It happens on Friday, April 15, at the church in Ntarama, in the middle of a eucalyptus forest. From the moment the radio announces President Juvénal Habyarimana’s assassination, Tutsi families from the nearest hills—Kibungo, Nyarunazi, and Kanzenze—rush to take refuge inside the church enclosure, for, with each pogrom over the past fifty years, they have continued to believe that they would find protection within the walls of God.
At around eleven o’clock in the morning, whatever illusions they have vanish along with the men escaping into the forest and bush, men too poorly armed to defend themselves against those making their way up the hill: a column of soldiers and interahamwe ahead of a horde of farmers, brandishing machetes, axes, spades, and all sorts of other implements. The farmers have been brought by truck from Nyamata, about twenty kilometers away, or led on foot from their fields through the woods. The soldiers use grenades to breach the walls of the church courtyard. They surge forward weapons-first, hurling themselves on the families huddled in the grass. Then they storm inside. They cut down anything that moves: the elderly, women, and the children whose mothers haven’t already left them behind. They hack until their arms ache, transforming over the next few hours a mass of people into heaps of corpses. When they finally withdraw in the afternoon, the killers leave in their wake about five thousand dead and several hundred dying, whom they return to finish off at the same time the following day. Some people survive, most often shielded from the blades by the corpses fallen on top of them.
Among the survivors is Janvier Munyaneza, a nine-year-old boy who remembered the slaughter in Life Laid Bare: “All we could hear was the commotion of the attacks. We were almost paralyzed amid the machetes. People were almost dead before the fatal blow. My first sister asked a Hutu she recognized to kill her without making her suffer. He said yes, pulled her out by the arm onto the grass, and struck her with his club. Then a close neighbor, named Habyarimana, shouted that she was pregnant. He sliced open her belly with a stroke of his knife. I weaved my way through the corpses, but unfortunately a boy managed to hit me with his bar. I fell flat on top of the corpses. I didn’t budge. I made my eyes dead.”
For sixteen years, the brutality of the murder of his sister, Ernestine Kaneza, was lost beneath the memory of five thousand corpses. Then came the gaçaça trials. During one of the hearings, held beneath the branches of an acacia tree not far from the church, a young soldier asked permission to speak. It was Janvier. He had come home on leave from the Kivu region. He wanted to testify.
Before we hear his account, let us return to those first days of the genocide on the Ntarama hill, turning to the more detailed recollections of his brother Vincent, who, three years his senior, farms the family plot on a hillside in Kiganwa. He recalls: “It was during the April school vacation. A cowherd and I were leading the cows to pasture when his eldest brother came shouting, ‘We absolutely have to leave. The Hutus have started killing in Kanzenze.’ We ran to the church, which is only a few kilometers away. We camped near the enclosure without going directly in so we could keep an eye on the cows. My mama decided to make a break for Kigali, taking the smallest children with her. I tried to catch them. Looking down from where we were, I could see the men hacking them with machetes on the bridge. I retraced my steps.
“On the fifteenth, the interahamwe arrived singing. They smashed open the doors of the church. I had the speedy legs of someone used to chasing after cows. I raced down to the marshes behind my papa, my oldest brother, and many other men. Janvier’s short legs kept him from coming with us. He stayed with his two sisters in the church. That night, those of us who had survived the marshes went back up to the church to save anyone who could still be saved. It was my papa who dragged Janvier out from under the corpses. He seemed dazed, but he was still alive. He somehow found the words to tell us how our sister Ernestine had been taken out of the church by Vincent Habyarimana and Modeste Mfizi. He called them by name, without hesitation, because both men were our close neighbors in Kiganwa. My papa examined the corpses behind the church. He found Ernestine sliced open from her genitals to chin, with the baby scattered in pieces next to her. It was only during the gaçaças that we learned the sad fate of my other sister, Christine Mukaruhogo. How she was taken away by the mob of killers to the Kibungo town square, stripped naked, and macheted to the howls and jeers of a huge crowd.”
According to Vincent’s account, a group of seven friends participated in the killing of April 15, including Vincent Habyarimana, Modeste Mfizi, Emmanuel Bampoliki, and Fulgence Bunani. The latter ordinarily worked with his gang of Adalbert, Pio, Pancrace, and Alphonse—with whom I wrote Machete Season—but on that day he threw in with some others whom he had met along the way. We already know what happened next. Janvier, Vincent, and their father survived hidden in the papyrus of the Cyugaro marshes. The killers fled with their families to the Kivu region in eastern Congo, where they settled in a camp for two years. In 1996, troops from the RPF led them back to Rwanda by force.1 Upon their return, most were imprisoned at the penitentiary in Rilima, where they were tried for the first time. Ernestine’s father didn’t testify, having died from exhaustion prior to the trials, nor did his sons, who were still too young. That explains why the murder wasn’t mentioned at the time. The seven men received prison terms of about fifteen years apiece, all except Habyarimana, who was sentenced to life for his role as one of the ringleaders of the expeditions.
