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

Even today, deaths are often explained on radio trottoir —sidewalk radio, the ever-warping word of the street—and in the more formal media as the work of invisible poisoners. In the absence of evidence to prove or disprove such rumors, the enduring fear of poison takes on the quality of metaphor. When death is always the work of enemies, and the power of the state considers itself in concert with the occult, distrust and subterfuge become tools of survival, and politics itself becomes a poison.

SO HABYARIMANA WAS shadowed by his wife, and his wife, at least, had forebodings of total destruction. Rwandans seemed to think she should know. On radio trottoir, Madame Agathe was called Kanjogera, after the wicked queen mother of Mwami Musinga, the Lady Macbeth of Rwandan legend. Le clan de Madame, Agathe’s court within the court, was known as the akazu, the little house. The akazu was the core of the concentric webs of political, economic, and military muscle and patronage that came to be known as Hutu Power. When the President crossed the akazu, he was quickly set straight. For instance, Habyarimana once cultivated a protégé from outside the akazu, Colonel Stanislas Mayuya; he liked Mayuya so much that one of the chiefs of the akazu had Mayuya shot dead. The gunman was arrested; then he and the prosecutor on the case were also killed.

Mayuya’s assassination occurred in April of 1988. A strange year followed. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank demanded that Rwanda implement a program of “structural adjustment,” and the government’s budget for 1989 was slashed nearly in half. At the same time, taxes and forced-labor demands increased. Inadequate rains and a mismanagement of resources created pockets of famine. Details of corruption scandals leaked out, and several of Habyarimana’s critics suffered so-called automobile accidents, in which they were run over and killed. To prevent Rwanda’s sterling image from being tarnished in the eyes of international aid donors, the Kigali police launched vice squads to arrest “prostitutes,” a category that included any number of women who had run afoul of the high authorities. The Interior Ministry deputized Catholic militants to vandalize shops that sold condoms. Independent-minded journalists who took note of all this mischief were thrown in jail; they were followed by unemployed idlers whose heads had been shaved in preparation for a “re-education” program.

The more trouble there was, the more new troublemakers emerged. Hutu oppositionists of diverse stripes began finding their voices and lobbying for attention from the Western governments whose aid allocations underwrote about sixty percent of Rwanda’s annual budget. The timing was perfect. Following the breach of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989—the same month that Odette was fired—the victorious Cold War powers of Western Europe and North America began demanding gestures of democratization from their client regimes in Africa. It took a good deal of bullying, but after a meeting with his chief foreign patron, President François Mitterrand of France, Habyarimana suddenly announced, in June of 1990, that it was time to establish a multiparty political system in Rwanda.

Habyarimana’s embrace of reform was conspicuously halfhearted, a capitulation to foreign coercion, and instead of simple relief and enthusiasm, the prospect of an open competition for power provoked widespread alarm in Rwanda. It was universally understood that the northwesterners, who depended on his power and on whom his power increasingly depended, would not readily surrender their percentage. While Habyarimana spoke publicly of a political opening, the akazu tightened its grip on the machinery of the state. As repression quickened in direct proportion to the threat of change, a number of the leading advocates of reform fled into exile.

And then, in the early afternoon of October 1, 1990, a rebel army, calling itself the Rwandese Patriotic Front, invaded northeastern Rwanda from Uganda, declaring war on the Habyarimana regime, and propounding a political program that called for an end to tyranny, corruption, and the ideology of exclusion “which generates refugees.”

EVERY WAR IS unconventional after its own fashion. Hutu Power’s unconventionality did not take long to show. The RPF invasion began with fifty men crossing the border, and although hundreds soon followed, the field of combat was clearly demarcated: a patch of national park in the northeast. If it was the RPF you wanted to fight, all you had to do was go up to the front. But on the night of October 4—three days after the invasion—there was a lot of shooting in and around Kigali. In the morning, the government announced that it had successfully put down a rebel attempt on the capital. This was a lie. There had been no battle. The gunfire was a charade, and its object was simple: to exaggerate Rwanda’s danger and to create the impression that rebel accomplices had infiltrated the country to its core.

The RPF invasion offered the Habyarimana oligarchy its best weapon yet against pluralism: the unifying specter of a common enemy. Following the logic of the state ideology—that identity equals politics and politics equals identity—all Tutsis were considered to be RPF “accomplices,” and Hutus who failed to subscribe to this view were counted as Tutsi-loving traitors. Habyarimana’s crowd didn’t want a border war, but they welcomed nationwide turmoil as a pretext for rounding up “internal enemies.” Lists had already been prepared: educated Tutsis, prosperous Tutsis, and Tutsis who traveled abroad were among the first to be arrested, and prominent Hutus who were, for one reason or another, considered to be out of step with the regime were picked up as well.

Odette’s husband, Jean-Baptiste, received a call from a presidential deputy, who said, “We know you’re a Hutu, but you’re very close to these Tutsis because of your wife. If you love your family, tell these Tutsis to write a letter to the President, confessing their acts of treason with the RPF.” The deputy dictated a sample letter. Jean-Baptiste replied that his friends had nothing to do with the RPF, which was true. Before the RPF struck, almost nobody outside of its ranks had known of its existence. But Habyarimana had repeatedly expressed his fear that the Rwandans in the Ugandan army were plotting against him, and the RPF invasion had, in fact, involved a mass desertion from the Ugandan ranks. As far as Habyarimana and his entourage were concerned, that was proof that anybody they suspected was, by virtue of their suspicion, an enemy agent.

Jean-Baptiste told his interrogator that he had no contacts with exiles. Odette didn’t know why he was left alone after that; nearly ten thousand people were arrested in October and November of 1990. But all sorts of mistakes were made. For instance, when men were sent to the hospital to arrest Odette they got the wrong person. “I had been given my job back,” she said, “and I had a colleague who had the same name. She was Hutu and she denied that she was me, but she was much taller than I am and they said, ‘There’s only one Tutsi doctor named Odette.’ So she was imprisoned and tortured, and in 1994 she was again mistaken for a Tutsi, and killed.”

Throughout the first weeks of the war, the government called on the population to keep calm. But the fake attack on Kigali, and the mass arrests, sent another message. On October 11, just ten days after the RPF invasion, local officials in the village of Kibilira, in Gisenyi, instructed Hutus that their communal work duty for the month would consist of fighting their Tutsi neighbors, with whom they had lived in peace for at least fifteen years. The Hutus went to work with singing and drumming, and the slaughter lasted three days; some three hundred fifty Tutsis were killed, and three thousand fled their homes. For those whose memories do not extend as far back as Odette’s, the massacre at Kibilira is remembered as the beginning of the genocide.