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

THE LAST RECORDED apparition of the Virgin Mary at the hilltop shrine of Kibeho occurred on May 15, 1994, at a time when the few surviving Tutsis in the parish were still being hunted. In the preceding month, thousands of Tutsis had been killed in Kibeho. The largest massacre there had occurred in the cathedral, and it lasted several days, until the killers got tired of working by hand and set the building ablaze, immolating the living and the dead. During the days before the fire, Father Pierre Ngoga, a local priest, had sought to defend the refugees and paid for it with his life, while another local priest, Father Thadée Rusingizandekwe, was described by survivors as one of the leaders of several interahamwe attacks. Clad, like the militia members, in a drapery of banana leaves, Father Thadée reportedly carried a rifle and shot into the crowd.

With the church leadership so divided, the May 15 apparition offered a theological resolution to the question of genocide. The exact words attributed to the Holy Mother by the visionary Valentine Nyiramukiza have been lost. But the message was broadcast on Radio Rwanda at the time, and a number of Rwandan priests and journalists—including Thomas Kamilindi, who heard it at the Hotel des Mille Collines—told me that the Virgin was reported to have said that President Habyarimana was with her in heaven, and that her words were widely interpreted as an expression of divine support for the genocide.

The Bishop of Gikongoro, Monsignor Augustin Misago, who wrote a book about the Kibeho apparitions, told me that Valentine’s suggestion that “the killing of Tutsis was approved in heaven” struck him as “impossible—a message prepared by the politicians.” But then, the messages sent by church leaders frequently carried a political edge during the killings. In fact, Bishop Misago was often described as a Hutu Power sympathizer; he had been publicly accused of barring Tutsis from places of refuge, criticizing fellow members of the clergy who helped “cockroaches,” and asking a Vatican emissary who visited Rwanda in June 1994 to tell the Pope “to find a place for Tutsi priests because the Rwandan people do not want them anymore.” What’s more, on May 4 of that year, shortly before the last Marian apparition at Kibeho, the bishop appeared there himself with a team of policemen, and told a group of ninety Tutsi schoolchildren, who were being held in preparation for slaughter, not to worry, because the police would protect them. Three days later, the police helped to massacre eighty-two of the children.

Bishop Misago was a large, imposing man. A portrait of him —dressed, as I found him, in a long, purple-buttoned white robe—hung near a much smaller portrait of the Pope on the wall of the room where he received me at the bishopric. Minutes after I arrived, a major thunderstorm broke. The room grew darker, the bishop’s robe appeared to grow brighter, and his voice rose to a shout against the din of rain on the corrugated-metal roofing. He seemed glad to shout. He was not at all happy about my visit—I had come without an appointment, carrying a notebook—and his conversation was accompanied by a lot of wild gesticulations, in between which he leafed constantly through a tiny pocket calendar without looking at it. He also had the unfortunate habit of laughing a loud, nervous, “Ha-ha-ha!” whenever he mentioned an awkward situation like a massacre.

“What could I do?” he said, when I asked him about the eighty-two dead Tutsi schoolchildren at Kibeho. He told me that he had gone to Kibeho with the commander of the Gikongoro police and an intelligence officer “to see how to restore order and unity.” He said he had no choice but to work with such authorities. “I don’t have an army. What could I do by myself? Nothing. That’s elementary logic.” He had found that the Tutsi students at Kibeho were inadequately protected, and he said, “The conclusion was that the number of police should be augmented. Before, there had been five. Now, they sent about twenty.”

The bishop laughed, and went on: “We returned to Gikongoro, confident that the situation would be better. The unfortunate thing was that among those policemen there were some accomplices of the interahamwe. I couldn’t have known that. These decisions were made in the army. So the director of the school came to Gikongoro to explain the situation and to ask that the police team be changed, and when he got home he discovered that the massacre had happened. You see? Ha-ha-ha! First we were badly informed, and then we were powerless to fix the situation. So, you are also an adult and able to judge that one does not imagine that a person will kill children.”

In fact, it seemed to me that in the fourth week of the genocide no adult in Rwanda could have imagined that the police were reliable protectors of Tutsis. The bishop insisted that he had been helpless. “You—you Westerners—left and abandoned us all,” he said. “Even the Papal Nuncio left on April 10. It’s not just the poor Bishop of Gikongoro.”

“But you were still a man of influence,” I said.

“No, no, no,” the bishop said. “That’s an illusion.” He laughed his nervous laugh. “When men become like devils, and you don’t have an army, what can you do? All paths were dangerous. So how could I influence? Even the Church—we are not like extraterrestrials who can foresee things. We could have been victims of a lack of information. When one is poorly informed, one hesitates to take a position. And there was powerful official misinformation. As a journalist, when you are not sure, you don’t publish it—you go verify it. The global accusations against the Church are not scientific. That’s ideological propaganda.”

The bishop wasn’t really denying that he’d committed a major blunder at Kibeho. But he didn’t seem to think it was a crime, and although he said he was “embarrassed” to have been taken in by official propaganda, he gave no sign of remorse. He wanted to be thought of as a victim of the same deception that had resulted in eighty-two children being slaughtered. If I understood him correctly, he was saying that he had been a profoundly ignorant man who was duped by demons. Perhaps. But it was curious that he treated my questions about his traffic with those demons as an attack on the institution of the Roman Catholic Church, and when I did ask him about the Church, his response hardly seemed to qualify as a defense.

“To my knowledge,” he said, “no official of the Church publicly declared anything that was happening to be unacceptable. Monsignor Vincent Nsengiyumva, the old Archbishop of Kigali, is the best example. He made no secret of his friendship with President Habyarimana. Of course, the other bishops and the other clergy disapproved. But, you know, profane society in the West likes very much to make exposes with journalism, film, and TV, while we are in the habit of doing things in secret and quietly without beating the drum or sounding the trumpet. If you spoke out, one could have said that you’d become a heretic.”

It was true that for many Rwandans to go against Hutu Power would have felt like heresy. But Bishop Misago seemed to have second thoughts about his outburst. A few minutes later, he said, “I was tired when you arrived. I was going to lie down. I was a bit tired and a bit agitated, so that may have colored my answers. And then, you ask such questions.”

Clearly, Bishop Misago hadn’t behaved as wickedly as Father Wenceslas. Still, it surprised me that a man with his reputation had stayed in Rwanda after the genocide. A number of priests had been arrested for their conduct in 1994, and an official at the Ministry of Justice in Kigali told me that a strong case could be made for arresting Misago. But, he added, “the Vatican is too strong, and too unapologetic for us to go taking on bishops. Haven’t you heard of infallibility?”