An organised madness has driven Rwanda’s Hutu militias to butchery over the past five years, including the massacre of 800 000 in 100 days in 1994. In search of the truth behind one atrocity, Philip Gourevitch journeys from the heart of Africa to a plush suburb in Texas
In the province of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, near the Tanzanian border, there’s a rocky hill called Nyarubuye, with a church where many Tutsis were slaughtered in April 1994. A year after the killing, I flew to Nyarubuye in a United Nations helicopter, low over the hills in the morning mists, with the banana trees like green starbursts dense over the slopes. The uncut grass blew back as we dropped into the centre of a parish schoolyard. A lone soldier materialised, and shook our hands with shy formality. I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom.
At least 50, mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor, wadded in clothing, their belongings strewn about and smashed. Macheted skulls had rolled here and there. The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They did not buzz with flies. They had been killed 13 months earlier, and they hadn’t been moved. Skin stuck here and there over the bones, many of which lay scattered from the bodies, dismembered by the killers, or by scavengers – birds, dogs, bugs.
The more complete figures looked a lot like people, which they were once. A woman in a cloth wrap printed with flowers lay near the door. Her fleshless hip bones were high and her legs slightly spread, and a child’s skeleton extended between them. Her torso was hollowed out. Her ribs and spinal column poked through the rotting cloth. Her head was tipped back and her mouth was open; a strange image – half agony, half repose.
I had never been among the dead before. What to do? Look? Yes. I had come to see them. The dead had been left unburied at Nyarubuye for memorial purposes – and there they were, so intimately exposed. I didn’t need to see them. I already knew, and believed, what had happened in Rwanda. Yet looking at the buildings and the bodies, and hearing the silence of the place, with the grand Italianate basilica standing there deserted, and the beds of exquisite, death-fertilised flowers blooming over the corpses, it was still strangely unimaginable.
Those dead Rwandans will be with me forever. That was why I had felt compelled to come to Nyarubuye: to be stuck with them – not with their experience, but with the experience of looking at them. What else could you really see? A Bible bloated with rain or, littered about, the little wreaths of thatch which Rwandan women wear as crowns to balance the enormous loads they carry on their heads, and the Converse tennis sneaker stuck somehow in a pelvis.
Mass violence does not occur aimlessly, and in Rwanda, the ideology of genocide went by the bald name of Hutu Power. For those who set about systematically exterminating an entire people – even a fairly small and unresisting sub- population of perhaps a million and a quarter, like the Tutsis in Rwanda – bloodlust helps. But the engineers and perpetrators of a slaughter like this need not enjoy killing, and they may even find it unpleasant. What is required is that they want their victims dead. They have to want it so badly that they consider it necessary.
The week before this massacre, the killing began in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. Hutus who opposed the Hutu Power ideology were denounced as “accomplices” of Tutsis and were among the first to be killed.
The dead at Nyarubuye were, I’m afraid, beautiful. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquility of their rude exposure, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture: these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront. I couldn’t settle on any meaningful response: repulsion, alarm, grief, shame, incomprehension, but nothing truly meaningful. I just looked, and I took photographs, because I wondered whether I could really see what I was seeing while I saw it, and I also wanted an excuse to look a bit more closely.
We went on through the first room and out the far side. There was another room and another and another. They were all full of bodies, and more bodies were scattered in the grass, and there were stray skulls in the grass, which was thick and wonderfully green. Standing outside, I heard a crunch. A Canadian army colonel stumbled, and I saw, though he did not notice, that his foot had rolled on a skull and broken it. For the first time my feelings focused, and what I felt was a small but keen anger at this man. Then I heard another crunch, and felt a vibration underfoot. I had stepped on one, too.
Rwanda is spectacular. Gashes of red clay and black loam mark fresh hoe work; eucalyptus trees flash silver against brilliant green tea plantations; banana trees are everywhere. In the rainy season, the clouds are huge and low and fast, mists cling in highland hollows, lightning flickers through the nights, and by day the land is lustrous.
One day, when I was returning to Kigali, the car mounted a rise between two winding valleys, the windshield filled with purple-bellied clouds, and I asked Joseph, the man who was giving me a ride, whether Rwandans realise what a beautiful country they have. “Beautiful?” he said. “After the things that have happened here? The people aren’t good. If the people were good, the country might be OK.” Joseph told me his brother and sister had been killed: “The country is empty,” he said. “Empty!”
