“IN YOUR COUNTRY,” the RPA colonel said, “I think you have many comedians.” We were sitting on his porch, in the cool, drizzling night of the central Rwandan highlands, drinking beer and whiskey and eating boiled potatoes and brochettes of grilled goat. The colonel dragged a chunk of meat off his skewer with his teeth. He chewed on it for a while, then he said, “In my understanding, many of these comedians in America are black. Why do you think that is?”
I suggested that it might have to do with adversity. People who feel up against it sometimes develop a canny take on how the world works—the rawness of it, the absurdities—and sometimes, if they’re funny, they make fun of it.
“Those black guys are funny,” the colonel said.
I said, “The funny ones are.”
He coughed out a one-syllable chuckle and the other guys on the porch, his associates, followed him with some laughter. After a while, the colonel said, “No comedians in Rwanda. Plenty of black people, plenty of adversity—no comedians.”
“You must have jokes,” I said.
He said, “They’re not really funny.”
I asked him to try one on me. “Another time,” he said. There
was a woman present, and the colonel poked his chin out in her direction. “Rwandan jokes,” he said, “are not decent.”
I was disappointed. I didn’t expect to have another time with this colonel, and the subject interested me broadly: not just jokes—art of any kind. Next door in the Congo, in Tanzania, in Uganda, there were great artistic traditions: visual arts and music predominated, and a literary culture had developed in postcolonial times. Even Burundi had world-famous drumming ensembles. Rwanda had a few spectacular costume dances, some traditional songs, and an oral literature of poems and tales that followed archaic forms from precolonial times, but no arts to compete with its neighbors. The closest modern Rwanda came to a cultural flowering was in the fascist agitprop of Hutu Power newspapers and radio, and in the ruffian chic of interahamwe pageantry and marching songs. New music was mostly imported, and while some Rwandans had written novels almost nobody read them.
I would have liked to ask the colonel about the poverty of Rwandan art, but I didn’t want to offend him. So the conversation moved on. Then the woman left, and the colonel said, “OK, I’ll tell you a joke.” The setup was simple: a Rwandan kid grew up in the hills, did well in school, went to Paris on a scholarship, and returned with a new set of manners—mod clothes, a grandiose vocabulary, a mincing accent, even a different way of walking, “like a little horse,” the colonel said. One day, the boy’s father, a simple old peasant, said, “Boy, what’s got into you? So you went to France. So what? Look at me. I’ve been screwing your mother for forty-five years, and I don’t walk around town like this.” The colonel’s hands went out, clutching the air in front of him, and he pumped his hips urgently, in the eternal fashion.
I laughed. But the Rwandans on the porch, the colonel’s associates, just nodded gravely. “You see,” the colonel said, “it’s not really a funny joke. It’s about logic. Rwandan jokes are like this, kind of intellectual. For instance, a guy gets what we call a French
haircut—shaved on the sides, flat on top—and his friends say, ‘How can you have a French cut? You don’t even speak French.’”
This time the Rwandans laughed, while I nodded. “It’s about logic,” the colonel said again. “It’s a trick. You laugh at the guy with the haircut and you laugh at his friends—back and forth.”
It seemed to me that both jokes did have a logic, as all jokes must, but that what they were about was provincialism and foreign influence. They were about aspirations to the image and offerings of a broader modern world, and the opposing tug of traditional Rwandan insularity and conformity; about being caught between a past that you reject or at least want to escape and a future that you can only imagine in terms of imported styles, whose imposition you also reject and want to escape. They were jokes that seemed well suited to a country undergoing the most catastrophic decolonization process in Africa. I told the colonel as much, in a groping way, and he said, “Maybe this is why we have no comedians.” He sounded quite discouraged.
“But the jokes are funny,” I said.
“No,” he told me, “it’s not funny. It’s going to take us a long time to overcome the old mentalities.”
