6. GUERRILLAS IN THE MIST

GISENYI, 21 JANUARY

The impeccable Kigali-Gisenyi road was built with World Bank money by Chinese Convicts – ‘Probably dissidents’, said Matt. From the capital’s outskirts it snakes steeply upwards for miles through dense bluegum plantations, then crosses a high narrow plateau overlooking scores of hilltops on both sides. Here the guide-book clíche, ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’, seems literally true. But unfortunately I’ve come at the wrong season for panoramic views. During the months ahead, according to Matt, these will be permanently haze-muffled. And the Virunga volcanoes on the northern shore of Lake Kivu are likely to remain in cloud prudah. As we were descending from the plateau, Matt slowed to point out the graves of nine Chinese ‘killed in action’ and buried on a hillside, each awarded a tombstone and a row of cacti.

Despite every square foot of the surrounding countryside being cultivated, few pedestrians use this road. Matt, on the lookout for bargain gifts to present to his ‘Goma guys’, slowed again as we passed a few roadside trading centres. Towards one widespread colourful weekly market lines of very small Twa women were head-carrying high sacks of shapely, intricately-painted pots. The pygmy Twa were Rwanda’s earliest inhabitants, now they make up about one per cent of the population.

We overtook several swaying lorries packed with soldiers; their guns, poking upwards and through the side slats, made these vehicles look from a distance like magnified hedgehogs. ‘Are they going to Gisenyi?’ wondered Matt, a trifle nervously. But most seemed to be heading for Ruhengeri’s important military base – extra important now because this north-western corner was a Habyarimana stronghold and under the present government is notoriously disaffected.

Today the splendour of Rwanda’s landscapes tormented me; there can be few worse forms of emotional torture than motoring from Kigali to Gisenyi. Many tracks lead off the main road, winding up to hilltop communes. Longingly I gazed at them, planning a cross-country return to Kigali from hilltop to hilltop … then I exulted, as the oceanic with of my beloved Lake Kivu appeared far below – only to be lost sight of as the road dropped to the shore through mightily flourishing banana groves.

At noon, from the Palm Beach hotel, Matt made a few ‘phone calls and learned that both the Goma-Bukavu ferry-boat and the Gisenyi-Cyangugu brewery barge are ‘in abeyance’. Last week, it is rumoured, a rocket was fired at the barge from the Bukavu shore. By whom and why? ‘Nobody knows,’ said Matt. ‘Or if they do they’re not telling. Maybe it’s not even true. But my friends have left suddenly – the brewery manager and his wife. A bad sign …’ Matt was almost tearfully apologetic about having led me astray. To soothe him I pointed out that in Gisenyi I am at least nearer to Bukavu than when he picked me up at Byumba. We may meet again on his return from this quick recce to Goma. I plan to spend a few days here, trying to winnow fact from rumour, before settling on a trekking route.

The seed of Gisenyi was sown in 1894 when Lieutenant von Goetzen set up an army post on the lake shore. The Belgians developed the place as their main Rwandan holiday resort and built opulent lakeside villas, many now rented at vast expense by foreign NG0s and UN agencies. A mile-long avenue of very tall palms runs along the low grassy shore to the super-luxury Meridien hotel, at present a dispirited place, dependent on aid workers (a dwindling breed since the Goma camps closed) in lieu of holiday-makers. Half-way down the avenue is the Palm Beach hotel which I at once recognizd from Andrew’s photographs; he and Rachel (and Rose in utero) stayed here eighteen months ago. From my room it’s a two-minute walk to the water and I have had three blissful swims today, though not as blissful as below No. 19. Here the water is shallow near the shore, there is less privacy and the ‘holiday resort’ after-taste lingers. Also, Gisenyi cannot compete with Bukavu’s unique beauty.

After all my efforts to obtain one-dollar bills in London, I find the bigger denominations more valuable in Rwanda. The rate for $50 bills and over is RF310; for under $50 it’s only RF295. But my immediate dollar-problem concerns a rabbit; it’s odd how those creatures impinge on one’s life in the Kivu region. Matt bought a comely young doe en route, from a wayside livestock trader, for breeding purposes – the Banyamulenge having eaten all his mission’s colony. She sat on my lap over the next fifty miles and peed copiously into my money-belt and the hotel receptionist refused to accept wet dollars. He was, however, reasonable (I didn’t explain the source of the wetness) and agreed to wait until this evening for payment. I then sat by the lakeside (windless and at that hour deserted) with dollars spread out on the sand all around me, drying in the sun. In Rwanda one needs such ‘light relief’ problems.

