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

Among the Tutsis at the Mugonero church and hospital complex were seven Adventist pastors who quickly assumed their accustomed role as leaders of the flock. When two policemen turned up at the hospital, and announced that their job was to protect the refugees, the Tutsi pastors took up a collection, and raised almost four hundred dollars for the policemen. For several days, all was calm. Then, toward evening on April 15, the policemen said they had to leave because the hospital was to be attacked the next morning. They drove away in a car with Dr. Gerard, and the seven pastors in the hospital advised their fellow refugees to expect the end. Then the pastors sat down together and wrote letters to the mayor and to their boss, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, Dr. Gerard’s father, asking them in the name of the Lord to intercede on their behalf.

“And the response came,” Samuel said. “It was Dr. Gerard who announced it: ‘Saturday, the sixteenth, at exactly nine o’clock in the morning, you will be attacked.’” But it was Pastor Ntakirutimana’s response that crushed Samuel’s spirit, and he repeated the church president’s words twice over, slowly: “Your problem has already found a solution. You must die.” One of Samuel’s colleagues, Manase Bimenyimana, remembered Ntakirutimana’s response slightly differently. He told me that the pastor’s words were “You must be eliminated. God no longer wants you.”

In his capacity as a hospital orderly, Manase served as the household domestic for one of the doctors, and he had remained at the doctor’s house after installing his wife and children—for safety—among the refugees at the hospital. Around nine o’clock on the morning of Saturday, April 16, he was feeding the doctor’s dogs. He saw Dr. Gerard drive toward the hospital with a carload of armed men. Then he heard shooting and grenades exploding. “When the dogs heard the cries of the people,” he told me, “they too began to howl.”

Manase managed to make his way to the hospital—foolishly, perhaps, but he felt exposed and wanted to be with his family. He found the Tutsi pastors instructing the refugees to prepare for death. “I was very disappointed,” Manase said. “I expected to die, and we started looking for anything to defend ourselves with—stones, broken bricks, sticks. But they were useless. The people were weak. They had nothing to eat. The shooting started, and people were falling down and dying.”

There were many attackers, Samuel recalled, and they came from all sides—“from the church, from behind, from the north and south. We heard shots and cries and they chanted the slogan ‘Eliminate the Tutsis.’ They began shooting at us, and we threw stones at them because we had nothing else, not even a machete. We were hungry, tired, we hadn’t had water for more than a day. There were people who had their arms cut off. There were dead. They killed the people at the chapel and the school and then the hospital. I saw Dr. Gerard, and I saw his father’s car pass the hospital and stop near his office. Around noon, we went into a basement. I was with some family members. Others had been killed already. The attackers began to break down the doors and to kill, shooting and throwing grenades. The two policemen who had been our protectors were now attackers. The local citizenry also helped. Those who had no guns had machetes or masus . In the evening, around eight or nine o’clock, they began firing tear gas. People who were still alive cried. That way the attackers knew where people were, and they could kill them directly.”

ON THE NATIONAL average, Tutsis made up a bit less than fifteen percent of Rwanda’s population, but in the province of Kibuye, Tutsis counted for a much higher proportion of the citizenry. It is estimated that on April 6, 1994, at least one out of three people in Kibuye was Tutsi. A month later most of them had been killed. In many of Kibuye’s villages, no Tutsis survived.

Manase told me that he was surprised when he heard that “only a million people” were killed in Rwanda. “Look at how many died just here, and how many were eaten by birds,” he said. It was true that the dead of the genocide had been a great boon to Rwanda’s birds, but the birds had also been helpful to the living. Just as birds of prey and carrion will form a front in the air before the advancing wall of a forest fire to feast on the parade of animals fleeing the inferno, so in Rwanda during the months of extermination the kettles of buzzards, kites, and crows that boiled over massacre sites marked a national map against the sky, flagging the “no-go” zones for people like Samuel and Manase, who took to the bush to survive.

Sometime before midnight on April 16, the killers at the Mugonero Adventist complex, unable to discover anybody left there to kill, went off to loot the homes of the dead, and Samuel in his basement, and Manase hiding with his murdered wife and children, found themselves unaccountably alive. Manase left immediately. He made his way to the nearby village of Murambi, where he joined up with a small band of survivors from other massacres who had once more taken shelter in an Adventist church. For nearly twenty-four hours, he said, they had peace. Then Dr. Gerard came with a convoy of militia. Again there was shooting, and Manase escaped. This time, he fled high up into the mountains, to a place called Bisesero, where the rock is steep and craggy, full of caves and often swaddled in cloud. Bisesero was the only place in Rwanda where thousands of Tutsi civilians mounted a defense against the Hutus who were trying to kill them. “Looking at how many people there were in Bisesero, we were convinced we could not die,” Manase told me. And at first, he said, “only women and children were killed, because the men were fighting.” But in time tens of thousands of men fell there, too.

Down in the corpse-crowded villages of Kibuye, live Tutsis had become extremely hard to find. But the killers never gave up. The hunt was in Bisesero, and the hunters came by truck and bus. “When they saw how strong the resistance was, they called militias from far away,” Manase said. “And they did not kill simply. When we were weak, they saved bullets and killed us with bamboo spears. They cut Achilles tendons and necks, but not completely, and then they left the victims to spend a long time crying until they died. Cats and dogs were there, just eating people.”

Samuel, too, had found his way to Bisesero. He had lingered in the Mugonero hospital, “full of dead,” until one in the morning. Then he crept out of the basement and, carrying “one who had lost his feet,” he proceeded slowly into the mountains. Samuel’s account of his ordeal following the slaughter at his workplace was as telegraphic as his description of life in Mugonero before the genocide. Unlike Manase, he found little comfort at Bisesero, where the defenders’ only advantage was the terrain. He had concluded that to be a Tutsi in Rwanda meant death. “After a month,” he said, “I went to Zaire.” To get there he had to descend through settled areas to Lake Kivu, and to cross the water at night in a pirogue—an outrageously risky journey, but Samuel didn’t mention it.

Manase remained in Bisesero. During the fighting, he told me, “we got so used to running that when one wasn’t running one didn’t feel right.” Fighting and running gave Manase spirit, a sense of belonging to a purpose greater than his own existence. Then he got shot in the thigh, and life once again became about little more than staying alive. He found a cavern, “a rock where a stream went underground, and came out below,” and made it his home. “By day, I was alone,” he said. “There were only dead people. The bodies fell down in the stream, and I used those bodies as a bridge to cross the water and join the other people in the evenings.” In this way, Manase survived.