SOMETIMES IT SEEMED that instead of fine arts, Rwandans had politics: the arts of statecraft, writ large and small, at the highest echelons of government and in the most basic negotiations of daily life. What, after all, was the struggle between proponents of a “new order” and adherents of the “old mentalities” if not a clash between two fundamentally opposed representations of Rwandan reality? After a century in which Rwandans had labored under the mystification and deceit of the Hamitic fable, whose ultimate perversity took the world-upside-down form of genocide, the RPF and its anti-Hutu Power allies described their struggle against annihilation as a revolt of realists. “Honesty” was among their favorite words, and their basic proposition was that greater truth
should be the basis of greater power. Under the circumstances, the last best hope for Hutu Power was to assert—in its usual simultaneous onslaught of word and action—that honesty and truth themselves were merely forms of artifice, never the source of power but always its products, and that the only measure of right versus wrong was the bastardized “majority rule” principle of physical might.
With the lines so drawn, the war about the genocide was truly a postmodern war: a battle between those who believed that because the realities we inhabit are constructs of our imaginations, they are all equally true or false, valid or invalid, just or unjust, and those who believed that constructs of reality can—in fact, must—be judged as right or wrong, good or bad. While academic debates about the possibility of objective truth and falsehood are often rarified to the point of absurdity, Rwanda demonstrated that the question is a matter of life and death.
In the summer of 1995, a man sought me out in Kigali, saying he had heard that I was interested in the problems of his country. He had long been privy to the workings of Rwandan politics—first as an associate of Hutu Power, then as an oppositionist—and he was now attached to the new government. He told me that he wanted to be completely honest with me about the affairs of his country, but anonymously. “If you betray my name,” he said, “I will deny everything.”
My visitor was a Hutu, who traveled with a Kalashnikov-toting soldier in tow. “Listen,” he said, “Rwanda had a dictatorship, Rwanda had a genocide, and now Rwanda has a very serious threat on the borders. You don’t have to be RPF to understand what that means. You don’t have to fall into the old thinking—that if you’re not with these guys you’re with those guys.” He went on to explain at length his view that Rwandans can never be trusted. “Foreigners cannot know this place,” he said. “We cheat. We repeat the same little things to you over and over and tell you nothing. Even among ourselves we lie. We have a habit of secrecy
and suspicion. You can stay a whole year and you will not know what Rwandans think or what they are doing.”
I told him that this didn’t fully surprise me, because I had the impression that Rwandans often spoke two languages—not just Kinyarwanda and French or English, but one language among themselves and an entirely different language with outsiders. By way of an example, I said that I had talked with a Rwandan lawyer who had described the difficulty of integrating his European training into his Rwandan practice. He loved the Cartesian, Napoleonic legal system, on which Rwanda’s is modeled, but, he said, it didn’t always correspond to Rwandan reality, which was for him an equally complete system of thought. By the same token, when this lawyer spoke with me about Rwanda, he used a language quite different from the language he would speak with fellow Rwandans.
“You talk about this,” my visitor said, “and at the same time you say, ‘A lawyer told me such and such.’ A Rwandan would never tell you what someone else said, and normally, when you told a Rwandan what you heard from somebody, he would immediately change the rhythm of his speech and close himself off to you. He would think that what he said to you might be passed on later. He would be on his guard.” He looked up and studied me for a moment. “You Westerners are so honest,” he said. He seemed depressed by the notion. “You say what you think, and you say what you’ve seen. You say, ‘A lawyer told me.’ Do you think there are many lawyers here?”
