IN RILIMA

On the road to Burundi, a path breaks off into the dust of the arid Bugesera toward Rilima. At the Gako military base, one leaves the last of the eucalyptus forests behind. The savanna grasses begin to grow yellow and short, the scraggly bushes knot, and first the banana groves and then the bean fields disappear. An undulating ocher expanse opens out under the dazzling sun for as far as the eye can see. At a certain point, the path plunges down toward the shore of a lake. Crocodiles slide through a tangle of aquatic grasses without rippling the water on the lookout for incautious birds and, as rumor has it, unfortunate fishermen.

People say that forty years ago the pastures belonged to free-ranging buffalo herds. Visitors crossed paths with elephants, pythons, and the occasional lion. Today, sinewy Ankole cattle graze in the bush, nodding their long, lyre-shaped horns, which attest to their noble bloodlines and account for their resistance to thirst.1 Thanks to their valiant pedigree, they have been exempted from the country’s agricultural reforms, and needn’t bother with cowsheds, road crossings, or ropes tied to trees. Nothing has changed since my last trip through here. The ocher earth surrounds squares of green crops, whose water points draw women, often young girls, walking single file to fill the jerry cans they carry on their heads or on their bicycles.

The penitentiary’s high beige walls overlook the landscape from atop a hill. A gate has replaced the former barrier of a simple rope, and flower-bedecked parking lots now welcome the SUVs of VIP visitors from the Red Cross, the UN, and various other humanitarian organizations. A crowd of women and children have settled under a cluster of trees beside the prison walls. They chat in small groups amid heaps of bundles from home. Some have lit fires and set out their cooking pots; a good many are asleep on mats. The women here rose before sunrise to arrive in time for visiting hours, carrying supplies or documents for their men to sign.

Nearby, pink-uniformed inmates attend to water duties, weed the flower beds, and unload the trucks. Farther off, on the esplanade from which a path leads down to the lake, a group of squatting prisoners, tools over their shoulders, await the whistle signaling them to depart for the prison plantations, which extend over several dozen acres. The men will return in the evening intoning work songs, their shoulders bent under sacks filled to feed their fellow inmates and enrich the prison administration.

On a blackboard in the intendent’s office, the figures for the day’s population are written out in chalk: 2,574 génocidaires, including 101 women, and 497 common criminals, 71 of whom are over seventy years old. Although the prison population has decreased by two-thirds since the presidential pardons in 2003, the clamor one hears from within the walls hasn’t diminished. The din of beating drums can’t quite drown out the rhythms of booming hymns; the muezzins’ calls still vie with the preachers’ sermons; the church choirs compete with the shouts from volleyball games and the syncopated singing of inmates at work.

Only two men remain from the group of prisoners who spoke in Machete Season: Fulgence Bunani, who was sent back to prison following a gaçaça trial, and Joseph-Désiré Bitero, whose death sentence was commuted to a life term. His daughter Fabiola had earlier jumped into my van to join me. The wait drags on. She grows restless, not knowing if her father will be allowed to come out, and anxious, too, about making the most of the few minutes authorized for their visit. She was four years old when her father was imprisoned. She attends a technical high school near Kibungo Prefecture. She is a beautiful young girl, at once cheerful and timid. In an ordinary family, she would have been strolling arm in arm with a sweetheart and perhaps by now a husband. Instead, she is by herself and stays constantly on her guard. One can sense her suspicions, but her distrust no doubt has less to do with people per se than with the way they look at her.

She expressed no hesitation about telling her story. On the contrary, she seized the occasion of our interviews to share her experiences, which she had long kept buried in herself. She didn’t finagle her way out of answering and she didn’t impose conditions on my questions, as I had feared. She shares her mother’s plaintive voice, which has become a way for her to convey her uneasiness. One rarely sees her in Nyamata, except at the market or occasionally at the Cultural Center; she won’t be found with a group of girlfriends. She takes on odd jobs during school vacations, sometimes on building sites. Otherwise she spends her time at home. Her gaze, like that of her brother Fabrice, hints at past hardships.

Joseph-Désiré finally arrives, approaching with the rolling gait of someone accustomed to being watched. He has a stout and supple sway to the shoulders and wears white sneakers a touch less chic than the boxing shoes he sported during our last visit. Although his star as an interahamwe chief has waned among the prisoners, his popularity surprisingly persists. He remains for everyone the same man he has always been. He lingers in long hearty greetings. His eighteen years of prison have scarcely left a trace. The region’s fresh dry air and the prohibition on alcohol undoubtedly compensate for the effects of living in such close quarters. He has hardly gained a pound; he sleeps well, has good digestion, and suffers only from rheumatism and from fevers during malaria epidemics. “Things seem to be going all right,” he says. “I’ve gotten used to this life, spending my days keeping my mind busy on pointless things.” All the same, a certain weariness emerges from his words; the firmness of conviction that was once so recognizable in him seems to have flagged. For years he expended his energy on refining his rhetoric, filing appeals, contesting evidential points, and decrying procedural errors. Although the strict logic of his thought would doubtless rule out the possibility, he probably senses that his litigiousness eventually undermined any hope of benefiting from the government’s policy of reconciliation. He may suspect—although he has always been a difficult man to read—that by rejecting contrition, by ignoring his victims, by refusing to open his eyes to the past, indeed, by endlessly calculating, he badly miscalculated.

A number of years ago, in the little garden near the prison wall, he explained to me: “Any civilized person must take responsibility for his actions. However, life sometimes presents us with actions that one can’t admit to out loud. Me, I was the leader of the interahamwe for the district … I assumed that responsibility. Not everyone is capable of acknowledging such a truth. Confessing to such a serious sin demands more than courage. And telling the details of something so extraordinary can be sheer hell—for the person who does the telling as well as for those who listen. Because afterward, if you have revealed a situation that society refuses to believe, a truth that society considers inconceivable, it may hate you beyond all measure … A man is a man, even on death row. If he has the opportunity to keep quiet about a terrible, or even diabolical, truth, he will try to keep that truth quiet forever. Too bad if his silence relegates him to the status of a savage brute.”

If there is a time when one knows he is being sincere, it is when he expresses his regrets as a father and teacher for having ruined his children’s education. As he told me one day, explaining why he returned from Congo after two years of exile, aware that a death sentence inevitably awaited him in Nyamata: “I knew that the prisons were overflowing and that a good many people were dying there. But I wanted to return to my country so that my family might still have the chance at an ordinary life on the parcel. I didn’t want my daughters to end up like some shabby derelicts in a faraway forest.”