May. 13, 2020
Read time: 120 minutes and 55 seconds.
tags:? FULGENCE: On April 11 the municipal judge in Kibungo sent his messengers to gather the Hutus up there. Lots of interahamwe had arrived in trucks and buses, all jostling and honking on the roads. It was like a city traffic jam. The judge told everyone there that from then on we were to do nothing but kill Tutsis. Well, we understood: that was a final plan. The atmosphere had changed. That day misinformed guys had come to the meeting without bringing a machete or some other cutting tool. The interahamwe lectured them: they said it would pass this once but had better not happen twice. They told them to arm themselves with branches and stones, to form barriers at the rear to cut off any escaping fugitives. Afterward everyone wound up a leader or a follower, but nobody ever forgot his machete again.
- Page 13 (location ~ 193-199)
ADALBERT: We sorted ourselves out on the soccer field. This team went up, that team went down, another team set out for a different swamp. The lucky ones could look around for chances to loot. At first the burgomaster, the subprefect, and the municipal councilors were coordinating all that, along with the soldiers or retired policemen, thanks to their guns. In any case, if you owned a weapon, even an old grenade, you were pushed forward and found yourself in favor. Later on the bravest young guys became leaders, the ones who gave orders without hesitation and strode eagerly along. Me, I made myself the leader for all the residents of Kibungo from the very first day. Previously I was leader of the church choir, so now I became a real leader, so to speak. The residents approved me without a hitch. We liked being in our gang. We all agreed about the new activities, we decided on the spot where we would go to work, we helped one another out like comrades. If someone presented a little excuse, we would offer to take on his part of the job that one time. The organization was a bit casual, but it was respected and conscientious.
- Page 14 (location ~ 206-214)
?LIE: The intimidators made the plans and whipped up enthusiasm; the shopkeepers paid and provided transportation; the farmers prowled and pillaged. For the killings, though, everybody had to show up blade in hand and pitch in for a decent stretch of work. People would bristle only when the leaders announced compulsory collections of money to pay the men who went to help out in neighboring sectors. Folks grumbled especially about collections organized to give bonuses to interahamwe from nearby areas. As for us, we frowned on those big operations, finding it more profitable for everyone to stick to his own backyard. We knew those who came long distances expected large rewards. Deep down, we didn?t like them; we preferred handling things ourselves. Concerning the business of the killings and compensations, people from the different hills did not have a sharing turn of mind.
- Page 16 (location ~ 234-241)
after which the Hutus rose in a murderous rebellion. Desperate Tutsis, fleeing the deadly pogroms
- Page 19 (location ~ 280-281)
Although the Bugesera is surrounded by marshes and enjoys two rainy seasons a year, its arid soil of ocher laterite has long discouraged settlement. Natural sources of drinking water are in fact quite rare in this landscape of dust and clay. Entering the Bugesera via the bridge across the Nyabarongo, one finds the first trickle of pure water twenty-five kilometers into the interior. Far from the putrid marshes, this stream of groundwater is the Rwaki-Birizi, which supplies Nyamata. Year in and year out, well before the first light of dawn, a mob?of women and girls with a jerry can in one hand and another on their heads, and boys with pedicabs rigged up to carry three or four cans?besieges the spring at Rwaki-Birizi, seeking water for their own households and those of their employers or clients. Immigration into the Bugesera dates back to 1959, when Mutara Rudahigwa, the last great Tutsi king, or mwami, died, after which the Hutus rose in a murderous rebellion. Desperate Tutsis, fleeing the deadly pogroms celebrating the abolition of their monarchy, were herded onto the wooden beds of trucks provided by the Belgian colonial administration and, after traveling all night, were abandoned on the banks of the Akanyaru River.
- Page 18 (location ~ 274-282)
At the beginning of the 1970s a famine raging in the fields near Gitarama drove a colony of Hutus around the mountains of Mugina to the confluence of the Akanyaru and the Nyabarongo. To avoid following in the footsteps of their Tutsi compatriots, the families pushed on across the boggy papyrus plain until they reached a virgin forest covering three hills. The hill of Ntarama bordered the Akanyaru; the hill of Kibungo lay along both rivers at the confluence; and the hill of Kanzenze faced the Nyabarongo to the north. After Rwanda?s independence was declared in 1962, local administrations throughout the country were placed in the hands of elected or appointed Hutu officials, and the Hutu settlers of the Bugesera were given free rein to claim plots of land in the forest. The new arrivals sheltered in huts and, with much hard labor, cleared the bush down to the riverbanks. These gifted farmers uncovered fertile alluvial soil particularly suited to the growing of bananas. As the seasons passed, plantations took over more of the riverside and thinned out the forest above. After their first harvests, the Hutu farmers were able to build themselves frame houses with the beige tile roofs characteristic of their native region, as well as chicken coops and pens for goats or black pigs?connected and covered pens unlike the vast open-air enclosures of leafy branches used for Tutsi cattle. Even today, however, these Hutu farmers?or more often farmwives?walk two to three hours each morning down to the marshes to fetch, on their backs, cans of muddy water for cooking and housekeeping.
- Page 20 (location ~ 294-305)
? On the eve of the genocide in 1994, the population of the Nyamata district?the small town and its fourteen surrounding hills, covering a total area of 398 square kilometers?was as high as 119,000. Among the fourteen hills, those of Kibungo, Kanzenze, and Ntarama accounted for 12,675 inhabitants in an area of 133 square kilometers. After the massacres, the population of Nyamata fell to 50,500 inhabitants and that of the three hills to 5,000. Within six weeks, about five out of every six Tutsis had been killed.
- Page 21 (location ~ 308-311)
PANCRACE: I don?t remember my first kill, because I did not identify that one person in the crowd. I just happened to start by killing several without seeing their faces. I mean, I was striking, and there was screaming, but it was on all sides, so it was a mixture of blows and cries coming in a tangle from everyone. Still, I do remember the first person who looked at me at the moment of the deadly blow. Now that was something. The eyes of someone you kill are immortal, if they face you at the fatal instant. They have a terrible black color. They shake you more than the streams of blood and the death rattles, even in a great turmoil of dying. The eyes of the killed, for the killer, are his calamity if he looks into them. They are the blame of the person he kills. ?
- Page 21 (location ~ 321-327)
something. The eyes of someone you kill are immortal, if they face you at the fatal instant. They have a terrible black color. They shake you more than the streams of blood and the death rattles, even in a great turmoil of dying. The eyes of the killed, for the killer, are his calamity if he looks into them. They are the blame of the person he kills. ?
- Page 22 (location ~ 324-327)
The first person, I finished him off in a rush, not thinking anything of it, even though he was a neighbor, quite close on my hill. In truth, it came to me only afterward: I had taken the life of a neighbor. I mean, at the fatal instant I did not see in him what he had been before; I struck someone who was no longer either close or strange to me, who wasn?t exactly ordinary anymore, I?m saying like the people you meet every day. His features were indeed similar to those of the person I knew, but nothing firmly reminded me that I had lived beside him for a long time. I am not sure you can truly understand me. I knew him by sight, without knowing him. He was the first victim I killed; my vision and my thinking had grown clouded.
- Page 23 (location ~ 352-358)
PIO: I had killed chickens but never an animal the stoutness of a man, like a goat or a cow. The first person, I finished him off in a rush, not thinking anything of it, even though he was a neighbor, quite close on my hill. In truth, it came to me only afterward: I had taken the life of a neighbor. I mean, at the fatal instant I did not see in him what he had been before; I struck someone who was no longer either close or strange to me, who wasn?t exactly ordinary anymore, I?m saying like the people you meet every day. His features were indeed similar to those of the person I knew, but nothing firmly reminded me that I had lived beside him for a long time. I am not sure you can truly understand me. I knew him by sight, without knowing him. He was the first victim I killed; my vision and my thinking had grown clouded.
- Page 23 (location ~ 352-358)
In 1994, during the killings in the marshes, I thought myself very lucky because I could use my former army gun. It?s one of our military traditions, to let a noncommissioned officer keep his weapon at the end of his career. Killing with a gun is a game compared to the machete, it?s not so close up.
- Page 24 (location ~ 363-365)
ADALBERT: The first day, I did not bother to kill directly, because at the start my work was to shout orders and encouragement to the team. I was the boss. Here and there I threw a grenade into the tumult on the other side, but without experiencing the effects of death, except for the shrieks. The first person I killed with a machete, I don?t remember the precise details. I was helping out at the church. I laid on big blows, I struck home on all sides, I felt the strain of effort but not of death?there was no personal pain in the commotion. Therefore the true first time worth telling from a lasting memory, for me, is when I killed two children, April 17. That morning we were roaming around, looking to rout out Tutsis who might be hidden on plots of land in Rugazi. I came upon two children sitting in the corner of a house. They were keeping quiet as mice. I asked them to come out; they stood up, they wanted to show they were being good. I had them walk at the head of our group, to bring them back to the village square in Nyarunazi. It was time to go home, so my men and I set out, talking about our day. As leader, I had recently been given a gun, besides the grenades. Walking along, without thinking, I decided to try it out. I put the two children side by side twenty meters away, I stood still, I shot twice at their backs. It was the first time in my life I had used a gun, because hunting is no longer customary in the Bugesera since the wild animals disappeared. For me, it was strange to see the children drop without a sound. It was almost pleasantly easy. I walked on without bending over to check that they were really dead. I don?t even know if they were moved to a more suitable place and covered up. Now, too often, I am seized by the memory of those children, shot straight out, like a joke.
- Page 24 (location ~ 365-379)
obsequious, he nevertheless makes a real effort to understand his predicament and to show
- Page 28 (location ~ 422-423)
Like Ignace Rukiramacumu, ?lie Mizinge belongs to the previous generation. He became acquainted with the gang during the 1994 massacres and the subsequent flight of Hutus into exile in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and he was truly accepted as one of them during their imprisonment. ?lie and Ignace are the two senior members of the gang. Their characters, however, are almost completely dissimilar. ?lie formerly enjoyed many privileges, first as a soldier, then as a policeman, and he has been deeply shaken by his fate. The genocide and its aftermath have marked him: he walks hesitantly, with a stoop. Querulous, docile, almost obsequious, he nevertheless makes a real effort to understand his predicament and to show that he was overwhelmed by events and acted badly. Ignace also knows that he went completely wrong, and he broods out loud over his failure without making clear whether it?s the undertaking itself or its outcome that he most deplores. He is one of the wiliest prisoners we interview. He?ll take one step forward, two steps back, then go in the opposite direction the next day. Sometimes he affects a complete indifference to others or stares at us accusingly, uttering bizarre prophecies.
- Page 28 (location ~ 418-427)
Cl?mentine Murebwayre has no ties with this gang beyond the fact that she lives in an adobe house on the hill of Kibungo. She is about thirty years old, with tiny brown freckles that make her delicate features even more lovely. She is Hutu, born in town; an uncle was the go-between for her marriage to Jean-de-Dieu Ruzindana, a Tutsi and ?a very good man despite the drawbacks of the countryside, who had settled me in nicely with his family in Kibungo.? Cl?mentine and her husband had nothing in common with the members of the gang and did not patronize the same cabaret but knew them well because their plot of land lay next to those of Pancrace and Adalbert. CL?MENTINE REMEMBERS: ?That bunch was famous on the hill for their carousing and tomfoolery. Those fellows did not seem so bad, except maybe old Ignace, grousing all his days against the Tutsis. But when they had been drinking, they took sport in spreading misunderstandings and wicked words from cabaret to cabaret. They used to scoff at the Tutsis and promise them serious retaliation, although they never laid hands on them. They were led on by Adalbert, the strongest, the most daring, the biggest mischief-maker, always ready to pick a bone over nothing. He could bait anyone without ever losing his temper. Among ourselves, we felt that gang was growing dangersome.?
- Page 29 (location ~ 441-450)
Innocent Rwililiza, a survivor, also a native of Kibungo, agrees: ?Those folks were hardworking, experienced farmers who could be very nice and very helpful. Still, they gradually absorbed the anti-Tutsi frustration and jealousy their parents had brought with them from Gitarama. During the killings of 1992, they suddenly fired themselves up against the Tutsis and turned very threatening. Those brawls ended without consequences in the neighborhood, thanks to the wisdom of the municipal judge. Afterward we sensed that cruelty had hooked them and could make them go wrong at any time. They seemed more and more hostile, on edge, especially whenever we had news about the war of the Tutsi inkotanyi.7 Yet never did we think they might one day kill at such a great pace.?
- Page 30 (location ~ 451-456)
L?opord no longer tried to rival Adalbert. He displayed an equal self-assurance but stayed in the background. To this day he is the only one who in a certain sense broke down. It happened in a Congolese refugee camp, where he was still acting as an interahamwe. Leaving an open-air mass one day, he felt the need to tell everything, to denounce himself to an astounded audience of accomplices and other interahamwe, who told him he?d gone crazy. Undaunted, upon his return to Nyamata he promptly offered to spill the whole story to the judges investigating his case. He is therefore one who plied his machete quite vigorously and also one whose confession is quite precise, with regard to both his own actions and those of his superiors. Jean-Baptiste, too, decided to surrender to the tribunal and volunteer a confession immediately after his return from exile in 1996. His cooperation earned him the good will of the administration in prison, where he runs an association of repentant detainees. Jean-Baptiste?whom Innocent has called ?as evil and cocky as he is crafty and intelligent??is quite articulate but is more calculating than L?opord. He seems mealy-mouthed and evasive, although whether from cowardice or embarrassment is impossible to tell. He is in fact the one who has most clearly realized what they all did, and the one who best understands the nature of the gaze that the outside world, in Rwanda and abroad, now turns on them. After years of silence, as their trial approached, most of the members of the gang began to admit?more or less, and with extreme caution?their participation in the genocide. They were prompted by the legal system?s promises of leniency, prompted as well by the desire to preserve the gang and stay part of it. Their long-standing friendship was very important to them, they explained.
- Page 31 (location ~ 462-475)
ALPHONSE: At first you cut timidly, then time helps you grow into it. Some colleagues learned the exact way to strike?on the side of the neck or the back of the head?to hasten the end. But other colleagues were all thumbs right up to the finish. Their moves were slow, they did not dare?they hit the arm instead of the neck, for example, then ran away yelling, ?That?s it, I killed this one dead!? But everyone knew it wasn?t true. A specialist had to intervene, catch up with the target, and dispatch it. ? ?LIE: The club is more crushing, but the machete is more natural. The Rwandan is accustomed to the machete from childhood. Grab a machete?that is what we do every morning. We cut sorghum, we prune banana trees, we hack out vines, we kill chickens. Even women and little girls borrow the machete for small tasks, like chopping firewood. Whatever the job, the same gesture always comes smoothly to our hands. The blade, when you use it to cut branch, animal, or man, it has nothing to say. In the end, a man is like an animal: you give him a whack on the head or the neck, and down he goes. In the first days someone who had already slaughtered chickens?and especially goats?had an advantage, understandably. Later, everybody grew accustomed to the new activity, and the laggards caught up. Only young guys, very sturdy and willing, used clubs. The club has no use in agriculture, but it was better suited to their way of trying to stand out, of strutting in the crowd. Same thing for spears and bows: those who still had them could find it entertaining to lend them or show them off. ? PIO: There were some who turned out to be easy killers, and they backed up their comrades in tough spots. But each person was allowed to learn in his own way, according to his character. You killed the way you knew, the way you felt it, each at his own speed. There were no serious instructions on know-how, except to keep it up. And then we must mention a remarkable thing that encouraged us. Many Tutsis showed a dreadful fear of being killed, even before we started to hit them. They would stop their disturbing agitation. They would cower or stand stock still. So this terror helped us to strike them. It is more tempting to kill a trembling and bleating goat than a spirited and frisky one, put it that way. ? FULGENCE: The fumblers were followed as a precaution, because of possible incompetence. The interahamwe gave them compliments or reprimands. Sometimes, if they wanted to be strict, the penalty was to finish off the wounded person, whatever it took. The culprit had to keep tackling the job to the end. The worst thing was being forced to do this in front of your own colleagues. We were only a few, at the very start. That didn?t last long, thanks to our familiarity with the machete in the fields. It?s only natural. If you and me are given a ballpoint pen, you will prove more at ease with writing work than me, no jealousy on my part. For us, the machete was what we knew how to use and sharpen. Also, for the authorities, it was less expensive than guns. Therefore we learned to do the job with the basic instrument we had.