I said I’d met several and that the one whom I’d referred to had told me I was free to quote him by name. “Fine,” my visitor said. “But I’m telling you, Rwandans are petty.” I wasn’t entirely sure of the French word that he used for “petty,” which was mesquin. When I asked him to explain it, he described someone who sounded remarkably like Iago—a confidence man, a cheater and betrayer and liar, who tries to tell everyone what he imagines they want to hear in order to maintain his own game and get what he’s after. Colonel Dr. Joseph Karemera, a founding officer of the RPF
and Rwanda’s Minister of Health, told me that there is a Kinyarwanda word for such behavior. Having described the legacy of thirty-four years of Hutu ethnic dictatorship as “a very bad mentality,” Karemera said, “We call it ikinamucho—that if you want to do something you are deceitful and not straight. For example, you can come to kill me”—he clutched his throat—“and your mission is successful, but then you cry. That is ikinamucho.”
My visitor liked the word mesquin. He used it repeatedly. I remarked that he didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of his people. “I’m trying to tell you about them without lying,” he said.
Shortly after our meeting, I learned that he had left Rwanda to join the leaders of Hutu Power in exile. I also learned that ikinamucho means “theater.”
DURING HER LAST year in medical school, in the early 1980s, Odette Nyiramilimo’s professor of pediatrics was a doctor named Théodore Sindikubwabo. “I was hugely pregnant when I took my exam with him, and he saw that I was suffering,” Odette recalled. “He took me to his office to drink a Fanta, then he drove me home. These were very human qualities, the genuine responses of a father. But he was a false man. During the First Republic, under President Kayibanda, he was the Minister of Health. When he saw Habyarimana taking power and imprisoning all the ministers, he went straight to Kigali Central Hospital, grabbed a stethoscope, and began practicing pediatrics. Then he became a deputy in the parliament. He loved to be important. He came from the south, he had a big house in Butare, which was anti-Power, and he was a Power man with the MRND—so very useful. He had this mentality like a chameleon. But I never thought he could be a killer.”
Three days after Habyarimana’s assassination, Sindikubwabo was installed as Rwanda’s interim President by Colonel Bagasora’s crisis committee. At that time, Butare was the only province with a Tutsi governor, and while other civic and political leaders led their constituencies to massacre, this governor, Jean-Baptiste Habyalimana,
urged restraint. For the first twelve days of the killing, Butare was a haven of virtual calm, and Tutsis fleeing massacres elsewhere flocked to the region. Then, on April 19, 1994, Théodore Sindikubwabo visited Butare. He fired the governor (who was subsequently killed) and held a rally, where he delivered a call to arms that was broadcast throughout the country. The day after Sindikubwabo spoke, soldiers of the Presidential Guard were flown into Butare, buses and trucks carrying militia and arms arrived, and the slaughter began. The killings in Butare included some of the most extensive massacres of the genocide: in just two or three weeks, at least twenty thousand Tutsis were killed in Cyahinda parish and at least thirty-five thousand in Karama parish.
Sindikubwabo’s old villa in Butare had been smashed into a heap of stones by the time I visited it, but he had a nice new one in an exclusive enclave of Bukavu, Zaire, where he lived as president of the government in exile. The property sat just behind the governor’s mansion in Bukavu and commanded a stunning view of the hills of Rwanda across the southern tip of Lake Kivu. Two black Rwandan government Mercedes sedans stood in the drive when I stopped by in late May of 1995, and several young Rwandans hung around the gate. An amiable man in a red sports shirt greeted me and introduced himself as Sindikubwabo’s chief of protocol. He said that the press was always welcome because Rwanda was terribly misunderstood in the world: yes, the country had suffered a genocide, but it was carried out by the RPF, and Hutus had been the victims. “Look at us, in exile,” he said, adding, “Even as we speak, Paul Kagame is killing all the Hutus in Rwanda, systematically.” Then he volunteered the opinion that Sindikubwabo was an innocent man and asked whether I believed in the idea of innocence until guilt is proven. I said that I didn’t know that Sindikubwabo had been charged with any crimes in any courts of law, and he told me that all Rwandan refugees were waiting for the judgment of the international tribunal. “But who is this tribunal?” he asked. “Who is influencing them? Who are
they serving? Are they interested in the truth or only in avoiding reality?”