The Palm Beach is now dependent on my dollars; yesterday the three e ex-pats who were lodging here left for Kigali, obeying orders from their NGO Director. He had been made twitchy by rumours of an imminent mercenary invasion of Kivu Province which might spill over the nearby border into Gisenyi. In the bar just now, a Primus-primed RPA major, speaking excellent Ugandan English, assured me – ‘We’re ready for them, we’re ready to go over.’ Meaning …? I’m not even trying to understand what goes on, apart from sussing out whether or not it’s safe for me to trek from here to Cyangugu via Kibuye, on the dirt road that runs through the mountains high above the lake. Luckily there are quite a few English-speakers around, all Tutsi returnees from Uganda. One Mbarara-born MSF worker mentioned those refugees back from Goma who have refused to return to their communes on the UNHCR trucks and are roaming the Kibuye area, hungry and desperate. They are said to be ruthless robbers (their only survival mechanism) though they rarely kill. My informant described them as ‘genocidal peasants’ but as I’m not a Tutsi they sound an insufficient deterrent to trekking.

Hereabouts the bird-life is fabulous but the major warned me against using either a camera or binoculars ‘at this moment in time’ – even within the hotel grounds, where all day soldiers have been patrolling with rifles at the ready. Gisenyi is included in ‘the blessed region’ (so described by the Akazu criminals) where support for Hutu extremism is strongest. In July ’94 a local trader told a French journalist, ‘We never had many Tutsi here and we killed them all at the beginning without much of a fuss.’

THE SAME, 22 JANUARY

While crossing the hotel’s inner courtyard, on the way back to my room after a long dawn swim, I saw something I should not have seen. Outside the kitchen door lay nine fat grey dead rats, all caught during the night. Obviously they had been thriving in the hotel’s larder. The cook was quite put out when he saw me photographing them.

After a breakfast of bread and bananas in my room (the restaurant is too expensive), I walked the mile or so to the Zairean border. Hundreds of refugees are still crossing daily and now that the flow is down to this mere trickle their processing is brisk and efficient. As they step across the border they are carefully counted and each individual’s age-group, sex and place of origin is noted by Rwandan UNHCR clerks. Then soldiers escort them quarter-of-a-mile down the road to a securely locked compound where trucks wait to take them back to their hilltops. They have remained in united commune groups, which greatly simplified life for their minders.

Standing near the barrier-pole, I observed this morning’s returnees loading their possessions onto crudely made but sturdy wooden hand-carts – to be pulled, for a small fee, to the compound gate. These are some of the people who, according to the international media, ‘fled into the interior of Zaire as the Tutsi rebels [Habila’s troops] advanced and endured severe hardships’. Many wore weary expressions but none seemed to have recently endured any form of physical deprivation. Quite the contrary: they looked much healthier and better dressed than the average peasant I met on the way from Gituna to Byumba. One often wonders who is playing what variation on this refugee theme – and why?

Suddenly a trio of UNHCR officials (Rwandan, American, French) pounced on me, asserting that without written permission from the burgomaster it is forbidden to photograph or communicate with any refugee. (At their own request, I had already taken several photographs of children and mothers with babies.) Why this curtailment of the returnees’ freedom of speech? Is there a good reason for it, related to media misreporting? But no: accredited journalists with press-cards are not similarly restricted. So is this yet another manifestation of the UNHCR’s tendency towards authoritarianism? (I simply don’t believe it has anything to do with the burgomaster and my new friend, the RPA major, agrees with me.) Or do they have something to hide from foreign snoopers, possibly representing a subversive group dedicated to rocking the UN boat?

On the way back I paused by the UNHCR compound gate to observe the activities within and was enchanted by a girl toddler (aged fifteen months or so) playing a self-devised game identical to one of Rose’s current favourite activities. On the flat surface of a low volcanic rock (her equivalent to Rose’s stool) she carefully placed a leaf, the swept it off, replaced it with another, swept that off – replaced it – and so on and on, with exactly Rose’s expression of self-satisfied concentration. Then the signal was given for a truck to be loaded and the toddler yelled indignantly as an older (sevenish) sister dragged her away. She looked none the worse for having been born in a refugee camp; life may be considerably tougher back on the family’s hilltop.

At lunchtime my communicative major reappeared and remarked to the barman (I was meant to overhear) that he likes this Irish muzungu – ‘She reminds me of my mother, she is a strong woman, she could frighten men.’ Perhaps because of this resemblance, and a few Primuses, he later confided that Goma is now, in practice, controlled by the RPA. He may have been putting a bit of a gloss on the situation but not many doubt that massive support is being given to Kabila’s force by Rwanda and Uganda.

