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

Riza took a similar view. In hindsight, he told me, “you can see all this very clearly—when you are sitting with your papers before you, with your music on, or whatever, and you can say, ‘Ah, look, there’s this.’ When it’s happening in the heat of the moment, it’s something else.” He described Dallaire’s fax as just one piece of an ongoing daily communication with UNAMIR. “We get hyperbole in many reports,” he said, and then he invoked hindsight himself, saying, “If we had gone to the Security Council three months after Somalia, I can assure you no government would have said, ‘Yes, here are our boys for an offensive action in Rwanda.’”

So General Dallaire, following his orders from New York, advised Habyarimana that he had a leak in his security apparatus, and there—but for the genocide—the matter might have ended. Not surprisingly, Dallaire’s informant stopped informing, and years later, when the Belgian Senate established a commission to sort out the circumstances under which some of its soldiers had wound up slaughtered while on duty for UNAMIR, Kofi Annan refused to testify or to allow General Dallaire to testify. The UN Charter, Annan explained in a letter to the Belgian government, granted UN officials “immunity from legal process in respect of their official acts,” and he did not see how waiving that immunity “was in the interest of the Organization.”

TOWARD THE END of March of 1994, Odette had a dream: “We were fleeing, people shooting left and right, airplanes strafing, everything burning.” She described these images to a friend of hers named Jean, and a few days later Jean called her and said, “I’ve been traumatized since you described that dream. I want you to go with my wife to Nairobi because I feel we’re all going to die this week.”

Odette welcomed the idea of leaving Kigali. She promised Jean she’d be ready to go on April 15, the day her contract with the Peace Corps ended. She remembers telling him, “I, too, am tired of this.”

Similar exchanges were taking place throughout Kigali. Just about every Rwandan I spoke with described the last weeks of March as a time of eerie premonition, but nobody could say exactly what had changed. There were the usual killings of Tutsis and Hutu opposition leaders and the usual frustration with Habyarimana’s failure to implement the peace agreement—the “political deadlock,” which the Belgian Foreign Minister, Willy Klaes, warned the UN Secretary-General in mid-March “could result in an irrepressible explosion of violence.” But Rwandans remember something more, something inchoate.

“We were sensing something bad, the whole country,” Paul Rusesabagina, director of the Hotel des Diplomates in Kigali, told me. “Everybody could see there was something wrong somewhere. But we couldn’t see exactly what it was.” Paul was a Hutu, an independent-minded critic of the Habyarimana regime who described himself as “always in the opposition.” In January of 1994, after he was attacked in his car, he had moved into the hotel for a while, and then he had gone to Europe on vacation with his wife and one-year-old son. When he told me that they had returned to Kigali on March 30, he laughed and his face took on a look of astonishment. “I had to come back for work,” he said. “But you could feel it was wrong.”

Bonaventure Nyibizi told me that he often wondered why he hadn’t left Rwanda in those days. “Probably the main reason was my mother,” he said. “She was getting old and I probably felt it would be difficult to move her without knowing where to go. And we were hoping that things would get better. Also, since I was born, since I was four or five years old, I have seen houses destroyed, I have seen people being killed, every few years, ‘sixtyfour, ’sixty-six, ’sixy-seven, ’seventy-three. So probably I told myself it’s not going to be serious. Yah—but obviously I knew it was going to be serious.”

On April 2, about a week after Odette’s dream of destruction, Bonaventure drove down to Gitarama to visit his mother. On his way home he stopped at a roadside bar, co-owned by Froduald Karamira, his prison friend turned Hutu Power leader. Bonaventure had a beer and spoke for a long time with Karamira’s barman about how Karamira had changed and where the country was going. The barman told Bonaventure that Karamira was saying everyone should follow Hutu Power and Habyarimana, and that later they would get rid of Habyarimana. “I asked him how,” Bonaventure recalled. “I said, ‘You’re giving a lot of power to Habyarimana, how are you hoping to get rid of him?’” Bonaventure laughed and said, “He didn’t want to tell me.”

Hassan Ngeze was telling anybody who would buy his newspaper. In the March issue of Kangura, he ran the banner headline “HABYARIMANA WILL DIE IN MARCH.” An accompanying cartoon depicted the President as a Tutsi-loving RPF accomplice, and the article explained that he would “not be killed by a Tutsi” but by a “Hutu bought by the cockroaches.” Kangura proposed a scenario strikingly similar to the schemes described by the informant in Dallaire’s fax—the President assassinated “during a mass celebration” or “during a meeting with his leaders.” The article opened with the words “Nothing happens that we did not predict,” and ended, “Nobody likes Habyarimana’s life better than he does. The important thing is to tell him how he will be killed.”

ON THE EVENING of April 6, 1994, Thomas Kamilindi was in high spirits. His wife, Jacqueline, had baked a cake for a festive dinner at their home in Kigali. It was Thomas’s thirty-third birthday, and that afternoon he had completed his last day of work as a reporter for Radio Rwanda. After ten years at the state-owned station, Thomas, who was a Hutu, had resigned in protest against the lack of political balance in news programming. He was taking a shower when Jacqueline began pounding on the bathroom door. “Hurry up!” she shouted. “The President has been attacked!” Thomas locked the doors of his house and sat by the radio, listening to RTLM. He disliked the Hutu Power station’s violent propaganda, but the way things were going in Rwanda that propaganda often served as a highly accurate political weather forecast. On April 3, RTLM had announced that during the next three days “there will be a little something here in Kigali, and also on April 7 and 8 you will hear the sound of bullets or grenades exploding.” Now the station was saying that President Habyarimana’s plane, returning from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had been shot down over Kigali and had crashed into the grounds of his own palace. The new Hutu President of Burundi and several of Habyarimana’s top advisers had also been on board. There were no survivors.

Thomas, who had well-placed friends, had heard that largescale massacres of Tutsis were being prepared nationwide by the President’s extremist entourage, and that lists of Hutu oppositionists had been drawn up for the first wave of killings. But he had never imagined that Habyarimana himself might be targeted. If Hutu Power had sacrificed him, who was safe?

The radio normally went off the air at 10 p.m., but that night it stayed on. When the bulletins ceased, music began to play, and to Thomas the music, which continued through his sleepless night, confirmed that the worst had been let loose in Rwanda. Early the next morning, RTLM began blaming Habyarimana’s assassination on the Rwandese Patriotic Front and members of UNAMIR. But if Thomas had believed that, he would have been at the microphone, not at the receiver.

Odette and Jean-Baptiste were also listening to RTLM. They’d been drinking whiskey with a visitor, when a friend called to tell them to tune in. It was 8:14 p.m., Odette recalled, and the radio announced that Habyarimana’s plane had been seen falling in flames over Kigali. Jean-Baptiste’s immediate reaction was “We’re leaving. Everyone get in the jeep, or we’ll all be massacred.” His idea was to head south, to Butare, the only province with a Tutsi governor and a stronghold of anti-Power sentiment. When Jean-Baptiste showed such adamance, their visitor said, “OK, me too. I’m getting out of here. Keep your whiskey.” Odette smiled when she told me this. She said, “This man liked his whiskey. He was handicapped, and he’d come over to show off his new television and video player, because my husband is very generous and he had given this guy money to buy it. Being a handicapped man, he used to say, ‘I’m going to die if I don’t have a TV to watch.’ Unfortunately he never got to watch his TV. He was killed that night.”