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JEAN-BAPTISTE: If you proved too green with the machete, you could find yourself deprived of rewards, to nudge you in the right direction. If you got laughed at one day, you did not take long to shape up. If you went home empty-handed, you might even be scolded by your wife or your children. In any case, everybody killed in his own way. Someone who couldn?t get used to polishing off his victim could just walk on or ask for help. He would find a supportive comrade behind him. No colleague ever complained of being mistreated for his awkwardness. Mockery and taunts?they could happen, but harsh treatment, never.
- Page 35 (location ~ 529-533)
IGNACE: Some hunted like grazing goats, others like wild beasts. Some hunted slowly because they were afraid, some because they were lazy. Some struck slowly from wickedness, some struck quickly so as to finish up and go home early to do something else. It was not important, it was each to his own technique and personality. Me, because I was older, I was excused from trudging around the marshes. My duty was to patrol in stealth through the surrounding fields. I chose the ancestral method, with bow and arrows, to skewer a few Tutsis passing through. As an old-timer, I had known such watchful hunting since my childhood.
- Page 36 (location ~ 543-547)
CL?MENTINE: ?I saw papas teaching their boys how to cut. They made them imitate the machete blows. They displayed their skill on dead people, or on living people they had captured during the day. The boys usually tried it out on children, because of their similar size. But most people did not want to involve the children directly in these bloody doings, except for watching, of course.?
- Page 36 (location ~ 552-555)
Distrust was also in the air during my first meetings with survivors in Nyamata, while I was writing Dans le nu de la vie. The wariness was one-sided, however, directed toward me, never the other way round, and their reticence was of a different nature. Besides being suspicious of a foreigner whose compatriots had not lifted a finger to prevent the genocide, the survivors were convinced that it was too late, that there could no longer be any point to their testimony, not when offered to people who had tolerated the massacres. So my whole enterprise was suspect. Even more tellingly, they did not think they would be believed if they recounted what they had lived through during and since the genocide. They also feared their stories might revive their pain. They concluded that they were wasting their time with this intruder, that there was no sense or advantage in speaking up outside the community of those who had escaped the slaughter. So their distrust was keen, but I found that if I remained mindful of their feelings, time did help to allay their suspicions. Survivors must stay on guard vis-?-vis the outside world, for they now live in their own world of survivors. The killer, on the other hand, does not dread your disbelief?on the contrary: he fears that you will bring accusations against him. Even if you can convince him that his words will do him no harm, he fears that no matter who his listener is?or later on, his reader?he would be better off remaining silent. And no relationship of trust can completely dispel that anxiety. The killer stays on guard because he feels the threat of punishment hanging over him.
- Page 37 (location ~ 560-572)
Throughout this work with the survivors, I did not contact the killers. The idea never occurred to me, and the killers meant nothing to me. I never thought of continuing my project with them or of drawing a parallel between the two sets of narratives. That would have been immoral, unacceptable in the eyes of the survivors (in the eyes of readers, too, of course), and uninteresting besides. Out on the hills I occasionally encountered people suspected of being killers, and I?d met many of them in 1994. I could well imagine what they were like. Only at the end of my conversations with the survivors did I feel any wish to visit the prison?out of a sort of ambiguous curiosity sparked by various details and contradictions in the survivors? descriptions. The idea of actually talking to the killers came much later, thanks to recurrent questions asked by readers of Dans le nu de la vie. Their interest was contagious. If people who had been touched or enthralled by the survivors? stories wanted to know what had gone on in the minds of the killers, that meant it was reasonable to try asking them. That said, while I had no doubts about my first project, I was constantly doubtful about this one. I began it skeptically, because the relationship I tried to establish with the killers seemed at first both disheartening and futile?and brutally different from the rapport I had established and have maintained with the survivors and other people in the Nyamata area.
- Page 39 (location ~ 589-599)
IGNACE: At the beginning we were too fired up to think. Later on we were too used to it. In our condition, it meant nothing to us to think we were busy cutting our neighbors down to the last one. It became a goes-without-saying. They had already stopped being good neighbors of long standing, the ones who handed around the urwagwa can at the cabaret, since they wouldn?t be there anymore. They had become people to throw away, so to speak. They no longer were what they had been, and neither were we. They did not bother us, and the past did not bother us, because nothing bothered us. ? ?LIE: We had to put off our good manners at the edge of the muck until we heard the whistle to quit working. Kindness, too, was forbidden in the marshes. The marshes left no room for exceptions. To forget doubt, we had meanness and ruthlessness in killing, and a job to do and do well, that?s all. Some changed color from hunting. Their limbs were muddy, their clothes were splattered, even their faces were not black in the same way. They became grayish from everything they had done. A little layer of stink covered us, but we didn?t care.
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The Nazi party developed more and more initiatives in the government and its departments, a rising tide of acts intended to sweep German society clear of Jews and Gypsies. Dismissals, confiscations, brutalities, anti-Jewish laws, the wearing of the yellow star; exclusions, deportations, pogroms, confinement within ghettos, in concentration camps ? Between 1933 and 1940, the regime confirmed with each passing day?with hate-filled speeches, decrees, and murders?that it was determined to exclude the Jewish community from the Third Reich. Still, the Final Solution probably became inevitable for Hitler and his two specialists, Himmler and Heydrich, only sometime in the course of 1941, and the decision to implement it was communicated during the following weeks to his general staff and the officers in charge of the project. The formal decision to commit genocide was the result of a long process. When was the decision made? when the Jews were declared subhuman, or when they were deported in large numbers to ghettos and concentration camps? at the time of Hitler?s famous speech at the Reichstag in January 1939? or, that same year, when a gassing technique was tested on tens of thousands of patients with mental illnesses and incurable diseases, to evaluate its large-scale effectiveness?
- Page 47 (location ~ 710-719)
At the time of Rwanda?s declaration of independence in 1962, the Hutu leaders who swept into power had emerged from a violent and flawed social movement: the popular revolution of 1959, following on the death of the last Tutsi king. This Hutu uprising overthrew the Tutsi aristocracy and abolished the constraints that the majority Hutu population now deemed unacceptable. The new Hutu leaders championed no ideals worthy of this revolt and cynically used the uprising to marginalize the entire Tutsi community?peasants, civil servants, teachers?from which the aristocracy had sprung. Having conflated the once-privileged Tutsi aristocrat with the hardworking Tutsi peasant, the populist Hutu administration depicted all Tutsis as scheming, treacherous speculators and parasites in an overpopulated country. A military coup d??tat led by Major General Juv?nal Habyarimana in 1973 reinforced this policy. To isolate Tutsi citizens accused of underhanded practices, Habyarimana ordered the seizure of goods and property, the uprooting of communities, the imposition of educational quotas, and the passage of exclusionary laws and laws prohibiting mixed marriage (which remained in force until 1976). Above all, he instigated recurrent waves of massacres. In 1990 rebel Tutsi troops?this was the early Rwandan Patriotic Front?marched out of the Ugandan bush to make war on the Hutu Rwandan army, opening a new phase in the conflict. All genocides in modern history have occurred in the midst of war?not because they were its cause or consequence but because war suspends the rule of law: it systematizes death, normalizes savagery, fosters fear and delusions, reawakens old demons, and unsettles morality and human values. It undermines the last psychological defenses of the future perpetrators of the genocide. The farmer Alphonse Hitiyaremye summed it up in his own way: ?War is a dreadful disorder in which the culprits of genocide can plot incognito.?
- Page 48 (location ~ 728-742)
In Germany, when the decision to commit genocide was actually made, the army, police, government services, and various sectors of civil society?educational institutions, railroads, chambers of commerce, churches?had already long been prepared to carry it out. And the last phase of the destruction of the Jews began without a hitch. Things in Rwanda went equally smoothly. In the early morning of April 7, six or seven hours after the explosion of the plane, a core group gave the green light; the administration, army, and police went into action. The soldiers were ready, the militias were gung-ho, plenty of machetes were available?many of them brand new?with stout arms to wield them. Spirits were willing. Orders went out across the country. The killings began, one day after another, at different paces in different regions, but nothing hindered the progress of the massacres. In Germany as in Rwanda, genocide was undertaken by a totalitarian regime that had been in power for some time. The elimination of the Jew, the Gypsy, or the Tutsi had been openly part of the regime?s political agenda from the moment it took power, and had been repeatedly stressed in official speeches. The genocide was planned in successive stages. It thrived in the disbelief of foreign nations. It was tested for short periods on segments of the population.
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PIO: Farming is simpler, because it is our lifelong occupation. The hunts were more unpredictable. It was even more tiring on days of large-scale operations, patrolling so many kilometers behind the interahamwe, through the papyrus and mosquitoes. But we can?t say we missed the fields. We were more at ease in this hunting work, because we had only to bend down to harvest food, sheet metal, and loot. Killing was a demanding but more gratifying activity. The proof: no one ever asked permission to go clear brush on his field, not even for a half-day. ? ?LIE: It was punishment to rummage through the papyrus all day long without coming back to eat at noon. The belly could gripe, and the calves, too, since they were soaking in mud. Still, we ate abundant meat each morning, we drank deep in the evening. That balanced things properly. The looting reinvigorated us more than any harvest could, and we stopped earlier in the day. This schedule in the marshes was more suitable, for the young and especially the old.
- Page 56 (location ~ 845-852)
Rwanda, famous land of a thousand hills, is above all a land of one vast village. Four out of five Rwandan families live in the countryside, and nine out of ten draw more or less all their income from the soil. Every doctor, every teacher or shopkeeper, owns a plot of land on his native hill, which he cultivates in his spare time or entrusts to a relative. Even Kigali, spread over an immense area, seems less like a capital city than a collection of villages linked by little valleys and tracts of open ground. After the genocide, many foreigners wondered how the huge number of Hutu killers recognized their Tutsi victims in the upheaval of the massacres, since Rwandans of both ethnic groups speak the same language with no distinctive differences, live in the same places, and are not always physically recognizable by distinctive characteristics. The answer is simple. The killers did not have to pick out their victims: they knew them personally. Everyone knows everything in a village.
- Page 57 (location ~ 872-880)
The inhabitants of the district of Nyamata all agree that those documents played no part in the killing there. The ethnic background of the region?s sixty thousand Tutsis was well known to their neighbors, without exception, even in the case of recently arrived families, civil servants in temporary posts, drifters, and hermits in rickety shacks in the depths of little valleys. Shortly after the announcement of the attack on President Habyarimana, moreover, the Tutsis gathered themselves together, in a spontaneous protective reflex. First, they moved toward hamlets with a concentrated Tutsi population?for example, on the hill of Ntarama; then they took refuge in churches; finally, at the start of the slaughter, they fled into marshes and forests. Another observation helps to explain the reactions of Rwanda?s essentially village society. For twenty years a presidential clan had ruled by requiring absolute allegiance from all leading figures, Hutu and Tutsi alike, and by completely suppressing dissent. This policy drove many intellectuals from Rwanda and undermined the so-called urban petite bourgeoisie, a class that can be the wellspring of careful reflection and protest during periods of grave social instability.
- Page 59 (location ~ 894-903)
As Jean-Baptiste Munyankore, a teacher in Ntarama and a survivor of the marshes, confirms: ?The principal and the inspector of schools in my district participated in the killings with nail-studded clubs. Two teachers, colleagues with whom we used to share beers and student evaluations, set their shoulders to the wheel, so to speak. A priest, the burgomaster, the subprefect, a doctor?they all killed with their own hands ? They wore pressed cotton trousers, they had no trouble sleeping, they traveled around in vehicles or on light motorcycles ? These well-educated people were calm, and they rolled up their sleeves to get a good grip on their machetes. For someone who has spent his life teaching the humanities, as I have, such criminals are a fearful mystery.? Ignorant of mechanized agriculture and agronomic technology, Rwanda?s peasant society made no attempt to modernize the carnage, ignoring all scientific, medical, and anthropological experimentation, employing no efficient industrial techniques such as gas chambers and no ingenious methods to economize effort. The army did not use helicopters, tanks, or bazookas, while lighter weaponry such as grenades and machine guns came only sporadically into play, and then simply for tactical or psychological support. In the fields, labor was manual. Therefore, the killings in the marshes were manual, and they proceeded at the pace of a seasonal culture.
- Page 60 (location ~ 907-917)
PANCRACE: It was obligatory. A special group of hothead boys was assigned to search the houses of those who tried to hide. We feared the authorities? anger more than the blood we spilled. But deep down we had no fear of anything. I?ll explain. When you receive a new order, you hesitate but you obey, or else you?re taking a risk. When you have been prepared the right way by the radios and the official advice, you obey more easily, even if the order is to kill your neighbors. The mission of a good organizer is to stifle your hesitations when he gives you instructions. For example, when he shows you that the act will be total and have no grave consequences for anyone left alive, you obey more easily, you don?t worry about anything. You forget your misgivings and fears of punishment. You obey freely.
- Page 62 (location ~ 941-947)
ADALBERT: At the start, the killings were very regulated, but later things were not so strict. Someone who felt tired or wanted to attend to other things, like looting, collecting sheet metal or merchandise, or doing house repairs, he could ask permission and pay a contribution to those jobbing in his place. You showed usefulness in your own way in the killings, or you paid. In any case you weren?t forced to kill, as in the first days. As long as the main activity was progressing properly, as long as you were not protesting out loud, the authorities became more flexible. The fines varied with the gravity of the fault or the person?s purse. It was one thousand or two thousand francs for an ordinary offense, but it could go as high as five thousand if you had overdone it. At first these fines were very punishing for a farmer because of his poverty. Afterward, thanks to looting, they became more acceptable. Especially if the authorities happened to forget about the fines altogether. ? MARIE-CHANTAL: ?The farmers were not rich enough, like the well-to-do city people, to buy themselves relief from the killing. Some doctors and teachers in Kigali paid their servants or their employees so as not to dirty themselves. ?On the hills, many killed simply to get around their poverty. If they went along on the killings, they did not risk fines, and besides, it could pay off big on the way home. Whoever found a chance to sheet-metal his roof, how could he hesitate?? ? IGNACE: If a neighbor noticed you had sneaked off, he might come see you that evening and ask for a small sum, under threat of denouncing you to the judge the next day and making you pay a heavier official fine. If he showed a willing spirit, you profited by reaching agreement with him. That is why, in our group, we arranged among ourselves to cover up our lapses on the
- Page 64 (location ~ 969-984)
Someone who felt tired or wanted to attend to other things, like looting, collecting sheet metal or merchandise, or doing house repairs, he could ask permission and pay a contribution to those jobbing in his place. You showed usefulness in your own way in the killings, or you paid. In any case you weren?t forced to kill, as in the first days. As long as the main activity was progressing properly, as long as you were not protesting out loud, the authorities became more flexible. The fines varied with the gravity of the fault or the person?s purse. It was one thousand or two thousand francs for an ordinary offense, but it could go as high as five thousand if you had overdone it. At first these fines were very punishing for a farmer because of his poverty. Afterward, thanks to looting, they became more acceptable. Especially if the authorities happened to forget about the fines altogether. ? MARIE-CHANTAL: ?The farmers were not rich enough, like the well-to-do city people, to buy themselves relief from the killing. Some doctors and teachers in Kigali paid their servants or their employees so as not to dirty themselves. ?On the hills, many killed simply to get around their poverty. If they went along on the killings, they did not risk fines, and besides, it could pay off big on the way home. Whoever found a chance to sheet-metal his roof, how could he hesitate?? ? IGNACE: If a neighbor noticed you had sneaked off, he might come see you that evening and ask for a small sum, under threat of denouncing you to the judge the next day and making you pay a heavier official fine. If he showed a willing spirit, you profited by reaching agreement with him.