The chief of protocol told me to wait where I was, and after a while André Nkurunziza, Sindikubwabo’s press attaché, took his place. Nkurunziza cut a slightly tattered figure; he had broken teeth and an ancient jacket, and he spoke in an injured, plaintive tone. “This is a government hurt by a media conspiracy that labels it a government of genocide,” he said. “But these are not people who killed anyone. We hear them called planners, but these are only rumors planted by Kigali. Even you, when you go to Kigali, they could pay you money to write what they want.” He put out a hand to touch my forearm soothingly. “I don’t say that they did pay you. It’s just an example.”
Nkurunziza told me that in 1991 he had visited Washington. “They didn’t know there was a war in Rwanda,” he said. “They didn’t know of Rwanda. I said, ‘It’s a little country next to Zaire.’ They said, ‘Where is Zaire?’ Now, how can they say they know what happened in my country last year?”
We were standing in Zaire, looking at Rwanda. I said, “What happened last year?”
“This is a long war,” Nkurunziza said. “And there will be another war. This is what we think here. There will be another war.”
Eventually, I was taken in to Sindikubwabo, who was in his mid-sixties, an old man by Rwandan standards. He sat in a low armchair in his modestly furnished living room. He was said to be ill, and he looked it: gaunt, with pale eyes filmed by cataracts and a strikingly bony, asymmetrical face, divided by a thick scar—the result of a motorbike accident in his youth—that drew his mouth up in a diagonal sneer. He told me that, in keeping with the Arusha Accords, he would welcome “a frank and sincere dialogue about the management of Rwanda” with the RPF. When I asked why anybody should negotiate with the man who was considered to have instigated the massacres at Butare, Sindikubwabo began
to laugh, a dry, raspy chuckle that kept up until he was out of breath.
“The moment has not yet come to say who is guilty and who is not guilty,” he said. “The RPF can bring accusations against it doesn’t matter whom, and they can formulate these accusations it doesn’t matter how—reassembling, stitching together, making a montage of the witnesses. It’s easy. You’re a journalist and you don’t know how this is done?” His face began to twitch around his scar. “This becomes a sort of theater piece”—“une comédie,” he said—“that they’re performing right now in Kigali, and it will be sorted out before the tribunal. I come from Butare, and I know what I said in Butare, and the people of Butare also know what I said.”
But he refused to tell me what he had said. Even if I found a tape of the speech, he instructed me, I would have to bring it back to him for an interpretation—“every word, what it means, every phrase, what it means, because to interpret the ideas and thoughts of others, it’s not easy and it’s not fair.” Later, when I repeated his words to Odette, she said, “There was nothing to interpret. He was saying things like ‘Eliminate those who think they know everything. Work on without them.’ I trembled when I heard it.”
Sindikubwabo’s speech was one of the most widely remembered moments of the genocide, because once the killing began in Butare it was clear that no Tutsi in Rwanda was to be spared. But he insisted that he had been misunderstood. “If the mayors of Butare affirm that the massacres began under my order—they are responsible, because it was their responsibility to maintain order in their communities. If they interpreted my message as an order, they executed an order against my words.” I wondered why he hadn’t corrected them, since he was a doctor and had been President while hundreds of thousands of people were being murdered in his country. He said that if the time came he would answer that question before the international tribunal.
Sitting with Sindikubwabo as he offered what sounded like a
rehearsal of the defense-by-obfuscation he was preparing for the tribunal, I had the impression that he almost yearned to be indicted, even apprehended, in order to have a final hour in the spotlight. But perhaps he knew that in Zaire he was beyond the reach of the UN tribunal. He maintained that a “truly impartial” investigation could not but vindicate him. By way of an example, he handed me what he regarded as a definitive account of recent Rwandan history, an article clipped from the Executive Intelligence Review, a publication put out by the crypto-fascist American conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche. I scanned it briefly; it appeared to demonstrate that the British royal family, through its Ugandan puppets, and in collusion with several other shadowy outfits including the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, had sponsored the extermination of Rwanda’s Hutu majority.
