7. BAD TIMING

KIGALI, 25 JANUARY

Last evening I discovered that François is quite a kindred spirit. He has been familiar with this region all his life – as a child he lived in Bukavu – and his present quest is for ‘facts’ about the killing of those thirty-odd Tutsi near Kibuye. ‘Poor devils! “Survivors” no longer … The militia see the genocide as unfinished business. That’s the inevitable result of no one challenging the culture of impunity.’ François is also investigating the motive(s) for the recent beating-up near Ruhengeri of a team of ex-pat HRFOR monitors. And he is working on a series of articles about an aspect of the genocide which he believes should not be allowed to fade into indecent obscurity – French government support for the organizers. That topic – one of the bees in my own bonnet – monopolized our conversation.

François was a twenty-year-old, working in Kinshasa, when the elected Patrice Lumumba was assassinated and replaced by the unelected Mobutu. ‘A reliable chap,’ said Françoise, ‘happy to co-operate with the West in destabilizing his neighbours, especially Angola.’ then in 1991 several of Mobutu’s Cold War allies, including France, suddenly saw a need for ‘democracy’ in Zaire and ditched the dictator. France decided to back instead Habyarimana & Co. in the FAR versus RPA war. Quai d’Orsay denizens frequently expressed their concern for ‘the principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty in the Great Lakes region’. Yet in 1992 and February 1993 700 soldiers of France’s élite Rapid Reaction Force intervened decisively to check RPA advances – advances which, if not impeded, could have stymied the genocide. And in 1993 alone FAR received US$10 million worth of French military aid. (For a minuscule country mainly populated by peasants living in dire poverty!) This ‘aid’ included training the ‘Zero Network’ death-squad led by – among others – Mme Habyarimana’s three brothers. Zero Network’s existence was exposed in October ’92 by two Belgians – Professor Filip Reyntjens and Senator Willy Kuypers – who recognized it as a harbinger of genocide and said so at the time.

When the killing started in Kigali the French Embassy’s Tutsi staff were locked out, left to their fate – certain death. However, the infamous Mme Habyarimana, her children, her equally infamous brother Seraphin Rwabukumba and some forty leaders of the MRND were cherished by the French government, who simultaneously refused political asylum to the five small children of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, one of the earliest victims of the genocide.

In Paris on 27 April 1994, while the killing was at its most frenzied, President Mitterrand, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur and Foreign Minister Alain Juppé officially received two of its organizers, the ‘Foreign Minister’ of the interim government, Jerome Bicamumpaka and the fanatical CDR leader Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza. Meanwhile France was still delivering arms to the genocidal army and continued to do so until June. Also, its Zairean stance was shifting again. On 9 May 1994 Mitterrand’s special counsellor for African affairs, Bruno Delaye, told Gérard Prunier (temporary adviser to the Ministry of Defence) – ‘We want Mobutu back in, he cannot be dispensed with and we are going to do it through this Rwanda business.’

By mid-June most of the killing was over. And France’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ – Operation Turquoise – began. This was prompted by rivalries within the then hybrid French government and by Francophone alarm when President Mandela tried to persuade Africa’s Anglophone nations to take action. Re-enter our old friend, General Dallaire. As UNAMIR’s C.O. he was aware of and enraged by France’s covert arms deliveries to FAR and suspected the motives behind Operation Turquoise. By then the poor man must have been beyond the end of his tether. Said he, ‘If they land in Kigali to deliver their damn weapons to the government I’ll have their planes shot down.’ In the end, Operation Turquoise did save a certain number of Tutsi lives – though not the ‘tens of thousands’ claimed by Mitterrand. It also gave protection to many thousands of FAR and Interahamwe militia – and enabled them to make their well-armed way, in safety, to the refugee camps. And for a time it considerably muddied the political waters, as it was intended to do.

‘We didn’t cause the genocide,’ said François, ‘but probably without our interference it couldn’t have happened. The constant backing of a Great Power encouraged the organizers.’ Not a bracing thought for a Frenchman.