Seven years later, in 2003, all except Habyarimana benefited from an amnesty law and returned to their land. Fulgence reunited with his wife, Jacqueline Mukamana, and his two sons, Idelphonse and Jean-Damascène. He was a tireless farmer. At daybreak every morning he headed out, hoe in hand, to his field near the river. He built a larger house to make room for the arrival of new children and started distilling urwagwa again. He found his way back to church and to the cabaret in Nyarunazi, where he would share a bottle with his accomplices Pancrace, Pio, and others, like Ignace.
When the gaçaça court opened on his hill, Fulgence wasn’t overly concerned by his many summonses to appear beneath the tall tree. At each hearing he kept to the tacit arrangement offered by the authorities: that the accused who cooperated and admitted to crimes would leave just as free as they had arrived. Neither he nor anyone else had anticipated that, one fine morning in Rilima prison, Habyarimana would ask to testify in the hope of seeing his sentence reduced. That was when Janvier first heard of what was afoot and decided to join Habyarimana at the trial. He described the details of his sister Ernestine’s murder and stated, “From where I was in the church, my eyes saw clear as day Habyarimana and Mfizi lead my sister outside.”
A long silence fell over the proceedings. The gaçaça’s presiding judge, Célestin Mangazini, remembers it well: “We looked at each other, dumbstruck. No words came to our lips because of the details of the young woman’s disembowelment. Then a terrible commotion took hold of the audience. Without further ado, we sentenced the two defendants to fifteen years.”
No sooner had the ruling been delivered than Mfizi found himself back in prison with his accomplice, Habyarimana. Furious, Mfizi lodged an appeal in which he promised to reveal the whole truth of what had occurred. The authorities named a neutral gaçaça court in Musenyi, a hill thirty kilometers away. Emmanuel was called to appear under the acacia. He promptly denounced his six sidekicks and then, ever the sly one, took advantage of nightfall to slip away into the eucalyptus, after which he eventually escaped to Uganda.
The presiding judge immediately summoned the six other men. It was the first time that Fulgence’s name had been mentioned in the case. Utterly unaware of what was transpiring at the gaçaça, Fulgence offered his swollen feet as an excuse to spend the Sunday quietly at home. He would have cause to regret it. In his absence, the gaçaça judge repeatedly called upon the men either to assume responsibility for the crime or to denounce the killer. Each denied his own involvement more adamantly than the next. The angry crowd grumbled.
As Célestin Mangazini recalls, “If they confessed, we weren’t going to send them back to prison. Clemency had opened its arms to those who asked forgiveness. Pardons had been granted right and left. But they were too ashamed. In front of their neighbors’ eyes, none of them could admit to having so brutally cut a young pregnant lady and her child. The culprits clung to their denials. Anger seized the judges and the public. They were shocked and outraged. The verdict rang out, and it was merciless: life in prison for them all. It was the last day of the gaçaças, the final decision of a supplementary session on a Sunday evening. It was the group’s bad luck, if I may put it that way.”
Five kilometers down the hill, on the stony path that leads to Kiganwa, Fulgence had little reason to suspect that his fate had just taken a very sour turn. His wife, Jacqueline, confirms as much: “It was dark outside, a Sunday, after supper. Customers were passing a bottle around in our cabaret, but Fulgence was already resting his feet in bed. Myself, I was cleaning utensils in the yard. He went out to pee. I heard the customers shouting. I went out, my little girl sticking close behind me. That’s how she saw him, her child’s eyes wide, staring at her papa tied up with rope. Three men pushed him along. I ran after them to put a jacket over his bare shoulders. I snuck the money from the evening’s drink sales from his pocket. The night was especially dark, a Sunday with no way out. I feared that they might simply kill him on the way, which is why I sent the two boys to follow behind the little procession. Was Fulgence ignorant of what was happening at the gaçaça? Yes. He knew the group had been called, but the summons said he only needed to give testimony. He wasn’t thinking of new charges. His feet had swollen—the pain shot up as high as his hips. He sent a boy to provide his excuse. And that’s how they tied him up and dragged him off to Kibungo. At the gaçaça, the verdict had already been announced for quite some time; the van had already taken the judges off into the night. Nothing was left to say. He was jailed at the sector office. The next day a truck brought him to Rilima.
“Do I know if Fulgence took part in the killings? I would think so, since he went off with the expeditions like so many other men. But Ernestine’s murder, that’s a big thing. I remember the night of the killing, on the fifteenth. Who doesn’t remember it? He came home with someone called Sylvère. They were sweating—they smelled of sweat through and through. They sat down, they didn’t ask for anything to drink. They seemed somewhat traumatized. They were panicked by the bad things done. Fulgence put down his machete and said, ‘What we saw today goes beyond anything so far. May God forgive me and help me not to go back!’
“If that was the day he became a butcher, wouldn’t his wife have noticed in bed?”