9. THE TURNING OF THE SCREW

BUTARE, 3 FEBRUARY

En route from Kigali to Butare one seems to be descending but in fact this is the higher city and at night perceptibly colder. Around Gitarama the landscape becomes more conventional; the hills are less steep and no longer separated by those distinctive wide flat valleys, though banana groves and bluegum plantations continue to dominate. The road surface is flawless and the young Muslim at the wheel of our minibus drove carefully, unlike most Rwandans. As usual in this well-disciplined country, only the legal number of passengers were carried. Again I noticed their silence and an unexpressed yet discernible hostility to the ex-pat. This was a cheap taxi, the non-stop service costs a little more, But I prefer (frugality apart) the slower pace of vehicle that stops frequently to drop off and take on – or to readjust the load, or allow people to buy potatoes or charcoal from wayside vendors.

We passed several ‘Shelter Programmes’, hundreds of mud-brick homes being built with UNHCR aid, as numerous conspicuous notices proclaim, on land cleared by gangs of prisoners from the many commune gaols – each holding three to four hundred genocidal suspects. When a convoy of three UN vehicles came towards us the youth in front of me leaned out to shake his fist at them while shouting something abusive. The UN will never be forgiven for their ‘desertion’ of Rwanda in April ’94. Moreover, aid workers in general are seen as ‘professional humanitarians’, here to profit from other people’s misfortunes. This is only partially unfair. One meets ex-pats who are in one way or another misfits back home and see aid work as offering an escape, besides having a certain glamour and allowing more scope for the uncriticized use of limited talents. However, most of the aid workers I’ve so far met here are dedicated individuals – several of them astute and conscientious enough to have become quite quickly disillusioned and troubled by the futility of their present mission.

Butare considers itself to be – and is – a cheated city, As ‘Astrida’ (so named in honour of the Belgian queen) it was colonial Rwanda’s administrative centre. It was also the country’s intellectual and spiritual (or perhaps I should say theological) centre, complete with cathedral. In 1961, when 6000 people lived in the village of Kigali, Butare was the obvious choice as capital of the new Republic of Rwanda. But politics intervened. This region was associated with the liberal opponents of President Kayibanda’s clan, based in Gitarama, and so the President decided to create a new city that would owe all its loyalty to the new régime. The stated reason was, ‘Kigali is more central’ – a laughable excuse, given the size of Rwanda.

Throughout this comparatively tolerant and tension-free prefecture, Tutsi used to form an uncommonly high percentage of the population. In April ’94 Butare had Rwanda’s only Tutsi préfet, Jean-Baptiste Habyarimana, who heroically refused to do his ‘duty’ by helping to arm and co-ordinate the killers. As word spread that Butare remained ‘safe’, tens of thousands of terrified families took refuge in its communes. The préfet then toured the hilltops, welcoming them, guaranteeing their safety, organizing feeding programmes and first-aid tents. He insisted on senior military and civilian officers accompanying him to several Parishes and through the force of his personality and the proper use of his authority restrained the sous-préfets, burgomasters and councillors from unleashing their killers. It is astounding that one man was capable of protecting a prefecture for twelve days while all around genocidal madness convulsed the country.

On 18 April the government replaced Jean-Baptiste Hanyarimana with a Gisenyi FAR officer, Colonel Tharcisse Muvunyi, and a civilian administrator, Sylvain Nsabimana, the préfet, together with his wife and two children, was murdered that evening. On 19 April, in the Parish of Karama, at least 38,000 were killed; more than 12,000 died together in the church. In the Parish of Cyahinda a carefully planned military attack, also beginning on 19 April, slaughtered at least 20,000. Groups of five or six hundred tried to escape into Burundi across the Kanyaro river at various fording points but were macheted by the Interahamwe – babies being chopped up in front of their mothers before being flung into the water. Throughout April and into May the killings continued in every Butare commune. In the end, this prefecture was the scene of some of the worst massacres; the coming together of so many Tutsi, during that period of illusory safety, simplified things for the killers.

Now I find it strange to remember that during the worst of the genocide I remained oblivious to what was going on. Having flown to Johannesburg on 1 April, I was too absorbed in the excitement and joy generated the birth of the new South Africa to pay attention to Central African events. But meanwhile, as the world rejoiced with South Africa, hundreds of thousands were being torn asunder by South African fragmentation grenades, sold by Pretoria to the Kigali regime in 1992. These were the favourite genocide weapons as FAR troops, gendarmerie and communal police exterminated men, women and children packed into churches, convents, schools, hospitals, Commune Offices.

Nowadays, according to my Kigali friends, Butare feels much less tense than the capital: but this morning it didn’t feel so to me. On arrival I wandered around for an hour or so, testing the vibes and appreciating the non-urban atmosphere – almost small-townish. Then, outside the Groupe Scolaire Hospital, I stopped to ask a white nun the way to an NGO residence. She proved to be Irish, though with a Belgian order, and has lived here since 1964. Even as she lowered her Toyota van’s window I could see that she was suppressing anger. The security guards at the hospital gates wouldn’t admit her to visit a priest badly injured yesterday in a car crash. At present no ex-pats, they said, were to be allowed through these gates. Not even an elderly resident nun speaking fluent Kinyarwanda – virtually an honorary citizen of Butare and among the few whites who did not run away in April ’94.

Later I tried to visit the university, promoted as one of Butare’s tourist attractions, but a friendly security guard – a Ugandan returnee – explained that ‘just for now’ no ex-pats are allowed on the campus.

Taking liquid consolation in the Chez Nous hotel’s open-air bar I met Ahmed, a Sudanese who since 1985 has been working with various NGOs in East Africa. A man of exceptional perspicacity and wit, he the sort one wishes could become a life-long friend. (That is the main disadvantage of the travelling life: meeting kindred spirits only briefly.) We considered the fate of Rwanda’s ‘accused’ prisoners, said to number 100,000 by now. Within the larger prisons the appalling conditions have caused an unknown number of deaths and the loss of many limbs through gangrene. However, Ahmed is dubious about the statistics; it seems some are imprisoned for only three, four or five months while some informal investigation is being conducted. (Or while some relative is collecting a certain amount of cash?) A minority are now being tried by the Special Tribunals set up in each prefecture but obviously the majority can never be given conventional legal treatment with the very limited resources available. Their ‘human rights’ are therefore of great concern to some outside observers but the HRFOR monitors one sees zooming around all over the country seem unable (or unwilling) to do anything about this particular ‘violation’.