This afternoon I had a swimming companion, a young Rwandan employed by a British NGO who worked for two years in Mugunga camp. As we sat on the grass afterwards he gave me his eye-witness’s (and war-witness’s) impression of events in and around the camp in mid-November. The refugees’ sudden return was not, in his view, caused simply by the overnight retreat of the Interahamwe and ex-FAR militia. It was a direct result of the Banyamulenge, supported by the RPA, threatening to annihilate them if they didn’t return AT ONCE! This version of events is not implausible. If left to themselves, would all those hundreds of thousands have immediately and simultaneously realized that now they were free to go home? And would they have got organized so rapidly? Heavy pressure from those who dreaded the re-establishment of the camps elsewhere, by the UNHCR, could explain the abruptness of that mass-return which astonished the whole world.

At sunset, as I sat alone on the hotel terrace enjoying a spectacular flaming sky above the Zairean mountains, Shirley drove up in her white UN vehicle. She introduced herself as an HRFOR (Human Rights Field Operation in Rwanda) monitor based in another prefecture but visiting a friend here. Earlier, I had passed HRFOR’s imposing lakeside mansion, set in an acre of garden. This is the first operation run by the UN High Commission for Human Rights – established, coincidentally, during the genocide. In Rwanda this agency is by now notorious for its squandering of scarce (very scarce, we are often told) resources. Also, it has neglected to take seriously its post-genocide obligations and has frequently and blatantly favoured opponents of the government, which in many cases means those implicated in the genocide. No wonder the high walls of Gisenyi’s HRFOR compound are defended by a triple barrier of South African razor-wire. No UN agency is popular in Rwanda but HRFOR is hated.

Shirley, a cheerful brash young American, arrived in Rwanda three months ago, fresh from college, having never before been out of her home-state. She admitted that to justify her existence she is reduced to sending regular reports to Geneva giving minute details of incidents of RPA soldiers being nasty to street children. I wasn’t surprised. And one can’t blame poor Shirley, who doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going. But who selected her for such a delicate and arduous job? This country urgently needs the help of experienced lawyers (who don’t have to belong to a UN agency) to investigate, most meticulously, accusations of ‘complicity’ in the genocide and to co-operate with the government as it tries to establish a respect-worthy judicial system. Instead, the competent and dedicated members of HRFOR’s team (a minority, but valuable) find themselves repeatedly frustrated by a leadership whose ineptitude is, even by UN standards, off the scale.

Today’s rumour-mill output: The Zairean army’s invasion of Kivu Province has been postponed to allow negotiations between Kabila and whoever is now in charge of Kinshasa. This is not credible. Said my major, ‘Their silly invasion, ‘twas never more than a bluff!’

THE SAME, 23 JANUARY

An exhilarating two-hour storm – the lightning frenzied – cheated me of my morning swim. At 7.00 the sky remained black all over, though the sun had risen, and the thunder was Wagnerian.

Poverty breeds, among other things, ingenuity. In Kisenyi it has bred the home-made wooden scooter, resembling a saddleless, pedal-less, brakeless bicycle; even the wheels, some eighteen inches in circumference, are wooden. On a broad shelf between the wide handlebars and the back strut, enormous loads are carried: two (even three) huge sacks of maize, or sweet potatoes, or bananas, or jerry-cans of banana-beer. Kisenyi, at lake-level, gets most of its food from high hilltop communes and every morning an awesome spectacle may be witnessed on the precipitous final mile of the descent. Down a smooth tarred road hurtle dozens of these machines, each steered b a boy or young man – sometimes two boys, the passenger embracing the one who steers. This is an insanely dangerous feat and the fatality rate, I’m told, is ‘fairly high’. These heavily weighted machines achieve thirty m.p.h. – or more – and at the foot of the hill must be steered around quite a sharp bend before they reach level ground and have space to lose momentum. The loads look terrifyingly insecure and the machines wobble sickeningly. Many riders’ expressions are fixed rigidly and some eyes are quite fearful, though the muzungu spectator can prompt an unconvincingly insouciant grin. This of course has long since become a macho thing; the bigger your load and the faster your speed the more kudos you acquire among your peers. Fifteen of those death-defying ‘dray-scooters’ passed me on my way up the hill after the storm.