As I travelled around collecting accounts of the killing, it almost seemed as if, with the machete, the masu – a club studded with nails – a few well-placed grenades, and a few bursts of automatic rifle fire, the quiet orders of Hutu Power had made the neutron bomb obsolete.
If you could walk due west from the massacre site at Nyarubuye, straight across Rwanda to the province of Kibuye, then you would come to another hilltop village. This hill is called Mugonero, and it, too, is crowned by a big church. While Rwanda is overwhelmingly Catholic, Protestants evangelised much of Kibuye, and Mugonero is the headquarters of the Seventh-Day Adventist mission. It resembles the campus of an American community college more than an African village; tidy tree-lined footpaths connect the big church with a chapel, a nursing school, an infirmary, and a hospital complex that enjoyed a reputation for excellent care.
It was in the hospital that Samuel Ndagijimana sought refuge in 1994. He had worked as a medical orderly since 1991. About his life in that time that Rwandans call “Before”, he said: “We were simple Christians.” On April 6 1994, Rwanda’s long-standing Hutu dictator, President Juvenal Habyarimana, was assassinated, and a clique of Hutu Power leaders from the military high command seized power. “The radio announced that people shouldn’t move,” Samuel said. “We began to see these groups with the local leaders of Hutu Power organising the population. You didn’t know what was happening, just that there was something coming.”
After a few days, when Samuel looked across the valley from Mugonero, he saw houses burning in villages. He decided to stay in the hospital until the troubles were over. Tutsi families from Mugonero and surrounding areas soon began arriving with the same idea. This was a tradition in Rwanda. “When there were problems, people always went to the church,” Samuel said. “The pastors were Christians. One trusted that nothing would happen at their place.” Many people at Mugonero told me that the church president, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, instructed Tutsis to gather at the complex.
Wounded Tutsis converged on Mugonero. They came through the bush, trying to avoid militia checkpoints along the road. Some told how a few miles to the north, in Gishyita, the mayor had been so frantic to kill Tutsis that thousands had been slaughtered even as he herded them to the church, where the remainder were massacred. A few miles to the south, in Rwamatamu, more than 10 000 Tutsis had taken refuge in the town hall, and the mayor had brought in truckloads of policemen and soldiers and militia with guns and grenades to surround the place; he had arranged villagers with machetes in case anyone escaped when the shooting began. There had been very few escapees.
By April 12, the hospital was packed with about 2 000 refugees, and the water pipes were cut. Nobody could leave; militiamen and members of the presidential guard had cordoned off the complex. When Pastor Ntakirutimana’s son, Dr Gerard, a Hutu Power supporter, learned several dozen Hutus were among the refugees, he arranged for them to be evacuated. He also locked up the pharmacy, refusing treatment to the wounded and the sick, “because they were Tutsi”, Samuel said. The refugees at the hospital watched Dr Gerard and his father driving around with militiamen and the presidential guard. The refugees wondered whether these men had forgotten God.
Among the Tutsis were seven Adventist pastors who quickly assumed their roles as leaders of the flock. When two policemen turned up, and announced that their job was to protect refugees, the pastors took up a collection, and raised almost $400 for the policemen. For several days, all was calm. On April 15, the policemen said they had to leave because the hospital was to be attacked next morning. They drove away in a car with Dr Gerard, and the pastors advised the refugees to expect the end. Then they sat down together and wrote letters to the mayor and to their boss, Pastor Ntakirutimana, asking them in the name of the Lord to intercede.
“And the response came,” Samuel said. “It was Dr Gerard who announced: `Saturday, the 16th, at exactly nine o’clock in the morning, you will be attacked.'” But it was Pastor Ntakirutimana’s response that crushed Samuel’s spirit. He repeated the church president’s words twice over: “Your problem has already found a solution. You must die.” One of Samuel’s colleagues, Manase Bimenyimana, told me the pastor’s words were: “You must be eliminated. God no longer wants you.”
The next morning, Manase saw Dr Gerard drive toward the hospital with a carload of armed men. Then he heard shooting and grenades exploding. There were many attackers and they came from all sides. “They began shooting at us, and we threw stones at them because we had nothing else, not even a machete,” Samuel said. “We were hungry, tired, we hadn’t had water for more than a day. There were people who had their arms cut off. There were dead. They killed the people at the chapel and the school and then the hospital. I saw Dr Gerard, and I saw his father’s car pass the hospital and stop near his office.