‘Probably unable,’ said Ahmed. ‘If they were seen to be making progress in that area somebody would kill them. And it’s my opinion they don’t have the know-how. That’s surely a job for Rwandans, specifically. Without belonging to the culture they’ve no way to get at the truth.’ Like others I’ve listened to, Ahmed despairs of Rwanda’s justice system. ‘It’s chaotic, almost to the point of non-existence. And right now you can’t blame the government for that. They haven’t the personnel or the funding to pull it together.’

Then Ahmed told me about Jean-Paul, a ‘Hutsi’ (Hutu father, Tutsi mother) employed as a driver by his NGO since August ’94, popular with all his fellow-workers and completely dependable. Two months ago a Hutu sister-in-law ‘accused’ him and he has been in gaol ever since, living on a bucket of rice and beans brought to him every Wednesday by his devoted wife – Wednesday being ‘feeding’ day. (What must that unrefrigerated food taste like by Tuesday evening?) Jean-Paul’s ex-pat employers are allowed to visit him twice a month and find him astoundingly philosophical; he says he can’t believe an innocent man will be convicted in the new Rwanda. His wing of the gaol is not a horror-pit and he gets plenty of fresh air and exercise, being marched out every week-day morning to make bricks. Meanwhile the accusing sister-in-law is cultivating his land and doing nicely, thank you.

A disquieting story. However, Ahmed is more sceptical than his European colleagues, more aware of all the possible combinations and permutations. No one disputes Jean-Paul’s reliability, amiability, respectability, popularity and so on. Yet it remains quite possible that he was a killer, that his sister-in-law’s accusation is justified.

‘But why so long delayed?’ I wondered.

Ahmed shrugged. ‘Could be lots of reasons – like someone’s died who would have killed her if she’d accused before. Genocide leaves a very dirty tangle.’

It does seem unlikely that Jean-Paul was a trained death-squad killer, But, as Ahmed pointed out, you can’t slaughter 800,000 people in less than three months without recruiting thousands of ‘amateurs’ who revert to normal when the frenzy is over. At least apparently revert to normal – and maybe actually? Is there a parallel here with troops returning from a war during which they ruthlessly killed as many as they could of those they had been told were ‘the enemy’? (The gratuitous bombing of Dresden’s residential districts also slaughtered thousands of helpless civilians, men, women and children.) Most ex-soldiers, though by no means all, readjust easily enough to civilian life. But in Rwanda that is a tricky parallel, never to be extended to the organisers of the genocide who knew they were setting up something very different from war.

Ahmed and I plan to meet again tomorrow. As an African Muslim, I find him much more on my wave-length than most African Christians. I remember speculating about this in Cameroon, when staying with Fulani families. Does it mean that in Africa Islam has taken root (can take root) as Christianity has not (and cannot)?

4 FEBRUARY

Butare is very proud of possessing the National Museum, a gift from Belgium’s King Baudouin I, opened in 1988 and covering 2700 square metres. Designed by M. Lode Van Pee, it lies (fortunately) below road level as one approaches from Kigali. Let my guide book (Rwanda Today, by Jean-Claude Klotchkoff, 1990) describe it:

A superb architectural achievement, incorporating brick, glass and wood in futuristic forms … this building is made of sun-dried clay bricks like those manufactured by Rwandan peasants. By playing with the palette of colours of this traditional material – from ochre to beige to tea-rose – the architect embellished the facade with geometric motifs which evoke rustic mats and baskets. The museum is composed of pavilions with pointed roofs, and recalls the straw huts still seen in the Rwandan countryside.

Undeterred by all that, I entered – and for hours was enthralled. So were my few fellow-visitors: all young men, looking like students, moving silently from room to room singly or in pairs. It must be good for their morale, to see how much beauty was created by their forebears – and happily still is, in some areas – using wood, earth, vegetable dyes, papyrus and eleusine fibres. Photographs taken between 1910 and 1970 show men and women wearing their own minimal garments made of bark, skins and woven vines. Even in cool Rwanda, Africans don’t really need the absurd amount of clothing now worn in imitation of Europeans, including heavy jerseys, woollen balaclavas and – the ultimate status symbol! – padded anoraks with hoods.

A replica of a royal thatched hut (the outer walls also thatched, the interior walls bamboo partitions) is thirty feet high with an elaborate porch – truly a work of art, constructed of stooks of tall grasses, forest branches and woven creepers. What must the loss of those skills do to a people’s self-esteem?

I paid my respects to the memory of Major-General Rwigyema, standing in front of his crayon portrait – hanging between life-size photographs of the Presidents Kayibanda and Habyarimana and the present President Bizimungu. Evidently there is no photograph of the misfortunate Rwigyema, the RPF’s most popular and inspiring leader, killed on the second day of the October ’90 invasion from Uganda. He was the only RPA casualty that day.