I planned to leave the main road on the summit and return to the town centre via a hilltop commune. Near the summit two soldiers, standing at a path-junction, stopped me. The English-speaking captain, a pleasant young man, asked, ‘Where to?’ He disapproved of my plan; I must not walk alone off the main road, his comrade would escort me.

His comrade was a moronic-looking teenager whose frayed uniform was a few sizes too large and whose rifle had a very worn butt. Silently he followed me on a squelchy footpath through a mile or so of thirty-foot banana plants. We emerged near a hamlet of rectangular mud huts – many rusty roofs askew, most of the walls disintegrating, the windows unglazed, the inhabitants surly. Here a bullock had just been slaughtered beside a butcher’s stall. A young man was carrying the head away – upside down on his own head with blood dripping onto the back of his shirt and the long curving horns framing his face, giving it a diabolical look. A small boy trotted after him, carrying a foreleg in one hand and the tail in another. I wanted to explore the hilltop and compare the choice of downward routes but my escort, suddenly vociferous, would not permit this. I know not why; he spoke only Kinyarwanda.

We took the main, ladder-steep path to the town – not yet visible, hidden by two lower intervening hills. From the edge of the hamlet I was baffled to see a line of about thirty men ascending with hoes over their shoulders, uniformly clad in apparently brand-new pale pink shorts and bush-shirts (without pockets). Only when I noticed their four guards, wearing scruffy civvies but carrying rifles, did I realize that these must be prisoners from Gisenyi’s enormous jail. Most looked cheerful and reasonably well-fed – of course by their families. Then suddenly one powerfully-built young man leaped off the path and vanished amidst the banana plants crowding the steep slope. His fellow-prisoners stopped, stood still, stared after him. Glimpses of pink could be seen for a few moments between the drab green of the foliage. Evidently the guards’ rifles were not loaded because two flung their weapons towards the escapee. Then I came as near to death as ever I have. From close behind me my escort fired, shouting angrily. I felt his bullet passing my left cheek and stumbled sideways as the soldier led the guards in pursuit – all the guards, leaving the rest of the work-gang to their own devices. They were grinning from ear to ear, leaning on their hoes, peering into the bananas. The shot had brought a score of youths to the scene and now the atmosphere was all excited violence. Rather shaken, I hastened on my way, then realised that my left ear was aching and my head buzzing. I sat under a tree to recover.

The path was thronged with men, women and children hurrying down to the central market. Some male heads were loaded with skilfully woven circular baskets holding six or eight stalwart, brilliantly handsome cocks. On other heads were balanced boxes and pails, bundles and basins, sacks of fruits and vegetables, rolls of matting and the omnipresent jerry-cans of banana-beer, corked with leaves. All those banana-plants, covering vast areas of Rwanda, supply more drink than food. Every young woman had a baby on her back; there was no exception during my fifteen-minute rest, apart from those carrying toddlers and followed by an older child (usually female) carrying the baby. From the age of four every child was loaded – sometimes overloaded, seeming distressed.

Cursing myself for not having brought a stick, I cautiously continued down this slightly rain-skiddy path. At times it became a stairway, the steps rocks and tree-roots, and the gradient allowed me to look into the head-loads of those in front. All the locals nimbly overtook me, their bare feet confident even on smooth slippy stretches of packed red earth. No one greeted me but when occasionally I almost fell those nearby laughed mockingly.

This path joins the main street which has an air of having given up on everything. Its most pleasing feature is a scarcity of motor traffic. Yet the numerous large, two-storied business premises and offices – closed or only half-occupied – recall what a bustling place Gisenyi once was. Now all the bustle is around the open-air market-cum-taxi terminus where tethered goats bleat loudly when not devouring discarded cabbage leaves and defective tomatoes.

I am avidly curious about the enormous Islamic college, complete with minaret, being constructed half-way up the long main street, dwarfing all other buildings. ‘It’s Arab money,’ said my major. ‘We don’t know any more.’ Arab money also funded two fine new red-brick primary schools on the edge of the town; each has a discreet little star and crescent on the roof over the main entrance. The post-genocidal era doubtless favours Islamic expansionism. None of the killers, whatever their Christian denomination, felt bonded by a shared faith to their fellow-church-goers. Only the Muslims (1.2 per cent of the population) saw each other as Muslims first. Without any known exception, the Hutu Muslim hid and protected the Tutsi Muslims – which fact deeply impressed their Christian compatriots when it became public knowledge.

