ONE OF THE few things that the fleeing Hutu Power vandals left in ready-to-use condition was Rwanda’s central prison system, thirteen red-brick fortifications, built to house a total of twelve thousand inmates. During the genocide, the gates were opened so that convicts could be put to work, killing and collecting corpses, but the jails didn’t stay vacant for long. By April of 1995, a year after the killings, at least thirty-three thousand men, women, and children had been arrested for alleged participation in genocide. At the end of that year, the number had climbed to sixty thousand. Some prisons were expanded, new ones were built, and hundreds of smaller community lockups were crammed to overflowing, but the space could not keep up with the demand. By the end of 1997, at least a hundred twenty-five thousand Hutus accused of crimes during the genocide were incarcerated in Rwanda.
A few soldiers usually stood around the periphery of Rwanda’s prisons, but there were no guards on the inside. Prisoners and soldiers both considered themselves safer this way. But the government’s fear of sending soldiers into the prisons did not extend to foreign visitors, and I was always permitted to bring a camera. This puzzled me. Rwanda’s prisons had not elicited favorable press. They were widely viewed as a human rights catastrophe.
Although the tightly packed inmates were all accused of terrible
violence, they were generally calm and orderly; fights among them were said to be rare, and killings unheard of. They greeted visitors amiably, often with smiles and with hands extended for a shake. At the women’s prison in Kigali, I found three hundred forty women lying around on the floor, barely clad in the stuffy heat of a few cramped cells and corridors; babies crawled underfoot, and two inmate nuns in crisp white habits said mass in a corner. At Butare prison, old men stood in a downpour with bits of plastic over their heads while young boys, scrunched together in a small cell, sang a chorus of “Alouette.” In the men’s block of Kigali prison, I was conducted past acrobatic and choral groups, a Scout troop, and three men reading Tintin by the captain of the prisoners and his adjutant, who wielded a short baton to clear a path through the tangled ranks of prisoners. The captain kept calling out, “Here’s a journalist from the United States,” and the huddled men, squatting at our feet, clapped mechanically and made little bowing motions. It occurred to me that this was the famous mob mentality of blind obedience to authority which was often described in attempts to explain the genocide.
Rwanda’s conventional hierarchies had reconstituted themselves behind the prison walls; “intellectuals,” civil servants, professionals, clerics, and merchants had the least uncomfortable cells, while the mass of peasants and laborers made do outdoors, crouching in the bony folds of their neighbors’ limbs in unroofed courtyards, and referred all questions to their leaders. Why did they put up with it? Why didn’t they riot? Why were attempted escapes so rare in Rwanda, when the guard system was so weak? A rampaging mob of five thousand prisoners could have easily overrun the walls of Kigali’s central prison and severely destabilized the capital, sparking a major crisis for the government they despised, even a general uprising if there was support for it. Nobody could entirely explain the passivity in the prisons; the best guess was that, having been assured that they would be slaughtered by the RPF, and finding themselves instead receiving regular visits
from friendly international relief workers, reporters, and diplomats, the prisoners were simply astonished to be alive and did not care to push their luck.
Between my visits to the prisons, I stopped by to see General Kagame in his office at the Ministry of Defense. I was wondering why the government exposed itself to bad press about the prisons, and how he interpreted the prisoners’ apparent calm acceptance of their horrible conditions. Kagame answered my question with a question of his own: “If a million people died here, who killed them?”
“A lot of people,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Have you found many that admit they participated?”
I hadn’t. In the early days after the genocide, it had been easy for visitors to find perpetrators, in the jails and the refugee camps and also on the streets of Rwanda, who admitted to taking part in the killings, and even boasted about it. Yet by the time I began visiting Rwanda, the criminals had recognized that confession was a tactical error. In the prisons and the border camps, I couldn’t find anyone who would even agree that there had been a genocide. There had been a civil war and, yes, some massacres, but nobody acknowledged seeing anything. Every one of the scores of prisoners I spoke with claimed to have been arbitrarily and unjustly arrested, and of course, in any given case it was entirely possible. But many prisoners also told me they were confident that their “brothers” in the UN border camps would soon come to liberate them.