A student accompanied me back to the town; he had spent hours taking notes in the geology room. Corneille is a survivor, one of those Tutsi saved by Hutu neighbours who knew they were thus putting their own lives at risk. All three generations of his family were killed, either on their hill or in Kigali. His Hutu friends buried him in a shallow grave in the soft earth of a banana grove, scattering loose withered fronds over a small ventilation hole. For six days he lay there, being given just enough water, at irregular intervals, to sustain life. Urination had to happen in situ and that was, he said, the worst of it – even worse than the immobility. When disinterred, by night, rashes and sores covered his thighs and lower body. By then there were, apparently, no Tutsi left alive in that commune – only heaps of putrefying corpses – and the deaths-quads had moved on. Yet Corneille remained in danger; some local Hutu, their cunningly aroused hatred still glowing white-hot, would have needed no further urging to kill him. His friends concealed him in their ruga for two months, a time of extreme tension. The possibility of being detected and ‘pointed out’ often felt like a probability,

Such survival accounts – and they are numerous – sound like gruesome parodies of Boy’s Own adventure stories involving incredible feats of stamina. Every sort of stamina: physical, mental, emotional. Yet the Tutsi survivors – bereft of all or many of their family and friends, their possessions looted, their homes and careers destroyed, their businesses appropriated – have received far less sympathetic attention and material aid than the Hutu refugees and ‘internally displaced persons’. Also, the RPA soldiers, who had stopped the killing, went unpaid until December ’94 while the ex-FAR, the Interahamwe and other killers were being sustained in various camps by the UNHCR. Nor were the Tutsi survivors’ very real security concerns appreciated by the ‘humanitarian community’. On 15 January ’95 HRFOR published its Operational Plan in which ‘the most vulnerable elements of Rwandan society’ were defined as ‘refugees and IDPs’, This prompted an angry vice-rector of Butare University (Dr Emmanuel Bugingo, who lost his wife and most of his friends and Tutsi colleagues) to demand, ‘And where was the concern of the UN for human rights during the genocide? Where? What human rights, whose human rights?’

The participation of so many doctors and nurses in the killings should not, I suppose, surprise anyone who knows anything about the Holocaust. Twenty doctors on the staff of Butare’s University Hospital have been identified by name in Death, Despair and Defiance and there is no shortage of witnesses to provide detailed evidence against them. They include Dr Seraphin Bararengana, a surgeon and younger brother of President Habyarimana, and Dr Bruno Ngirabatware, an internist and younger brother of Stanislas Mbonampeka, former Minister of Justice. Twenty-six members of the staff of the University Centre for Public Health were also implicated as leaders of the death-squads. These include five doctors and Therésie Nyiramisago, a younger sister of President Sindikubwabo, head of the interim government in charge of Rwanda at the time of the genocide. Between staff and students, more than 900 were killed on the University campus – many of them Hutu but, as ‘intellectuals’, suspected of disloyalty to the Hutu Power ideology. Usually their children, living in the University’s residential district of Buye, were killed too. Gérard Prunier records:

On the campus of Butare University, a Hutu teacher whose Tutsi wife was in an advanced state of pregnancy saw her disembowelled under his eyes and had the foetus of his unborn child pushed in his face while the killers shouted ‘Here! Eat your bastard!’

Butare’s Groupe Scolaire Hospital provided seven identified genocide organisers, notably Dr Jeanne Nduwamariya whose habit it was to go to road-blocks around the city and taunt the Interahamwe for their failure to kill certain named ‘wanted’ women. She formed a deadly trio with Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the Minister for Family and Women’s Affairs, and Simeon Remera, wife of a prominent local politician. Her husband was (maybe still is) Dr Jean Chrisostome, then Butare’s Regional Health Director, notorious for his extremism. He had raged against the Arusha Accords and frequently publicly denounced Butare’s préfet, Jean-Baptiste Haibyarimana, as ‘an RPF accomplice’. One of his Tutsi colleagues left her job after being similarly labelled; when the killing began he led the Interahamwe to her home and she and her son were murdered. Her severely wounded daughter remains incapacitated. Drs Nduwamariya and Ndindabahiz departed for Gabon in July ’94 to become gainfully employed exiles.

Butare is, indisputably, the ecclesiastical capital of Rwanda. Nuns swarm, many of them very young, and so do priests – less obviously. The massive brick cathedral remains by far the largest building in this pleasingly undeveloped town. It is in an architectural category all its own, with windows showing some remote Gothic influence and a hint of the Byzantine about its west door. The austere interior comes as a pleasant surprise: pale brick walls, a very high arched ceiling of dark beams and bamboo, a simple stone altar. Queen Astrid of Belgium laid the foundation stone shortly before she died in a motoring accident in 1935. Four years previously the Catholic Church had finally vanquished paganism when the resolutely anti-Christian King Yuhi V Musinga was replaced by the hand-picked (a Belgian hand) King Mutara III Rudahigwa, who soon proved himself a satisfactory puppet. Or so it seemed at the time. The reality was rather more complicated.

Since 1899 the Catholic Church had been present and active in Rwanda but for a generation its few converts came from amongst the poorest of the poor. Then suddenly, in 1927, thousands began to clamour for baptism. They had seen the light and it showed them that under the Belgians’ reformed administration becoming a Christian must be the first step to joining the new élite. By 1994 Rwanda was routinely described as ‘the most Catholic country in Africa’.

My guide book (consistently slanted to placate the NRND) gives one revealing quote from The Evangelization of Rwanda by Abbe Felicien Muvara: ‘In 1959 the Belgian trustee administration and the Catholic church, by giving strong support to the Hutu élite, dealt the Banyiginya monarchy a death blow. By doing so, they sped up the foundation of the Republic.’ Unhappily the Catholic Church (and all other denominations, in a grisly display of ecumenism) continued to give ‘strong support to the Hutu élite’ – before, during and after the genocide. Even non-Christian outsiders like myself have been shaken to discover the extent of their complicity with Hutu extremism. Given their influence, the senior churchman could without doubt have put a brake on the killing machine. Every Sunday in every Parish their message was heard; only they had the means and the power to counteract the foul RMC propaganda and the rabble-rousing communal officials. Why did they not intervene? Because with very few (and not very potent) exceptions they were ‘Habyarimana’s men’. The Catholic Archbishop of Kigali, Vincent Nsengiyumva, was also a successful entrepreneur, a close friend of the Habyarimana family and a member of the MRND central committee until December 1989. At the beginning of June ’94 the Anglican Archbishop of Rwanda, Augustin Nshamihigo, and the Anglican Bishop of Kigali arrived in Nairobi to give a press conference and announced that they were there ‘not to condemn but to explain what is happening in Rwanda’. Mark Huband of The Observer commented, ‘Even the most senior members of the Anglican church were acting as errand boys for political masters who have preached murder and filled the rivers with blood.’