A PORTRAIT OF President Habyarimana stood behind Sindikubwabo’s chair. The dead leader, buttoned up in military dress and draped with braid, looked much happier than the exiled leader, and it seemed to me that as a dead man he did have the happier position. To his people, Habyarimana was the true President—many people in the UN camps told me so—whereas Sindikubwabo was regarded as a nobody who had filled the job for only a brief, unfortunate moment. “He is President of nothing,” several refugees said. To his enemies, too, Sindikubwabo was a nobody; RPF leaders and genocide survivors saw him as an attendant lord, plucked from the lower echelons of Hutu Power at the moment of crisis precisely because he was content to play the puppet. Sindikubwabo’s own son-in-law was Minister of Agriculture in the new government, and during a mass reburial ceremony in Butare he had denounced his father-in-law as a murderer, and urged Rwandans to avoid ascribing guilt or protecting the guilty on the basis of familial association.
Yet even in his spurned and discredited state, Sindikubwabo remained of use to the Hutu Power machine—as a scapegoat.
With time, the leaders of the ex-FAR, who kept their headquarters at the northern end of Lake Kivu, ten miles west of Goma, had distanced themselves from the government in exile and created an assortment of new political front organizations, whose operatives were not known to have distinguished themselves in the genocide and could be presented to the world as “clean.” Chief among these was the Rassemblement Democratique pour la Retour (RDR), whose propaganda, blaming the refugee crisis on the RPF and calling for a blanket amnesty as a precondition for repatriation, won it a great following among relief workers and journalists. Field officers of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees often made a special point of introducing me to RDR leaders when I visited the camps. I couldn’t understand it. They sounded exactly like Sindikubwabo, and yet the humanitarians who promoted them seemed convinced that they were sensible and legitimate voices of the excluded. RDR spokesmen in Zaire, Kenya, and Brussels were frequently cited on the BBC as “leading representatives of the refugees.” That the RDR might be associated with the génocidaires—that it was, in fact, a shadow Hutu Power regime chartered by the ex-FAR command in Goma, and that RDR agents micromanaged the camps, extorting monthly taxes, in cash or a cut of food-aid rations, from every refugee family in Zaire, and intimidating refugees who wanted to go home—was rarely even hinted at.
This was one of the great mysteries of the war about the genocide: how, time and again, international sympathy placed itself at the ready service of Hutu Power’s lies. It was bewildering enough that the UN border camps should be allowed to constitute a rump genocidal state, with an army that was regularly observed to be receiving large shipments of arms and recruiting young men by the thousands for the next extermination campaign. And it was heartbreaking that the vast majority of the million and a half people in those camps were evidently at no risk of being jailed, much less killed, in Rwanda, but that the propaganda and brute force
of the Hutu Power apparatus was effectively holding them hostage, as a human shield. Yet what made the camps almost unbearable to visit was the spectacle of hundreds of international humanitarians being openly exploited as caterers to what was probably the single largest society of fugitive criminals against humanity ever assembled.
Aid agencies provided transportation, meeting places, and office supplies to the RDR and paramilitary groups that masqueraded as community self-help agencies; they fattened the war coffers of the Hutu Power elites by renting trucks and buses from them, and by hiring as refugee employees the candidates advanced through an in-house patronage system managed by the génocidaires . Some aid workers even hired the Hutu Power pop star Simon Bikindi—lyricist of the interahamwe anthem “I Hate These Hutus”—to perform with his band at a party. In the border camps in Tanzania, I met a group of doctors, recently arrived from Europe, who told me how much fun the refugees were. “You can tell by their eyes who the innocent ones are,” said a doctor from—of all places—Sarajevo. And a colleague of hers said, “They wanted to show us a video of Rwanda in 1994, but we decided it would be too upsetting.”