“Around noon, we went into a basement. The attackers began to break down the doors and to kill, shooting and throwing grenades. The two policemen who had been our protectors were now attackers. The local citizenry also helped. Those who had no guns had machetes or masus. In the evening, they began firing tear gas. People who were still alive cried. That way the attackers knew where people were.”
Some time before midnight, the killers went off to loot the homes of the dead, and Samuel in his basement, and Manase in hiding, found themselves unaccountably alive. Manase made his way to the nearby village of Murambi, where he joined up with a small band of survivors who had taken shelter in an Adventist church. For nearly 24 hours, they had peace. Then Dr Gerard came with a convoy of militia. Again there was shooting, and Manase escaped, fleeing high into the mountains, to a place called Bisesero, where the rock is steep and craggy, full of caves. Bisesero was the only place in Rwanda where Tutsi civilians mounted a defence against the Hutus.
The hunters came to Bisesero by truck and bus. “When we were weak, they saved bullets and killed us with bamboo spears. They cut Achilles tendons and necks, but not completely, and then they left the victims to spend a long time crying until they died. Cats and dogs were eating people.”
Samuel, too, had found his way to Bisesero. He had lingered in the Mugonero hospital until one in the morning. Then he crept out of the basement and, carrying “one who had lost his feet” he proceeded slowly into the mountains. Eventually, he descended to cross Lake Kuvi at night in a canoe.
Three months after the Mugonero massacre, Pastor Ntakirutimana fled with his wife to Zaire, then Zambia, and from there to Laredo, Texas. The Ntakirutimanas had another son named Eliel in Laredo, a cardiac anaesthesiologist who had been a naturalised United States citizen for more than a decade.
So the pastor and his wife were granted green cards – “permanent resident alien” status. Shortly after they arrived, Tutsis who lived in the US sent a letter to the White House, asking that Pastor Ntakirutimana be brought to justice for his conduct during the massacre. “After several months,” one of the letter’s signers told me, “an answer came from the State Department, expressing sympathy for what happened and then stating the terms of the foreign aid America was giving to Rwanda. We were saying `here are a million killed, and here’s one man’ – we were kind of upset.”
The story was sensational: a preacher accused of presiding over the slaughter of half his congregation. But the press hardly noticed.
The address I had for the Ntakirutimanas in Laredo was 313 Potrero Court – a suburban brick ranch house. A dog growled when I rang the bell, but nobody answered. Later, down the street, I found a man spraying his driveway. I told him I was looking for a family of Rwandans, and indicated the house. He told me: “They moved out about a month ago.”
Dr Eliel Ntakirutimana’s new phone number was unlisted, but I got hold of an operator who gave me his address. The house was on Estate Drive, in an expensive-looking new private community, designed, as in Rwanda, with each home set within a walled compound. An electronic gate controlled access to the subdivision, where most of the plots were still empty prairie. The few houses were wild, vaguely Mediterranean fantasias.
The Ntakirutimana’s house stood behind another electronic security fence. A barefoot Rwandan maid led me past an open garage that housed a white Corvette convertible and into a vast kitchen area. She phoned Dr Ntaki – he had chopped down his name as a courtesy to American tongues – and I told him I was hoping to meet his father. He asked how I’d found the house. I told him and he gave me an appointment at a hospital called Mercy.
While I was still on the phone, the doctor’s wife, Genny, came home from taking her kids to school. She offered me a cup of coffee -“From Rwanda,” she said proudly. We sat on huge leather couches beside a gigantic television, with a view over a patio, a barbecue pavilion, and, on the far shore of a tiled swimming-pool, a patch of garden. She said: “With my father-in- law, we were the last ones to hear anything. He was in Zaire, he was in Zambia, a refugee, and an old man – more than 70 years old. His one great wish was retirement and old age in Rwanda. Then he comes here and suddenly they say he killed people. You know Rwandans. Rwandans go crazy with jealousy. Rwandans don’t like it if you are rich or in good health.”
She did not seem to have her own mind entirely made up about her father-in-law. She said: “This is a man who can’t stand to see blood even when you kill a chicken. But anything is possible.”
Pastor Ntakirutimana was a man of stern composure. He sat in a wing chair, clutching a manila folder in his lap. He spoke in Kinyarwanda, the language of his country, and his son translated. “They are saying I killed people, 8 000 people.” The number was about four times higher than any I had previously heard. The pastor’s voice was full of angry disbelief. “It is all 100% pure lies. I did not kill any people. I never told anybody to kill any people.”
