbance, and to hear them tell it, barely a dozen prisoners in all are psychologically troubled. There are regrets, complaints, homesickness, dejection, and ailments due to imprisonment—but never any fits of depression about their machete blows.
Meeting them again in the penitentiary six years after knowing them in Kibungo, Innocent says, “I thought they had become bitter, miserable, savage, and I am just astonished now to see them sometimes smiling and youthful. They seem more like boarders than prisoners. What’s more, they speak of the genocide as of a barbarity already long past, a thing simply ordered up by the authorities.” At every interview, the men speak in even voices with a familiar tone that denotes astonishing impassiveness.
If the ferocity glimpsed in the forest of Nyungwe had ever surfaced in any of their faces, would we have stopped the interview? I really don’t know. On the other hand, their unshakable placidity is clearly quite important in the interviews—both smoothing over boredom and disgust, and raising nagging questions. Why are these guys participating in this project? Why are they agreeing to speak to us, often quite frankly, sometimes even with striking naïveté? Or rather, why do they say what they say without any mea culpas or remorse (whether sincere or not) and without expecting compensation? These unanswered questions keep us on our toes and encourage us to bear with the unbearable moments.
Still, if I had to pick out the most impressive facet of the men’s personalities on display, it would be not their calm detachment but their egocentrism, almost equally overpowering in all of them, at times just unbelievable. When they talk about the genocide, they are not describing an event in which they were simply peripheral figures; they place themselves at the center of a
swirl of activity involving victims, survivors, officials, priests, interahamwe, whites, and so on. The paradox is that while they minimize their participation and shift the blame onto others (the Hutu government, the interahamwe, possibly even whites and Tutsis), at the same time they focus only on themselves in the story, then and now.
They do not all interpret the killings in the same way. Although Élie, Alphonse, and Léopord would like to understand the events better, Pio and Pancrace admit that they are beyond their comprehension, while Jean-Baptiste seems to sense the monstrosity of their actions and their effect on the world. Obsessed as they are with finding a safe way out, Adalbert, Ignace, and Joseph-Désiré constantly trip themselves up while making a show of soul-searching.
These differences notwithstanding—which provoke no shouting matches because the men never discuss such things among themselves—the killers worry only about their own fates and essentially feel no compassion for anyone but themselves. Some of them, evaluating the catastrophic results of that bloody episode, catalogue its effects on their blighted future. When we tackle the theme of regret, not one of them spontaneously mentions the victims. They think of them, but only afterward: their instinctive reaction is to dwell on their own personal losses and hardships. One day Fulgence says, “We saw the first awful consequences of the killings on our way to Congo, with the moaning of our starving bellies and the terrible rumblings of turmoil at our heels.” Their natural tendency to dwell on their own suffering is stupefying.
Unlike war criminals, who tend (aside from certain psychopaths) to lie low and slip out the back door after their downfall,
these fellows usually place themselves in the center of the stage.
I have only one tentative explanation for this unusual behavior. The absolute character of their project was what allowed them to carry it out with a certain equanimity, and today this same absoluteness allows them to avoid fully understanding and agonizing over what they did. The monstrous nature of the extermination haunts the survivors and even tortures them with guilt, whereas it exculpates and reassures the killers, perhaps protecting them from madness.
We meet every morning on the main street. Innocent, a much earlier riser, gossips with Marie-Louise as he waits on a bench in front of her shop, sometimes with a bottle of Primus already between his knees. Although he’s not fond of sweet things, I often take him across the street to the veranda of Sylvie’s boulangerie-pâtisserie. We start our day with milky tea and freshly baked doughnuts while we crack jokes about the owner’s mood swings. Then I make the rounds of the pharmacies with a sheaf of prescriptions signed by the director of the prison infirmary. The kindness of the women pharmacists and the ritual of these purchases for the gang members make this a pleasant chore, like the idea of seeing them again, as we roll along on our way to the prison.
At first, I feel only natural hatred or aversion for them; at best, in a few instances, condescension. I do not need either the “feedback” of Innocent’s highly reactive presence or contact with my daily circle of Marie-Louise, Sylvie and her clients, Édith and her children, Claudine, and all my Tutsi friends on the hills to keep me from falling into a syndrome of indulgent complacency.
But as time goes by, a kind of perplexity creeps in, which makes the Kibungo gang not more likable but less unpleasant to
spend time with—under the acacia tree, anyway. This is awkward to admit, but curiosity wins out over hostility.
Their friendly solidarity, their disconnection from the world they soaked in blood, their incomprehension of their new existence, their inability to notice how we see them—all this makes them more accessible. Their patience and serenity, and sometimes their naïveté, finally rub off on our relationship and touch particularly on their mysterious willingness to talk. They don’t give a hang about bearing witness for history; they have no complexes to work off and no hopes for any clemency from these pages. They are probably opening up because for the first time they can do so without feeling threatened.
But there is more to it than that. Some of them occasionally reveal that they no longer completely recognize themselves in those men who marched down to the marshes, singing, and others seem to fear what they became there. Perhaps their egocentrism is less egotistic than it seems. Perhaps they harbor more self-doubt than their accounts would lead us to believe. Perhaps they feel the need to glimpse themselves as they were, even from this distance, in the stories they tell. Perhaps they are telling their stories to convince us they are ordinary, the ordinary people described by Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt. In some confused way they are also probably trying to emphasize, to all of us at the edge of that exterminating whirlwind, an agonizing truth.
ALPHONSE: Some offenders claim that we changed into wild animals, that we were blinded by ferocity, that we buried our civilization under branches, and that’s why we are unable to find the right words to talk properly about it.
That is a trick to sidetrack the truth. I can say this: outside the marshes, our lives seemed quite ordinary. We sang on the paths, we downed Primus or urwagwa, we had our choice amid abundance.
We chatted about our good fortune, we soaped off our bloodstains in the basin, and our noses enjoyed the aromas of full cooking pots. We rejoiced in the new life about to begin by feasting on leg of veal. We were hot at night atop our wives, and we scolded our rowdy children. Although no longer willing to feel pity, we were still greedy for good feelings.
The days all seemed much alike, as I told you. We put on our field clothes. We swapped gossip at the cabaret, we made bets on our victims, spoke mockingly of cut girls, squabbled foolishly over looted grain. We sharpened our tools on whetting stones. We traded stories about desperate Tutsi tricks, we made fun of every “Mercy!” cried by someone who’d been hunted down, we counted up and stashed away our goods.
We went about all sorts of human business without a care in the world—provided we concentrated on killing during the day, naturally.
At the end of that season in the marshes, we were so disappointed we had failed. We were disheartened by what we were going to lose, and truly frightened by the misfortune and vengeance reaching out for us. But deep down, we were not tired of anything.
WRITTEN IN MARCH 2003