Of the 192 clergymen killed, few died in defence of their parishioners; they were killed because they were Hutu moderates or Tutsi. A minority of priests, nuns and pastors opposed the genocide; another minority enthusiastically collaborated with its organizers while the majority simply sat on the fence. In the Rwandans’ hour of need, their Christian Churches gave no leadership, abandoning them to the civil authorities. Then it could be seen that the Catholic Church, despite its imposing superstructure, had provided no moral foundation on which the ordinary Rwandan could stand steady while rejecting the concept of genocide. Instead, it had contributed to the moulding of a population who believed it was right to do what they were told to do. The result, now, is demoralization in its most precise sense. Having been conditioned to do what they were told, the Hutu did what they were told but that, seen retrospectively, was wrong. Rwanda’s peasants are uneducated, but not stupid. After the event, genocide makes you think; why did you go along with it? Subsequent developments have proved that it wasn’t necessary to slaughter all Tutsi to preserve for the Hutu what had been gained by the 1959 revolution. So now there are many Rwandans unhappily adrift in an ocean of guilt, doubt, shame, denial, bewilderment, cynicism – and resentment of those who led them into hell.

There was only one person in the Cathedral this afternoon – a young man lying stretched out, face down, at the base of the altar, gently knocking his forehead on the floor, non-stop, and muttering what sounded like the same frantic prayer over and over again. I don’t think he registered my presence.

Were Evelyn Waugh in Africa he could base a sequel to Black Mischief on the antics associated with ‘the Burundi sanctions’. These date from August ’96 when a military – but bloodless – coup reinstated Pierre Buyoya as President. (Not much else is bloodless in present-day Burundi where the internecine annual death-toll is about 50,000.) Although the Buyoya régime is not recognized by any country, the UN has never ratified the sanctions, imposed by neighbouring states – themselves among the leading sanctions-busters.

Late each evening, when Butare is abed, one can hear the convoys of petrol tankers and articulated trucks revving up their engines before rumbling off to cross the border. A little earlier, some of the sanctions-busting planes have passed overhead beginning their descent to Bujumbura ninety miles to the south. They come from all directions – Belgium, Dubai, Angola, the Congo Republic and are significantly unafraid of over-flying the sanctions-imposing neighbouring states. Some are gigantic Antonov transporters; NGO workers visiting from Bujumbura report the Burundi army was never before so well-equipped, and the capital’s thriving French restaurants continue to be well supplied with fine wines and the very best of French cheeses and patés. Meanwhile Burundi’s main exports, coffee and tea, travel unhindered to Dar or Mombasa.

Black Mischief indeed, But unfunny for Burundi’s impoverished Hutu majority and not very funny either for the middle-class urban Tutsi – as Ahmed observed, when we met again this evening at Chez Nous. He is working at present near one of the main smuggling ferry-points and often sees rice, sweet potatoes and manioc being sold cheaply to Rwandans by Burundis desperate for cash with which to buy petrol and other imported goods. (Mainly imported from Kenya.) He occasionally visits Bujumbura and since August has observed the price of those foods more than doubling. ‘They could soon have famine,’ he said sombrely, ‘And they’ve run out of medical supplies and some seeds and all fertilisers. That’s lethal, like in this country 90 per cent are farmers. And guess who’s raking in the loot? The Tutsi élite could wash their shirts in champagne! It’s always the way with sanctions, I’ve seen it happen before. For those at the top, prices and profits go up – up into the stratosphere! I can’t get on with the Burundi Tutsi. If the Rwandan lot were the same in the old days, I’m not surprised they ran into trouble.’

At sunset, while returning to my NGO residence, a touching coincidence cheered me. Walking along Butare’s pleasantly decrepit main street, I heard shouts of ‘Mama Rosa! Mama Rosa!’ Turning, I saw a beaming young man, hawking Bukavu mobiles, running towards me – a November returnee. He was full of detailed enquiries about the real ‘Mama Rosa’ (his only way of drawing my attention) and about Rosa herself, who plainly has made a lasting impression on her Bukavu circle.

Two days hence I should be within sight of Bukavu, looking at No. 19 across the lake. Sandy – my hostess here – is driving down to Cyangugu and will be glad of company on the way. Her NGO has decided to pull its ex-pat team out of that area, for security reason, and they will need help with their packing up. A dismal occasion for them; they are unanimous and emphatic about wanting to stay on but the decision cannot be theirs.

Sandy and Serge are a splendid young couple, by far the most effective aid workers I’ve met in Rwanda. They have a hunch that one faction within the government, known to be eager to get rid of foreign NGOs, may not be too upset by the recent ex-pat murders. Incidentally, the original account of the Spaniards’ murders, given in a UN news-sheet, has proved to be a fabrication. Presumably it was circulated to disguise the fact that the RPA guards who shot at the robbers-turned-murderers as they were escaping with their loot, did not behave very sensibly. Only when the soldiers appeared did the robbers turn back and kill the Spaniards. But why did the UN swallow what was fed to them, without checking?

In Ruhengeri town, last week, an NGO security guard was murdered while on duty. When his young widow, with their first-born on her back, appealed to the NGO for a little financial assistance she was told they couldn’t be responsible for any of their staff’s dependents. ‘How to lose friends and antagonize people,’ commented Serge.

Sandy gave me a copy of a report published on 31 January by HRFOR who have recently become less indifferent to the plight of the survivors. According to their information, Hutu death-squads murdered at least 227 survivors in 1996 and are now threatening many Tutsi in their homes on the more remote hills of Ruhengeri, Gisenyi and Cyangugu prefectures. Several cases of poisoning have been reported – a family’s food contaminated and every member dying. The UN is now urging the Rwandan government ‘to take measures to protect the survivors from the militia’. This must cause much governmental foaming at the mouth. It reveals the UN at its most crass.

Today government spokesmen are publicizing the unoriginal theory that Fr Picard’s killer was one of the recently returned militia. They have announced that after the Spaniards’ murders the RPA killed more than eighty people in a ‘crack-down’ in the forest of Ruhengeri prefecture. ‘But did they’, wondered Sandy, ‘crack down on the right people.?’