ONCE THE CHOLERA outbreak in Goma had been contained, the camps had ceased to offer a solution to the refugee crisis and became a means of sustaining it; for the longer the camps remained in place, the greater was the inevitability of war, and that meant that rather than protecting people, the camps were placing them directly in harm’s way.
Throughout 1995 and 1996, the Hutu Power forces in exile continued their guerrilla war against Rwanda, with raiders from the camps slipping over the borders to mine a road, blow up a power pylon, or attack genocide survivors and witnesses. In addition, the ex-FAR and interahamwe from the Goma camps fanned out through the surrounding province of North Kivu, which was
home to a sizable population of Zaireans of Rwandan ancestry, and began recruiting, training, and arming Zairean Hutus to fight with them for ethnic solidarity on either side of the Rwanda-Zaire border. Reports soon circulated of Hutu Power raiders getting on-the-job training—attacking Tutsi ranchers and pillaging their cattle—in the rich highland pastures of the Masisi region of North Kivu. By mid-1995, as Zairean tribal militias mounted a resistance, Masisi became known as a combat zone. “This is a direct consequence of the camps,” a security officer at UNHCR headquarters in Goma told me, “and there’s nothing we can do but watch.”
Such expressions of helplessness were common among the relief workers who maintained the camps. The UNHCR’s Jacques Franquin, a former theater director from Belgium who supervised camps that held more than four hundred thousand Rwandan Hutus in Tanzania, told me that he knew a number of génocidaires among them. “But don’t ask me to sort them out,” he said. “Don’t ask me to take the criminals out of the camps and put humanitarian workers in danger.” What he meant—and what I heard repeatedly—was that so long as the major powers that sat on the Security Council and funded most humanitarian aid lacked the will to act against Hutu Power, humanitarians could not be blamed for the consequences.
“Food, shelter, water, health, sanitation—we do good aid,” a relief agency boss in Goma told me. “That’s what the international community wants, and that’s what we give it.” But if the faults of the international response did not originate within the relief industry, they quickly took up residence there. Even if not taking sides were a desirable position, it is impossible to act in or on a political situation without having a political effect.
“The humanitarian mind-set is to not think—just to do,” said a French UNHCR officer at the Rwandan camps in Burundi. “We’re like robots, programmed to save some lives. But when the contracts are up, or when it gets too dangerous, we will leave and
maybe the people we saved can get killed after all.” Humanitarians didn’t like to be called mercenaries, but “not to think—just to do,” as the UNHCR worker put it, is a mercenary mind-set. As a Swiss delegate for the International Committee of the Red Cross told me, “When humanitarian aid becomes a smoke screen to cover the political effects it actually creates, and states hide behind it, using it as a vehicle for policymaking, then we can be regarded as agents in the conflict.”
ACCORDING TO ITS mandate, the UNHCR provides assistance exclusively to refugees—people who have fled across an international border and can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their homeland—and fugitives fleeing criminal prosecution are explicitly disqualified from protection. The mandate also requires that those who receive UNHCR’s assistance must be able to prove that they are properly entitled to refugee status. But no attempt was ever made to screen the Rwandans in the camps; it was considered far too dangerous. In other words, we—all of us who paid taxes in countries that paid the UNHCR —were feeding people who were expected to try to hurt us (or our agents) if we questioned their right to our charity.
Nobody knows exactly how many people were in the Zaire camps because no thorough census was ever attempted, and piecemeal efforts were programmatically, often violently, sabotaged by the génocidaires, who had a political interest in keeping numbers radically inflated, and liked the extra rations. The birth rate in the camps was close to the limit of human possibility; breeding more Hutus was Hutu Power policy, and the coerced impregnation of any female of reproductive age was regarded as a sort of ethnic public service among the resident interahamwe. At the same time, roughly half a million people had succeeded in returning to Rwanda from Zaire of their own accord in the first year after the genocide. Thereafter, the UNHCR claimed that the camp population
stabilized at about a million and a quarter Rwandans, but a number of UNHCR staffers told me that its estimates were at least twenty percent too high.