Malachi and Declan arrived then, on their way to the Meridien, looking exhausted after hours of packing up their home and office. They advised me to return to Kigali, stay with friendly ex-pats in their secure compounds and see how the situation develops. A prospect that pleases me not. Especially as all this post-Spanish murders panic seems a bit excessive, an over-reaction. However, at present there’s little alternative so here I am, staying tonight in John Walton’s bungalow with two of his colleagues, Gavan and Sandra. Luckily my present frustration had been half-expected, even as I planned – or wisely didn’t plan – this mini-journey. So it’s not too acute. Now I must settle for what’s on offer, a view of NGOs in action on the hilltops. By the time my Rwandan visa expires on 18 February it may be possible to enter Kivu Province.

This morning, much to my annoyance, I found myself infected by the above-mentioned panic. When offered a lift to Kigali in an Italian NGO vehicle, driven by a charming young water engineer from Milan, I felt I’d be safer in a taxi packed with Rwandans. On the back seat of the minibus I was squeezed between a middle-aged man very obviously dying of AIDS and a youngish leper who had lost all ten fingers and half his nose before being diagnosed and treated. At five of the six road-blocks en route (three more than when Matt and I drove down) the soldiers callously insisted on the AIDS patient being dragged out to queue with the rest of us, though he was travelling alone and unable to stand without support. His family were awaiting him in Kigali with one of those woven hammock-like rural stretchers. Two young women – probably daughters – burst into tears when they saw him.

During the journey, I pondered the standard NGO reaction to perceived ‘danger’. Declan and Malachi were not scared, did not want to retreat from Gisenyi leaving their Rwandan colleagues as the only targets for whomever may have a grudge against foreign NGOs. But dead aid workers raise no funds back home – quite the contrary. They are not seen as martyrs in a good cause but victims of the inefficiency or poor judgment of their Directors. Which in fact makes sense; most Rich World interventions hardly merit the description ‘good causes’. Rwanda’s present chaos is not simply ‘an African problem’ which kindly ex-pat humanitarians are trying to alleviate. As France’s contribution to the genocide illustrates, it is part of an immensely complex political and economic inter-continental problem.

THE SAME, 26 JANUARY

Despite its population (approx. 450,000), Kigali has the merit of seeming not like a city – more like a series of large villages spread higgledy-piggledy on several hillsides overlooking broad valleys. Mount Kigali (almost 6000 feet) is obvious but not dominant; other surrounding hills are almost as high. There was nothing here in 1907 when the Germans decided to install a civil administrator and develop a trading centre to improve their commercial prospects in Central Africa. (They had been allotted Rwanda/ Burundi as part of their East African territories at the Berlin Conference in 1995.) Because the valleys were then malarial swamps, the Banyarwanda had avoided permanent settlement nearby, though Tutsi herds grazed the slopes. Later, under the Belgians, the small industrial district of Kimihurura burgeoned on the main ex-swamp. Since 1961, when the population was about 6000, Kigali had doubled in size every seven years. Yet fewer than 300,000 Rwandans are involved in the national economy’s monetary – as distinct from subsistence – sector. Which perhaps explains why the busy commercial centre still has a provincial town rather than capital city aura.

Wide, well-maintained motorways connect Kigali’s rich districts. The traffic is heavy, smelly and reckless; crashes are numerous and often fatal. The plethora of ex-pat vehicles, each with its conspicuous logo, is mind-boggling – and alarming. International aid missions based her provide much of the urban wealth; very little aid money trickles away towards the rural areas where live 93 per cent of Rwandans. Today I noticed several vehicles newly stripped of their logos and inscriptions, preferring to seem not ex-pat property. Also, some of the identifying notices at the entrances to NGO offices and residences have been taken down. How twitchy can you get!

Kigali’s middle-class communes are connected by steep, rutted, dusty tracks and not much troubled by motor traffic. Substantial bungalows (some colonial, some built by Rwandans since Independence) stand in ample, tree-shaded gardens, usually surrounded by high walls; their sturdy gates are opened only when the carefully-polished family car departs or arrives. Every family who can afford it now employs an askari.

