Philip Gourevitch - We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

It was the same with nearly all the Tutsi survivors I met in Rwanda. When I pressed for stories of how they had lived during the long periods between bouts of violence—household stories, village stories, funny stories, or stories of annoyance, stories of school, work, church, a wedding, a funeral, a trip, a party, or a feud—the answer was always opaque: in normal times we lived normally. After a while I stopped asking, because the question seemed pointless and possibly cruel. On the other hand, I found that Hutus often volunteered their memories of life’s engrossing daily dramas before the genocide, and these stories were, just as the Tutsi survivors had said, normal: variations, in a Rwandan vein, of stories you might hear anywhere.

So remembering has its economy, like experience itself, and when Odette mentioned the hand of the professor of internal medicine on her bottom, and grinned, I saw that she had forgotten that economy and wandered in her memories, and I felt that we were both glad of it. A professor had imagined her susceptible and she had imagined that as a married man and her teacher he should know greater restraint. They had each other wrong. But people have the strangest notions as they navigate each other in this life —and in the “good years,” the “normal times,” that isn’t the end of the world.

ODETTE’S HUSBAND, JEAN-BAPTISTE Gasasira, had a Tutsi father and a Hutu mother, but his father had died when Jean-Baptiste was very young, and his mother had succeeded in arranging for him to have Hutu identity papers. “That hadn’t prevented him from being beaten up in ’seventy-three,” Odette said, “but it meant the children had Hutu papers.” She had two sons and a daughter, and might have had more if she and Jean-Baptiste hadn’t been traveling abroad a great deal in the 1980s, to pursue specialized medical studies, “a big opportunity for Tutsis,” which was facilitated by their friendship with the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Education.

When Habyarimana took over, Rwanda was significantly poorer than any of its neighbor states, and by the mid-1980s it was economically better off than any of them. Odette and Jean-Baptiste, who had settled into well-paid jobs at the Central Hospital of Kigali, were living very close to the top of the Rwandan ladder, with government housing and cars and a busy social life among the Kigali elite. “Our best friends were Hutus, ministers and those who were in power from our generation,” Odette recalled. “This was our crowd. But it was a bit hard. Even though Jean-Baptiste was hired as a Hutu, he was seen to have the face and manner of a Tutsi, and we were known as Tutsis.”

The sense of exclusion could be subtle, but with time it became increasingly blunt. In November of 1989, a man came to the maternity ward asking for Dr. Odette. “He was very impatient and insisted we had to talk. He said, ‘You’re needed at the Presidency, at the office of the Secretary-General of Security.’” Odette was terrified; she assumed that she would be interrogated about her habit, during occasional trips to neighboring countries and to Europe, of visiting family members and Rwandan friends living in exile.

Since 1959, the diaspora of exiled Rwandan Tutsis and their children had grown to include about a million people; it was the largest and oldest unresolved African refugee problem. Nearly half of these refugees lived in Uganda, and in the early 1980s a number of young Rwandans there had joined the rebel leader Yoweri Museveni in his fight against the brutal dictatorship of President Milton Obote. By January of 1986, when Museveni claimed victory and was sworn in as President of Uganda, his army included several thousand Rwandan refugees. Habyarimana felt threatened. For years he had pretended to negotiate with refugee groups who demanded the right to return to Rwanda, but, citing the country’s chronic overpopulation, he had always refused to let the exiles come home. Ninety-five percent of Rwanda’s land was under cultivation, and the average family consisted of eight people living as subsistence farmers on less than half an acre. Shortly after Museveni’s victory in Uganda, Habyarimana had simply declared that Rwanda was full: end of discussion. Thereafter, contact with refugees was outlawed, and Odette knew how thorough Habyarimana’s spy network could be. As she drove to the Presidency, she realized that she had no idea what to say if her visits to exiles had been discovered.

“Dr. Odette,” Habyarimana’s security chief said, “they say you’re a good doctor.”

Odette said, “I don’t know.”

“Yes,” he went on. “You’re said to be very intelligent. You studied at these good schools without the right. But what did you say in the hospital corridor recently, after the death of President Habyarimana’s brother?”

Odette didn’t know what he was talking about.

The security chief told her: “You said that demons should take the whole Habyarimana family.”

Odette, who had been trembling with fear, laughed. “I’m a doctor,” she said. “You think I believe in demons?”

The security chief laughed, too. Odette went home, and the next morning, as usual, she went to work. “I started my rounds,” she recalled. “Then a colleague came up to me and said, ‘You’re always going away. Where are you going to go now, to Belgium, or where?’ And he took me to see—my name had been struck from the doors to the wards, and everyone was told I didn’t work there anymore.”

TUTSIS WERE NOT alone in their disappointment as the Second Republic calcified into a mature totalitarian order, in which Habyarimana, running unopposed, claimed a comical ninety-nine percent of the vote in the presidential elections. The President’s entourage was drawn overwhelmingly from his home base in the northwest, and southern Hutus felt increasingly alienated. Among the peasant masses, Hutus remained very nearly as downtrodden as Tutsis, and they were put to hard use after Habyarimana revived the despised colonial regime of mandatory communal work details. Of course, everyone turned out, as the ubiquitous MRND-party enforcers required, to chant and dance in adulation of the President at mass pageants of political “animation,” but such mandatory civic cheer could not mask the growing political discontent in much of Rwandan society. While the country as a whole had grown a bit less poor during Habyarimana’s tenure, the great majority of Rwandans remained in circumstances of extreme poverty, and it did not go unnoticed that the omnipotent President and his cronies had grown very rich.

Then again, it had never been otherwise in Rwandan memory, and compared to much of the rest of postcolonial Africa, Rwanda appeared Edenic to foreign-aid donors. Just about everywhere else you turned on the continent, you saw the client dictators of the Cold War powers ruling by pillage and murder, and from the rebels who opposed them you heard the loud anti-imperial rhetoric that makes white development workers feel bitterly misunderstood. Rwanda was tranquil—or, like the volcanoes in the northwest, dormant; it had nice roads, high church attendance, low crime rates, and steadily improving standards of public health and education. If you were a bureaucrat with a foreign-aid budget to unload, and your professional success was to be measured by your ability not to lie or gloss too much when you filed happy statistical reports at the end of each fiscal year, Rwanda was the ticket. Belgium shoveled money into its old stomping ground; France, ever eager to expand its neocolonial African empire— la Francophonie —had begun military assistance to Habyarimana in 1975; Switzerland sent more development aid to Rwanda than to any other country on earth; Washington, Bonn, Ottawa, Tokyo, and the Vatican all counted Kigali as a favorite charity. The hills were thick with young whites working, albeit unwittingly, for the greater glory of Habyarimana.