The one sure statistic about the Zaire camps was that they cost their sponsors at least a million dollars a day. A dollar per person per day may not sound like much, especially when one considers that at least seventy percent of that money went right back into the pockets of the aid teams and their outfitters, in the form of overhead, supplies, equipment, staff housing, salaries, benefits, and other assorted expenses. But even if just twenty-five cents a day was being spent on each refugee, that was nearly twice the per capita income of most Rwandans. The World Bank found that Rwanda after the genocide had become the poorest country on earth, with an average income of eighty dollars a year. Since thousands of people in Rwanda were making thousands of dollars a year, at least ninety-five percent of the population was probably living on an average income closer to sixty dollars a year, or sixteen cents a day.
Under the circumstances, living in a refugee camp was not a bad economic proposition for a Rwandan, especially for one plugged into the Hutu Power patronage network. Food was not only free, but ample; malnutrition rates in the camps were far lower than anywhere else in the region, on a par, in fact, with those of Western Europe. General medical care was also as good as it got in central Africa; Zaireans who lived in Goma spoke enviously of refugee entitlements, and several told me they had pretended to be refugees in order to gain admission to camp clinics. After having all essential living expenses covered by charity, camp residents were free to engage in commerce, and aid agencies frequently provided enticements—like agricultural supplies—to do so. The major camps in Zaire quickly became home to the biggest, best-stocked, and cheapest markets in the region. Zaireans came for miles to shop chez les Rwandais, where at least half the trade appeared to be in humanitarian-aid stuffs—beans, flour, and
oil, spilling from sacks and tins stamped with the logos of foreign donors. And, as the interahamwe and ex-FAR stepped up their attacks on the Tutsi herdsmen of North Kivu, the Goma camp markets became famous for incredibly cheap beef.
The camps were cramped, smoky, and smelly, but so were the homes many Rwandans had fled; and unlike most Rwandan villages, the main thoroughfares of the big camps were lined with well-stocked pharmacies, two-story video bars powered by generators, libraries, churches, brothels, photo studios—you name it. Humanitarians showing me around often sounded like proud landlords, saying things like “Great camp,” even as they said, “These poor people,” and asked, “What are we doing?”
The profits from refugee commerce went in many directions, but large slices went straight through the political rackets into the purchase of arms and munitions. Richard McCall, chief of staff of the United States Agency for International Development, described Zaire as “an unfettered corridor for arms shipment” to the génocidaires. The UNHCR, more cautiously, made similar statements, but that never stopped it from asking for more money to keep the camps going.
Officially, the UNHCR’s policy in the border camps was to promote “voluntary repatriation.” At first, this was done by having people sign up a day or two in advance for buses that would take them back to Rwanda. When a number of the people who did that got beaten or killed before their departure date, it was decided simply to station idling buses in the camps every morning, and let those who wanted make a run for them. Not surprisingly, that program, too, was soon judged a failure. “What is voluntary?” General Kagame once asked me. “It normally means that somebody has to think and make a decision. I don’t think that even staying in the camps is a voluntary decision for the innocent people. I believe there is some influence. So how can we speak of them leaving voluntarily?”
In fact, influence against returning to Rwanda often came from
within the very humanitarian community that was ostensibly promoting repatriation. “It’s not safe for them to go home,” I was told by one aid worker after another. “They could get arrested.” But what if they deserved to be arrested? “We can’t judge that,” I was told, and then, to finish the discussion, it was usually said, “Anyway, the government in Kigali doesn’t genuinely want them back.” Of course, very few of the people working in the camps had ever spent any time in Rwanda; their organizations did not encourage it. So, with time, there developed among them an epidemic of what diplomats call clientitis: an overly credulous embrace of your clients’ point of view. As soon as I crossed back over the border to Rwanda, I felt that I’d passed through a looking glass. At UNHCR Goma, I would be told that Rwanda was determined to prevent repatriation and that returnees were frequently harassed just to ensure that the rest of the refugees stayed away. But at UNHCR Kigali, I would be regaled with statistics and arguments demonstrating not only that Rwanda wanted the refugees home but that those who had come back were received with all due propriety.