In the poor communes, precipitous narrow footpaths squeeze between two- or three-roomed shacks housing families of eight, ten, twelve of more. Tiny shops and wayside hawkers cater for local needs. The banana-beer shebeens do not advertise themselves but are detectable by anyone seriously interested in banana-beer – one tenth the price of commercial brews, equally alcoholic and much better for the health. (Though the last opinion is disputed by ex-pats who have watched it being made on the hilltops.)

On some semi-rural slopes (Kigali’s equivalent to leafy suburbs) one sees a few large burnt-out dwellings, formerly the homes of rich Tutsi and already half-smothered by resurgent bush. Otherwise, apart from bullet holes on some exterior walls and shell-damaged roofs, little visible evidence remains of the events of April-July 1994. Rwanda’s physical rehabilitation has been surprisingly rapid – or perhaps not surprisingly, given the millions of aid dollars provided post-genocide. The country – and the capital in particular – was then completely devastated, socially, with a severely traumatized population, no police force, no civil administration, no functioning economy, no educational or judicial system, no electricity or water supply, no medical care, no public transport.

In August ’94 UNAMIR II arrived and was, naturally, made to feel unwelcome after the failure of UNAMIR I. In March ’96 it was thrown out – or, as the diplomats put it, ‘UNAMIR II retired at the request of the Rwandan government’. However, it had by then achieved much more than its predecessor. Since UN-bashing features largely in my books, I must give it credit where credit is due. The Secretary General’s Special Representative, Shaaryar Khan (successor to the futile Booh-Booh), drew up an inventory of UNAMIR II’s good deeds, over and above its official mandate, ‘It rebuilt 14 bridges, repaired 13 roads, made Kigali airport operational again, provided all necessary equipment to restore the telephone system, treated 1600 patients a day at its medical unit, vaccinated 62,000 people and supplied medicines and trained hospital staff all over the country. It also transported a million refugees and displace persons; distributing food, seeds, tools and cattle; lessened prison over-crowding by building extensions for 20,000 inmates and relocating 10,000; cleared over 1400 mines and disposed of more than 1500 pieces of unexploded ordnances.’ It nice to be able occasionally to say – ‘Three cheers for the UN!’

This morning I called to the local headquarters of a very large and globally powerful NGO. My letter of introduction was from their head-office, where a fund-raising officer had urged me to ‘write something’ about their Rwandan projects – a suggestion I feel ambivalent about, but it would be interesting to observe said projects. Weaving my way between nine four-wheel-drive vehicles parked in the forecourt, I entered a colonial-era mansion and found all the ex-pat staff absent – ‘unavailable for now’, away at some NGO indaba hastily convened by the UN to debate the security situation. I left my letter and a contact number with a languid young Rwandan woman, sitting alone amidst a herd of computers in a large comfortably furnished office.

Security problems aside, some NGOs are at present in deep trouble with the government, having failed to obtain work-permits for their ex-pat staff-members as they agreed to do last year. So Isa informed me over supper in her bullet-pocked bungalow in Kicukiro – not far from the airport, where there was much fighting during the battle for Kigali. This was one of Isa’s reasons for resigning from a British NGO and taking a translating job in a European embassy. She commented, ‘To many NGOs treat our government with no respect, behave like they were God Almighty. Like we should be so grateful to have them here they can pick and choose which laws to keep.’

Soon after the RPA victory, more than 200 aid agencies arrived in Rwanda – then a fund-raising winner. The majority, Isa complained, were unfamiliar with the country (often unfamiliar with Africa) and either ignorant of or misled about the background to the genocide. ‘Mostly they zoomed in on the displaced persons’ camps – nearly all Hutu. They spent hardly any time or money on the survivors or the returnees – nearly all Tutsi. That made the RPF mad angry. And they gave no end of trouble to our new government departments. The people taking over were in a muddle anyway – no offices or equipment or money. And trying to learn as they went about how to run a country. Then they had to turn round and try and organize and dovetail all those NGO projects, a lot of them only half-thought out. Here we’ll never have a good feeling between officials and the agencies. We can’t forget how fast most ex-pats got themselves safely out when the killing started – no attempt to help friends and colleagues, people they’d worked with sometimes for years.’