In Ruhengeri town it is believed that the lone gunman is a Tutsi survivor, well known locally, who lost his mind during the genocide and was released not long ago from a psychiatric ward.

This evening a friend of Serge’s called during supper, a tall, slim, dark-skinned young man, with a narrow face, fine features, a rather haughty expression – the very prototype of the colonists’ ‘superior Hamitic Tutsi’. He told me he was born and grew up in Kinshasa where his father ran an import business.

I asked, ‘Are all your family here now?’ – assuming them to have been among the many who hastened home from Zaire when the RPF took over.

‘Only my aunt is here,’ replied Aloys. ‘My parents and three brothers and two sisters were killed in the genocide.’ He made that statement factually, almost casually, showing no trace of emotion, as I might say ‘I’m flying home on 15 March.’

I haven’t yet learned how to deal with this situation when I’m taken unawares. I looked at him, the look presumably conveying my reaction, but found myself incapable of speech. To have simply said, ‘I’m so very sorry’ or ‘How awful for you!’ would have seemed almost offensively banal. Yet those same words would have sounded natural, adequate, acceptable had his family been killed in an earthquake or air-crash.

Afterwards Serge explained that the family had returned in ’91 when Mobutu’s rejection by the West adversely affected father’s business. Aloys survived because he had gone to Mulindi in March ’94 to join the RPA.

5 FEBRUARY

Although Butare experienced more than its share of genocidal horrors, it does now feel less stained and shadowed than Kigali. ‘The spirit of place …’ Perhaps that’s at work, a tradition of
tolerance reasserting itself, exorcising the evil that took over in ’94.

This morning, in the old colonial suburb, I walked along wide tree-lined avenues, their surfaces softened by pine needles. Here large gardens – some given over to maize or beans – surround well-kept bungalows and important-looking villas, a remarkable number occupied by NGOs and various UN or EU agencies. I was searching for Juliette’s home, Juliette being a young university lecturer eager to talk to me about Donatilla Mujawimana. Had Sandy not identified her as Tutsi I’d never have guessed; she is among the many whose appearance contradicts the stereotype. As the askari admitted me, she emerged onto the verandah – a plump, short, golden-skinned twenty-five-year-old who interbraids auburn false hair with her own and wears heavy make-up and long flowing gowns.

Juliette brewed coffee in a large bright kitchen – shared with three other young lecturers – while telling me about herself. (She already knew quite a lot about me, having read my autobiography.) Father was a ’59-er, a businessman based in Kampala where Juliette was born. Most of the family returned to Kigali in ’92, when increasing Ugandan hostility towards the Banyarwanda in general was making things uncomfortable. Juliette, however, remained behind to study economics at Makerere University. In ’94 her mother decided to spend Easter with her. ‘She arrived on 3 April, very worried, saying things were terrible in Kigali – terrible tension.’ On 11 April Juliette’s father and two younger brothers were killed. Within the next week her three married siblings, their spouses and five of her eight nephews and nieces were killed. Like Aloys, she stated this in a flat, matter-of-fact voice, looking away from me towards the hibiscus outside the kitchen window. Then suddenly her expression hardened and she spoke through clenched teeth. She hopes the organisers of the genocide will be tracked down, extradited, tried in Rwandan courts and immediately executed, without giving Amnesty or HRFOR or anyone else time to protest. I can see her point.

We took our coffees to the verandah where climbing roses pink, white, yellow – entwined the pillars and we were overlooking an ex-lawn planted with cabbages and onions.

For two hours Juliette talked, The case of Donatilla Mujawimana is, in a sense, straightforward, but there are extraneous complications from which the outside world can – and must – learn lessons. On 21 April ’94 Donatilla, a poor Hutu peasant married to a Tutsi, was raped and publicly sexually mutilated in Kayenzi commune, Marenga sector, Kayonza cellule in the prefecture of Gitarama. Although thousands of Tutsi women were repeatedly raped and gang-raped – sometimes over a period of weeks – before being killed, this is the only known case of a Hutu woman being raped during the genocide. Donatilla had recently married and moved to Kayenzi commune and it is assumed her attacker mistook her for a Tutsi – or perhaps didn’t care, only wanted revenge for her husband’s escape from the Interahamwe. She remains semi-invalided as a result of the frequent beatings inflicted on her by the rapist while she was confined to a neighbour’s house. And her left foot is permanently deformed. When she was examined by Dr Maurice Bucagu, a gynaecologist and obstetrician, at his Kigali clinic he reported:

The left inner labia is the site of a lesion scar of about 2 cm long, situated half way between the clitoris and the fourchette, oblique from top to bottom and from left to right … The vulva has been scarred by a lesion which would correspond to an incision by a sharp object, for example scissors or a knife … There is still today a post-traumatic inflammatory oedema of the left ankle.

That was on 9 November 1996, when African Rights arranged a full medical examination for Donatilla. ‘Otherwise’, said Juliette, ‘she could not have afforded it. These are very poor peasants.’

On 20 March ’96 Donatilla, accompanied by her husband Gerard Gatanazi, her stepson Abiyingoma Habyarimana – now aged thirteen – and another witness, Scholastique Nikuze, travelled by taxi to Kigali and in Muhima police station accused Joseph Ruyenzi of rape and sexual mutilation. On the morning of 30 March Ruyenzi was arrested, a file having been completed and presented to the public prosecutor’s office and a warrant written out by Gaetan Ntibiringirwa who observed all the correct procedures. At the time of writing Ruyenzi remains in Kigali Central Prison.

I asked, ‘Why was he not accused much sooner?’

Juliette stared at me with something akin to contempt. ‘Can you not imagine what an ordeal it was to accuse him? To give such details to a tough bunch of gendarmerie? In Europe you’ve specially trained policewomen and counsellors and help-lines and so on for rape victims. Here we don’t. But our feelings are the same. And the mutilation – can you imagine yourself describing that to those men? She could never have done it without Gerard’s support and the evidence of her stepson and witness. For ages Gerard himself was traumatized, by her ordeal and his own while being hunted. He needed time to get to a state where he could accuse. What made it all worse for him – the two families were old friends. Ruyenzi’s parents lived close to Gerard’s ruga and his mother was godmother to Gerard’s mother.’