Still feeling slightly bullet-shocked, I sought a therapeutic litre of banana-beer in a grotty little restaurant where people were eating mounds of matoke and beans, accompanied by bones with a little meat attached. Gisenyi is not muzungu-friendly but the choice of banana-beer, when commercial alternatives are available, does something to lower the barriers. Not that those are one-sided. How much does my perception of Gisenyi as a main bastion of Hutu fanaticism – Habyarimana’s commune is nearby – have to do with the locals’ reaction to me? Were I an uninformed tourist, relaxed and outgoing, would the Gisenyi fold respond to me quite differently? That is possible; being informed – therefore prejudiced – has its disadvantages. But all that said, there is a darkness, a grimness, an unease in Gisenyi that must surely transcend the individual visitor’s attitude.

I took a new route away from the centre and on one stretch of road was almost asphyxiated by the most dreadful stench I have ever encountered. I had to breathe through my mouth – feeling waves of nausea – over the next half-mile, which revealed the source of the stench. In Gisenyi’s grossly over-crowded gaol, the primitive drainage system broke down a year ago and has not been repaired. To my astonishment the high double-gate stood wide open without a sentry in sight and hundreds of prisoners were sitting in rows on the dusty ground in an enormous forecourt. Later, an elderly French journalist, who arrived at the Palm Beach last evening, explained laconically, ‘Would-be escapees are shot dead. The cheapest security system.’ I wondered then about the fate of the young man who leaped into the bananas.

Back by the lake, I saw that swimming is out for today. Last night’s torrential rain flooded a nearby river and the inshore water is now extremely unsavoury – smelly as well as muddy and containing every sort of litter including turds.

Again I strolled to the border where a UNHCR Rwandan clerk was tactless enough to tell the snooper that 1489 returnees had crossed since morning. More were crossing as I watched, slowly walking home under that splendid avenue of acacia, now in full yellow bloom, which separates Rwanda and Zaire. These folk seemed poorer than yesterday’s contingent, virtually their only possessions the clothes they wore and a few poultry – two or three hens per family, tucked under people’s arms. Given the uncertainties awaiting them, their cheerful demeanour astonishes. But that’s Africa …

This country is festering with rumours and to get hold of a fact is very hard work. Yesterday, government spokespersons in both Kigali and Kampala – backed up by the Banyamulenge – denied allegations that Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers have infiltrated Eastern Zaire. But a Goma-based Belgian priest, with whom I dined this evening, last week saw with his own eyes ten Uganda-registered trucks, packed with soldiers, crossing into Zaire near Rutshuru, thirty-eight miles north of Goma. At least that’s a fact.

Today Radio Rwanda quoted a Belgian foreign ministry statement: ‘If reports of thousands of Rwandan troops in Kivu Province are confirmed, this would signify a violation of Zaire’s territorial integrity and a totally unacceptable situation.’ Promptly Mr Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s Defence Minister, dismissed ‘these stupid allegations’ and added, ‘Why not ask what the Belgian mercenaries are doing in Zaire. Brussels is trying hard to divert attention from those 280 mercenaries led by a Belgian citizen, Christian Taverniers, and backing Mobutu.’

Kuwait, too, has indignantly denied that it is ‘helping Kabila’s Tutsi rebels’ – to me a brand new rumour. And this evening the Zairean military command alleged that mercenaries from Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia are assisting Kabila, while 2000 heavily armed Ugandan troops are said to be camped around Bukavu.

To find out how things really are in Bukavu I must go there - or try to. My new plan is to compromise on trekking. In Rwanda at present one can’t expect the hospitality offered in most African countries and to camp would be unwise, given the numbers of psychopaths still on the loose. Therefore I’ll set out at dawn each morning, walk twenty miles or so, then hitch-hike on to the next town with a hotel – Kibuye tomorrow, Cyangugu the next day. Already I’ve noticed how very tough are the soldiers manning the roadblocks near Gisenyi and I can imagine their attitude to a lone muzungu trekker. So I’ll deviously hitch-hike to the turn-off for Kibuye, a few miles beyond the roadblocks.

GUESS WHERE? 24 JANUARY

Hitch-hiking out of Gisenyi was easy. An aged Belgian nun, driving a minibus-load of handicapped children to Kigali, gladly picked me up and was disappointed to hear I didn’t want to go all the way. She told me she belongs to the Sisters of the Assumption. On 26 April ’94 six Tutsi nuns from her convent were raped and murdered at nearby Birambo. In Gisenyi town fifteen nuns belonging to other orders were massacred. Within this prefecture scores of Tutsi priests were killed on the hilltops, usually by their own parishioners. A Belgian priest was also killed while trying to escape into Zaire with two Tutsi friends who died beside him at the border post. Yet the leaders of the Catholic Church in Rwanda refused to condemn the genocide and oppose its organizers – recalling the Vatican’s attitude to another genocide.