In June of 1995, Zaire’s Prime Minister, Kengo Wa Dondo, visited Goma, and delivered a speech in which he said that if the international community wouldn’t shut down the camps, Zaire would be obliged to send the Rwandans home. That August, Zairean soldiers did move on the camps, and in traditionally roughshod manner—lots of shakedowns, and torched huts—they hustled about fifteen thousand Rwandans across the border in less than a week. That was more than the UNHCR had accomplished in the preceding six months. But the UNHCR opposed forced repatriation—unless, as Gerald Gahima at Rwanda’s Justice Ministry reminded me, you happened to be a Vietnamese boat person in Hong Kong. The UN refugee commissioner herself, Sadako Ogata, persuaded President Mobutu to call off his boys—it was widely rumored that he was paid cash—and the repatriation
“deadlock” that she often decried to the Security Council promptly resumed.
Press coverage of the Zairean action stressed the numerous violations of international humanitarian law that the refugees—mostly older people, women, and children, who were unable to run away—had suffered. There were almost no follow-up stories from the Rwandan side of the border, and events there were rather dull: the refugees were smoothly resettled in their communities, arrest rates were below average, and the Kigali office of the UNHCR, impressed by the government’s handling of the matter, proclaimed it an auspicious demonstration of Rwanda’s sincerity in calling its people home.
“THERE’S NO WAY you can stop the international community from coming, given a situation like a genocide,” General Kagame once said to me. “But they may provide the wrong remedies to our problems. On the one hand, they admit that a genocide took place in Rwanda, but they don’t seem to understand that someone was responsible for it, that someone planned and executed it. That’s why we get confused when there are insinuations that we should negotiate. When you ask, ‘With whom?’ they cannot tell you. They can’t quite bring themselves to say that we should negotiate with the people who committed genocide. Of course, in the long run they create a bigger problem, because the genocide can be made to seem less and less visible as a very big crime that people should be hunted for and prosecuted.” What’s more, Kagame said, “there are some directly innocent people in those camps, and this has been a very bad situation for them. At least here in Rwanda, although some incidents may take place, there is some level of sanity. It may not be pleasant, it may not be the best, but it is the best in these circumstances.”
I told him I kept meeting Rwandans who said that Rwandans never tell the truth, that Rwanda has a culture of dishonesty, that
to understand Rwanda one has to get inside that realm of mystification. I wondered what he thought.
“Maybe even those who’re saying that are not speaking the truth,” he said, and let out an unusually hearty laugh. Then he said, “I don’t think it’s our culture, especially since I don’t see a lot of honesty in politics in many other countries. But in some other countries, when you try to tell lies you are exposed by strong institutions that work to know what exactly has been happening.” He fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “Personally, I have no problem with telling the truth, and I’m Rwandan, so why don’t people also take me as an example of a Rwandan? People have even told me that perhaps, in politics, sometimes there are certain things you don’t say that I have been saying publicly. The more they tell me that, the more I get convinced I am right.”
In Kagame’s view, lying was not a Rwandan trait but a political tactic, and he thought it a weak one. That didn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep secrets; but secrets, even if they involve deception, aren’t necessarily lies—just truths you don’t tell. In a world where politicians were presumed to be liars, Kagame had found that one could often gain a surprise advantage by not being false. “Sometimes,” he said, “you tell the truth because that is the best way out.”
If there is one thing sure in this world, it is certainly this: that it will not happen to us a second time.
—PRIMO LEVI, 1958
Survival in Auschwitz
It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.
—PRIMO LEVI, 1986
The Drowned and the Saved