- Page 64 (location ~ 970-984)
? ADALBERT: At the start, the killings were very regulated, but later things were not so strict. Someone who felt tired or wanted to attend to other things, like looting, collecting sheet metal or merchandise, or doing house repairs, he could ask permission and pay a contribution to those jobbing in his place. You showed usefulness in your own way in the killings, or you paid. In any case you weren?t forced to kill, as in the first days. As long as the main activity was progressing properly, as long as you were not protesting out loud, the authorities became more flexible. The fines varied with the gravity of the fault or the person?s purse. It was one thousand or two thousand francs for an ordinary offense, but it could go as high as five thousand if you had overdone it. At first these fines were very punishing for a farmer because of his poverty. Afterward, thanks to looting, they became more acceptable. Especially if the authorities happened to forget about the fines altogether. ? MARIE-CHANTAL: ?The farmers were not rich enough, like the well-to-do city people, to buy themselves relief from the killing. Some doctors and teachers in Kigali paid their servants or their employees so as not to dirty themselves. ?On the hills, many killed simply to get around their poverty. If they went along on the killings, they did not risk fines, and besides, it could pay off big on the way home. Whoever found a chance to sheet-metal his roof, how could he hesitate?? ? IGNACE: If a neighbor noticed you had sneaked off, he might come see you that evening and ask for a small sum, under threat of denouncing you to the judge the next day and making you pay a heavier official fine. If he showed a willing spirit, you profited by reaching agreement with him. That is why, in our group, we arranged among ourselves to cover up our lapses on the sly.
- Page 64 (location ~ 969-984)
? L?OPORD: Mornings I checked the absences. Someone might show up drooping because of too much drink, and that passed because it was a common reason. Also, someone might offer a pressing obligation, like an illness or a piece of business. Anyway, if the reason wasn?t valid, the person had to pay a fine or a jerry can of urwagwa; it could even go as high as a case of Primus. Some people were beaten, but only if they lied shamelessly. ? PIO: Anyone who had the idea of not killing for a day could get out of it, no problem. But anyone with the idea of not killing at all could not let on, or he himself would be killed while others watched. Voicing disagreement out loud was fatal on the spot. So we don?t know if people had that idea. Of course you could pretend, dawdle, make excuses, pay?but above all you could not object in words. It would be fatal if you refused outright, even hush-hush with your neighbor. Your position and your fortune could not save you from death if you showed a kindness to a Tutsi before unfamiliar eyes. For us, kind words for Tutsis were more fatal than evil deeds.
- Page 66 (location ~ 1005-1015)
Sheet metal arrived in Rwanda at the same time as the Belgians, immediately after the First World War, and not by accident, since it was intended as roofing for colonial buildings. Tiles covered the colonists? houses, foliage covered the Rwandans? homes, and sheets of metal covered the public buildings where both peoples would be brought together. The sheet iron of that period was a good centimeter thick, able to last around fifty years, or as it turned out, until independence. With the passage of time and the emancipation of the people, sheet metal became thinner and spread into the towns, their outlying districts, and gradually the hills, to cover almost every dwelling, including the most modest, which have come to be known as terres-t?les (sheet metal adobes). The sheet of corrugated metal is now the measure of a habitation. One says, ?So-and-so has built himself a house? not ?of so many square meters? but ?of so many sheets.? The sheets last varying lengths of time depending on whether they have been imported from Europe (the best), Uganda (the most compact), Kenya (the toughest), or manufactured locally, in the Tolirwa factories of Kigando, near Kigali. These homemade sheets are the thinnest (three millimeters), cheapest, and flimsiest. They last around fifteen years, about as long as the adobe walls of the farmers? houses. After the genocide, humanitarian organizations handed out sheets of compressed papyrus fiber, but their life-span of a few months fooled no one, either as to their usefulness or as to the benevolence of their donors.
- Page 68 (location ~ 1034-1046)
Of all the elements of the house (walls, frame, furniture, domestic accessories), the corrugated metal sheet is the only one the villager cannot make with his own hands?hence its commercial value. ?Before the war, in Kibungo, people organized lotteries of sheet metal,? says Innocent. ?Everyone brought in a brand-new sheet, they passed around bottles of urwagwa, they drew lots, and the lucky winner left with a new roof. You could also offer them more formally, in a dowry before a wedding, for example.? A nanny goat costs two sheets, an Ankole cow at least twenty. One sheet clears the slate for about fifteen Primuses. Its price in Rwandan francs depends on its quality and even more on the season. ?During a racking drought, the farmer tends to take down his metal roofing to sell and replaces it with strips of plastic. Then prices nosedive,? according to Innocent. ?Later on, if the harvest proves bountiful, he buys more metal roofing, new or used, and the price looks up again.? Many factors besides drought can feed the secondhand market, including theft. To hear Innocent tell it, ?Agile boys can climb onto a roof and, using damp cloths, uncover sleepers during their dreams, then flee into the bush, especially if they know the owners have been partying.? Gambling and alcoholism are frequent causes of ?uncovering.? I shall not mention here the name of a friend in Nyamata who, at the end of a monumental binge, sold his sheets of roofing one after the other for a last little drink for the road and wound up sleeping under the stars. The most serious impetus for this trade, however, is war, which impoverishes its victims and drives them into exile. ? Although metal roofing is the only element of a house that its owner cannot make on the spot, it is also the one he can most easily transport: a few turns of the screw, and it?s on the ground next to the bundles. Its standardization makes it usable throughout the Great Lakes region of central Africa.
- Page 69 (location ~ 1052-1067)
ADALBERT: Straggling killers let themselves wander away from eager ones so as to lay early hands on loot, but they did not become extra rich. In the evening the eager killers managed very well for themselves and retrieved what they had let escape. They knew they were tough. At bottom, we didn?t care about what we accomplished in the marshes, only about what was important to us for our comfort: the stocks of sheet metal, the rounded-up cows, the piles of windows and other such goods. When we met a neighbor on a new bike or waving around a radio, greed drove us on. We inspected roofs along the way. People could turn mean if they heard about some fertile land already snapped up behind their backs. They could turn meaner than in the marshes, even if they were no longer brandishing their machetes. Me, it so happens, I am strong and vigorous, I had made myself boss. It was a position with advantages for looting. ? PANCRACE: After work we would tally up the profit. The money the Tutsis had tried to take with them under their clothes into death. The money of those who had offered it willingly, in hope of not suffering. The money from goods collected on the way home, and the sheet metal or utensils you could sell in the free-for-all, even at laughable prices. We hid rolls of franc notes in our pockets.
- Page 73 (location ~ 1105-1115)
? ADALBERT: Straggling killers let themselves wander away from eager ones so as to lay early hands on loot, but they did not become extra rich. In the evening the eager killers managed very well for themselves and retrieved what they had let escape. They knew they were tough. At bottom, we didn?t care about what we accomplished in the marshes, only about what was important to us for our comfort: the stocks of sheet metal, the rounded-up cows, the piles of windows and other such goods. When we met a neighbor on a new bike or waving around a radio, greed drove us on. We inspected roofs along the way. People could turn mean if they heard about some fertile land already snapped up behind their backs. They could turn meaner than in the marshes, even if they were no longer brandishing their machetes. Me, it so happens, I am strong and vigorous, I had made myself boss. It was a position with advantages for looting. ? PANCRACE: After work we would tally up the profit. The money the Tutsis had tried to take with them under their clothes into death. The money of those who had offered it willingly, in hope of not suffering. The money from goods collected on the way home, and the sheet metal or utensils you could sell in the free-for-all, even at laughable prices. We hid rolls of franc notes in our pockets. For example, if you snagged two bikes, you didn?t fuss about cashing one in. You sold it for a losing price, and then you bought drinks calmly. We were drinking so much the price of drinks was multiplied by three?even by five, once. But the drinker didn?t care anymore, thanks to the money from looting. Some farmers even hid Tutsis they knew for a certain price. After the Tutsis had coughed up all their savings, the farmers abandoned them to the arms of death, without paying them back, of course. Those were crooked deals.
- Page 72 (location ~ 1104-1119)
? L?OPORD: We began the day by killing, we ended the day by looting. It was the rule to kill going out and to loot coming back. We killed in teams, but we looted every man for himself or in small groups of friends. Except for drinks and cows, which we enjoyed sharing. And the plots of land, of course, they were discussed with the organizers. As district leader, I had gotten a huge fertile plot, which I counted on planting when it was all over. Those who killed a lot had less time to pillage, but since they were feared, they would catch up because of their power. No one wound up ahead, no one wound up robbed. Anyone who couldn?t loot because he had to be absent, or because he felt tired from all he had done, could send his wife. You would see wives rummaging through houses. They ventured even into the marshes to get the belongings of the unfortunate women who had just been killed. People would steal anything?bowls, pieces of cloth, jugs, religious images, wedding pictures?from anywhere, from the houses, from the schools, from the dead. They stole blood-soaked clothing that they were not afraid to wash. They stole stashes of money from underwear. Not in the church, though, because of the rotting bodies forgotten after the massacre on the first day.
- Page 75 (location ~ 1141-1151)
At the same time, in Kigali, whites were leaving embassies, offices, monasteries, and universities via road convoys to neighboring countries and an emergency airlift operating out of the Kanomb? airport. A very few foreigners sought refuge in guarded villas, but no foreigners were left in Nyamata. Not one foreigner?priest, service corps volunteer, diplomat, NGO worker?can provide a convincing reason for this immediate and astonishing flight during the opening hours of the killings. In any case, neither danger nor panic can justify such haste. The most telling explanation I have heard so far (food for thought for those who, at every human tragedy, wonder aloud about the usefulness of information and eyewitness testimony) comes from Claudine Kayitesi, a farmer and survivor on the hill of Ntarama, when she says, reversing our proverb: ?Whites do not want to see what they cannot believe, and they could not believe a genocide, because that is a killing that overwhelms everyone, them as much as the others.? So they left. Incidentally, Claudine, twenty-one years old at the time, gives this remarkable definition of the event: ?I think, by the way, that no one will ever line up the truths of this mysterious tragedy and write them down?not the professors in Kigali and Europe, not the intellectuals and politicians. Every explanation will give way on one side or another, like a wobbly table. A genocide is a poisonous bush that grows not from two or three roots but from a tangle of roots that has moldered underground where no one notices it.?
- Page 78 (location ~ 1185-1196)
One should pause to consider the leading role of radio during the genocides in both Germany and Rwanda, societies whose cultures were otherwise so different. Neither the Germany of the Third Reich nor the Rwanda of the Second Republic of Habyarimana was in the television era, let alone in the era of the Internet, so radio exerted a decisive influence. But this observation is inconclusive, which is why I will quote from memory?I hope not too inaccurately?a remark made by Serge Daney, a critic and essayist, during the first Gulf War. Contradicting the received wisdom of the time, when media specialists were debating the overwhelming impact on the event of televised images, Daney maintained, ?Radio is far and away the most dangerous of the media. It wields a unique and terrifying power, once the state or its institutional apparatus collapses. It casts off everything that might attenuate or sidetrack the force of words. In a chaotic situation, radio can prove to be the most efficient tool of democracy as well as of revolution or fascism, because it penetrates unhindered to the individual?s deepest core, anywhere and at any moment, immediately, without the necessary and critical distance inherent in the reading of a text or image.?
- Page 79 (location ~ 1200-1208)
PANCRACE: The evening atmosphere was festive, but some came spoiling for a fight, their fists clenched or machetes still dirty in their hands, because of badly distributed land. For fields, negotiations got very serious. Since many drank Primus without counting, it could get chancy. At night the bosses were gone and their authority with them; conditions in town were no longer controlled, as they were in the marshes during the day. It was heated and disreputable. So the women would come looking for their husbands and take them home if they heard they were in bad company. ? ADALBERT: Vagabond children, children from the streets of Nyamata, more or less abandoned by misfortune, took part in the marshes. Little good-for-nothings, so to speak. But the educated children of the farmers?they could not go. They contented themselves with the looting activities and the merrymaking on the hills. ? ALPHONSE: During the killings, we had not one wedding, not one baptism, not one soccer match, not one religious service like Easter. We did not find that kind of celebration interesting anymore. We did not care spit for that Sunday silliness. We were dead tired from work, we were getting greedy, we celebrated whenever we felt like it, we drank as much as we wanted. Some turned into drunks. Anyone who felt sad about someone he had killed really had to hide his words and his regrets, for fear of being seen as an accomplice and being treated roughly. Sometimes drinkers went mean when they had found no one to kill that day; others went mean because they had killed too much. You had to show them a smiling face, or watch out.
- Page 81 (location ~ 1240-1253)
CL?MENTINE: ?I knew the gang well. Those boys were known in Kibungo for bad behavior when they had had a lot to drink. Before the killings, they used to harass Tutsis. They would lay ambushes to throw taunts and punches at them. Some in the gang spoke extreme words against the Tutsis, calling them cockroaches and threatening them with an evil end. The older ones especially did that, and it made the young ones laugh. ?So during the killings, that gang muscled up to the front line in the marshes. They went off together with great strides, they helped one another during the day, they came back staggering beneath loads of spoils. Evenings they spun out all their boasting to demoralize those who hadn?t had as good a hunt. They never tired of killing, mocking, drinking, laughing, celebrating. They displayed constant merriment.?
- Page 83 (location ~ 1265-1271)
L?OPORD: In the evening, we told about Tutsis who had been obstinate, those who had gotten themselves caught, those who had gotten away. Some of us had contests. Others made predictions or bets to win an extra Primus. The bragging amused us?even if you lost, you put on a smile. We had sessions with girls who were raped in the bush. Nobody dared protest that. Even those who were edgy about it, because they had received blessings in church for example, told themselves it would change nothing since the girl was marked for death anyway. Me, I had no taste for such messing around; I didn?t like the drink so much, either. I would take a little for solidarity, then go home to bed early, around eight o?clock, to be in shape the next day. Since I was a cell leader, I had to feel always ready.
- Page 83 (location ~ 1271-1277)
Tite Rushita, jersey number ten, a former star who dominated the game through some fifteen championships, remembers, ?There was a rich merchant named Fran?ois and a prosperous truck-company owner named L?onard. They were rolling in money, so they helped the team out with little advantages. We got brochettes and sweet drinks, and lifts out to the fields. Kids who lived way out could borrow a bike to come in for practice. ?If we pulled off a great win, we could even walk away with a goat or some bags of grain from the happy shopkeepers. Soccer life was profitable. That?s how we got strong enough to play two seasons in the first division.?