Although the map shows a main road from Gisenyi to Cyangugu there is only a rough track, used by few vehicles. For the first few miles it climbs gradually and is lined with tin-roofed, mud-brick dwellings. The locals, while not exactly hostile, seemed deeply suspicious. Only small children smiled at me – which of course meant I was all the time being smiled at. This wide, sloping valley floor is so intensively cultivated – with much inter-cropping – you couldn’t grow an extra onion between the bananas, sweet potatoes, sorghum, cabbages, cassava, sugar-cane, groundnuts, coffee, beans, Beans are a staple food, for most peasants the main source of protein. While driving from Kigali we passed acres of a high-yielding variety, growing on awesomely steep slopes, When Matt told me his mission had funded extensive research to induce an indigenous variety to double-yield I couldn’t applaud this agricultural philanthropy. Here, as elsewhere in the Poor World, ‘experts’ have done immense damage by disregarding peasant knowledge and experience and brow-beating subsistence farmers into the use of new seeds and methods that frequently prove catastrophic. The promotion of this high-yielding bean is a classic case: it is also the bean most vulnerable to disease and fickle weather. Rwandan farmers wisely sow up to a dozen different varieties simultaneously, thus ensuring that even if misfortune strikes some will survive. And ensuring, too, a less monotonous diet since each bean has a distinctive flavour.

When the road began to climb around the flanks of steep wooded hills I noticed myself relaxing; now all visible dwellings were left behind. I cannot – the fact must be faced – feel at ease among Rwandans. Up and up went the broad red track, coiling through the trees, many now in blossom, until Goma appeared very far below, away to the north, beyond the dark blue shimmering of Lake Kivu. The sky was cloudless, the sun hot, the breeze cool. I tried to forget the deeds done on these hills, to concentrate on the wondrous beauty all around me.

At intervals tracks led off the road, a few motorable in a four-wheel-drive, most narrow footpaths, all leading to hidden communes. Sometimes figures were visible in the distance, beyond a valley, busy in their fields. Here more men than is usual in Africa work beside their womenfolk; a consequence, I’m told, of returnees having quickly to restore abandoned, overgrown land. The minuteness of each plot makes the hillsides look like allotments. All land belongs to the State; only in towns can Rwandans buy plots as building sites. Some 60 per cent of families have the use of less than one hectare (two and a half acres), normally divided into five or more widely scattered plots – and half the cultivable land is on slopes of over one-in-ten gradients. In Rwanda each square kilometre of farmed land must support more than 450 people: a figure rising annually and rising fast. This circumstance surely helped the organizers of the genocide as they plotted to turn the Hutu peasants into mass-murderers. But to say so out loud is wildly – in some circles unforgivably – non-p.c.

Until about 1.30 I met no one, either awheel or afoot; then a Land-rover overtook me and stopped. Inscriptions on both sides recorded that UNICEF had donated it to Rwanda’s Department of Health. The young Kabale-born Tutsi in the front passenger seat – Augustin – is a child welfare officer and was on his way to check up on vaccination programmes in three communes and deliver ‘supplementary feeding for under-fives’.

‘Let us help you,’ urged Augustin, opening a back door. ‘You are coming to a road-block, you will have problems on foot. And here is not safe, there is fighting at night in the forest.’

I sat in and asked, ‘Who’s fighting whom?’

‘Our RPA are fighting the militia,’ Augustin stated flatly – his bluntness almost startling me, so quickly have I become accustomed to Rwandan evasiveness on such issues. He introduced me then to the driver, Marc, a tall burly unsmiling returnee from Bujumbura – middle-aged, a genuine ’59-er. Augustin himself is small, slight, quite fair-skinned with a high forehead and a neat little moustache. He went on, ‘Too many militia came back from the camps very well armed and in good health with money saved. That’s the main thing the UN’s done for Rwanda. Now they’ve merged into the communes. Everyone knows who they are but even the people against them fear to identify them. They’re getting themselves organized into small units to hunt survivors and destabilize our government. And in this area it’s easy to get recruits, so many hate the RPF. Why do you walk in such a dangerous place?’

When I had explained myself Augustin advised, ‘Don’t say to the road-block you’re a writer. They’d think that means writing reports to Geneva about RPA “infringements of human rights” and “arbitrary arrests” – they’ve had too many foreigners with notebooks.’