I once heard Kagame say that he suspected as many as a million people had particpated directly or indirectly in the genocide. His adviser, Claude Dusaidi, who liked to make extreme pronouncements, put the number at three million, which amounted to proclaiming every other Rwandan Hutu guilty. Such claims—impossible to prove or to disprove—struck many Rwandans and foreign observers as acts of intimidation, carefully calculated to
place all Hutus under a cloud of suspicion; and this perception was only hardened when a UN-sponsored effort to honor those Hutus, like Paul Rusesabagina, who had protected Tutsis during the genocide was scuttled by infighting among Rwandan cabinet ministers. But Dusaidi insisted that Rwanda’s outrageously packed prisons did not reflect the outrageousness of the crime that had been visited on the country. “Sometimes one person could kill six people, and sometimes three people could kill one person,” Dusaidi said. “Pick any single film of the genocide, and just watch how they kill people. You’ll find a group killing a person. So there are many more killers still walking the streets than we have in prison. The number in prison is a dot.”
Of course, the fact that guilty people remained free didn’t mean that those in prison were the right people. I asked Kagame if it bothered him that a good many innocent people might be in jail and that the experience might harden them into oppositionists. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a problem. But that was the way to deal with the situation. If we had lost these people through revenge, that would have been an even bigger problem for us. I would rather address the problem of putting them in prison, because that is the best way to do it for the process of justice, and simply because I don’t want them out there, because people would actually kill them.”
IN JULY OF 1995, Rwanda’s National Commission of Triage—a sporadically functioning body charged with identifying prisoners against whom the accusations of genocide were insubstantial—ordered the release of Placide Koloni from the prison at Gitarama. Koloni had held the office of deputy governor before, during, and—until his arrest—after the genocide. This was normal; the majority of provincial and communal officials who had not fled Rwanda, or been jailed as génocidaires, had retained their posts. Koloni had spent five months as a prisoner, and upon his release he returned to his office. Three days later, on the night of July 27,
a sentry at a UN military observers’ post staffed by Malian blue-helmets saw some men enter Koloni’s home. A scream was heard, and the house exploded in flames. The blue-helmets watched as the fire burned through the night. Shortly after dawn, they entered the house and found that Koloni, his wife, their two daughters, and a domestic had been killed.
A week later, a Hutu deputy governor in Gikongoro, to the west of Gitarama, and a Catholic priest in Kamonyi parish, not far from Kigali, were shot dead. An edgy mood settled over Rwanda, not because the death toll was especially high, but because the victims were prominent civic leaders. In mid-August, the government was shaken when the Prime Minister, Faustin Twagiramungu, and the Minister of the Interior, Seth Sendashonga, quit in protest over the persistent insecurity in the provinces, for which they blamed the RPA. Both men were Hutus—Twagiramungu, a leader of the anti-Hutu Power opposition under Habyarimana ; Sendashonga, a prominent member of the RPF—and both went into exile.
General Kagame, who never tired of reciting the number of RPA soldiers—four hundred, seven hundred; I lost count after a thousand—who had been thrown in military jails for killings and indiscipline, liked to point out that soldiers were not the only Rwandans frustrated to the point of criminality in the aftermath of the genocide and that Rwanda even has apolitical criminals. “But given the situation you have here,” he said, “ordinary crimes are not going to be looked at as ordinary crimes.” His distinction offered little comfort to frightened Hutus. “When we see how Koloni was killed, we’d rather be in here than out there,” a detainee told me at Gitarama prison, which was known as Rwanda’s worst prison in the summer of 1995.
At Gitarama, more than six thousand men were packed into a space built for seven hundred and fifty. That worked out to four prisoners per square yard: night and day, the prisoners had to
stand or to sit between the legs of those who stood, and even in the dry season a scum of condensation, urine, and bits of dropped food covered the floor. The cramped prisoners’ feet and ankles, and sometimes their entire legs, swelled to two or three times normal size. They suffered from an atrophying of their swollen extremities and from rot; infection often followed. Hundreds had required amputations.
When Lieutenant Colonel R. V. Blanchette, a UN military observer from Canada, first learned of the conditions at Gitarama prison, he paid a visit. “I went down in the back with my flashlight,” he told me, “and I saw this guy’s foot. I’d heard it was pretty bad in there, but this was quite ugly—very swollen, and his little toe was missing. I shined my flashlight up to his face, and he reached down and pulled off the next toe.”
A few weeks after Blanchette’s encounter, prisoners at Gitarama told me that conditions were much improved. The Red Cross, which supplied the food and cooking fuel for all of Rwanda’s central prisons, had installed duckboards underfoot and evacuated the worst medical cases. “We had eighty-six deaths in June, and in July only eighteen,” a doctor at the prison clinic told me. The main causes of death, he added, were malaria and AIDS, which was normal for men in Rwanda, and while prison conditions remained grim—atrocious in most of the small community lockups—by mid-1996 mortality rates in the central prisons were reported to be lower than among the Rwandan population at large.
