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

For the next week, the roadways out of Kibeho were clogged with tens of thousands of bedraggled IDPs marching home. Here and there along the way, groups of civilians gathered to taunt and sometimes to beat the returning IDPs. It was a tense time in Rwanda. “Last year, when nobody in the world tried to stop the genocide, and I saw the first RPF coming to liberate Rwanda, these guys were heroes, I went straight to shake his hand,” Fery Aalam, a Swiss delegate of the Red Cross, told me. “After Kibeho, I don’t know if I’d put out my hand first.”

The Kibeho returnees experienced a slightly higher overall rate of arrests and violence than those from other camps. But many of the Hutu Power loyalists from Kibeho were reported to have fled through the bush, making their way across Rwanda’s borders to the humanitarian archipelago of UN camps. There was no other safe haven left for the génocidaires.

IT WAS ON my fifth day in Rwanda, as I was getting a ride south from Kigali, that I came upon the car wreck in which the young man was killed. There were several injured survivors, and the people I was riding with took them to the hospital in Butare. Some Norwegian Red Cross nurses came out to chat. The nurses were tending to a special emergency wing that had been set up for Kibeho casualties. They had been performing thirty major operations a day, and had discharged a large group of patients that morning. Only the worst cases remained.

“Want to see?” one of the nurses asked, and led the way. Twenty or thirty cots were crowded beneath weak neon light, in a stench of rotting flesh and medicine. “The ones who’re left,” the nurse said, “are all machete cases.” I saw that—multiple amputations, split faces swollen around stitches. “We had some with the brain coming out,” the Norwegian said quite cheerily. “Strange, no? The RPA don’t use machetes. They did this to their own.

I felt woozy and moved out to the hall, where I lay down flat on the cool concrete floor beside an open window. The Norwegian followed me. “Strange country,” she said. I agreed. She said, “This hospital—last year, big massacre. Hutus killing Tutsis, doctors killing doctors, doctors killing patients, patients killing doctors, nurses, everybody. I’m with the Red Cross—so very Swiss, very neutral. I’m new, just arrived for this Kibeho business. But you think about it. With Kibeho, people say it’s starting again. It’s the next genocide. I look around. I talk to people. I see what happened. I think maybe it’s just ending very ugly and slow.”

“How can you tell the difference?” I asked.

“Talk to people. They’re scared. They say, What about the Zaire camps, Burundi, Tanzania? What about revenge? What about justice? OK. When people are scared like that they’re also hopeful. They’re saying they have something to lose—some hope.”

I said, “I can see that you’d be a good nurse.”

“No, really,” she said. “People always say bad things about a government—like with doctors. OK. So, like with doctors, maybe this is because you only need them most when they can’t help you enough.”

She made me laugh. I said, “You mean, like doctors, they kill some, they can’t help some, and they save some.”

“Is that so bad?” she said. “Ask people. In a place like this, pretend to yourself like you’re a journalist. Talk to everybody.”

I told her I was a journalist. “Oh,” she said. “Oh la la. I can’t talk to you. Red Cross rules. Forget everything I said.”

But how could I forget that Norwegian nurse? She was the most optimistic person I ever met in Rwanda.

ONE NIGHT, A few weeks later, I was at a Kigali bistro, sharing a pot of fondue bourguignonne and a pitcher of wine with Annick van Lookeren Campagne and Alexandre Castanias. Annick, who is Dutch, and Alexandre, a Greek, worked as monitors for the UN Human Rights mission in Rwanda. They had both been at Kibeho throughout the catastrophe, and this dinner was the last time they would have together before Annick returned to Holland. That may be why Alexandre spoke about Kibeho. He said it was the first time he did so, and when we finished eating we stayed in the restaurant for hours. We ordered a second pitcher of wine, and sent out for cigarettes, and Alexandre kept standing us rounds of cognac.

The talk about Kibeho had started when Alexandre asked me if I had been to the church at Nyarubuye, to see the memorial there of the unburied dead from the genocide. I hadn’t yet, and although when I did go I didn’t regret it, I gave Alexandre what I thought—and still think—was a good argument against such places. I said that I was resistant to the very idea of leaving bodies like that, forever in their state of violation—on display as monuments to the crime against them, and to the armies that had stopped the killing, as much as to the lives they had lost. Such places contradicted the spirit of the popular Rwandan T-shirt: “Genocide. Bury the dead, not the truth.” I thought that was a good slogan, and I doubted the necessity of seeing the victims in order fully to confront the crime. The aesthetic assault of the macabre creates excitement and emotion, but does the spectacle really serve our understanding of the wrong? Judging from my own response to cruel images and to what I had seen in the hospital ward of Kibeho wounded, I wondered whether people aren’t wired to resist assimilating too much horror. Even as we look at atrocity, we find ways to regard it as unreal. And the more we look, the more we become inured to—not informed by—what we are seeing.

I said these things, and Alexandre said, “I totally disagree. I experienced Kibeho as a movie. It was unreal. Only afterward, looking at my photographs—then it became real.”

When the first wave of shooting began, Alexandre had been at Zambatt, and he said: “I remember there were thousands of people crushing into the parking area. Thousands and thousands of people. I was up on the roof, watching. And I saw this one woman, a fat woman. In thousands and thousands and thousands of people, this one fat woman was the only thing I saw. I didn’t see anyone else. They were just thousands. And this fat woman, pressing along with the crowd—while I watched she was like a person drowning.” Alexandre brought his hands together, making them collapse inward and sink, and he appeared to shrink within his own frame. “One second she was standing, one second she was falling in the people, and I watched this happening. She disappeared. That was when I wanted only to take photographs. That fat woman, one fat woman, when you say the word Kibeho, she is all I really remember. That will be my one real image of Kibeho forever, that fat woman drowning in thousands and thousands of people. I remember she wore a yellow chemise.”

I never saw Alexandre’s photographs, but I told him that his description of that moment, and of his own passage from a sense of unreality during the events to the reality of his pictures, was more disturbing, more vivid, and more informative than anything I believed the photographs themselves could tell. In some ways it was quieter; the moment of shock was less concentrated, but it also involved one more and took one along with it.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you anything if I wasn’t looking.”

“You see and you don’t see,” Annick said. “Mostly you just do things. The pictures come later. When they were crushing on the gate at Zambatt, we were crushing back on it so it didn’t fall, and people started throwing babies over. You just catch them. You do things you’d never want to see a picture of.”

“Like walking over the bodies,” Alexandre said. “I feel very bad about that. It was very unreal and very insane, this decision to walk on dead people. I don’t know. I don’t know what was right or wrong, or if I feel guilty, but I feel bad. It was necessary. It was the only way to get through.”