Soon after we turned a corner and saw the road-block – a piece of string (string, not. rope) stretched between two thin sticks stuck in the soft earth. Four soldiers, their AK-47s ready for action, were sitting on the verge looking purposeful; they seemed like hardened campaigners. The captain wanted to see my passport, to know why I was in a government vehicle, by whom I am employed, where I meant to spend the night …

‘I’m taking a taxi from Kayove’ (Augustin’s first stop) ‘to Kibuye,’ I lied.

‘There are no taxis from Kayove,’ said the captain – then suddenly seemed to lose interest in me and waved us on.

‘You can’t get to Kibuye today,’ said Augustin. ‘There’s no traffic, you must come back to Gisenyi with us. Or stay with my friend Callixte – he’s clinic supervisor – and go on to Kibuye in the morning if you still want to.’

When we turned onto the Kayove track it felt as though the Land-rover were climbing a wall. At walking speed we juddered through a patch of dense forest, the trees meeting overhead. Then the engine noise brought a reception party of dozens of small children. They encircled the vehicle, laughing and clapping, before running ahead of it, leading us onto the flat, open hilltop with its stunning views of other hills and valleys Marc parked beside the health centre’s store-room and shouted at two young mothers who had appeared around a distant corner, ordering them to unload boxes. Augustin told me to wait near the vehicle; soon he’d be back with Callixte.

Kayove’s health centre is outwardly impressive – well-built, well-maintained red-brick buildings hidden by forest from the rest of the ‘parish’. The fifty-bed maternity hospital is long and low. In the opposite clinic are a consulting-room, a dispensary, a radiography room (not functioning), a staff-room, two day-care wards (empty today), a padlocked store-room – all leading off a deep verandah, its walls hung with big bright AIDS-education posters. Nearby is a row of well-kept latrines, essential to cater for the hundreds of mothers and infants who converge here, coming from miles around, on vaccination days. Originally rural health-care facilities were mission-funded, then the government came to contribute about 50 per cent of the running costs. The structural restorations needed post-genocide (massacres occurred in and around many heath-centres) were funded from abroad. However, the standard of health care has been declining since Rwanda’s peasants joined those other millions of Africans who are the voiceless victims of a World Bank/IMF Structural Adjustment Programme (SAD).

I took an instant liking to Callixte, a handsome, sad-looking young Goma-born Tutsi who is successfully studying English by courtesy of the World Service. He lives with his Bujumbura-born wife, Emerithe, and their eight-months-old daughter, Florence Gratias, in a tiny brick bungalow at the forested edge of the compound. Emerithe, a nurse, also serves as Kayove’s resident doctor. In 1991 Rwanda had one doctor per 27,000 (or so) inhabitants – when Britain had one per 659. In ’97 Rwanda has even fewer many were killed, many others participated in the genocide and are now prospering as exiles.

When Augustin and Marc had driven off to another commune, Callixte showed me around. In the maternity hospital only twelve beds were occupied, ‘Ten years ago,’ said Callixte ‘no empty beds!’ We glanced into the kitchen annex where two women were cooking beans, rice and matoke (provided by the patients) on an improvised wood-stove, ‘Here was a fine gas-cooker’ – Callixte gloomily recalled – ‘until the looting that April.’ Numerous offspring of the (untrained) nursing staff were wandering between the buildings. ‘Lucky they are,’ commented Callixte, ‘what patients can’t eat they get.’ The toddlers seemed afraid of me; their older siblings begged for sweets.

In the consulting room Emerithe was applying her stethoscope to the chest of a terrified old woman lying wheezing on a three-legged couch, propped up by bricks. When Callixte, had conferred with his wife (she speaks no English) he invited me – begged me – to stay the night. ‘Please be with us! Very early tomorrow the Gisenyi-Kibuye bus is on the big road. For you I can stop it.’

Elated, I agreed to this plan; we could argue about bus transport versus trekking when the time came. Callixte carried my rucksack to his little home and left me in the living-room while he went to get the burgomaster’s permission for a muzungu to stay overnight in the commune. This was a cramped, dreary room, the furniture sparse: a plastic-topped table, three metal camp-chairs, a huge old horse-hair armchair with hernias – and on the floor in one corner a new expensive trannie-cum-cassette-player, the better to hear the World Service. Three bullet holes disfigured the ceiling. The arrival of Florence Gratias, in the arms of a teenaged aunt, brought on another bout of grandmaternal nostalgia

When Callixte reappeared – walking slowly up the path, crestfallen – I foresaw a re-run of my Pierre experience near Gatuna. And so it was. The burgomaster had refused permission, ‘for security reasons’ I must return to Gisenyi with Augustin. It is said the militia are targeting ex-pats in this area – and their residences, offices and vehicles – to undermine ‘the new Rwanda’. Last night in Kibuye a Dutch priest was attacked in his home and badly wounded; he is not expected to recover. A youth was at once despatched to the main track to stop the Land-rover and ask Augustin to pick me up.