Isa’s husband, a prominent Hutu moderate, was murdered in Kigali in mid-April ’94. She and her four children, aged eighteen to ten, had already fled to Butare where the genocide was delayed for a fortnight by a courageous préfet who refused to obey MRND) orders. They were sheltered by an equally courageous elderly Hutu couple whose three sons were FAR officers, among those directing the genocide. Isa believes she and her children survived because a blind eye was turned on the septuagenarian parents’ ‘disloyalty’. However, when killer-teams were imported, from Kibuye and Ruhengeni, the fugitives had to be concealed behind a false partition built overnight in the kitchen and ingeniously food-stained to disguise its newness.

Last year Isa adopted Albert, now aged three, the only surviving child of a Tutsi friend whose husband and five other children were slaughtered. Albert’s mother committed suicide on the first anniversary of their deaths. ‘She thought she was doing fine, then suddenly she couldn’t handle the memories.’ Such suicides, especially among women, are not uncommon – though not always acknowledged to be suicides, Mercifully Albert was (or so it seems) too young to be affected by his mother’s death. He is a most engaging child, composed and polite and affectionate; throughout the evening he insisted on feeding me fistfuls of Bombay Mix.

According to Isa’s sister – visiting from Gisenyi, where I first met her – ‘little combats’ are a regular occurrence now in the hills between Gisenyi and Cyangugu, (‘Little’ combats, during which two or three hundred are killed? But I suppose if you’ve experienced genocide, that is ‘little’.) Said Isa, ‘Your timing is bad. You should’ve come before all this returnee militia hassle started. Then you could have walked safely through any prefecture.’ I daresay she’s right; when Rachel and Andrew lived here in ’95 there were not no such ‘security problems’ – at least not for muzungus.

27 january

At my present base, an NGO residence, l have a fellow-guest. Nganga, a thirty-year-old Kenyan (Kikuyu) is simultaneously doing his Ph.D. – subsidised by a British university – on childhood trauma and setting up remedial units to help street children in Tanzania, Kenya and here. This ‘interfacing’ between the academic and humanitarian worlds bothers me. Nganga graduated with a first-class degree in psychology and is immensely congenial, a special person – compassionate, sensitive, thoughtful. But his conversational English has become painfully jargon-deformed, and one can see him sliding into the abyss of well-paid research, which will do little if anything to help those being ‘researched’. A fortune is being spent on flying him from Nairobi to London to Dar to Kigali – and back again … In other words, he has been absorbed into the fast-expanding ‘humanitarian industry’ without realizing quite what’s happening to his career.

When I spoke of my feeling that the children murdered in ’94 were luckier than the traumatized survivors, Nganga didn’t disagree. In twenty years time, how many Rwandans will remain disabled, emotionally and/or physically, by their childhood experiences? Numerous details of what children witnessed, endured, were forced to do and voluntarily did are given in Death, Despair and Defiance. This book is so harrowing that when Andrew tried to read it, while living in Kigali, he failed – gave up half way. Later, I struggled through to the end, with great difficulty. Rachel, watching me struggle, wondered – ‘What’s the point?’ But I believe there is a point. ‘Deeply disturbing as are the minute details of the genocide, we do need to confront them, to remember them and – spurred on by our remembering – to put pressure on the ‘international community’ to fund the Rwandan government’s effort to punish, proportionately, the organizers and perpetrators. At the time the media reported a selection of those details and people were shocked and revolted. But in the public consciousness such reports soon merge into the morass of other gruesome disasters that regularly snatch at fragments of our attention. The outside world’s reluctance to focus on the details and consequences of Rwanda’s genocide is surely one of the reasons why most of the chief organisers have escaped punishment while 100,000 or so Hutu (including children) rot in gaol because they have done the actual killing – often under duress – or are suspected of having done it.