When the “chaos” began in Kigali, the pastor explained, he didn’t think it would reach Mugonero, and when Tutsis began going to the hospital, he claimed he had to ask them why. After about a week, he said, there were so many refugees that “things started turning a little weird”. So the pastor and his son Dr Gerard held a meeting to ask what they were going to do. But at that moment, two policemen showed up to guard the hospital.
Then, on April 16, at seven in the morning, the two policemen came to Pastor Ntakirutimana’s house. “They gave me letters from the Tutsi pastors,” he said. “One was addressed to me, another to the mayor. I read mine. The letter they gave me said `They are plotting, they are trying to kill us, can you go to the mayor and ask him to protect us?'” He read this, then went to the mayor. “I told him what my message said, and gave him his letter. The mayor told me, `Pastor, there’s no government. I have no power. I can do nothing.'”
“I was surprised,” Ntakirutimana went on. “I returned to Mugonero, and I told the policemen to go to the pastors to tell them nothing can be done, and the mayor said he can do nothing.” The pastor took his wife and others who “wanted to hide” and drove out of town – to Gishyita, where many of the refugees had been wounded. “Gishyita,” he explained, “had killed its people already, so there was peace.”
The pastor said that he hadn’t returned to Mugonero until April 27. “Everybody was buried,” he told me, “I never saw anything.” After that, “I stayed at my office. Only, one day I went to Rwamatamu because I heard that pastors had also died there, and I wanted to see if I could find even a kid of theirs to save. But I found nothing to save.”
The pastor told me: “I think I’m closer to God than I have ever been in my life.” He said: “When I see what happened in Rwanda, I’m very sad about it because politics is bad. A lot of people died.” He didn’t sound sad; he sounded tired, harassed, indignant. He said once more: “Everything was chaos.” “They say you organised it,” I reminded him. He said: “Never, never, never, never.”
I asked him whether he remembered the precise language of the pastors’ letter he had received on the morning of the massacre. He opened the folder. “Here,” he said, and held out the handwritten original and a translation. His daughter-in-law Genny made me copies. Dr Ntaki wanted a drink, and fetched a bottle of Scotch.
The letter was dated April 15 1994: “Our dear leader, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, How are you! We wish you to be strong in all these problems we are facing. We wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. We therefore request you to intervene on our behalf and talk with the Mayor. We believe that, with the help of God, who entrusted you the leadership of this flock, which is going to be destroyed, your intervention will be highly appreciated, the same way as the Jews were saved by Esther. We give honour to you.”
A day after we met, Pastor Ntakirutimana was in his car, driving south on Interstate 80 towards Mexico. To the FBI agents who were trailing him, his driving appeared erratic. A few miles from the border, they pulled him over, informed him that he was indicted for genocide by the UN Tribunal for Rwanda, and took him into custody. The arrest went almost entirely unnoticed in the American press.
A few days later, in the Ivory Coast, the pastor’s son, Dr Gerard, was arrested and transferred to the UN Tribunal, in Tanzania. But the pastor had that green card and the rights that came with it, and he retained Ramsey Clark, a former attorney general, to fight his case. Clark argued that it is unconstitutional for the US to hand the pastor to the tribunal, and the federal district judge agreed. In December 1997, after 14 months in a Laredo jail, Pastor Ntakirutimana was released. Nine weeks later, FBI agents arrested him a second time, pending an appeal of the judge’s decision.
I cannot count the times I’ve been asked, “Is there any hope for Rwanda?” I like to quote a Hutu hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina, who told me after the genocide, “with my countrymen – Rwandans – you never know what they will become tomorrow”. Although he didn’t mean it that way, this struck me as one of the most optimistic things a Rwandan could say after the genocide.
But I’ll leave you to decide if there is hope for Rwanda with one more story. In 1997, Rwandan television showed footage of a man who confessed to being among a party of gnocidaires who had killed 17 schoolgirls and a 62-year-old Belgian nun at a boarding school two nights earlier. It was the second such attack in a month.
The prisoner on the television explained that the massacre was part of a Hutu Power “liberation” campaign. During both attacks in Gisenyi, the students, teenage girls who had been roused from their sleep, were ordered to separate themselves – Hutus from Tutsis. But the students had refused. The girls said they were simply Rwandans, so they were beaten and shot indiscriminately. Rwandans have no room in their corpse-crowded imaginations for more martyrs. None of us does. But might we all take some courage from those brave Hutu girls who could have chosen to live, but chose instead to call themselves Rwandans?
This is an extract from We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch