Otto Penzler - The Best American Crime Writing 2003

She hadn’t seen Pauline since the genocide began and was hungry for news of her. I asked her if she knew that Pauline was in detention in Arusha, and she nodded. I asked her if she knew why, and she nodded again. Then I said that I saw Pauline three weeks before in the courtroom and that she looked healthy enough. Smiling broadly, Theresa said: “Pauline wanted to teach at the health center. She liked to teach good health.” She paused, still smiling, and said, “Pauline’s ministership was the joy of my heart.”

I asked her if she thought her daughter was innocent of the charges against her. Theresa sobered instantly. “It is unimaginable that she did these things,” she said. “She wouldn’t order people to rape and kill. After all, Pauline is a mother.” Then Theresa leaned forward, her hands outstretched. “Before the war, Hutu and Tutsi were the same,” she said. She told me that Pauline had many Tutsi friends. Theresa added that during the genocide, she herself had hidden a Tutsi boy in her home.

At first, Theresa’s story took me by surprise. But then, Rwanda’s lethal racialism could never be as starkly delineated as, say, Nazi Germany’s. Whether Hutus and Tutsis are separate ethnic groups is a subject of debate, but it was only after European colonists arrived in Rwanda that any political distinction was made between them. Intermarriage had long been common, and both groups spoke the same language and practiced the same religion. Around the turn of the twentieth century, however, German and Belgian colonists used dubious racialist logic-namely, that Tutsis had a more “Caucasian” appearance-to designate the minority Tutsi the ruling class, empowering them as their social and governing proxy.

In the 1930s, the Belgians, deciding to limit administrative posts and higher education to the Tutsi, needed to decide exactly who was in Rwanda. The most efficient procedure was simply to register everyone and require them to carry cards identifying them a sone or the other. Eighty-four percent of the population declared themselves Hutu and 15 percent Tutsi. Considering the degree of intermarriage in Rwandan history, this accounting was hardly scientific. What’s more, Rwandans sometimes switched ethnic identities, the wealthy relabeling themselves as Tutsis and the poor as Hutus.

“Identity became based on what you could get away with,” said Alison Des Forges, a senior adviser to the African Division of Human Rights Watch who has studied Rwanda for thirty years. “Half of the people are not clearly distinguishable. There was significant intermarriage. Women who fit the Tutsi stereotype-taller, lighter, with more Caucasian-like features-became desirable. But it didn’t necessarily mean that the women were one or the other.”

With desire comes its emotional alter ego, resentment. A revolution in 1959 brought the majority Hutus to power. As tensions increased around 1990, politicians began disseminating propaganda denouncing Tutsi females as temptresses, whores, and sexual deviants. Before the 1994 genocide began, Hutu newspapers ran cartoon after cartoon depicting Tutsi women as lascivious seducers.

Unlike the Nazis, who were fueled by myths of Aryan superiority, the Hutus were driven by an accumulated rage over their lower status and by resentment of supposed Tutsi beauty and arrogance. “The propaganda made Tutsi women powerful, desirable-and therefore something to be destroyed,” Rhonda Copelon told me. “When you make the women the threat, you enhance the idea that violence against them is permitted.”

This pernicious idea, of course, came to full fruition during the genocide. The collective belief of Hutu women that Tutsi women were shamelessly trying to steal their husbands granted Hutu men permission to rape their supposed competitors out of existence. Seen through this warped lens, the men who raped were engaged not only in an act of sexual transgression but also in a purifying ritual. “Once women are defiled as a group, anything one does to them is done in some kind of higher purpose,” Robert Jay Lifton said. “It become a profound, shared motivation of eliminating evil. Tutsis must be killed down to the last person in order to bring about utopia. They are seen, in a sense, as already dead.”

This explanation conformed with my sense of Pauline’s view of the Tutsis; like many of her countrymen, she seemed able to view individual Tutsis as abstractions. But in my conversations with Pauline’s mother, things became even more complicated. After Theresa told me about the Tutsi boy she had hidden, she paused, looked at me intently, and told me, matter-of-factly, that Pauline’s great-grandfather was a Tutsi. The great-grandfather had been redesignated a Hutu, Theresa explained, because he became poor. Stunned, and knowing that in Rwanda kinship is defined patrilineally-through the blood of fathers-I asked Theresa if that didn’t mean that Pauline was a Tutsi. “Yes, of course,” she said eagerly. And would Pauline have known that she came from Tutsi lineage? Theresa pursed her lips and gave a firm, affirmative nod.

The young man Theresa hid was not difficult to find. His name is Dutera Agide, 36, a jobless handyman in Ndora. He told me that he is Pauline’s second cousin, and that he is a Tutsi. He said he had spent one week hiding in Theresa’s house, listening to the slaughter going on outside. Then he said something even more surprising. At one point, he said, he was hidden in Pauline’s house. “I saw Pauline twice a week during the genocide,” Dutera told me. “One day she came home, and she said: ‘The war is not ending. I’m starting to get afraid. I don’t know what will happen.’ Then she came back again with her husband, loaded things from the house into a car, and left. She looked scared.”

After my conversation with Dutera, I went back to Theresa’s home one more time. Her exuberance had all but gone. She seemed to have settled into the truth, or a form of it. “People killed people because of fear to be also killed by the perpetrators of the genocide,” she said. “My daughter, who was also a minister in the government, could have participated in the killing not because she wanted to kill but because of fear.” Theresa then used the Kinyarwanda expression Mpemuke ndamuke: “to be dishonest in order to escape death.”

I spoke again with Pauline’s sister, Vineranda. “In 1959, when the Tutsi regime changed, our family changed with the situation,” Vineranda explained. “Because she was a Tutsi, Pauline was afraid that maybe the government would find out. And she was among many men in the government. And she had money and a position. She didn’t want to lose that.”

Robert Jay Lifton was intrigued by the revelation that Pauline was of Tutsi descent. “Part of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s fierceness had to do with eliminating the Tutsi in her,” he hypothesized. “She was undergoing an individual struggle to destroy that defiled element in herself.”

Pauline’s husband, Maurice Ntahobari, denied irritably that there were Tutsi roots in either his or Pauline’s family. After being asked repeatedly about Pauline’s and Shalom’s actions during the genocide, he sighed and said: “Try to understand, try to be in my shoes. This is about my wife and my son.”

When I spoke again with Pauline’s attorney, Nicole Bergevin, in July, and told her what Pauline’s mother had told me about Pauline being of Tutsi descent, Bergevin said she knew. (In an odd reversal, she later denied that Pauline was Tutsi.) Bergevin’s demeanor had changed since we had last spoken. This time around, she sounded defeated. Though she still insisted that Pauline knew nothing of the mass raping or murdering, she said, “I’m sure she’s going to be found guilty.” Then she paused and said with resignation, “When you do murder trials, you realize that we are all susceptible, and you wouldn’t even dream that you would ever commit this act.” There was a short silence. “But you come to understand that everyone is. It could happen to me, it could happen to my daughter. It could happen to you.”