Nothing more clearly defines the particularity of genocide than the deliberate seeking out and killing of children – especially male children – not only en famille but in hospitals, schools, orphanages, homes for the handicapped. Millions of children, world-wide, are bereaved and traumatized by wars and natural disasters, After an earthquake or a bomb attack they may find themselves lying beside or under their parents’ corpses, and I shall never forget the stricken small children I met in Cameroon, survivors of the Lake Nyos gas explosion. In such circumstances, however, they are incidental victims. In Rwanda, once the killing started, all Tutsi children of an age to understand language know they were targets. And countless Hutu children witnessed their own fathers – sometimes their mothers, too, and their older siblings – killing their friends and playmates. Such experiences, as Nganga noted, do not merely leave scars. A scar marks the place where a wound has healed. In many cases the wounds inflicted on Rwanda’s child survivors are unlikely ever to heal.

Is the West’s indifference to this genocide partly racist? Images of children seeing and hearing their parents being hacked to death, of spears being thrust through babies on their mothers’ backs, of babies being flung into rivers by their mothers to save them from the other sort of death, of toddlers being beheaded or disembowelled, of seven-year-olds having their arms chopped off, of eleven-year-olds smashing five-year-olds’ skulls – such images are of course dreadful, but perhaps insufficiently shocking because this is what Europeans have been conditioned, over generations, to expect of Africans. Yet we know there is nothing specifically ‘African’ or primitive about genocide; the country that produced Durer, Beethoven and Goethe also produced the gas-ovens that eliminated six million Jews and other ‘undesirables’. Nganga dryly remarked that very likely the impersonal hi-tek Nazi method strikes some Westerners as less barbaric than the chopping up of one individual by another with a machete. Although the end result is the same, the European way might somehow seem tidier, more discreet … He could have a point there. Many journalists became oddly obsessed by the killers’ using agricultural implements – and, later, by the refugees’ bare feet. They seemed not to realise that both phenomena are simply a measure of where this country is at, economically. Most Rwandan peasants habitually go barefooted and if they want to kill a goat, a bullock – or a person – they use bare steel. Just as our own ancestors did before the invention of gunpowder.

Thinking on from there, is it fair to see a difference in culpability between the credulous, illiterate Hutu peasants – cunningly brainwashed and by tradition submissive to authority – and the thousands of educated Germans (and others) who collaborated to make possible the Holocaust? Not to mention all those who for years knew what was going on but pretended not to notice. Or am I now, as Nganga hinted, being racist in a convoluted way, tending to blame Africans less because I expect Europeans to be more capable of defying a criminal régime?

We asked ourselves then, can there be such a thing as an understanding of genocide? Does anyone understand the Holocaust? Knowing why and how it happened doesn’t really enable ‘normal’ human beings to comprehend the level of depravity involved. Or perhaps, as Nganga suggested, we don’t want to understand are afraid to understand –because genocide exposes what we prefer not to know about ourselves as human beings. It’s reassuring to imagine a clear line dividing ‘normal’ people from genocidal Turks, Germans, Rwandans. But given the combined pressures applied by the organizers of Rwanda’s genocide, how would each of us react? Can we be certain we would continue to uphold our civilized and humane standards?

28 JANUARY

Early this morning I had a disconcerting experience, provoked by my own stupidity. While walking on a footpath beside a dual-carriageway – its lanes separated by shrubs – I noticed that there was, unusually, no other pedestrian in sight. Here was my chance to photograph an isolated mini-skyscraper, spectacularly damaged during the battle for Kigali and poised on a cliff-edge. As I aimed my camera a red car, speeding towards me along the far lane, slowed abruptly. The driver glared at me and yelled, angrily shaking his fist. Hastily I lowered the camera – photograph untaken – and walked on, vaguely wondering why so many Rwandans are paranoid about photography. My thoughts were on something quite different when the same car stopped beside me, the driver had turned at the nearest gap in the hedge, half a mile away, to pursue the offending ex-pat. He emerged, his face ugly with rage – otherwise an unremarkable forty-ish man wearing a neat suit. Saying nothing, he struck me violently on the side of the head with the flat of his hand: so violently that my neck is stiff and sore this evening. By then there were several pedestrians near, by but none reacted in any way to this surely uncommon incident. As my attacker drove on to the next turning point I rubbed my head gently and called myself a fool. Elsewhere, I would now be attempting to analyse that encounter. In Rwanda, I accept it as one more conundrum.