In 1994 Joseph Ruyenzi was a teacher, a prefect of studies at a Nyabikenke college, and as such greatly respected by the youth of his home commune, Kayenzi. Both there and in Nyabikenke he had been known since 1990 as a Hutu Power extremist, a political activist who worked closely with senior commune officials, some of whom preceded him to prison – as did two of his brothers and several other relatives. When the genocide started he became one of Kayenzi’s militia leaders and was relentless in his pursuit of individual Tutsi who, like Gerard, had eluded the death-squads and were in hiding. One such, Noel Habyarimana, tried to take his family to the ‘safety’ of the bishopric of Kabgayi. At a road-block his wife and six children were murdered; he escaped by a fluke and took to the bush. Ruyenzi then paid three Interahamwe for the use of their hunting dogs to track him down but he escaped again, this time thanks to the quick thinking of a Hutu neighbour. In Kayenzi many Hutu hid Tutsi, usually children. To find these, Ruyenzi announced that Caritas, a Christian NGO, was seeking families who had Tutsi ‘lodgers’ to give them food rations and cash. The gullible Hutu obediently gave lists of their ‘lodgers’ to those who were allegedly distributing Caritas goodies. At once the militia toured the sheltering rugas, killing all the Tutsi including three babies.

I asked another of my silly questions. ‘Why did anyone trust Ruyenzi, at that stage?’

‘Because of his status,’ replied Juliette, impatiently, ‘They were very simple people. and he had authority as an educated man, a teacher in an important school, from an influential family.

As the RPA approached Gitarama, Ruyenzi moved to Cyangugu, returning to his parents’ home in September ’94. He then went job-hunting in Kigali, where Radio Rwanda employed him in January ’95 as a Kinyarwanda news reader.

‘Radio Rwanda is government owned and run,’ said Juliette. ‘It’s too easy for killers to get away with it and settle in good jobs in Kigali. Will the Tribunal ever find anyone brave enough to give evidence against Ruyenzi? Donatilla and Gerard have had to move, they daren’t stay in Kayenzi. The family are intimidating everyone who could testify against any of the ones in prison. They’re sure they can safely murder witnesses, that’s what “the culture of impunity” means. If no one will smash it we can have no justice, I know exactly who killed my family. A lot of us do., But we can’t find justice.’

At some stage Ruyenzi had joined the League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights in Rwanda (LIPRODHOR), which forms part of the Collective of Human Rights Leagues and Associations (CLADHO). In April ’94 the chairman of LIPRODHOR was Innocent Mazimpaka; he, too, has been accused of rape during the genocide and has been defended by both LIPRODHOR and CLADHO.

Within two days of Ruyenzi’s arrest Amnesty International had launched a campaign on his behalf, issuing one of its Urgent Action letters in which he was described as a ‘journalist’ – though a news reader is not a journalist and previously he had worked only as a teacher. The Amnesty letter referred to ‘government victimization of journalists in Rwanda’ and urged its members to demand ‘information on the charges against Joseph Ruyenzi’ and insist that he be ‘given access to legal advice’. It suggested that his arrest might be linked to ‘attempts to exercise his right to freedom of expression as a journalist’ . But neither then nor later did Amnesty produce any evidence that Ruyenzi ever tried to put together or broadcast programmes offensive to the government. And Ruyenzi himself has stated that he sees no link between his arrest and his Radio Rwanda work.

Amnesty International, the world’s largest human rights organzation, has a well-deserved reputation for helping the helpless by focussing public attention on the misdeeds of oppressive governments. But in this case its Central Africa Team’s shameful irresponsibility caused Donatilla – whose name was never even mentioned by Amnesty – much extra grief and hurt. Moreover, Amnesty undermined her credibility within Rwanda where peasant women have no status and virtually no legal rights and are unlikely to be believed if such an honoured organization is seen to be on the side of the accused.

On 30 March 1996 Amnesty knew as much as I did about Joseph Ruyenzi and since it ????? the true explanation for his arrest, given by the Director of the Office of Information, it should have undertaken its own independent investigation of the case. Instead, it continued to run its damaging campaign until 1 July ’96 when Ruyenzi was removed from the Urgent Action network. Even then Amnesty failed to admit its error and counteract the misinformation it had spread around the world. Yet in March ’96 it had communicated to the Rwandan government that ‘unless impunity in Rwanda is brought to an end, human rights abuses are likely to continue’.

Meanwhile Reporters Sans Frontiéres (RSF), the French organization dedicated to ‘preserving press freedom’, had also become involved. On 1 April it issued a statement claiming that Ruyenzi had been ‘arrested by soldiers from the RPA, reportedly charged with participating in clandestine meetings and there has been no news of his whereabouts since his arrest’ – all of which was pernicious nonsense. On the same date RSF wrote to President Bizimungu:

Reporters Sans Frontieres is informing you of its extreme concern over the matter of Joseph Ruyenzi and requests you to instantly do everything in your power to identify the place where he is currently detained and, unless he is charged, to obtain his immediate and unconditional release.

Not until mid-May did RSF try to establish the facts. Yet it has its own correspondent in Rwanda, the editor of a Catholic newspaper, Fr Andre Sibomana – based in Kabgayi, close to Kayenzi. However, unlike Amnesty, RSF did finally acknowledge their mistake in another letter to President Bizimungu (5 July) admitting that their inquiry ‘enabled them to collect damning testimonies against Joseph Ruyenzi’.