On the day of my visit to Gitarama prison, six thousand four hundred and twenty-four prisoners formed a solid-looking knot, and I had to plan each step I took with care. It was difficult to figure out how the people fitted together—which limbs went with which body, or why a head appeared to have grown three legs without a torso in between. Many of the feet were badly swollen. The bodies were clad in rags.
Yet the faces didn’t correspond to the discomfort in which the bodies were confined. They had a clarity and composure and forthrightness of expression that made the people inside the prison nearly indistinguishable from those outside. Here and there, of course, I would catch the electric glint of insane eyes or a ragged leer of unnerving brutality. But, pressing through the throng, I received the usual welcoming smiles, cheers, and handshakes. In the children’s cell, sixty-three boys, ranging in age from seven to sixteen, sat in rows on the floor, facing a blackboard where an older prisoner—a schoolteacher by profession—was conducting a lesson. They looked like schoolboys anywhere. I asked one why he was in prison. “They say I killed,” he said. “I didn’t.” Other children gave the same reply, with downcast eyes, evasive, as unconvincing as schoolboys anywhere.
Rwanda’s formal arrest procedures were rarely followed, and it was sometimes enough for someone to point a finger and say, “Genocide.” But, according to Luc Cote, a lawyer from Montreal who directed the UN Human Rights office in Butare, “most of the arrests were founded on some type of evidence, and a lot of the time there was a whole lot of evidence,” which meant that while they might be technically incorrect they weren’t necessarily arbitrary. And even if the procedures were followed to the letter, it wasn’t clear what difference it would make, since Rwanda’s courts were closed, and for more than two and a half years nobody was brought to trial.
The government attributed the judicial paralysis to its lack of financial and human resources. Police inspectors, responsible for assembling the dossiers against the accused, were constantly being recruited and trained, but even then most were amateurs who found themselves with hundreds of complex cases, no transportation, no support staff, and quite often threats coming at them from both accusers and accused. Rwanda pleaded for bicycles, motorcycles, and pencils and pens from foreign donors, but these basic necessities were much slower in coming than expressions of
“concern” that not enough was being done to protect the rights of the accused.
NOBODY EVER TALKED seriously about conducting tens of thousands of murder trials in Rwanda. Western legal experts liked to say that even the lawyer-crowded United States could not have handled Rwanda’s caseload fairly and expeditiously. “It’s materially impossible to judge all those who participated in the massacres, and politically it’s no good, even though it’s just,” the RPF’s Tito Ruteremara told me. “This was a true genocide, and the only correct response is true justice. But Rwanda has the death penalty, and—well, that would mean a lot more killing.”
In other words, a true genocide and true justice are incompatible. Rwanda’s new leaders were trying to see their way around this problem by describing the genocide as a crime committed by masterminds and slave bodies. Neither party could be regarded as innocent, but if the crime was political, and justice was to serve the political good, then the punishment had to draw a line between the criminal minds and the criminal bodies. “With those who masterminded the genocide, it’s clear-cut,” General Kagame told me. “They must face justice directly. I’m not as worried about these ordinary peasants who took machetes and cut people in pieces like animals.” He explained that “long ago” Rwandan justice was conducted in village hearings, where fines were the preferred penalties. “The guy who did the crime can give some salt or something, and that can bring the people back together,” Kagame said.
Salt for state-sponsored mass murder? Village justice, as Kagame sketched it, sounded hopelessly inadequate. But as the lawyer François Xavier Nkurunziza explained: “When you speak of justice with our peasants, the big idea is compensation. A cattle keeper or cultivator who loses his whole family has lost his whole economic support system. You can kill the man who committed genocide, but that’s not compensation—that’s only fear and anger. This is how our peasants think.” The problem, as Kagame suggested
when he spoke of salt, was that after genocide compensation could, at best, be symbolic.
The government discussed easing the burden on the courts by ranking degrees of criminality among the génocidaires, and assigning lesser offenders to public works or reeducation programs. Politically, the RPF was more concerned with what in postwar Germany was called “denazification” than with holding every individual who had committed a crime during the genocide to account. “Actually, we’re trying to see how to get as many ordinary people off the hook as possible,” Gerald Gahima, an RPF political officer who was the Deputy Minister of Justice, explained. “But that’s not justice, is it? It’s not the justice the law provides for. It’s not the justice most people would want. It’s only the best justice we can try for under the circumstances.”