That was a bad start to the day but later on Fate compensated me. By now I have a favourite writing-corner in a secluded and inexpensive Ethiopian restaurant far enough off a motor road to be comparatively fume-free. In its open-air bar, decorated with Ethiopian Airline posters of Gondar and Lalibela, the aroma of ersatz injara and wat drifts from the kitchen and bougainvillaea tumbles over a ten-foot-high wall. Here the more adaptable and price-conscious ex-pats consort after work with their Rwandan friends. And here Pius approached me this afternoon, as I closed my notebook and took off my specs. He already knew about my thwarted journey; a few days ago his friend the restaurant owner listened sympathetically to my tale of woe.

Pius was born three years after his parents fled to Uganda in ’59. In January ’95 he ‘returned’, a fluent English-speaker with not a word of French. ‘Naturally I wanted to live in my own country but at first it felt like some foreign place.’

‘And now …?’ I asked.

Pius was silent for a few moments, eyes downcast, frowning slightly and, it seemed, making some decision. As our Primuses arrived he said, ‘Now, it’s different. I know I’m needed. In Kampala I worked eight years for a paper, writing in English. But here I can write in Kinyarwanda and there is a big task for me, doing anti-propaganda. Why did we have a genocide? What made it possible? It’s not normal. And it can’t happen suddenly. Rwandans must try to understand it, nothing can be healed without understanding, The killers, the survivors, the witnesses – everyone needs to know why it became possible, People should be thinking and talking about this, looking for the true explanations. Not just struggling on, trying to live as if it hadn’t happened, When I came first many wanted to talk and talk about what they saw and suffered – to describe the most terrible events – it was their therapy. That was good. Now they have gone silent – and not because they’re healing. I know it’s now nearly three years ago, they have had time to cry. And I hope all did. Maybe those who didn’t killed instead. But I shouldn’t say such things – it’s too easy for returnees to talk. We weren’t involved, we didn’t personally suffer except the way every Rwandan suffers still from the evil of it.’

I said, ‘Maybe the survivors have only enough energy left to struggle on, none to spare for asking “Why?” Anyway they must think they know the answer. And the killers and their accomplices have their own set of answers.’

‘But they’re all wrong!’ said Pius. ‘They know nothing about the tangles in the background, for so many years the truth was hidden from people here. Without studying at Makerere, talking to scholars, how could I know about our past? Before the colonists we were isolated, accepting it was OK for 15 per cent to rule the rest. Then the Europeans came to abuse that set-up for gain, putting Tutsi and Hutu into a confrontational position. So when the Hutu got independence and power they persecuted us and went totalitarian. Then they felt their power threatened by the international community and went berserk and we had genocide. Easy to organize with most Hutu still ignorant and frightened and full of memories of Tutsi cruelty. Many of the peasant killers were victims, too. In a way, even the organizers were victims. You can trace the blame back to the Belgians and the Tutsi chiefs corrupted by them.’ Pius paused, ‘Are you bored?’ he asked, suddenly anxious. ‘Maybe you know about all this?’

‘I’m riveted,’ I reassured him. ‘Doubly riveted because it’s coming from a Tutsi. Let’s have another Primus.’

Pius beckoned a waitress and continued – ‘I’ve heard a few foreigners saying it’s all wrong to associate the war – the RPA invasion – with the genocide. They want to keep those two events separate. I see why, politically it makes sense. It’s emotionally they’re wrong, not knowing what makes our peasants tick. It’s too soon to judge about the political bit, nothing has shaken down yet, we can’t see how sincere the RPF are about power-sharing. So far I believe in them, I think most are good guys. Only you have to be suspicious about the effects of power on personalities. But without the “invasion from Uganda” I’m certain genocide could never have been organizsed, there wouldn’t have been enough fear around. More pogroms like before – yes, surely, but that’s different. And all those Hutu refugees, they were terrorized by propaganda about Tutsi soldiers taking revenge on them. Which of course some are doing now though we don’t hear much about it. The RPA couldn’t keep up to Kagame’s Ugandan standards when they had to recruit from Tutsi survivors and returnees from Burundi and Zaire. Maybe you get irritated by clíches but they’re true. Violence breeds violence. Past Tutsi violence bred the genocide,’ Pius stopped and studied my face, then chuckled. ‘You’re shocked! You’re thinking I’m trying to excuse the genocide – me, a Tutsi! You’re off your nest, I can see!’