- Page 85 (location ~ 1300-1305)
Tite Rushita is a Tutsi survivor of the marshes. Today he divides his time between training and supervising kids in the afternoon, and Mutzig beers in the evening chez Chicago or Marie-Louise. Here is how he sums up the atmosphere among the players in the last few months preceding the genocide: ?Before the match, they would show a smile to one another, and out on the field they hid their thoughts, but after the game they no longer shared drinks. The team limped along and got tripped up by piddling opponents.? The star of the last team to play before the killings was ?vergiste Habihirwe, Tite?s successor?like him a Tutsi, a survivor, and a lefty. He no longer wants to have anything to do with soccer, despite the appeals of friends and local merchants. Wearing a cap jammed tight on his head, he leaves his plot of land only to go to Marie Mukarulinda?s cabaret, Au Coin des Veuves (The Widows? Place), in Kanzenze. About those times, he has this to say: ?Certain days, the Hutu players left practice to attend meetings. When they returned, they would kick us viciously in the ankles. So during the games, rough play won out over finesse. The shooters no longer took good aim at the goals, the songs went silent. Mockery and muttering went rumbling along.?
- Page 86 (location ~ 1308-1317)
Tite Rushita is a Tutsi survivor of the marshes. Today he divides his time between training and supervising kids in the afternoon, and Mutzig beers in the evening chez Chicago or Marie-Louise. Here is how he sums up the atmosphere among the players in the last few months preceding the genocide: ?Before the match, they would show a smile to one another, and out on the field they hid their thoughts, but after the game they no longer shared drinks. The team limped along and got tripped up by piddling opponents.? The star of the last team to play before the killings was ?vergiste Habihirwe, Tite?s successor?like him a Tutsi, a survivor, and a lefty. He no longer wants to have anything to do with soccer, despite the appeals of friends and local merchants. Wearing a cap jammed tight on his head, he leaves his plot of land only to go to Marie Mukarulinda?s cabaret, Au Coin des Veuves (The Widows? Place), in Kanzenze. About those times, he has this to say: ?Certain days, the Hutu players left practice to attend meetings. When they returned, they would kick us viciously in the ankles. So during the games, rough play won out over finesse. The shooters no longer took good aim at the goals, the songs went silent. Mockery and muttering went rumbling along.? In 1994 ?vergiste was raising a herd of Ankole cattle in the meadows above Kanzenze. On the first morning of the massacres, he impulsively sought refuge at the home of Ndayisaba, his closest friend and teammate (a left back), a Hutu who lived a few hundred meters away. ?When I arrived in his courtyard, he was holding his machete, and I saw that he had already cut two children. Luckily, time offered me a short breather, and I could get away. At my house it was already too late; I never saw any of them again. ?My runner?s legs carried me full tilt through the forest. During the day I kept my head down in the sorghum; by night I scrounged in the dirt for cassava. I would hear my teammates hunting around my house. It was the same guys who used to pass the ball back and forth with me ? They would yell, ??vergiste, we sorted through the piles of bodies, we have not yet seen your cockroach face! We are going to sniff you out, we shall work at night if we have to, but we shall get you!? They shouted and quarreled over not catching me. The players were the most dogged in cutting other players. They had that ferocity of the ball in their hearts.? In Marie-Louise?s little place, where Innocent?s band of friends meets every evening, Tite nods in agreement with ?vergiste. ?Me, too. The players tried everything to cut me,? he says. ?They were obliged to. They were famous interahamwe thanks to soccer, so they had to shine thanks to soccer. They had to cut well-known players. On the team, not one teammate gave a helping hand to another. Not one closed his eyes in a kind complicity. Anyone who dared try would have been cut to pieces on the spot.?
- Page 86 (location ~ 1308-1329)
?However,? he adds drily, ?there is one known case of a soccer player reaching an understanding?one case of mutual help out of hundreds of players. He was a Tutsi named Mbarushimana, known as Mushimana. He played on the team, he was number six. During the killings, he denounced his Tutsi neighbors, he unearthed hiding places, he tracked on hunting expeditions for the killers. He hoped to save his life by helping them cut his Tutsi teammates. The interahamwe used him, and at the bloody end they laid him out across a path, not even pushing him into a ditch.? The team played its last game in February 1994, against Gashora. That Sunday there were five Hutus, five Tutsis, and one son of a mixed marriage?Tutsi mother and Hutu father?by the name of C?lestin Mulindwa. Mulindwa is one of the team?s three survivors and the only one who still kicks the ball around on weekends, with fellow teachers or the children in his little village. ?We had lived as brother players,? he says, ?and we parted as enemy brothers. Our love for the ball burst at the first machete blow. You see, nothing survived the genocide. It cut down soccer with a casual swipe, like all the rest.?
- Page 87 (location ~ 1332-1341)
?A young man from Kanazi arrived all out of breath and came over to me. ?I came from Kanazi to fetch you,? he said. ?It?s your brother who sent me rushing here. Luck is waiting for you, outside, for you and your children. She is impatient for you know what?don?t make her wait ?? I looked at the mama who had just given birth in front of me on a mattress, lying there with her two children. I prayed at top speed, My God, tell me the one I should take. Then I thought, If I take the newborn, I can?t feed it since I have no milk. The older one will be easier. I put him in a cloth sling on my back and told the soldiers, ?He is mine, too.?? Outside in the garden, Val?rie watched what followed: ?They surrounded the maternity hospital. They ripped down the gates, they simply shot up the locks. They wore very handsome cartridge belts of highly polished leather, but they wanted to avoid wasting bullets. They killed the women with machetes and clubs. Whenever one of the more agile girls managed to escape in the commotion and get out a window, she was caught in the gardens. When a mama had hidden a child underneath her, they picked her up first, then cut the child, then cut its mother last. They didn?t bother to cut the nursing infants properly. They slammed them against the walls to save time, or hurled them alive on the heaps of corpses.? Her faltering voice has almost faded away. ?That morning, we were more than three hundred women and children. That evening in the garden, there were only five women left, spared because they were lucky to be born Hutu. And one child: his name is Honn?te, and he was taken to Kenya to live with his aunt.?
- Page 89 (location ~ 1364-1376)
French and German conscripts chatted across the trenches and swapped tins of potted meat; Algerian fellaghas hid French colonists with whom they played cards; a Vichy minister foiled the deportation of a colleague with whom he went to school. It was the same in Vietnam, Ireland, Lebanon, Angola, El Salvador, Israel, Chechnya?in the name of passion, childhood, a clan, elemental things like affection or loyalty. During the height of the ethnic cleansing operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, during the worst of the sieges of Sarajevo and Gorazde and the massacres in Foa and Brko, lovers met secretly, coffee and sheep were smuggled, there were hideouts and escapes and secret reunions, as well as conversations across the front lines to exchange news about children or mistresses. At Vukovar, besieged and flattened by artillery, a slender path through cornfields provided a safety valve that was common knowledge among the Serbian tank crews. And at the end of the war we were dumbfounded to learn about the thousand and one touching anecdotes we could never even have imagined. In Nyamata, however, we find not one comradely impulse among teammates, not one gesture of compassion for helpless babies at the breast. No bond of friendship or love that survived from a church choir or an agricultural cooperative. No civil disobedience in a village, no rebellious adolescent in a gang of budding toughs. And not a single escape network, although it would have been easy to set one up in the forty kilometers of uninhabited forests between the marshes and the Burundi border; no convoy, no links among the herders? paths, no web of hiding places to allow the evacuation of survivors. Is this a particular characteristic of genocide? Yes, essentially, despite the too-rare exceptions here and there. This special characteristic should be emphasized, as the word genocide is becoming more and more compromised, bandied about by political figures, journalists, and diplomats whenever they speak of particularly cruel killings or carnage on a massive scale. All wars generate savage temptations that are more or less murderous. The bloodthirsty madness of combatants, the craving for vengeance, the distress, fear, paranoia, and feelings of abandonment, the euphoria of victories and anguish of defeats, and above all a sense of damnation after crimes have been committed?these things provoke genocidal behavior and actions. In other words, panic or explosive fury and the desire to crush the enemy once and for all lead to massacres of civilians and prisoners, campaigns of rape and torture, deadly deportations, pure devastation in all directions. Sometimes nonmilitary actions result as well: the poisoning of rice fields with pesticides, the slaughter of buffalo herds, the forced conversions to foreign religions and cultures. But to confuse these war crimes?even when they tend, in their collective insanity, to destroy a civilian community?with an explicit and organized plan of extermination is a political and intellectual mistake, symptomatic of our culture of sensationalism.
- Page 90 (location ~ 1378-1401)
That said, what purpose does it serve to distinguish one massacre from another when they reach such a scale? Is it not imprudent to pronounce categorically upon episodes of ongoing history? Is not the pain of the victims immeasurable? Is not the savagery of Srebrenica or Grozny as cruel as that of Nyamata? For those who experienced it, it is. For the rest of us, the barbarity of Nyamata is more harrowing because it was absolute. ?War happens when authorities want to overthrow other authorities to take their own turn at the trough. A genocide?that?s when an ethnic group wants to bury another ethnic group. Genocide goes beyond war, because the intention lasts forever, even if it is not crowned with success. It is a final intention,? says Christine Nyiransabimana, a farmer, in an astonishing echo of the ?final solution.?
- Page 93 (location ~ 1416-1422)
ADALBERT: The women led a more ordinary life. They housecleaned, they tended to the cooking, they looted the surrounding area, they gossiped and haggled in town. There were fierce wives who wanted to march off on expeditions and help with the killing, but they were prevented by the organizers, who lectured them that a woman?s place was not in the marshes. I know one case of a woman who bloodied her hands out there, a too quick-tempered woman who wanted a reputation for herself. Still, if women happened to come upon some Tutsis hidden in an abandoned house, that was different. ? MARIE-CHANTAL: ?When my husband came home in the evenings, I knew the disturbing gossip, I knew he was a boss, but I asked him nothing. He left the blades outside. He no longer showed the slightest temper anymore in the house, he spoke of the Good Lord. He was cheerful with the children, he brought back little presents and words of encouragement, and that pleased me. ?I don?t know of any wife who whispered against her husband during the massacres.
- Page 95 (location ~ 1445-1453)
the burning zeal of their husbands. They weighed the loot, they compared the spoils. Desire fired them up in those circumstances. ?There were also men who proved more charitable toward the Tutsis than their wives, even with their machetes in hand. A person?s wickedness depends on the heart, not the sex.? ? JEAN-BAPTISTE: During the killings, much jealousy spilled from the mouths of our women because of the constant talk about the Tutsi women?s slender figures, their smooth skin thanks to drinking milk, and so on. When those envious women came upon a Tutsi searching for food in the forest, they called their neighbors to taunt her for crawling around that way all slovenly. Sometimes women shoved a neighbor to the bottom of the hill and threw her bodily into the waters of the Nyabarongo. ? ALPHONSE: My wife would tell me, ?Listen, really, going every day, every day, it?s too much. These filthy things should be stopped,? and suchlike recommendations I ignored. One evening she scolded me, ?Alphonse, be careful. Everything you are doing will have accursed consequences, because it is not normal and passes all humanity. So much blood provokes a fate beyond our lives. We are going toward damnation.? Around the end she refused to share the bed, she slept on the ground, she said, ?You are cutting so many, you cannot count them anymore. I am afraid of this foul thing. You are turning into an animal, and I won?t sleep with an animal.?
- Page 95 (location ~ 1454-1466)
?Neighbor women asked me how I could have let myself be impregnated by a cockroach. They?d warn me not to hope for anything for my husband, since their men were firmly resolved to kill everyone. They advised me to teach my son that he hadn?t had a Tutsi father, that he was a full-blooded Hutu, because if he ever let his tongue slip later on, it would be deadly for him. ?In Nyamata the midwives returned to their jobs at the maternity hospital after the slaughter as though they had not seen any bloody marks upon the walls. They even snagged their last pay before leaving for Congo. ?On the hill of Kibungo not a single woman took in the child of a Tutsi neighbor who had gone to his death. Not one woman mixed a nursling in with her own brood. Not even for money. Not even in a forest hideout. Because the women did not want to be scolded by their husbands, if the men came home punished by a fine for that misdeed.?
- Page 98 (location ~ 1493-1500)
It was close to noon on April 11, the first day of the Tutsi hunt on the hill of Ntarama. Isidore Mahandago was sitting on a chair in front of his terres-t?le house, resting after a morning of weeding. He was a Hutu farmer, sixty-five years old, who had arrived twenty years before in Rugunga, on the Ntarama hill. Some strapping fellows armed with machetes came singing up the path that ran near his house. Isidore called to them in his deep old voice and lectured them in public, in front of the neighbors: ?You, young men, are evildoers. Turn on your heels and go. Your blades point the way toward a dreadful misfortune for us all. Do not stir up disputes too dangerous for us farmers. Stop tormenting our neighbors and go back to your fields.? Two killers approached him, laughing, and without a word cut him down with their machetes. Among the band was Isidore?s son, who according to witnesses neither protested nor stopped to bend over the body. The young men went on their way singing. Isidore Mahandago is the Just Man of Ntarama. The next day, three kilometers away in the bush of Kibungo, Marcel Sengali was watching a herd of brindle Ankole with their lyre-shaped horns. The Sengali family lived in Kingabo, an area inhabited by Tutsis and by three Hutu families, including the Sengalis, who over time had learned from their neighbors how to raise cattle. Because of their mutual trust and friendship, the residents had combined their animals in a single herd.
- Page 98 (location ~ 1501-1512)
On April 12, the second day of the slaughter, some of them appeared at his home, accompanied by interahamwe. Knowing he was married to a Tutsi, they ordered him to kill her to show support for the genocide. He refused stoically and forbade them to enter his house. Terrified by the confrontation, his neighbors urged him to obey by sacrificing his wife. Instead, he tried to get rid of his visitors. He was murdered in his courtyard and buried on his property. He is the Just Man of Kanzenze.
- Page 100 (location ~ 1523-1527)
And the Just who are still alive, who and where are they? In truth, after many visits and much searching, I have not yet met any of them on the three hills of Kibungo, Ntarama, and Kanzenze. But I can mention some other worthy people in their stead. Ibrahim Nsengiyumua, a prosperous merchant of Kibungo, paid fine after fine to avoid killing and looting, to the point of ruining himself. He did it ?because he had amassed enough wealth in his life not to spoil it with blood,? explains Innocent. Val?rie Nyirarudodo brought her little ones to her job at the maternity hospital one morning and left with an extra toddler. A mama, living in a house at the foot of the forest of Kayumba, slapped her children because they denounced Tutsis hidden in the bush. Many people, in the words of the young farmer Christine Nyiransabimana, ?were able to pretend, to dawdle behind and return in the evening without dirtying their machetes ? but had to show they were with the others.? In closing, one should mention the special case of spouses in mixed marriages who saved their wives and a few relatives in spite of the merciless sanctions. Unlike the Nazi administration, which generally classified Jewish spouses in a mixed marriage according to their religious faith and instruction, Jewish or Christian, and decided their fate on that criterion, the Habyarimana regime applied a more simplistic, sexist rule. Tutsi husbands of Hutu wives had to be executed, and they were, without exception. Tutsi wives of Hutu husbands could be spared, and sometimes their children with them?that is, if their husbands accepted conditions that Jean-Baptiste Murangira sums up as follows: ?Tutsi wives of poor Hutus had to be killed, but their children could be spared. Tutsi wives of well-off Hutus could be saved if the husbands participated conspicuously in the killing duties.? Thus the census taker Jean-Baptiste Murangira saved his wife Sp?ciose Mukandahunga; the judge Jean-Baptiste Ntarwandya saved his wife Drocelle Umupfasoni; the retired chief warrant officer Marc Nsabimana saved his wife Annonciata Mukaligo; the director of the post office and a few other prominent citizens and prosperous farmers protected their wives. Following his spontaneous confessions about ?the killing duties,? the census taker was sentenced to a prison term. Thanks to testimony in his favor, the judge was released after two years in prison; his case is closed, but he has not been reappointed to the bench.
- Page 101 (location ~ 1539-1557)
ALPHONSE: We killed everything we tracked down in the papyrus. We had no reason to choose, to expect or fear anyone in particular. We were cutters of acquaintances, cutters of neighbors, just plain cutters. Today some name acquaintances they supposedly spared, because they know these are no longer living to contradict them. They tell the tales to attract the favor of suffering families, they invent rescues to ease their return. We joke about those fake stratagems. ? ?LIE: We were forbidden to choose among men and women, babies and oldsters?everyone had to be slaughtered by the end. Time was hurrying us on, the job pulled us along, and the intimidators kept saying, ?Anyone who lowers his machete because of somebody he knows, he is spoiling the willingness of his colleagues.? Anyway, someone who avoided the fatal gesture before a good acquaintance did it out of kindness to himself, not to his acquaintance, because he knew it brought no mercy to the other person, who?d be struck down anyhow. Quite the contrary, the victim might wind up cut more cruelly, for having slowed up the job for a moment.
- Page 103 (location ~ 1572-1581)
JEAN-BAPTISTE: I know the case of a Hutu boy who fled into the marshes with the Tutsis. After two or three weeks they pointed out to him that he was Hutu and so could be saved. He left the marshes and was not attacked. He had spent so much time with Tutsis in his early childhood that he was a bit mixed up. His mind no longer knew how to draw the proper line between the ethnic groups. Afterward he did not get involved in the killings. That is the sole exception. The only able-bodied person not forced to raise the machete, even coming along behind. It was clear his mind was overwhelmed, and he was not penalized. ? FULGENCE: It was much better to kill strangers than acquaintances, because acquaintances had time to stab you with an intense look before receiving the blows. A look from a stranger pierced your mind or memory less easily. ? MARIE-CHANTAL: ?For a woman, it was unthinkable to hide an acquaintance, even if you had been close to her since childhood, even if she gave you small sums of money. When the news got around of a concealed survivor, you had to give her up without delay to your neighbors. You might even be forced to kill her with your own hands. So it did not save her, besides lasting a few days longer for nothing, and it obliged you to do the most sickening work of the men.?
- Page 105 (location ~ 1610-1620)
FRANCINE: ?There are killers who whispered the names of acquaintances as they lifted up the papyrus, promising them protection. But it was a simple ruse to encourage them to rise from their watery hiding place, to cut them without the trouble of a search. It was very dangerous to be discovered by an acquaintance, because he could make you suffer for the show of it.? ? BERTHE: ?Before, I knew that a man could kill another man, because it happens all the time. Now I know that even the person with whom you?ve shared food, or with whom you?ve slept, even he can kill you with no trouble. The closest neighbor can turn out to be the most horrible. An evil person can kill you with his teeth: that is what I have learned since the genocide, and my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world.?
- Page 107 (location ~ 1629-1636)
After a genocide, the anguish and dread have an agonizing persistence. The silence on the Rwandan hills is indescribable and cannot be compared with the usual mutism in the aftermath of war. Perhaps Cambodia offers a recent parallel. Tutsi survivors manage to surmount this silence only among themselves. But within the community of killers, innocent or guilty, each person plays the role of either a mute or an amnesiac. In Nyamata I maintain cordial and sometimes even friendly relations with Hutu families. I have conversations with women who are above reproach?with people who have been cleared of all suspicion. I talk with relatives of killers behind their houses, out of sight; I have chatted under the cloak of anonymity in Africa and Europe with exiled former functionaries of the Habyarimana regime. None of those conversations are of particular interest, and some of them are absurd. Bad faith, lying, and denial compete with unease and fear as soon as the subject of the genocide is raised. It was not difficult to obtain sincere and detailed accounts from soldiers in Vietnam, from torturers for the Argentine dictatorship or in the Algerian war, from militiamen of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, from secret policemen in the Iraqi or Iranian detention camps?sometimes by following the maxim of Oscar Wilde, ?Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth.? But in the wake of a genocide, the evasion of the ordinary killers and their families passes understanding, and it cannot be explained simply by fear of reprisal. ? When I went to the regional penitentiary at Rilima, I hoped to attach faces and voices to the killers whom the survivors had mentioned in their accounts. One characteristic of these narratives was that, hidden in the mud beneath the papyrus, the survivors almost never saw the killers, and could describe them only through their movements and shouts during the hunts.
- Page 108 (location ~ 1654-1668)
Subsequent visits confirmed my hunch that only an imprisoned killer, a killer who has not yet lived at liberty, can or will tell his story. Clearly, the freer the Hutus were on their land, the less free they were with their words. Conversely, the thicker the prison walls, the more these narratives were encouraged; the walls protected their authors from victims who might recognize a name and condemn them, from colleagues and neighbors who might accuse them of betrayal, and from children who would feel ashamed of them. Witness the fact that when Ignace?the first of the gang to be released from the penitentiary, because of his age?returned to his home in Nganwa in January 2003, after our interviews, he grumbled about his participation in the book and refused to talk about things he had discussed and that we had recorded in the garden at the Rilima prison. Very quickly, however, it turned out that those prison walls were no guarantee that a killer would speak. Dialogue with a killer must also occur at a particular moment in his life as a prisoner: after the judicial inquiry into his case has been closed and he has been condemned to a more or less long sentence?in other words, when he knows his account can no longer affect the judicial decision and he believes he will not be confronting the outside world for quite a while.
- Page 109 (location ~ 1670-1680)
? PIO: There was voluntary suffering and involuntary suffering, so to speak. Because numerous Tutsis ended screaming from cuttings simply because of poor technique. They were the wounded left writhing, through haste, carelessness, or disgust with what had just been done more than through cruelty. Those were sufferings through sloppiness. ? L?OPORD: I saw colleagues linger over their catch to make the agony last. But often they left before polishing someone off because they were too eager to go looting. For example, they gave the first machete blow and then spotted a bike, and?hop, they?d rather jump on the bike than finish the job. Same for a roof with good sheets of corrugated metal. It was greed more than wickedness. I trusted that there was time for each of those occupations. I struck fast and true, I struck just to get it done.
- Page 112 (location ~ 1714-1721)
?LIE: Making someone suffer was up to each person, as long as he did his job. The intimidators gave no particular order to encourage or discourage it. They repeated, ?Just kill, that is the main thing.? We didn?t care. If a colleague had to play around with a victim, we kept going. But I have to say that the coups de gr?ce were not well done. Even if it was not from meanness, it was not done nicely. ? ALPHONSE: Saving the babies, that was not practical. They were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away. But they were killed more quickly, because of their small size and because their suffering was of no use. They say that at the church in Nyamata they burned children with gasoline. Maybe it?s true, but that was just a few in the first-day turmoil. Afterward that did not last. In any case I noticed nothing more. The babies could not understand the why of the suffering, it was not worth lingering over them. ? FULGENCE: When we saw Tutsis wriggling like snakes in the marshes, it made the guys laugh. Some let them crawl awhile longer for more fun. But that was not the case for everybody. Some didn?t care one way or the other and didn?t bother with that mockery. If it was easier to catch them crawling, that was better, and that was all. ? ADALBERT: When we spotted a small group of runaways trying to escape by creeping through the mud, we called them snakes. Before the killings, we usually called them cockroaches. But during, it was more suitable to call them snakes, because of their attitude, or zeros, or dogs, because in our country we don?t like dogs; in any case, they were less-than-nothings.
- Page 113 (location ~ 1722-1735)
Their collective collaboration is rewarded with supplies of sugar, salt, soap, sodas, and medicines from a list they draw up. Another highly valued token of our appreciation is the news we bring them of their families, whom we visit briefly in the afternoons to pass on their messages. For their part, the men are free to withdraw from the project at any time, temporarily or permanently, without repercussions on their colleagues. As it turns out, none will choose to leave. They must all follow the same procedure when they don?t want to answer certain questions: if they find a question unpleasant or embarrassing, they are to remain silent or briefly state their unwillingness to reply, explaining their refusal if at all possible. But they must promise not to lie or to say just anything.
- Page 118 (location ~ 1807-1812)
Their collective collaboration is rewarded with supplies of sugar, salt, soap, sodas, and medicines from a list they draw up. Another highly valued token of our appreciation is the news we bring them of their families, whom we visit briefly in the afternoons to pass on their messages. For their part, the men are free to withdraw from the project at any time, temporarily or permanently, without repercussions on their colleagues. As it turns out, none will choose to leave. They must all follow the same procedure when they don?t want to answer certain questions: if they find a question unpleasant or embarrassing, they are to remain silent or briefly state their unwillingness to reply, explaining their refusal if at all possible. But they must promise not to lie or to say just anything. That last rule, seemingly so simple and approved at the outset, quickly becomes the subject of exhausting, sometimes tense discussion, because the men cannot help using, for Innocent and me, the defense mechanism they created to protect themselves from the judicial system, their families, or their own consciences: mixing lies, more or less spontaneous or tactical, into their accounts. This forces me to break off the interviews with two of the gang and exclude them from the group, because their insistence on elaborating impossible stories, refusing to face facts, and hiding behind foolish nihilism gets us nowhere. After an initial period of misunderstandings and uncertainty, however, the others gradually adapt to ?zigzagging with the truth? only through silence, and in the end they ?zigzag? less and less. Each one zigzags in his own way, though; some of them go off in a great curve that seems to go on forever, while others merely take a short sharp turn on occasion, as we shall see.
- Page 118 (location ~ 1807-1820)
In spite of our rules, the accounts presented here certainly contain a few lies, one or two that I know of and others I may not have discovered yet. For example, the circumstances surrounding Jean-Baptiste?s first murder do not jibe with his description. A Hutu farm woman who witnessed it says that Jean-Baptiste was not singled out and forced to kill his first victim as he claims, but was on the contrary quite willing, so much so that he went on to cut down an elderly couple near the cabaret he mentions. After some hesitation, I chose to leave Jean-Baptiste?s version alone, because despite its deliberate falseness, it does reflect a more essential truth about the frenzy of the mob mentality and the blackmail used against the husbands of Tutsi wives. And there are exceptions to every rule. The Rwandan government was cooperative: the minister of the interior granted us permission to visit the prison and conduct interviews there without restrictions. The warden of the penitentiary set three conditions: First, the meetings had to take place outside the inner enclosure housing the sleeping blocks and the prison yard, to avoid drawing crowds of onlookers. Second, because of his death sentence, the interviews with Joseph-D?sir? Bitero had to be conducted under the surveillance of an armed guard sitting ten meters away. This had no effect on the interviews because at that distance the guard?who couldn?t have cared less?could not hear our conversation, and anyway he didn?t understand French, which Joseph-D?sir? Bitero, a former teacher, spoke fluently. Third, the interviews were to be suspended on Sunday, the day of rest.
- Page 119 (location ~ 1824-1835)
PANCRACE: Men are not created by God in the same way. There are killers with good hearts who agree to make confession. There are killers with hard hearts who feed their hatred in silence. They are very dangerous because faith does not soften their character. They never miss a scheduled religious session. They throw themselves wholeheartedly into prayers and hymns, they observe all the religious gestures like signs of the cross, kneeling, and the like. They seem gifted for religion, but deep down they know they must begin to kill again. They are waiting patiently for the next opportunity. ? FULGENCE: I was a deacon, the one who made arrangements for Christian gatherings on the hill of Kibungo. In the priest?s absence, it was I who conducted ordinary services. During the killings, I chose not to pray to God. I sensed that it was not appropriate to involve Him in that. This choice came up naturally. Still, when dread would grip me suddenly in the night, if I had done too much during the day, I would ask God as a personal favor to let me stop for just a few days. God preserved us from genocide until the crash of the president?s plane; afterward He allowed Satan to win the match. That is my point of view. Since it was Satan who pushed us into this predicament, it is God alone who can judge us and punish us, not men, who are surpassed by the power of those other two, especially in this unnatural situation.
- Page 122 (location ~ 1857-1868)
IGNACE: The white priests took off at the first skirmishes. The black priests joined the killers or the killed. God kept silent, and the churches stank from abandoned bodies. Religion could not find its place in our activities. For a little while, we were no longer ordinary Christians, we had to forget our duties learned in catechism class. We had first of all to obey our leaders?and God only afterward, very long afterward, to make confession and penance. When the job was done. ? PANCRACE: In the marshes, pious Christians became ferocious killers. In prison, very ferocious killers became very pious Christians. But there are also pious Christians who became timid killers and timid killers who became quite pious Christians. It happened for no clear reason. Each person satisfied his faith in his own way without any particular instructions, since the priests were gone or were up to their necks in it. In any case, religion adapted to these changes in belief.
- Page 122 (location ~ 1870-1878)
?LIE: God and Satan seem quite contrasting in the Bible and the priest?s sermons. The first one blazes with white and gold, the second with red and black. But in the marshes, the colors were those of muddy swamps and rotting leaves. It was as if God and Satan had agreed to cloud our eyes. I mean that we did not give a damn for either of them. Once we found a little group of Tutsis in the papyrus. They were awaiting the machete blows with prayers. They did not plead with us, they did not ask us for mercy or even for a painless death. They said nothing to us. They did not even seem to be addressing heaven. They were praying and psalming among themselves. We made fun of them, we laughed at their Amens, we taunted them about the kindness of the Lord, we joked about the paradise awaiting them. That fired us up even more. Now the memory of those prayers just gnaws at my heart.
- Page 123 (location ~ 1879-1885)
PIO: In the marshes, you heard no children?s cries, not even murmurs. They waited silently in the mud. It was really something. When we uncovered a woman with a nursling, the infant would never even whimper. It was miraculous, so to speak. Many Tutsis no longer asked to be spared, that was how they greeted death, among themselves. They had stopped hoping, they knew they had no chance for mercy and went off without a single prayer. They knew they were abandoned by everything, even by God. They no longer spoke to Him at all. They were leaving in suffering to join Him and no longer asked Him for anything, not comfort, not blessing, not welcome. They no longer prayed even to drive away the fear of an agonizing death. It was too astounding, it was unnatural! Even animals that know nothing of pity, nothing of anguish, nothing of evil?they cry out terribly at the moment of the fatal blow. That mystery drove us to many discussions. We sought explanations for these Tutsis who went off into death without breaking their silence. That could frighten us sometimes, at night, because it was said that such calmness must be a bad omen from heaven. ? JOSEPH-D?SIR?: Me, I was born Hutu, I did not choose this, it was God. I massacred some Tutsis, and then the Tutsis killed some Hutus. I have lost everything, except my life, for the moment. I no longer recognize my own existence in this chaos. It is God alone who can see it, watch over it, and guide it. After all, what is there to say? There are some who killed and now thrive on their hills or in a villa abroad, others who killed and now sweat in the prison yard of those condemned to death. Why did God direct some toward happiness and others to the ordeal of suffering? Me, I don?t know. I find myself here, in the purgatory of prison, but I still draw breath thanks to the power of God. I fear my capital punishment above everything else. We all fear dying before our day, since we remain human whatever the circumstances. That is why I have chosen to entrust my fate to God. He is the only one who could stop a genocide, He is the only one who can understand me, He is the only one who can save my life now. No human being can step between Him and me. That is what I want to believe from this moment on.
- Page 123 (location ~ 1886-1903)
MARIE-CHANTAL: ?Now, the guiltier the killers feel, the more they go to church. Likewise, the more traumatized the survivors feel, the more they go to church. Guilty ones and victims sit shoulder to shoulder praying in the first pew as if they had forgotten. Before the war, religion was not feverish as it is now. Now, many cling to prayers and hymns to get through this shattered life. Many preachers are pleased with this state of affairs. Even if there are no charitable feelings among those praying, there are no troublesome feelings in the churches. There is no fear, as on the hills. ?The less people look at one another with understanding and support, the more they gaze with love at the religious figures on the walls. ?As to Joseph-D?sir?, I had thought he might well be killed at some point because of his actions. But prison forever, that, no. So we exchange Bible verses copied onto paper slips, thanks to visiting families, because we do not find much to say to each other about our new predicament.?
- Page 126 (location ~ 1925-1932)
we didn?t even care about the presence of God. Those who say otherwise are half-witted liars.
- Page 127 (location ~ 1938-1939)
L?OPORD: Through killing well, eating well, looting well, we felt so puffed up and important, we didn?t even care about the presence of God. Those who say otherwise are half-witted liars. Some claim today that they sent up prayers during the killings. They?re lying: no one ever heard an Ave Maria or the like, they?re only trying to jump in front of their colleagues on line for repentance. In truth, we thought that from then on we could manage for ourselves without God. The proof?we killed even on Sunday without ever noticing it. That?s all.
- Page 127 (location ~ 1938-1942)
Sometimes the survivor, man or woman, would offer several different versions of the same event from one day to the next. This was usually for a reason that Ang?lique Mukamanzi, a young woman from Kanzenze, tactfully explained: ?There are also people who constantly change the details of a fateful day because they believe that, on that day, their life snatched away the luck from another life that was just as worthy. Still, in spite of these zigzags, a person?s memories do not go away ? People choose certain memories, depending on their character, and they relive them as if they had happened just last year and will go on for another hundred years.? Or for another reason described by Janvier Munyaneza, a herdsman and lyc?e student in Kibungo: ?Over time I sense that my mind sorts through my memories as it pleases, and I can?t do anything about it?it?s the same for my colleagues. Certain episodes are told over and over, so they expand with all the contributions from different people. They remain transparent, so to speak ? Other episodes are neglected, and darken like a dream ? But I know we no longer have any interest in inventing or exaggerating or concealing, as we did at the liberation, because we are no longer muddled by fear of the machetes.? In every case, it was easy to speak frankly about these ?zigzags.? Sometimes the survivor might break off abruptly, because, in the words of Marie-Louise Kagoyire, a shopkeeper in Nyamata, ?showing our hearts to a stranger, talking about how we feel, laying bare our feelings as survivors is shocking beyond measure. When the exchange of words becomes too blunt, as in this moment with you, one must come to a full stop.?
- Page 130 (location ~ 1979-1991)
express his feelings as precisely as possible, while Ignace automatically answers at first with a lie
- Page 131 (location ~ 2003-2003)
Each killer controls what he says in his own way. ?lie, for example, tries touchingly to express his feelings as precisely as possible, while Ignace automatically answers at first with a lie that he can then carefully refine. All of them gradually speak more sincerely as the interviews progress, making more of an effort to open up. Nevertheless, there is a cautionary line that they almost always refuse to cross. Although they speak in a monotone that increases our uneasiness, there is something more, something equivocal in their voices that makes us think these men are not so indifferent as they appear. Their guardedness is dictated probably by prudence or perplexity, often by a strange insensitivity, but also perhaps by a sense of propriety. It is worth remembering that since their return to Rwanda they have not yet met any survivors face to face. We shall get back to this later. Finally, we might mention the question of vocabulary. To describe events, the survivors employed a vocabulary that was raw, vivid, and precise. They constantly used the words job, cutting, or pruning, taken from the work on banana plantations, to designate the murderous action of the machete. Said Jeannette Ayinkamiye, ?I know that when you have seen your mama cut so cruelly ? you lose forever some of your trust in others. I mean, you will never again be able to live with people as you did before.? Or Berthe Mwanankabandi: ?Others could not help making a last gesture to ward off the machete that would cut them, a gesture that would make them suffer even more. This refusal is our bond with nature.? Moreover, they all spoke of the genocide?using this new word in their language, itfembabwoko, or falling back on the word ubwicanyi, ?killing??with an astonishing grasp of its significance.
- Page 131 (location ~ 2002-2015)
JEANNETTE: ?When there has been one genocide there can be another, at any time in the future, anywhere?if the cause is still there and no one knows what it is.? ? ?DITH UWANYILIGIRA: ?During the genocide, survivors lose their confidence along with everything else, and that muddles them more than they realize. They can doubt everything?strangers, colleagues, even their surviving neighbors ? Understand this: the genocide will not fade from our minds. Time will hold on to the memories, it will never spare more than a tiny place for the solace of the soul.? ? INNOCENT: ?Genocide is not really a matter of poverty or lack of education ? In 1959 the Hutus relentlessly robbed, killed, and drove away Tutsis, but they never for a single day imagined exterminating them. It is the intellectuals who emancipated them, by planting the idea of genocide in their heads and sweeping away their hesitations.? ? BERTHE: ?Genocide pushes into isolation those who were not pushed into death.? ? SYLVIE: ?I must make clear that after a genocide, certain words no longer have their old meaning, certain words just lose their meaning, and anyone who listens must watch out for the changes.?
- Page 132 (location ~ 2016-2027)
?LIE: When I dream of those times, it is my wife who appears, and the field, and the house, but almost never the killed people. Except for the social worker, of course, because she was the first one I struck down. Basically my dreams try to slip past those moments of killing. In memories, on the other hand, it is a big deal: those moments track me and often catch up with me. I know colleagues who hope to escape their crimes by forgetting them. Some prisoners here in Rilima claim that by trying hard not to remember, you can manage to forget. I don?t think so, not where I am concerned, in any case. A memory of killing gets by, it adapts to lies, it comes and goes, but it does not wash out. No prisoner has paid for his remorse with his life. Not one has even tried or faked that to win a little pity. In prison, death has come with the epidemics, and with the infernal misery of the place, but never with feelings of shame and suchlike.
- Page 140 (location ~ 2132-2139)
ADALBERT: I knew my misdeeds would come to light when I returned from Congo. But I chose
- Page 140 (location ~ 2146-2147)
ADALBERT: I knew my misdeeds would come to light when I returned from Congo. But I chose to bring my offenses back to my local penitentiary rather than to hide them in the Congo jungle, with no acquaintances to share them. I don?t know if my repentance will be accepted, if I will be spared. But penitence is like death: you must bring it back home to your hill. ? GASPARD, A SURVIVOR: ?If killers come to church to pray to God on their knees, to show us their remorse, I cannot pray either with them or against them. Real regrets are said eye to eye, not to statues of God. The accommodation of killers is not my concern.? ? ?LIE: In prison and on the hills, everyone is obviously sorry. But most of the killers are sorry they didn?t finish the job. They accuse themselves of negligence rather than wickedness. Those who keep saying that they weren?t there during the fatal moments, that they don?t remember a thing, that they lost their machetes and tripe like that, they are bowing down with the hope of evading punishment?while waiting to start all over again. Repentance may wear many faces. But it is worthless if it is not the right kind.
- Page 140 (location ~ 2146-2156)
Let?s simply note that there is no evidence of any event in his childhood, any cause of humiliation or resentment, which might have fed a personal desire for revenge, and that for a young teacher, climbing the social ladder but living on a meager salary, this party in power for twenty-five years, the party of his cousin the burgomaster, was the only pathway to success?unless he tried his luck in the capital or in the army, which was risky for a farmer?s son who had never set foot outside Nyamata. He himself puts it this way: ?It was an absorbing activity that could bring small advantages. We had a good time at the formal political events. We wanted the superiority of power and all its satisfactions.? Joseph-D?sir? impressed everyone with his imposing presence at meetings and his relaxed good humor in cabarets. He bought a modest house built of fired brick in Gatare, the Nyamata neighborhood favored by educated people and civil servants. His wife, Marie-Chantal, found a position at the maternity hospital. On any given day, with the same easygoing manner, Joseph-D?sir? would spend time both with Tutsi pals and with rabidly anti-Tutsi Hutu fanatics. Talking about the Bitero he knew back then, Innocent says: ?Basically, Bitero started out a good guy, well spoken, who did not seem at all dangerous. He had no thought of doing harm. Aside from his being in the other camp, it was fun to pop a bottle with him. Without the tumult of war, he might have remained the man he was.? For Joseph-D?sir?, the tumult began in 1991, when the inkotanyi attacks and the political wrangling led to a vast increase in public virulence, and new orators began crisscrossing the country. It was then that Joseph-D?sir? discovered the joys of militancy in his party?s youth groups. ?My job was to enroll young Hutus, to keep them from going astray into crime or into the wrong parties,? he explains. ?I urged them to listen to the president?s speeches; I organized gymnastic exercises, games, and meetings to explain our policies. But the war took a wrong turn. The Rwandan army could not hold the front, and we suspected a cover-up of their defeat. That fanned the politicians? brutality and thirst for vengeance. We militants were intoxicated by orders, and we acquiesced.? The word ?acquiesced? is a euphemism,
- Page 144 (location ~ 2208-2225)
At one point in our interviews when Joseph-D?sir? tries to present himself as a scapegoat, the expiatory victim of a politicized judicial system, Innocent interrupts brusquely and points out that someone who won?t confess has no right to complain. I remind Joseph-D?sir? that he was an educated person and the leader of killers. ?I was a teacher,? he replies. ?I was a committed party member, I obeyed, I killed. In a party, a leader can?t just do what he wants. Yes, I had a teaching diploma, but it wasn?t for me to think about our activists? political slogans. That?s not what you?re there for when the situation gets hot. All I had to think about was implementation.? Listening to him, you wonder if he doesn?t actually believe what he is saying. ? Whenever Joseph-D?sir? goes back and forth between his special block and the garden by the road, he claps some former drinking or killing companion on the back, fires off a joke, winks and rolls his eyes, and asks how everyone?s doing, testing his popularity while trying to renew old ties. He even attempts a genuine reconciliation with Innocent. He has few complaints about his cramped and unpleasant quarters, except that they?re giving him rheumatism.
- Page 149 (location ~ 2275-2284)
ADALBERT: The educated people were certainly the ones who drove the farmers on, out in the marshes. Today they?re the ones who juggle with words or turn close-mouthed. Many sit quietly in their same places as before. Some have become ministers or bishops; they aren?t so much in the public eye, but they still wear their fancy clothes and gold-framed glasses. While suffering keeps us in prison. ? IGNACE: The organizers could always leave if they didn?t feel all right about the daily killings. They could sit around discussing schedules or go visit distant relatives?unlike the farmers, who didn?t know how to fend for themselves in town. But the organizers did all stay. Those who didn?t step into the front ranks got along fine at the back. They wanted to make sure they were noticed, or to make sure they got theirs.
- Page 157 (location ~ 2397-2404)
To understand this withdrawal, we should think about these words from Francine: ?When you have experienced a waking nightmare in real life, you no longer sort through your daytime and nighttime thoughts the way you did before. Ever since the genocide, I always feel hunted, night and day. In my bed, I turn away from shadows; on a path, I look back at forms following me. I fear for my child when I meet a stranger?s eyes. Sometimes I see the face of an interahamwe near the river and tell myself, Look, Francine, you?ve seen that man before in a dream, and I remember only afterward that the dream was in real time, wide awake, back then in the marshes.? Less obtrusive than the mudugudus, other features appear or reappear, to the surprise of strangers and native Rwandans alike. In Nyamata new churches are going up beside the old ones, all of them packed during services, especially the funerals attended every week by hundreds or thousands of the faithful. The trumpeting muezzin of a mosque frequented by repatriates from Uganda startles the village awake twice a night. A slew of local and international Christian sects flourishes even to the farthest reaches of the bush. In Nyamata the commune has become a district, and the burgomaster a mayor. Here and there computers with the promise of e-mail and the Internet await a telephone jack or the return to work of an ailing engineer. The cultural center, once occupied by the militias under Joseph-D?sir? Bitero?s command, now hosts a reading club in the morning and television shows in the afternoon. At night dozens of recently acquired TVs join antediluvian radios in a vain attempt to overpower the mooing, croaking, clicking, and cooing of cows, frogs, crickets, and turtledoves.
- Page 158 (location ~ 2422-2435)
Years have passed since the genocide. Now that the refugees have returned to these Hutu and Tutsi communities, forced by fate to live together despite the genocide, the constant question is?how are they getting along? There are promising signs in Nyamata: noisy, happy wedding celebrations on Saturday afternoons, the construction of an antenna for cell phones, a brand-new hospital, the departure of the humanitarian organizations, the fashion for black, pink, and almond-green seats in the pedicabs, the reaccreditation of examinations at the Lyc?e Apebu, the rivalry between two hardware stores over the sale of corrugated metal sheets, the appearance of the first new detached houses ? Another answer is that the fear is still there, ever present, and there is no way of knowing how many generations it will torment before it fades away. It is the fear experienced by Ang?lique: ?I saw many people cut down beside me, and all this time I have battled a tenacious fear, truly overwhelming terror. I have overcome it, but I cannot say it has let go of me for good.? Or the fear felt by Hutu children, as Sylvie described it: ?For the Hutu youngsters who went to Congo, the oppression remains, because they are not facing the past. Silence is paralyzing them with fright. Time is holding them back. From visit to visit, I find no change. One can see that anxiety is stifling their thoughts. It is such hard work to encourage them to speak, but they can never set foot back in life if they don?t talk about what they must confront within themselves.?
- Page 161 (location ~ 2464-2475)
Denise Nikuze is very sweet, hospitable, and intelligent. She offers us urwagwa and some pineapple from the marshes. At the mention of the killings she falls silent, except to say, ?Terrible sickness came for my mother during that bad time. Death carried off papa amid a mystery of rumors. My three brothers were scattered during the confusions, perhaps to Congo, perhaps to a prison far away ? somewhere I may never know about. Here I meet only passing lovers who will never hold me with the arms of a real husband. No one threatens me anymore, but I hear no words of conciliation, either. From now on I see only silence to protect me from fear and the evil shadows that stalk our fields.? Farther along the road, we meet Rose and Pancrace?s sister, Marthe, sitting on their doorsteps shelling beans or grinding sorghum. They are gracious, sometimes funny, as well as curious about a world they have vaguely heard about on the radio; they are eager for news from Rilima, but without turning hostile, they fall silent whenever mention is made of the bloodstained past.