‘The worst thing for Donatilla and Gerard’, said Juliette, ‘was the local media reaction to all this international fuss. Some articles made it seem like Donatilla was lying so Ruyenzi must be innocent. She’s still miserable and humiliated about this. If you could see them now you’d cry. They’ve lost their home and their land and are living off corners of other people’s plots. They’ll never get back their physical health. Donatilla suffers terribly with every period though she was normal before – a very strong young woman, walking miles. She’ll never again have the strength for farming but she’s qualified for nothing else. She can’t carry anything on her head, all the massue blows left it so sensitive.’ [A massue is a nail-studded wooden club.] ‘They used it too on her breasts and feet. Gerard has to do all the farming and fetch the water and most of the work at home. But he was badly beaten before he escaped so he’s never well. Donatilla is just waiting for AIDS, like all the other rape victims who survived. The only thing they’ve left is loving each other very much.’

Juliette offered me lunch then but I seemed to have lost my appetite. As I was leaving she lent me her copy of a recently published African Rights report – Joseph Ruyenzi: Prisoner Without a Conscience. ‘In there’, she said, ‘you can read all the details I couldn’t talk about.’

Walking back to the town centre, I found myself seething with rage. Not about Donatilla’s case in particular but about the general lack of concern among outsiders for all survivors, coupled with their tenderness for prisoners like Ruyenzi. Linked to that is the ease with which exiled (fugitive) genocide organizers deceive those around them – are taken at face value, made welcome, helped by being given good jobs in various African countries and in France, Belgium, Canada, Scandinavia and who knows where else. The case of Innocent Mazimpaka, LIPRODHOR ex-chairman, illustrates this ‘denial syndrome’ at its most scandalous. In April ’94 he was employed by a Dutch NGO, the Netherlands Development Organization (SNV). His younger brother, Fabien Rugwizangoga, was burgomaster of their home commune of Gatare in Cyangugu prefecture. Gatare’s Tutsi population on 6 April was 12,263, of whom twenty-one survived. Mazimpaka used SNV vehicles to transport death-squads and grenades and to drive into groups of Tutsi by way of showing onlookers how they should be treated, He planned and led the 11 April Parish of Hanika massacre, a quasi-military operation which led to the deaths (usually slow) of between 3500 and 4000 Tutsi who had taken refuge in the Parish church. And that was only the start of it … Why then did SNV, a major Dutch aid agency, continue to employ Mazimpaka, giving him a job in their Benin office? And when he was accused of genocidal crimes why did they try to defend him by employing dirty tricks? What is going on here? And how much of what is going on has to do with the sheer superficiality of the West’s concern about an African genocide? Leading to an unwillingness to spend time, energy and money on establishing the truth and punishing the guilty. Also, as Gérard Prunier has noticed, ‘Events not seen on a TV screen do not exist in contemporary Western society. And TV coverage of the genocide was not available, given the technical ear impossibility of catching killers in the act. But there must be more to it than that. One can discern complicated reasons for the widespread reluctance, outside Rwanda, to accept that the genocide was organised by those who had all the advantages of education, money, power and the respect of the peasantry. Can outsiders only cope with the horror by labelling it ‘primitive savagery’, thus distancing it from ‘our world’? The criminals being those Rwandans most influenced by ‘our world’ – the Hutu a visiting foreigner would most comfortably consort with – is, apparently, too much for us to stomach. With that, there goes a shying away from detail. To study, for instance, the not exceptional brutality of Donatilla’s rape and mutilation means confronting the sort of violently pornographic behaviour that would have delighted the Marquis de Sade . Perhaps it’s natural for most people to shy away from such details.

6 FEBRUARY

At present we are all more tense than we realize. Yesterday afternoon I called in to Sandy’s office to fetch a book and my heart gave a little lurch when I saw her face – very pale, her eyes strangely blank. She had just heard by radio that about three hours earlier – it was then 5.00p.m. – five HRFOR monitors, travelling in two marked UN vehicles, had been murdered in the Nyungwe forest some forty miles from here. They were a Cambodian, an Englishman and three Rwandans who had spent the previous night in Gitarama and were en route to Cyangugu.

Only when Sandy joined me at sunset, at the end of her ten-hour day, did she explain that Graham Turnbull and Sastra Chim-Chan were friends of hers and Serge’s. They had been planning to attend Graham’s Kigali engagement party this weekend and to help him and his Ugandan fiancée write out the wedding invitations.

Later, more details came by radio, some too gruesome to be recorded here. One of Sandy’s Kigali colleagues was also driving to Cyangugu yesterday, to help the departing team move out, and half an hour after the ambush he came on the scene. The UN vehicles had turned off the main road to visit a commune prison two miles up a dirt-track. In the forest they were fired on and surrounded by more than thirty men; there are conflicting reports about whether or not some or all of them wore uniforms. One driver survived, seriously injured but conscious and able to give evidence. Then he died on the plane that took the bodies to Kigali from Cyangugu airstrip. Had he been able to stay in Cyangugu hospital he might have recovered but he was refused admission; the authorities feared an attack on the building to eliminate him, as a witness, Clearly the RPA are considered incapable of protecting a hospital – not very reassuring … It’s assumed the ambush was carefully planned; many in the commune would have known in advance about this HRFOR prison visit which had to be pre-arranged with the burgomaster.

Sandy’s Field Director forbade her to drive anywhere today – not that either of us felt lie taking that route through the Nyungwe forest. This evening the three evacuees from Cyangugu arrived to stay here overnight. They are in a state of shock, bemused and grief-stricken. They Cyangugu NGO community was small and Graham and Sastra were close friends of theirs. They spent Christmas together, co-ordinated their days off to do things together, truly enjoyed each other’s company. The trio were utterly devastated at the thought of Grahm’s fiancée arriving in Kigali today, looking forward to the reunion on Saturday. Sastra’s wife, too, was looking forward to a reunion; he would have been flying home next week at the end of his Rwandan contract. Heart-breaking – and yet, I thought, what a tiny drop this is in Rwanda’s ocean of misery.

The UNHCR have become quite hysterical and seem to be assuming totalitarian powers over the NGOs who work with them; all ex-pats have been ordered to abandon their projects and hole up in Kigali ‘until the situation becomes clearer’. How absurd can you get! And surely this is a tactical error, giving in to whatever faction (a moot point) wishes to rid Rwanda of foreign NGOs.