I admitted to being off my nest; actually I haven’t been on it since crossing the border. But I denied thinking that Pius was ‘making excuses’. Looking for explanations is another sort of activity. I added that what most deeply shocks me, in Rwanda now, is the ‘culture of impunity’ – a tiresome sociologist’s buzz-phrase yet useful in this context.

‘That ties in’, Pius, ‘with what I’m on about. It’s true many who set up the genocide and many killers seem carefree. No remorse, no fear of punishment, seeing Rwanda’s history justifying what they did. I mean the propaganda version they were fed on. Unless we can get to answer that “Why?”, countering the propaganda, how can we have reconciliation? The RPF sound like hypocrites when they preach “we must all be Banyarwanda together”. False history and then the genocide have fixed everyone in a distorted mould. That’s why I say outsiders are needed. Only people who escaped that mould can break it for others and help them start again, facing facts.’

I was moved by Pius’s face-the-facts mission and said so. But privately I remained unconvinced that it could achieve much, even were he working with teams of kindred spirits. Not that I doubt his commitment to his ideal or his intellectual ability and honesty, an honesty too rare on this scene. He concluded that the genocide has muzzled plain speaking, has indeed made it dangerous. Given three-quarters of a million dead Tutsi, references to past Tutsi cruelty, to their repression of and contempt for the Hutu majority are certain to be seen as making excuses rather than looking for explanations. ‘But’, said Pius, ‘nothing venture, nothing win!’ And on that we clinked glasses.

Walking back to my NGO base, I wondered how the different categories – survivors, killers, accomplices, passive witnesses – are in fact coping, inwardly, with the aftermath of genocide. A many-layered question, when asked by a European.

One hears it argued that Africans possess a capacity we lack to transcend such horrors, are able to get on with life now, forgetting what happened then. This may be partially true, in relation to some disasters, tragedies, bereavements. But I cannot believe it applies to present-day Rwanda This is an eerily subdued country. People don’t communicate normally. Most Africans are ebullient, uninhibited in their social exchanges, openly affectionate or antagonistic or argumentative – it all hangs out. Not so here. In taxis, bars, market places, restaurants, in queues at the bank or supermarket, conversations – whether personal or commercial – seem curiously controlled, taut. Rwanda, a tiny country, has quite a good public transport (minibus-taxi) system. (In 1994 most buses were hi-jacked and taken to Zaire or Tanzania by the retreating FAR and Interahamwe; I remember seeing several in Bukavu.) Therefore people cannot be sure of finding anonymity in another place leaving behind their genocidal roles. And there is a widespread awareness of who did what, or to whom what was done. The genocide organizers were cunning. By forcing so many to kill, by spreading the guilt throughout the population, they forged a bloody link of loyalty between the Hutu. Thus were any thousands deprived of the possibility of claiming, afterwards, that they had been anti-genocide – though left to themselves they might never have raised a hand against a neighbour.

The submissiveness of Rwanda’s peasants goes back a long way. Jean-Jaques Maquet, the French anthropologist, noted the absolute power of the traditional Tutsi kings:

Inferiority is the relative situation of a person who has to submit to another in a defined field. But dependence is inferiority extended to all spheres of life. When the ruler gives an order, he must be obeyed, not because his order falls into the sphere over which he has authority, but simply because he is the ruler.