- Page 162 (location ~ 2482-2490)
? ?LIE: In the camps many came to feel intimidated by what they had done, and others changed in prison, like me. I wrote short notes of apology to some families of victims I knew and had them delivered by visitors. I denounced myself and I spoke of my guilt to the families of people I killed. When I get out, I will take gifts, food and drink; I will offer enough Primus beer and brochettes for proper reconciliation gatherings. After that, I?m going to take up ordinary life again, but this time with a good will. I?m going to turn a kind eye on my neighbors bright and early every morning. I want to sow my plot of land, or weld, or saw wood, or do masonry; I?ll eagerly accept odd jobs. Or be a soldier if necessary in patriotic and dangerous situations, except without aiming or shooting a gun. From now on, I don?t want to kill even a highway robber anymore. ? PIO: I think that if Providence helps me get out of prison, I won?t waste my days as I do now. I?ll go back to my hill and look for a good wife; because of the events, I am still a single man. I see nothing to keep me from a proper life. Anyway, I find no satisfaction in going somewhere else so as to hide from angry looks. A stained life is better than one that isn?t mine anymore. If forgetting is merciful, I shall be grateful. If the opportunity arises, I shall express my regrets; if the opportunity returns, I shall apologize again. I shall make patience and shyness my companions. I am truly finished with playing the tough guy. If life in good company was possible before, it still ought to be, in spite of those stupid killings. In any case, we must all get used to the evil we experienced, even if this wickedness took different forms for different people. Because we all had to bear it in our own way.
- Page 163 (location ~ 2497-2511)
? JEAN-BAPTISTE: I feel more at peace since I began to speak. After I have endured my punishment, I see nothing to prevent me from returning to my wife, my place in society, my six children, even if they have grown up without me and no longer recognize me. I must point out something, however: there is now a crack in my life. I don?t know about the others. I don?t know if it?s because of my Tutsi wife. But I do know that the clemency of justice or the compassion of the stricken families can never fix this crack. Even the resurrection of the victims might not fix it. Perhaps not even my death will fix it. ? IGNACE: I am a good farmer, and I no longer own even one basic tool. My children have scattered far and wide without sending me comforting words. I receive no news about the soundness of my house. I haven?t walked upon my hill since the killings. I am discouraged. Sometimes I feel terrified by the look in the eyes of the survivors who wait for me. I feel disappointed by all I have lost. When I get out, I think I will manage for food. But comfort and respect, as before?I can tell already these are gone for good. My life zigzags in prison, always banging into things, and the only goal I can find for it is my field back home. I yearn to hold the hoe firmly in my own two hands, to bend to my work without hearing another word, except talk about crops. ? FULGENCE: What we did goes beyond human imagination, so it is too difficult to judge us?too difficult for those who did not share our situation, in any case. Therefore I think we must be farmers like before, this time with good thoughts; we must show our regrets at all times; we must give a little something to those who have suffered. And leave to God the too-heavy task of our final punishment.
- Page 165 (location ~ 2528-2542)
In Memory, History, Forgetting, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur writes, ?Can one forgive someone who does not admit his guilt? Must the person forgiving the offender have been offended against? Can one forgive oneself? Even if an author comes down on one side or the other of these questions (and how could he not, at least if the philosopher?s job entails more than simply describing dilemmas), there will always be room for objections.? For half a century, contemporary conflicts that purposefully target civilian populations have posed new questions about forgiveness. Can one grant it to the authors of collective crimes? of state crimes, or crimes against humanity? Can one grant collective pardon to a community that actively participated in or passively condoned such crimes, to a people united in their support for them, to a state guilty of crimes on a massive scale? to those who seek forgiveness but take no responsibility for their crimes? Can you forgive, in the aftermath of a genocide, those who tried to exterminate you? Several years after the events, the Bugesera survivors are almost unanimous in replying no to that last question, although they cannot say whether their position might evolve over time. To understand this refusal, consider the replies of three survivors of the Nyamata marshes who can speak for their companions.
- Page 168 (location ~ 2564-2574)
Now Sylvie, a social worker out on the hills and a baker in the town of Nyamata: ?In the deepest part of me, it is a question not of forgiving or forgetting but of reconciling. The white who let the killers work, there is nothing to forgive him for. The Hutu who massacred, there is nothing to forgive him for. Someone who watched a neighbor open the bellies of girls to kill the babies before their mamas? eyes, there is nothing to forgive. There?s no point in wasting words talking to him about it. Only justice can pardon ? a justice that makes room for truth, so that fear will drain away ? ?One day, perhaps, living together or helping one another will come back among the families of those who killed and those who were killed. But for us, it is too late, because from now on there will be a void. We stepped forward into life, we were cut, and we retreated. It is too heartbreaking, for human beings, to find themselves fallen behind where they once were in life.?
- Page 169 (location ~ 2582-2589)
? We can see, then, that the survivors and the killers do not show the same understanding of forgiveness or pardon, and that itself may make forgiveness impossible. Of all the active and passive protagonists in the Rwandan genocide?survivors, killers, repatriates, witnesses from political, religious, and humanitarian organizations?the survivors are the least preoccupied with forgiveness. Even though they are distressed by the prospect of reconciliation, they will speak of it only when asked. The killers, on the contrary, mention forgiveness the most often, but with a disconcerting na?vet?, as the following pages will show. The killers? and survivors? differing ideas of forgiveness illustrate two distinct visions of the future and of their changed relationship. Speaking of which, I should note a new and essential distinction between ordinary war criminals and the perpetrators of genocide. The former, while equally guilty of savagery when they destroy, torture, and rape, often prove able, with time, to reflect on the effort and grace demanded by forgiveness?from both their victims and themselves. But the killers of the Kibungo gang, while they speak frequently of forgiveness, and hope to receive it, do not use the questioning language of self-examination. The way they see it, pardon?whether collective or individual, useful or useless, painful or not?comes on its own and is available upon request. Strangely, the prisoners can imagine what resentment, anger, and distrust mean to a survivor, they can understand the spirit or act of revenge, and they accept the plausibility of these violent responses to their return. But they simply cannot fathom what the act of forgiveness would mean to a survivor. Some prisoners see it as an obligatory first step; for others, it is a mysterious gesture that will depend on the kindness or the personality of the interlocutor. But either way it boils down to a renunciation of revenge.
- Page 170 (location ~ 2595-2610)
The killer has no idea of the ordeal that begins for the victims once they have agreed to forgive, for in so doing they not only reopen old wounds but also lose the possibility of gaining relief through revenge. The killer does not understand that in seeking forgiveness, he is demanding that the victim make an extraordinary effort, and he remains oblivious to the survivor?s dilemma, anguish, and courageous altruism. The killer does not realize that when he asks for forgiveness as though it were a simple formality, his attitude increases the victim?s pain by ignoring it. The killer does not grasp that truth, sincerity, and forgiveness are bound together. For him, more or less telling the truth is a recommended ploy for more or less diminishing his offense and, thus, his punishment, even his guilt. Asking for pardon is thus a selfish act invested in the future, because it facilitates his reunion with family and friends, promotes his rehabilitation, and helps him renew former relationships.
- Page 171 (location ~ 2615-2622)
?lie and most of the others in the gang do not ask for forgiveness. They offer their apologies in more or less loud voices to survivors who are free to hear, accept, or refuse them?rather like the way one says ?Sorry? to somebody one has just jostled on a sidewalk. Or like that German soldier in the strange parable told by Simon Wiesenthal in The Sunflower, they ask for pardon with the certainty that this request, because it is humiliating and expresses sympathy, deserves in itself a positive response.
- Page 172 (location ~ 2625-2629)
of their nightmares, however, is more perplexing. Most
- Page 172 (location ~ 2633-2633)
Most of them claim not to have nightmares?unlike their victims, who are tormented at night by haunting, distressing, appalling dreams from which they awaken in an agony of guilt. And when the killers do have their rare nightmares, these are about the horrors of prison or the camps in Congo rather than the killing season in the marshes. Is this possible? Is it possible that of all categories of war criminals, the perpetrator of genocide winds up the least traumatized? Is it believable that sleep would so thoroughly mask such extraordinary acts and feelings? Are their victims truly so absent from their nightmares? If so, how do they elude the pangs of remorse in their dreams without the protection of lies? To what do they owe the indulgence of their unconscious minds, their bizarre ability to bolt the gates of slumber against their guilt? And if this is not possible, why do they deny or downplay their nightmares?which they might offer as tangible proof of their repentance and, in a way, some slight repayment of their debt?especially when at the same time, in broad daylight, they tell us of their crimes in great detail? Do they fear being overwhelmed by their descriptions of these dreams, which might contradict or transform their narrative accounts, discredit them, or make them more heinous? Are they afraid that recounting these nightmares might reveal things they wish to keep hidden? Is their silence a way of anticipating their rehabilitation? or simply a refusal to take a backward look, eyes wide open, for fear of what they might see about themselves? Is there some connection between this reluctance to discuss their nightmares and their incomprehension of forgiveness? Is this a way to dam up their memories, to avoid any risk of losing control of their confessions? to survive, psychologically, what they did?
- Page 172 (location ~ 2633-2646)
IGNACE: Forgiveness is the grace of God that allows someone who has been pursued and struck to forget. Someone who has lost his wife, his children, his house with all his belongings, his herd, someone who entrusts his grief to God?forgiveness will allow this man to go beyond what he has lived and lost in misfortune. If the survivor is touched by faith, that is mercy; if not, it is mischance. I know that in the opposite situation, I would manage to forgive my offender, because through thick and thin I have always preserved a great faith in God. ? ADALBERT: If I am pardoned by the authorities, if I am pardoned by God, I will be pardoned by my neighbors. It will take time, and the effort will be hard, but this forgiveness is necessary. Without forgiveness, terrible killings might start up again. This forgiveness is a decision of the new policy from the authorities in Kigali. It is too burdensome for neighbors who have suffered to oppose the justice of religion and their country.
- Page 175 (location ~ 2673-2681)
L?OPORD: In the marshes, many Tutsis begged to be spared before the fatal stroke of the machete. They pleaded for mercy, for pity; they asked to escape death or the dreadful agony of the blows. Terror and suffering inspired their words. They gave all their supplication, because they had nothing else to give. But we could not have cared less about whatever they were asking or even begging for. On the contrary, that could spur us on. They were only Tutsis good for killing, and we were men without pity. Therefore it is awkward to speak of forgiveness in prison. Outside, if I receive a tornado of fury instead of forgiveness, I will not show any spite. I will take my trouble patiently. I will simply tell people, All right: forgiveness, now it belongs to you, it?s on your side, you have certainly earned it. So from now on you can handle it however you like. Me, I can wait for your right moment. I will pick up my life again where it left off without whispering against you. ? ?LIE: There are some people who envy those who didn?t have to seek forgiveness, and who returned to their land without crossing the threshold of Rilima. Some people say that those who asked forgiveness have not been properly rewarded and are still in prison; they claim that pardon, for the prisoner, is a hazardous and useless expense.
- Page 176 (location ~ 2699-2709)
So let?s consider a question often raised more or less openly: are the Tutsis, so to speak, the Jews of central Africa?s Great Lakes region, of Rwanda in particular? Are they distant cousins of the Jews of Ethiopia, the Falashas, lost on a detour from their destination? Do the fates of the Jews and Tutsis have something in common? The immediate answer is, obviously not: Jews and Tutsis do not share the same history at all. And yet ? Tutsis practice no distinctive religion, do not trace their roots back through any founding holy scripture, and do not speak their own language or dialect. No custom or principle, aside from their traditional cattle breeding, distinguishes their way of life from that of their compatriots. What?s more, unlike European Jews, Tutsis have wielded absolute power in Rwanda. In fact, they founded a monarchy that lasted for almost eight centuries, a complex and sophisticated monarchy that left an incisive mark on the collective Hutu memory, although it remains an enigma to historians even today. And yet ? One is struck by the similarities not between Jewish and Tutsi mythologies or ways of life but between the expression of European anti-Semitism before the Jewish genocide and the expression of anti-Tutsi feeling before the Rwandan genocide. The elements of anti-Tutsi propaganda are strangely similar to those of anti-Semitic propaganda?in singling out physical characteristics (low or high foreheads, hooked or straight noses, crooked or slender fingers); psychological qualifiers relating to cowardice, slyness, and treachery; and allusions to greed and arrogance. Equivalent terms sum up this correspondence: parasites and cockroaches.
- Page 178 (location ~ 2722-2734)
Until the genocide in 1994, country people in Rwanda knew about Jews only what they had learned from the Bible: Noah?s ark, the judgment of Solomon, Moses and the flight from Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, Calvary on the Mount of Olives?but nothing about Treblinka or the mass emigrations and pogroms leading up to it. So when Jeannette, Claudine, Ang?lique, Innocent, and the other survivors discovered during our interviews that they were not the first to have lived through the experience of extermination, they were staggered. ? Francine clarified what Jeannette meant by ?noble bearing?: ?Hutus still suffer from a bad idea of Tutsis. The truth is, our physiognomy is the root of the problem: our longer muscles, our more delicate features, our proud carriage. That is all I can think of?the imposing appearance that is our birthright.? To which Claudine adds, ?Many Hutus could not bear Tutsis anymore, and that?s the truth. Why? That stubborn question haunts the banana groves. I can see there are differences between the two groups that make the Hutus resentful. Tutsis sometimes have longer necks and straighter noses. They are more sober of disposition and more affected in their manner ? But as to wealth and intelligence, there is no difference at all. Many Hutus distrust a so-called malice in the Tutsi character that simply does not exist.? More perplexed, Sylvie wonders, ?I have been looking for some clue I cannot find. I know Hutus did not feel at ease with Tutsis. They decided to not see them anymore anywhere, to feel more comfortable among themselves. But why? I have no answer. I do not know if I bear on my face or on my body some special marks they cannot endure. Sometimes I say no, that can?t be it?being tall and slender, with delicate, gentle features, all that silliness. Sometimes I say yes, that really is what began to grow deep inside them. It is an utter madness that even those who killed can no longer manage to contemplate, still less those who were supposed to die.?
- Page 180 (location ~ 2757-2772)
For a member of the battalion, acknowledging his own anti-Semitism meant compromising his chances of emerging unscathed from his interrogation, and bringing up the anti-Semitism of the battalion as a whole meant accusing his comrades ? This unwillingness to speak of anti-Semitism also stems, however, from an attitude of political denial ? For the men to admit that their behavior had an explicitly political and ideological dimension, and that the Nazi moral philosophy seemed reasonable to them at the time, means admitting that they were simply political whirligigs, turning docilely with the wind at every change of regime. And that is a truth few among them can or will confront.
- Page 182 (location ~ 2787-2791)
The contexts in which the German and Rwandan killers explain themselves are different: the former gave their testimony as free men, more than twenty years after the fact and over an extended period of time, but they were facing prosecutors who could conceivably indict them, and their testimony was filtered through court clerks. But I mention these passages because the Kibungo gang is also reluctant to admit that anti-Tutsi sentiment affected them in the marshes. After all, someone who claims as Adalbert does??The Hutu infant was swaddled with hatred for the Tutsis before first opening his eyes to the world??might well exonerate himself to a certain extent by insisting that he was brainwashed. And yet, no: they find it much harder to deal with anti-Tutsi sentiment than to talk about their first murder. It takes hours of discussion before they agree to address the subject. Their reticence leads me to wonder about issues like those raised by Browning (whose book I read only after I had been in Rwanda) and about other pragmatic questions.