While we waited, Callixte admitted to being afraid of living in Kayove. ‘They tell us, all must pretend not to be afraid and try to live well together – all Banyarwanda! But fear is there’ – he laid a hand over his heart. ‘Only in this commune more than a thousand were killed – the graves are near, I can show you if was time.’ I asked why he and Emerithe had accepted jobs in this notoriously anti-Tutsi prefecture. He sighed and said, ‘In Rwanda we could get no other jobs. And in Burundi and Zaire is violence even worse, now.’ Then he began visibly to tremble. Dismayed, I reached across the table and held his hands, tightly. Last week, he told me, between thirty and thirty-five Tutsi ‘survivors’ were killed together in a commune near Kibuye town. (Precise figures are always elusive.) I understood then my own disquiet. This morning, trekking through all that beauty, trying to forget the deeds done on those hills I accused myself of being morbidly obsessed by the genocide, failing to locate it in the past, allowing it to overshadow all my reactions to Rwanda. But it isn’t in the past. The evil continues here and now, no longer a major drama, yet in its disruptive intensity no less because those massacred at one time, in one place, number thirty-five rather than 35OO.

When the Land-rover arrived Callixte invited everyone to drink tea but Augustin was edgy. ‘We need to get home before dark,’ he insisted.

Not far from Kayove purple-black clouds suddenly gathered, then sank to envelop us in a thick mist. Marc slowed and Augustin exclaimed, ‘I hate this!’

‘But with a sensible driver it’s safe,’ said I soothingly.

‘It’s now the militia get going,’ muttered Augustin. ‘They’re at home here, they know the terrain, the RPA are outsiders.’ When we came to the road-block it was unmanned. Instead of driving through the string, Marc got out and tenderly lowered it, then return to replace it – a demonstration of loyalty to the State which Augustin seemed to regard as superfluous.

Ten minutes later we heard rifle-fire not very far away. Augustin and Marc argued in Kinyarwanda. I told myself it was all happening off the road, down in the forest on our right. Marc won the argument and speeded up in defiance of the mist. Augustin said to me, ‘I told you they use the weather. We’d be safer now not moving. They can hear a vehicle and go for it.’

I decided that trekking back to Kigali from hilltop to hilltop – my fantasy en route to Gisenyi – was really rather a bad idea.

‘A few days ago,’ said Augustin, ‘three Tutsi were murdered in Gisenyi town, one an off-duty RPA officer.’ (The major had already told me this.) ‘The bandits who killed them came out of the forest here.’

‘How d’you know?’ I asked.

‘People see more than they shout about,’ replied Augustin.

Back in Gisenyi, just before sunset, I called on the residence of an Irish NGO; Declan and Malachi were due to return today from a consultation at their Kigali head office. I found them packing up, having been ordered to pull out of Gisenyi immediately – and not to sleep tonight in their residence but in the Meridien hotel, it being provided with armed guards specifically to protect ex-pats.

Rather peevishly I demanded, ‘Why all this panic? What goes on?’

They explained it all started with the Spaniards … On 18 January, the day before I crossed the border, three Spanish medical workers – two men and a woman – were shot dead in their Ruhengeri residence by persons unknown. And a badly injured American colleague has since lost a leg – gangrene, At that point a penny dropped. The Gituna immigration officer who so agitatedly waffled on about heavy rain and dangerous traffic had had something else in mind. Remembering the disdain with which the young Tutsi officer viewed me, I reckon she regarded ex-pats as expendable.

It seems odd that I’ve been six days here, talking to many Rwandans and a few ex-pats, yet have heard about these murders only now. I’m beginning to realize that the Rwandans are an exceptionally reticent people. And perhaps the ex-pats assumed I already knew. Obviously Matt hadn’t been told or he would have referred to the attack while discussing Ruhengeri’s particular problems after our stop in the town to buy a load of matoke

The French journalist, Francois, was not surprised to see me back on the Palm Beach terrace. ‘When they told me where you were heading for, I didn’t think you’d get far.’