In 1974 Major General Juvenal Habyarimana imitated the kings by founding the MRND the Mouvement Revolutionnaire National pour le Developpement. No other political party was permitted and membership was compulsory for every Rwandan. No one could change their place of residence without good reason; all ID cards had to show their owner’s address. Within every MRND cell keen spies (keen for promotion) observed activities on each hill. In Gérard Prunier’s words, ‘Administrative control was probably the tightest in the world among non-Communist countries.’ The want of remorse that at present so worries outsiders is surely connected to this ‘culture of control’. Countless peasant killers were psychologically incapable of not obeying commands.

29 JANUARY

This evening Nyanya is euphoric. A fax arrived from Andrew. On 29 September (or thereabouts) Rose will acquire a sibling. I became so over-excited I invited two friends to celebrate with me in Kigali’s up-market Chinese restaurant and spent more in a few hours than I would normally spend in a month.

2 FEBRUARY, SUNDAY

Today Sandra and Gavin invited me to accompany them to a Sunday luncheon party in Ruhengeri prefecture, at a tea-estate run by old friends of theirs from Sri Lanka. Twenty miles short of Ruhengeri town we turned off the main road and passed through a straggling trading centre, its mud-brick stores all locked up and looking semi-derelict, many bullet-pocked with shell-damaged gables or roofs. Then we followed a wide valley of extraordinary beauty that wound between low wooded hills and high rounded mountains – the latter meticulously terraced, every inch cultivated. Pedestrians thronged the narrow bumpy dirt-track, the young women wearing brilliantly-patterned wrap-around skirts and carrying tall woven baskets on their heads. They walked in single file with that marvellous supple grace too often lost in early middle-age when decades of over-exertion in the fields bring on rheumatism. This is Rwanda’s most densely populated region: the 1991 figure was 820 people per each square kilometre of cultivable land.

Then came a long, steep climb, the track curving around a series of mountains, each higher than the last, the views increasingly frustrating to this would-be trekker imprisoned in a motor vehicle. We were now close to both the Zairean and Ugandan borders, traversing the last corner of Rwanda to be brought into the Tutsi kingdom.

At the entrance to the tea factory-cum-residential compound we encountered abnormally tight security; ex-pats living on this remote hilltop are extremely vulnerable to anyone running a ‘kill foreigners’ campaign. Although Gavin’s vehicle was expected, we had to wait while the askari checked the registration number with our host. And fifty yards farther on another double-gate was elaborately locked.

Kali Alles, who manages this estate, gave me a conducted tour of the factory, pointing out countless bullet- and shell-holes; most have been patched up but those on the very high roof are too hard to reach. The Alles’s garden is a vivid botanical cornucopia overlooking a score of lower hills, their tints varying with distance. As we sat on the verandah drinking iced beer and talking of books and music, then eating a work-of-art curry, it was difficult to remember that here is not Paradise but a district where everyone’s nerves – locals’ and foreigners’ – are now permanently on edge.

We left in time to get home before dark; these days no ex-pat travels after sunset. On the way, several extra road-blocks and many racing military vehicles puzzled us. I had a supper appointment with NGO friends and immediately on entering their living-room my hostess’s expression warned me that the news was bad.

This morning in the commune of Kampanga, twelve miles north of Ruhengeti town, and less than twelve miles east of where we lunched, a Canadian priest was shot dead while saying Mass. Shot at close range, when it seemed his killer was about to receive holy communion. The man then fled down the length of the church and disappeared. No one tried to capture him which is fair enough, given that he was armed and homicidal. One of my fellow-guests knew Fr Picard, a sixty-one-year-old White Father from Quebec. He had lived in Rwanda for thirty-four years, stayed with his parishioners throughout the genocide and saved a dozen or more Tutsi lives. Probably the motive for his murder was to get rid of a witness, someone who might recognize and denounce the ex-FAR and Interahamwe killers among the returnees. Those men prefer to return to their own communes where their reputations are enough to terrorize the peasants into silence. But someone of Fr Picard’s calibre could not be so easily terrorized.

Later: A radio message has just come through from the UN, ordering all aid workers not to stay overnight in Ruhengeri but to commute from Kigali. Everyone advises me to forget Bukavu. But I haven’t quite given up hope.