But if the guilty could never be fully punished and survivors could never be properly compensated, the RPF regarded forgiveness as equally impossible—unless, at the very least, the perpetrators of the genocide acknowledged that they had done wrong. With time, the quest for justice became, in large measure, a quest for repentance. Where ministers and parliamentarians had once preached the civic virtue of murdering one’s neighbors, members of the new government now traveled the countryside to spread the gospel of reconciliation through accountability.
Mass reburial ceremonies for genocide victims were a favorite forum for the new message. I attended such a reburial in the summer of 1995, on a hilltop amid the lush, mist-strewn tea plantations of Gisenyi. In this setting of astonishing tranquillity, the newly grown grass was pulled back to disclose a mass grave. The broken bodies within it were exhumed and laid out on a long rack. On the orders of village leaders, the local peasantry had come to see, and to smell the death smell, and President Bizimungu came with a half dozen cabinet ministers and many other officials. Soldiers distributed translucent plastic gloves among the villagers, and put them to work, placing pieces of the corpses in coffins and wrapping
the rest in green plastic sheets. There were speeches and benedictions. A soldier explained to me that the President had used his speech to ask the peasantry where they had been when these dead were killed in their community, and exhorted them to make atonement. Then the dead were placed in new mass graves, and covered up again with earth.
WHEN RWANDANS SPOKE of reconstruction and reconciliation, they spoke of the need to overcome or to liberate themselves from “the old mentalities” of colonialism and dictatorship, and from the perfect pecking order of intimidation and obedience that had served as the engine of the genocide. The systems by which the old mentalities had been implanted had names—impunity, cronyism, ethnicity, feudalism, Hamitism—but the mentalities themselves lay deeper within each Rwandan, internalized in the reflexive habits of a lifetime’s experiences and expectations of brutality: us or them; kill or be killed. When Kagame said that people can be made bad, and can be taught to be good, he added, “There are mechanisms within society—education, a form of participation. Something can be achieved.” This view was widely shared, with varying degrees of certainty and skepticism, not only within the RPF but among many of the surviving anti-Habyarimana Hutu leaders, and—on a good day, at least—by much of the Rwandan public.
But where was Rwanda to turn for a model? The justice at Nuremberg was helpfully brought by foreign conquerors, and denazification in Germany was carried out in a context where the group that had been subjected to genocide would no longer be living side by side with the killers. In South Africa, armed struggle had ended, and the post-apartheid Truth Commission could presume that the country’s defeated white masters had accepted the legitimacy of the new order. Rwanda offered no such tidy arrangement. Guerrilla attacks from Hutu Power forces in Zaire escalated steadily throughout 1995, as did attacks on witnesses and survivors
of the genocide. “Right now, if you were to give a general amnesty you would be inviting chaos,” said Charles Murigande, chairman of Rwanda’s Presidential Commission on Accountability for the Genocide. “But if we could put our hands on the leaders, even an amnesty would be very well received.”
That was a very big “if.” Just as Habyarimana’s death had made him a martyr for Hutu Power, it also ensured that the killing which was purportedly carried out in “defense” of his name had never carried a signal signature: a Hitler, a Pol Pot, a Stalin. The list of Rwanda’s “Most Wanted” was a hodgepodge of akazu members, military officers, journalists, politicians, businessmen, mayors, civil service functionaries, clerics, schoolteachers, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, and untitled hatchet men—dizzying to keep track of and impossible to rank in a precise hierarchy of command. Some were said to have given orders, loudly or quietly, and others to have transmitted or followed orders, but the plan and its execution had been ingeniously designed to look planless.
Still, Rwandan investigators were able to draw up a list of some four hundred top génocidaires—masterminds and master implementers. But all of them were in exile, beyond Rwanda’s reach. Almost immediately after its installation in 1994, the new government had appealed to the United Nations for help in apprehending fugitive Hutu Power leaders, so that they might stand trial before the nation. Instead, the UN created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which was essentially a subset of the tribunal that had been established for the ugly Balkan war of the early 1990s. “We asked for help to catch these people who ran away and to try them properly in our own courts,” a Rwandan diplomat told me. “But the Security Council just started writing ‘Rwanda’ under the name ‘Yugoslavia’ everywhere.”