- Page 183 (location ~ 2792-2799)
Do the killers fear that admitting their anti-Tutsi feelings will complicate their return to the hills, reinforcing their neighbors? distrust? These neighbors might think that someone confessing to ingrained anti-Tutsi opinions has no reason to change and thus remains dangerous. But for the killers to fear this would be na?ve, even absurd, given that their enthusiastic performance in the marshes, well known to neighbors and survivors, was enough to earn them a chilly reception ad vitam aeternam. Have they discussed?are they discussing?this among themselves? They hardly ever reply. Were they all equally anti-Tutsi? During our conversations it develops that no, they were not, quite the contrary. But paradoxically their differences bolster their unwillingness to speak about this, since bringing them into the open might undermine their solidarity. Jean-Baptiste, for example, happily married to a Tutsi and living on a hillside inhabited by Tutsi families, harbored no anti-Tutsi feelings at the beginning of the genocide, only all-consuming fear and ambition. Pio, a youth whose passions ran to soccer rather than politics, never cared a whit for anti-Tutsiism, so long as he got the ball in a position to score. Even Joseph-D?sir? Bitero, leader of the interahamwe, a terrifying criminal if ever there was one, was not rabidly anti-Tutsi until the last few months before the massacres. The cases of Pancrace, ?lie, Fulgence, or Adalbert are a little more complicated, but the different attitudes toward Tutsis did not keep any of the gang from sharing equally in the killing. Other offenders, once released from prison, have said things out in their fields or in cabarets that are shockingly anti-Tutsi, on the other hand. This tends to prove that if anti-Tutsiism was a driving force of the genocide, helping to push it into criminal reality, the bigotry was only one motive of many and not sufficient on its own to explain everyone?s actions and attitudes. Ignace, for example, one of the most vicious Tutsi-haters and certainly the most outspoken anti-Tutsi in the gang, is one of those who swung his machete the least. The gang members have a kind of intuition, more perceptible in their silence than in their words, that helps to explain their reluctance to discuss their anti-Tutsi feelings during the genocide. Although they are not disturbed by their killings, they often seem befuddled or overwhelmed by them.
- Page 183 (location ~ 2800-2817)
ALPHONSE: During the dry seasons of early childhood, the Hutu hears grown-ups repeating that Tutsis take up too many plots of land, that we cannot fight poverty in this situation, that those people are too in the way. Then the words are forgotten after abundant harvests. But the child grows used to this grumbling. Even sitting next to a muddy little Tutsi, a Hutu child feels a natural jealousy of the other child, sees him as a show-off. He gets used to following his parents? lead. Afterward, when a problem arises, he no longer looks it full in the face, he prefers to glare at the Tutsi who just happens to be passing by. ? PANCRACE: The radios were yammering at us since 1992 to kill all the Tutsis; there was anger after the president?s death and a fear of falling under the rule of the inkotanyi. But I do not see any hatred in all that. The Hutu always suspects that some plans are cooking deep in the Tutsi character, nourished in secret since the passing of the ancien r?gime. He sees a threat lurking in even the feeblest or kindest Tutsi. But it is suspicion, not hatred. The hatred came over us suddenly after our president?s plane crashed. The intimidators shouted, ?Just look at these cockroaches?we told you so!? And we yelled, ?Right, let?s go hunting!? We weren?t that angry; more than anything else, we were relieved. ? IGNACE: I do not know if killing Tutsis is different from killing non-Tutsis, since we have no experience of that. In Rwanda, if we don?t meet a brother Hutu, we meet a Tutsi, since the Twa pygmies are invisible in their forests and the whites are white. In harmony, in discord, it is impossible for us to encounter ordinary people, like us, who are not Tutsis. What I mean is, in private killings or bigger ones, all we know is killing Tutsis.
- Page 187 (location ~ 2861-2876)
Instead, let us replace the questions with a few observations. In postwar Germany, throughout forty years of trials of Nazi criminals, not one defense lawyer could cite a single case of a German who was severely punished for refusing to kill an unarmed Gypsy or Jew. During the operations of that 101st Battalion of police reservists, according to Christopher Browning, not one policeman was punished for refusing to shoot. (He estimates that 80 to 90 percent of the five hundred reservists did follow orders.) In Rwanda the massacres were over too quickly for the administration implementing the genocide to hold trials and condemn anyone who refused to kill. True, tens of thousands of Hutus were murdered because of their moral objections to the slaughter, but no examples have surfaced of someone arrested simply for refusing to kill, except in very specific cases: spouses in mixed marriages or people accused of having hidden Tutsis. In Kibungo, Ntarama, Kanzenze, and throughout the commune of Nyamata, anyone who publicly opposed the genocide, by word or deed, risked being executed or condemned to kill a victim on the spot. Everybody had to participate in some way, to be involved in the killings, destruction, and looting, or to contribute monetarily. Still, I repeat: no one was seriously threatened with physical harm for reluctance to use a machete on a Tutsi.
- Page 190 (location ~ 2911-2920)
FULGENCE: The more we saw people die, the less we thought about their lives, the less we talked about their deaths. And the more we got used to enjoying it. And the more we told ourselves, deep inside, that since we knew how to do it, we really should do it down to the very last one. This final viewpoint seemed natural amid the uproar and the shouting, but it went without saying. ? ALPHONSE: We slogged through the marshes with a crowd of people to kill. The mud came up to our ankles, sometimes to our knees. The sun hammered our skulls. The papyrus tore our shirts and the skin beneath. Colleagues were watching us. If they saw trembling, they sneered and called us cowards. If they saw hesitation, they grew angry and accused us of treachery. If they saw generosity, they scolded and called us old women. They were quick to abuse us. In that situation, the jeering of colleagues is awful to overcome if it gets around your neighborhood. It is just the same in school or in the cabaret, but more serious in the marshes. This taunting is a poison in life. You try to protect yourself from it, of course. So you join the camp of the ones doing it. When the killings begin, you find it easier to ply the machete than to be stabbed by ridicule and contempt. This truth is impossible to understand for anyone who was not there beside us. That is what I want to say. In the tumult of killings, stepping aside is not viable for a person, since that person would then find only his neighbors? backs to talk to about ordinary concerns. Being alone is too risky for us. So the person jumps up at the signal and takes part, even if the price is the bloody work you know.
- Page 192 (location ~ 2941-2954)
JEAN-BAPTISTE: The whole time the killings went on, I never heard the word genocide. It reached our ears only through the voices of international reporters and humanitarian officials, first on the road into exile?but we did not know what the word meant?and then in the camps in Congo. This is a truth: among ourselves, we never said that word. Many did not even know the meaning of genocide. It was of no use. And yet if we were getting up every morning to go hunting, even when we were tired or had other work left unfinished, it was certainly because we thought we had to kill them all. People knew what job they were doing without needing to name it. ? ADALBERT: Genocide is not an idea common to wars and battles. It is an idea the authorities have?to rid themselves of a danger once and for all. A convenient idea that need not be named or encouraged, except with the usual malicious outbursts. It?s a quite ordinary idea when it flies from word to word, sometimes from joke to joke; it becomes extraordinary when it is caught on the tips of machetes. This idea does not die with the killings, not after victory, not after defeat. It can be salvaged by future authorities for another destiny. But how can you kill an idea, used so extraordinarily, if you do not know how to kill its word, which can recall it to life? Killing enemies, killing offenders, killing neighbors?that you can understand.
- Page 194 (location ~ 2972-2983)
JEAN-BAPTISTE: The whole time the killings went on, I never heard the word genocide. It reached our ears only through the voices of international reporters and humanitarian officials, first on the road into exile?but we did not know what the word meant?and then in the camps in Congo. This is a truth: among ourselves, we never said that word. Many did not even know the meaning of genocide. It was of no use. And yet if we were getting up every morning to go hunting, even when we were tired or had other work left unfinished, it was certainly because we thought we had to kill them all. People knew what job they were doing without needing to name it. ? ADALBERT: Genocide is not an idea common to wars and battles. It is an idea the authorities have?to rid themselves of a danger once and for all. A convenient idea that need not be named or encouraged, except with the usual malicious outbursts. It?s a quite ordinary idea when it flies from word to word, sometimes from joke to joke; it becomes extraordinary when it is caught on the tips of machetes. This idea does not die with the killings, not after victory, not after defeat. It can be salvaged by future authorities for another destiny. But how can you kill an idea, used so extraordinarily, if you do not know how to kill its word, which can recall it to life? Killing enemies, killing offenders, killing neighbors?that you can understand. Killing ideas and words?that is beyond intelligence, a farmer?s intelligence, anyway.
- Page 194 (location ~ 2972-2983)
IGNACE: We called them ?cockroaches,? an insect that chews up clothing and nests in it, so you have to squash them hard to get rid of them. We didn?t want any more Tutsis on the land. We imagined an existence without them. At first, we favored getting rid of them without actually killing them. If they had agreed to leave?for Burundi or other likely destinations?they could have gone and saved their lives. And we wouldn?t have piled up the fatalities of the massacres. But they couldn?t imagine living there without their ancient traditions and their herds of cows. That pushed us toward the machetes. The Tutsis had accepted so many killings without ever protesting, they had waited for death or bad blows so often without raising their voices, that in a certain way we thought deep down they were fated to die, here and now, all together. We thought that since this job was meeting no opposition, it was because it really had to be done. That idea helped us not to think about the job. Afterward we learned what it was called. But among us here in prison, we don?t use that word.
- Page 197 (location ~ 3010-3017)
L?OPORD: When the Tutsis were caught, many died without a word. In Rwanda people say ?die like a lamb in the Bible.? Of course in Rwanda there are no sheep, so we have never heard their cry. It sometimes touched us painfully that they awaited death in silence. Evenings, we would ask over and over, ?Why no protest from these people who are about to leave? Why do they not beg for mercy?? The organizers claimed that the Tutsis felt guilty for the sin of being Tutsi. Some interahamwe kept saying they felt responsible for the misfortunes they had brought upon us. Well, I knew that was not true. The Tutsis were not asking for anything in those fatal moments because they no longer believed in words. They had no more faith in crying out, like frightened animals, for example, howling to be heard above the mortal blows. An overpowering sorrow was carrying those people away. They felt so abandoned they did not even open their mouths.
- Page 199 (location ~ 3050-3057)
For example, is it ethical, not to talk to such killers, but to encourage them to speak for themselves? More to the point: is it ethical to publish interviews with prisoners who have been deprived of their physical liberty and thus of freedom of expression? At other times, in other countries, I have met people incarcerated because of war: enemy prisoners, individuals suspected of treason, of collaboration, of crime, of rape, or those born into the wrong ethnic group or with the wrong name. I have heard a great many ?compromised? conversations or confessions. I have systematically refused to publish accounts of them or sometimes?such was the pressure exerted by the jailers?even to listen to them, so as not to be a party to the prisoners? humiliation. So why did I make an exception in Nyamata? Offhand, I can list many reasons, among them the complete indifference of the prison authorities in Rilima, which ensured their discretion during and after our visits; the strong bonds, sometimes of friendship, which I continue to enjoy with the survivors; the unbearable, intolerable silence of the Hutus I have met outside the prison and the gloomy unease that weighs on the hills; the specific character of the genocide, which belies every preconception you may have about it; and the power of Hannah Arendt?s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was written after she had listened to the words of a prisoner?indeed, on the eve of his sentencing. The most honest answer is that perhaps I became swept up in the project, that the whole question simply faded away during the interviews, and that when I returned to Paris the question no longer worried me, for it was immediately replaced by other, more pressing ones.
- Page 202 (location ~ 3087-3100)
Meeting them again in the penitentiary six years after knowing them in Kibungo, Innocent says, ?I thought they had become bitter, miserable, savage, and I am just astonished now to see them sometimes smiling and youthful. They seem more like boarders than prisoners. What?s more, they speak of the genocide as of a barbarity already long past, a thing simply ordered up by the authorities.? At every interview, the men speak in even voices with a familiar tone that denotes astonishing impassiveness. If the ferocity glimpsed in the forest of Nyungwe had ever surfaced in any of their faces, would we have stopped the interview? I really don?t know. On the other hand, their unshakable placidity is clearly quite important in the interviews?both smoothing over boredom and disgust, and raising nagging questions. Why are these guys participating in this project? Why are they agreeing to speak to us, often quite frankly, sometimes even with striking na?vet?? Or rather, why do they say what they say without any mea culpas or remorse (whether sincere or not) and without expecting compensation? These unanswered questions keep us on our toes and encourage us to bear with the unbearable moments.
- Page 204 (location ~ 3127-3136)
Some of them, evaluating the catastrophic results of that bloody episode, catalogue its effects on their blighted future. When we tackle the theme of regret, not one of them spontaneously mentions the victims. They think of them, but only afterward: their instinctive reaction is to dwell on their own personal losses and hardships. One day Fulgence says, ?We saw the first awful consequences of the killings on our way to Congo, with the moaning of our starving bellies and the terrible rumblings of turmoil at our heels.? Their natural tendency to dwell on their own suffering is stupefying. Unlike war criminals, who tend (aside from certain psychopaths) to lie low and slip out the back door after their downfall, these fellows usually place themselves in the center of the stage. I have only one tentative explanation for this unusual behavior. The absolute character of their project was what allowed them to carry it out with a certain equanimity, and today this same absoluteness allows them to avoid fully understanding and agonizing over what they did. The monstrous nature of the extermination haunts the survivors and even tortures them with guilt, whereas it exculpates and reassures the killers, perhaps protecting them from madness.
- Page 206 (location ~ 3147-3155)
At first, I feel only natural hatred or aversion for them; at best, in a few instances, condescension. I do not need either the ?feedback? of Innocent?s highly reactive presence or contact with my daily circle of Marie-Louise, Sylvie and her clients, ?dith and her children, Claudine, and all my Tutsi friends on the hills to keep me from falling into a syndrome of indulgent complacency. But as time goes by, a kind of perplexity creeps in, which makes the Kibungo gang not more likable but less unpleasant to spend time with?under the acacia tree, anyway. This is awkward to admit, but curiosity wins out over hostility. Their friendly solidarity, their disconnection from the world they soaked in blood, their incomprehension of their new existence, their inability to notice how we see them?all this makes them more accessible. Their patience and serenity, and sometimes their na?vet?, finally rub off on our relationship and touch particularly on their mysterious willingness to talk. They don?t give a hang about bearing witness for history; they have no complexes to work off and no hopes for any clemency from these pages. They are probably opening up because for the first time they can do so without feeling threatened.
- Page 207 (location ~ 3162-3171)
ALPHONSE: Some offenders claim that we changed into wild animals, that we were blinded by ferocity, that we buried our civilization under branches, and that?s why we are unable to find the right words to talk properly about it. That is a trick to sidetrack the truth. I can say this: outside the marshes, our lives seemed quite ordinary. We sang on the paths, we downed Primus or urwagwa, we had our choice amid abundance. We chatted about our good fortune, we soaped off our bloodstains in the basin, and our noses enjoyed the aromas of full cooking pots. We rejoiced in the new life about to begin by feasting on leg of veal. We were hot at night atop our wives, and we scolded our rowdy children. Although no longer willing to feel pity, we were still greedy for good feelings. The days all seemed much alike, as I told you. We put on our field clothes. We swapped gossip at the cabaret, we made bets on our victims, spoke mockingly of cut girls, squabbled foolishly over looted grain. We sharpened our tools on whetting stones. We traded stories about desperate Tutsi tricks, we made fun of every ?Mercy!? cried by someone who?d been hunted down, we counted up and stashed away our goods. We went about all sorts of human business without a care in the world?provided we concentrated on killing during the day, naturally. At the end of that season in the marshes, we were so disappointed we had failed. We were disheartened by what we were going to lose, and truly frightened by the misfortune and vengeance reaching out for us. But deep down, we were not tired of anything.
- Page 208 (location ~ 3177-3189)