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

I heard such comments, too, and constantly. Frohardt wasn’t alone among foreign visitors in recognizing that “everything you do in Rwanda has to be done in the context of the genocide,” but he represented a small minority. For most, it was as if the memory of the genocide was a nuisance or, worse, a political gimmick created by the new government as an alibi to explain away its imperfections. After a while, I took to asking, “If, God forbid, a close family member or friend of yours were murdered—or just died—how long would you take to get over the immediate sense of loss, so that a few days or even a week could go by in which you didn’t feel its grip? And how about if your entire social universe had been wiped out?” Usually I’d get an answer like “OK, sure, but that doesn’t make the genocide an excuse for today’s problems.”

Sometimes, in Rwanda, I would sit in a hotel dining room watching the news on American satellite television. Among the stories that commanded special fascination between 1995 and 1997 were the O. J. Simpson trial and the coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing. O.J., a football player turned advertising personality, was accused of killing his ex-wife and her friend, and millions of people around the world were galvanized by the quest for truth and justice—and the betrayal of that quest—for a couple of years. In Oklahoma City, a hundred and sixty-eight people were blown to their deaths in a federal building by a couple of crackpots who thought the United States government had embedded computerized tracking chips in their bodies, and the families of the victims became TV household familiars. And why not? Their world had been shattered in a single instant of insanity. The Rwandans in the hotel dining room seemed to understand that sympathetically, though sometimes one or another of them would observe, quietly, that these crimes on American television were comfortingly isolated, and that the “survivors,” as victims’ families are known in the West, had not themselves been endangered.

Everyone in the hotel dining room would watch, and discuss the details of the trauma, or the legal proceedings, and wonder how it would all turn out. It was an activity that brought us together. And yet here was a society whose soul had been shredded, where an attempt had been made to extirpate an entire category of humanity, where hardly a person could be found who was not related to someone who had either killed or been killed, and where the threat of another round remained intensely real; and here were young foreigners, who had been sent in the name of humanitarianism, saying that Rwandans should quit making excuses.

A YEAR AFTER Kibeho, in May of 1996, I was talking with General Kagame, who had become Rwanda’s Vice President and Minister of Defense after the war, about how the UN camps that ringed Rwanda’s borders seemed to create more problems than they solved. “I’ll give you an example,” Kagame said. “Perhaps it’s a bad example in that it was tragic. But let’s talk about Kibeho, the famous Kibeho. There were hundreds of thousands of people in these camps. Well, unfortunately, in the process of closing the camps, people were killed—very unfortunately—about eight thousand people, to take the highest number. Still we managed to resettle those hundreds of thousands of people. I’m not saying it should have been the cost. But we insisted. We said, ‘If you don’t want to close them, then we shall close them.’ And that’s what happened, that tragic situation. But the camps were no more, you see, and you could have had more trouble for the whole country by keeping the camps there.”

I was surprised to hear Kagame bringing up Kibeho of his own accord; he might have preferred to forget it. And I was surprised that he used the figure of eight thousand dead. I asked him if he thought that was the accurate number.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “It was much less than that.”

“But that operation went wrong,” I said. “And then nobody was able to stop it, or nobody did stop it.”

“They did stop it,” he said. “It was stopped, certainly. Maybe you would have lost twenty or even thirty thousand if it wasn’t stopped.”

“But there were excesses.”

“Sure, on the part of individuals.”

“On the part of your soldiers.”

“Yes,” Kagame said. “Yes, yes, and it just proves how it was stopped.”

I ONCE MET a woman from the southwestern Ugandan town of Mbarara, who had been in secondary school with Paul Kagame in the early 1970s. I asked her what he was like back then. “Skinny,” she said, and then she laughed, because calling Kagame skinny was like calling water wet. You couldn’t see him without wondering if you’d ever seen a skinnier person. He stood an inch or so over six feet, and his trouser legs hung as if empty—the creases flat as blades. His Giacometti-like stick figure looked as if it had been dreamed up by Hutu Power cartoonists at Kangura, with the fine skeletal fingers that you’d expect of a chief of the cockroaches.

One of the popular cultural myths about Tutsis is that they like to drink milk but don’t much like eating, and although I’ve watched any number of Tutsis eat heartily, the myth has some basis, at least as a comment on manners. “Tutsi wives are lousy cooks because their husbands aren’t interested. We just pick a little here and there,” a Tutsi told me. He had made something of an informal study of Tutsi arcana. “You’ve noticed, we’ll invite you to drink, and of course later there’s some food, but we’ll never say, ‘Philip, I’m so hungry, let’s feast.’” I had noticed. The custom was explained to me as a residual trait of aristocratic refinement, like moving slowly or speaking softly, which are also alleged to be Tutsi manners. The idea was that vulgar people, peasants, are driven by appetite and tend to run around and shout unnecessarily in the confusion of their coarse lives, while people of standing show reserve. Hutus often describe Tutsis as “arrogant,” and Tutsis tend to find no cause for apology.

But the Ugandan woman had seen the teenage Kagame differently. When she said he was skinny, she added, “He was a refugee,” suggesting that his build told of misfortune, not aristocracy. She also said that he was a top student, and liked music—“I used to see him hang about the record shop until closing time”—but that was about the limit of her recall. “I didn’t pay much attention to him,” she said. “He was Rwandan.”

This was what mattered in Uganda: he was a foreigner. Uganda’s population, like that of most African countries, is distributed among so many tribal and regional subpopulations that there is no majority group, just larger and smaller minorities. When Kagame was growing up in Uganda, people of Rwandan descent constituted one of the larger groups. Most are believed to have been Hutu by ancestry, but in the Ugandan context the labels Hutu and Tutsi stood for little more than different historical experiences: nearly all Tutsis were political refugees, while Hutus were primarily descendants of precolonial settlers or economic migrants. Despite the widespread assumption that Hutus and Tutsis carry a primordial germ of homicidal animosity for one another, the exiled Rwandans got along peacefully in Uganda, in Kenya, in Tanzania, and—until Hutu Power politics spilled over in the early 1990s—in Zaire. Only in Burundi did refugees find the politics of Hutu and Tutsi inescapable.

“In exile, we saw each other as Rwandans,” Tito Ruteremara, one of the RPF’s founders and political commissars, explained. “Living outside Rwanda, you don’t see each other as Hutu or Tutsi, because you see everyone else as strangers and you are brought together as Rwandans, and because for the Ugandans, a Rwandan is a Rwandan.”