The Rwandan government regarded the UN’s decision to keep its resources to itself as an insult. The very existence of the UN court implied that the Rwandan judiciary was incapable of reaching just verdicts, and seemed to dismiss in advance any trials that
Rwanda might hold as beneath international standards. “If the international community really wants to fight impunity in Rwanda, they should help Rwanda to punish these people,” Gerald Gahima told me at the Ministry of Justice. “It makes it harder to forgive the ordinary people if we don’t have the leaders here to be tried in Rwandan courts before the Rwandan people according to Rwandan law.” But the UN tribunal would not even sit in Rwanda, where the witnesses and concerned audience were; instead it was headquartered on “neutral territory,” in Arusha, Tanzania. “The tribunal,” Charles Murigande said, “was created essentially to appease the conscience of the international community, which has failed to live up to its conventions on genocide. It wants to look as if it is doing something, which is often worse than doing nothing at all.”
In fact, during its first two years, the UN tribunal didn’t appear to be doing much. It was understaffed and systematically mismanaged, and its prosecutorial strategy appeared directionless and opportunistic. Most of its indictments followed the chance arrest on immigration charges of Rwandan fugitives in various African countries, and in some high-profile cases, like that of Colonel Bagasora, who was captured in Cameroon, the UN fought a Rwandan extradition request to advance its own. In this way, the tribunal ultimately wound up with an impressive sampler of Hutu Power masterminds in its custody. But it quickly became clear that the prosecutors had no intention of trying more than a few dozen cases. This only served to aggravate the feeling in Kigali that the UN court was not designed to serve Rwanda’s national interest, since the message to the vast majority of fugitive génocidaires was that they had nothing to fear: the international community would not help Rwanda get them, nor would it pursue them itself. “It’s a joke,” Kagame’s adviser, Claude Dusaidi, said to me. “This tribunal is now acting as a spoiler.”
The largest concentrations of Rwanda’s most-wanted were settled in Zaire and Kenya—states whose notoriously corrupt Presidents,
Mobutu Sese Seko and Daniel arap Moi, had been intimates of Habyarimana and had taken to hosting his widow, Madame Agathe, at their palaces. Mobutu had called Habyarimana his “little brother,” and the slain Rwandan’s remains, which had been spirited across the border amid the mass flight to Goma, were entombed in a mausoleum on the grounds of Mobutu’s primary estate. When I asked Honoré Rakotomanana, a Madagascan who headed the UN’s prosecution team in Rwanda, how he expected to indict anybody from Zaire or Kenya, he said, “There are international treaties to which those countries are signatories.” But in nearly two years, before he was sacked in 1997, Rakotomanana never bothered to send a single investigator to Zaire. Meanwhile, in October 1995, Kenya’s President Moi assailed the tribunal as a “haphazard process,” and announced, “I shall not allow any one of them to enter Kenya to serve summonses and look for people here. No way. If any such characters come here, they will be arrested. We must respect ourselves. We must not be harassed.”
Watching the old-boy network of African strongmen protect its own, Kagame spoke of “a feeling of betrayal, even by our African brothers,” and he added, ominously, “We shall remind them that what happened here can happen elsewhere—it can happen in these other countries—and then I am sure they will run to us. It can happen tomorrow. Things have happened, and they can happen again.”
Even when genocidal leaders were eventually turned over to the tribunal, the problem remained that the UN had forbidden the court to recommend a death penalty. The Nazis at Nuremberg and the Japanese war criminals in Tokyo had faced the death penalty after World War II. Were the crimes committed against humanity in Rwanda lesser offenses than those which prompted the Genocide Convention to be written? According to Kagame, when Rwanda protested that the tribunal should carry the death penalty out of respect for Rwanda’s laws, the UN advised Rwanda to abolish its death penalty. Kagame called this advice “cynical.”
“The Rwandan people know this is the same international community that stood by and watched them get killed,” Gerald Gahima said. And his RPF colleague Tito Ruteremara, noting that Rwandans convicted by the tribunal were expected to serve their sentences in Scandinavia, told me, “It doesn’t fit our definition of justice to think of the authors of the Rwandan genocide sitting in a full-service Swedish prison with a television.” As it turned out, even those Hutu Power leaders who wound up in custody at Arusha found the croissants they were regularly served for breakfast a bit rich. After a while, the tribunal prisoners mounted a protest to demand a normal Rwandan breakfast of gruel.