My plan is to taxi to Gitarama tomorrow morning, stay the night at another NGO residence, then obediently take refuge in Kigali. At noon today the government broadcast a ‘request’ to all foreign nationals not to enter the prefectures of Ruhengeri, Gisenyi, Kibuye and Cyangugu where the RPA are about to embark on a ‘crack-down’ against ex-FAR and Interahamwe ‘infiltrators’. Bye-bye Bukavu!

GITARAMA, 7 FEBRUARY

This morning Bess, my Gitarama hostess, together with representatives of all other NGOs based here, attended a two and a half hour security meeting with the prefecture’s senior RPA and gendarmerie officers. The ex-pats were assured that they are valued in Gitarama and must stay and will be cherished by the security forces. This residence is to have a military guard from sunset to sunrise and a strict 7.00p.m. curfew has been imposed on all aid workers, ex-pat and Rwandan. This evening Bess’s young Egyptian colleague was harshly reprimanded for arriving home eight minutes late. And quite right too; if the Rwandan authorities are expected to take NGO security seriously, then those being protected must be seen to take it equally seriously.

It was also proposed that in future military vehicles should escort NGO vehicles on their tours of the hills. A tricky proposal, threatening to compromise NGO neutrality – given the deep distrust existing between some returnees and the RPA. And perhaps a counter-productive proposal; the RPA is now influenced to an unwholesome extent by fanatically anti-Hutu returnees from Burundi – mostly in the officer class. And many of the recent young conscripts are ill-disciplined Tutsi survivors who cannot reasonably be expected to operate impartially should events bring about any confrontation with their ‘fellow-Banyarwanda’. As Pius said to me in Kigali, ‘Our army is not a swarm of angles.’ In this country it’s impractical for NGOs to work under armed protection; if they don’t feel safe on their own, they must go home.

Bess reckons the RPA commanders in each prefecture usually know when a particular NGO is at risk and will always provide what protection they can. But my fellow-guest, recently evacuated from Ruhengeri, disagrees. In that town she had quite a different experience at NGO security conferences; it seemed the local RPA viewed ex-pats as a nuisance, rather than as people who should be encouraged to stay around by giving them more protection than the rest of the population.

Going walkabout this morning, a rough track took me steeply up from Gitarama’s uninspiring colonial town centre towards a large hilltop market. En route I came on a busy district of old arcaded shops, stocking no more than the bare essentials, with tailors of both sexes busy on the verandahs and hawkers sitting beside their mountains of beans or flour, displayed by the wayside on UN tarpaulins.

Here an elderly barefooted woman, small and thin and sharp-featured, suddenly rushed towards me, laughing shrilly, and slapped me very hard on the back. When I extended a hand she seized my forearm with both hands, stared intently into my eyes – a crazed, unblinking stare – then hugged me with manic strength, pinning my right arm to my side, and wouldn’t let go. Her face was anguished, her speech a hysterical babbling. The stench from her ragged shift and ravelling cardigan was overpowering. Flinging her head back she began to howl and pant, tightening her grip on me until I feared for my ribs. All around us, everyone stopped everything to stare and laugh. With my free hand I gently stroked her forehead and tangled and dirty hair: there was nothing to be said, even if we shared a language. Gradually she calmed down, released me – then flung herself on the ground and began to sob silently. As I waked on the spectators, still laughing, broke into excited comment on the incident. I felt, and still feel, beyond commenting. Except to not the odd fact that an incident of this nature could stimulate among Rwandans something approaching vivacity.

Later I was told Alphonsine’s story, well known in Gitarama. A Hutu married to a Tutsi, she saw her own brothers – three of them – hacking her husband to death. Her eight children, aged from three to twenty-five, were killed. This was not a mass-slaughter; three times within a month the Interahamwe – always including her brothers – came to her ruga seeking her hidden children. She pleased with her brothers at least to spare their three-year-old nephew but they beheaded him in her presence. A resourceful woman, she had successfully smuggled two grandchildren (a baby and toddler) to a distant friend’s ruga, after her husband was killed but before their mother’s death. (Even amidst the prevailing terror, this was an unusual ploy – to separate a nursing baby from its mother.) At the end of May, the doctor who was among the local genocide organizers called a public meeting and announced that order had been restored, the Interahamwe disbanded and everyone could come out of hiding. Next day, when Alphonsine fetched her grandchildren from their refuge, they were murdered at a road-block – as were all the other Tutsi who had believed the doctor. She tried to hang herself but failed. Then she went mad.

KIGALI, 8 FEBRUARY

We left early for Kigali; Bess and her local staff had to attend a 9.00a.m. security conference called by their own NGO. On Monday they must attend a general conference for all NGOs who shelter under the UNHCR umbrella; they are to be given ‘personal protection’ advice by a security expert from the British Embassy. How much of all this panic is inspired by a UN over-reaction? How real is the risk to any individual, percentage-wise? Or is that a silly question? This morning Bess quoted a veteran aid worker of her acquaintance whose motto was: ‘Unless engaged in saving lives, don’t risk your own’ – which makes sense. Certainly few lives are being saved in Rwanda by the present activities of all those NGOs and EU and UN agencies, now numbering 180.

Soon after the Spaniards’ murders the government issued a soothing statement: ‘Good-will prevails between Rwandan officials and NGO workers despite the co-ordination problems, which are to be expected when there are so many organizations doing the same work. Those problems are not the fault of the individuals at the various NGOs, but of their respective headquarters which sent them out on overlapping mandates.’

That statement also criticized the new UNHCR refugee integration plan. ‘It turned out that the “plan” was a fund-raising tool sent only to donors.’ No wonder people question UNHCR statistics such as the totally implausible claim made on 24 January that ‘Hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees and displaced persons are trapped within Eastern Zaire.’

On the way to Kigali our driver told us, ‘Within a few days they’d identified the killers of the Spaniards. Three ex-FAR soldiers – and they’d a friend, a local security guard, who let them into the Medicos del Mundo compound. Two of them soon died in custody. It’s the quickest way to deal with people like that.