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

In the summer of 1995, I found Mbonampeka living in a drab little room at the Protestant Guest House in Goma, Zaire, about a mile from the Rwandan border. “In a war,” he told me, “you can’t be neutral. If you’re not for your country, are you not for its attackers?” Mbonampeka was a large man with a calm and steady demeanor. He wore gold wire-rimmed spectacles, neatly pressed trousers, and a pink-and-white-striped shirt, and he had the absurd title of Minister of Justice in the Rwandan government in exile—a self-appointed body culled largely from officers of the regime that had presided over the genocide. Mbonampeka was not in that government in 1994, but he had operated informally as its agent, pleading the Hutu Power cause both at home and in Europe, and he regarded this as a normal career development.

“I said Mugesera must be arrested because he sets people against each other, which is illegal, and I also said that if the RPF continued to fight we must have civil defense,” Mbonampeka told me. “These positions are consistent. In both cases I was for the defense of my country.” And he added, “Personally, I don’t believe in the genocide. This was not a conventional war. The enemies were everywhere. The Tutsis were not killed as Tutsis, only as sympathizers of the RPF.”

I wondered if it had been difficult to distinguish the Tutsis with RPF sympathies from the rest. Mbonampeka said it wasn’t. “There was no difference between the ethnic and the political,” he told me. “Ninety-nine percent of Tutsis were pro-RPF.”

Even senile grandmothers and infants? Even the fetuses ripped from the wombs of Tutsis, after radio announcers had reminded listeners to take special care to disembowel pregnant victims?

“Think about it,” Mbonampeka said. “Let’s say the Germans attack France, so France defends itself against Germany. They understand that all Germans are the enemy. The Germans kill women and children, so you do, too.”

By regarding the genocide, even as he denied its existence, as an extension of the war between the RPF and the Habyarimana regime, Mbonampeka seemed to be arguing that the systematic state-sponsored extermination of an entire people is a provokable crime—the fault of the victims as well as the perpetrators. But although the genocide coincided with the war, its organization and implementation were quite distinct from the war effort. In fact, the mobilization for the final extermination campaign swung into full gear only when Hutu Power was confronted by the threat of peace.

ON AUGUST 4, 1993, at a conference center in Arusha, Tanzania, President Habyarimana signed a peace agreement with the RPF, officially bringing the war to an end. The so-called Arusha Accords ensured a right of return for Rwanda’s refugee diaspora, promised the integration of the two warring armies into a single national defense force, and established a blueprint for a Broad-Based Transitional Government, composed of representatives of all the national political parties, including the RPF. Habyarimana would remain President, pending elections, but his powers would be basically ceremonial. And, crucially, throughout the peace-implementation period a United Nations peacekeeping force would be deployed in Rwanda.

The RPF had never really expected to win its war on the battlefield; its objective had been to force a political settlement, and at Arusha it appeared to have done that. “You use war when there is no other means, and Arusha opened a means to come and struggle politically,” Tito Ruteremara, one of the RPF leaders who negotiated the Accords, told me. “With Arusha we could go inside Rwanda, and if we had good ideas and a very nice organization, we’d make it. If we failed, it meant that our ideas were no good. The struggle wasn’t ethnic, it was political, and Habyarimana feared us because we were strong. He had never wanted peace, because he saw that we could be politically successful.”

For Habyarimana, it was true that the Arusha Accords amounted to a political suicide note. Hutu Power leaders cried treason, and charged that the President himself had become an “accomplice.” Four days after the signing at Arusha, Radio Television Libres des Milles Collines, a new radio station funded by members and friends of the akazu, and devoted to genocidal propaganda, began broadcasting from Kigali. RTLM was a Kangura of the airwaves; its reach was virtually ubiquitous in radio-saturated Rwanda, and it became wildly popular with its mixture of rousing oratory and songs by such Hutu Power pop stars as Simon Bikindi, whose most famous number was probably “I Hate These Hutus”—a song of “good neighborliness”:

And so on; it is a very long song.

“Anyone who thinks that the war is over as a result of the Arusha Accords is deceiving himself,” Hassan Ngeze warned in Kangura , in January of 1994. Ngeze had railed against Arusha as a sellout from the start, and with the arrival of the blue-helmeted soldiers of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda at the end of 1993, he had a new target. UNAMIR, Ngeze proclaimed, was nothing but a tool “to help the RPF take power by force.” But, he reminded his readers, the record showed that such peacekeepers were generally cowardly, inclined to “watching as spectators” when violence broke out. He predicted that there would be plenty to watch, and he explicitly warned UNAMIR to stay out of the way. “If the RPF has decided to kill us, then let’s kill each other,” he urged. “Let whatever is smoldering erupt…. At such a time, a lot of blood will be spilled.”

IN 1991, ODETTE had left her job at the hospital to serve as the doctor for the United States Peace Corps mission in Kigali. Two years later, when Washington suspended the program in Rwanda, Odette put her kids in school in Nairobi, and took a series of short-term Peace Corps postings—in Gabon, Kenya, and Burundi. She liked being in Burundi, because it was easy to get home to see her family, and because Burundi appeared, at last, to have become a country where Hutus and Tutsis were committed to sharing power peacefully. In August of 1993, after nearly thirty years of brutal Tutsi dictatorship, a Hutu was sworn in as Burundi’s first popularly elected president. The transfer of power was smoothly accomplished, and Burundi was celebrated at home and abroad as a beacon of hope for Africa. Then, in November, four months after the new President took office, some Tutsi military men assassinated him. The President’s death triggered a Hutu uprising and a violent crackdown by the Tutsi army that eventually left at least fifty thousand people dead. The violence in Burundi provided great grist for the mills of Rwanda’s Hutu Power purveyors of fear, who trumpeted the news as proof of Tutsi treachery, but it left Odette without a job.

She didn’t want to go back to Kigali. With Habyarimana resisting the implementation of the Arusha Accords, attacks on Tutsis and Hutu oppositionists were becoming ever more frequent, and Odette had only to tune her radio to RTLM to feel that her days there would be numbered. But the Peace Corps wanted to resume operations in Rwanda, and Odette was offered twenty-five dollars an hour—in a country where the average income was less than twenty-five dollars a month—to help prepare the program. She was tired of moving her kids around and being apart from Jean-Baptiste. What’s more, following the Arusha Accords, a contingent of six hundred RPF soldiers had arrived in Kigali. And there was UNAMIR.