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

I once asked Kagame whether he had ever considered at that point that he could become the Vice President of Rwanda and the commander of its national army. “Not by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “It was not even my ambition. My mind was just obsessed by struggling and fighting to regain my rights as a Rwandan. Whatever that would propel me into was a different matter.”

IN EARLIER GENERATIONS, when Africans spoke of “liberation” they meant freedom from the European empires. For the men and women who formed the RPF, and for at least a half dozen other rebel movements on the continent in the 1980s and 1990s, “liberation” meant climbing out from under the client dictatorships of Cold War neocolonialism. Coming of age in an ostensibly free and independent Africa, they saw their predatory leaders as immature, as sources of shame rather than of pride, unworthy and incapable of serving the destiny of their peoples. The corruption that plagued so much of Africa was not just a matter of graft; the soul was at stake. And to this rising generation, the horror was that the postcolonial agony was being inflicted on Africans by Africans, even when the West or the Soviet Union had a heavy hand in it. Museveni, whose example in rebellion and later in building up Uganda from bloody ruin had stimulated the RPF, once told me that Africa’s failure to achieve respectable independence could no longer be blamed on foreigners: “It was more because of the indigenous forces that were weak and not organized.”

Because Museveni was under intense domestic pressure in the late 1980s to rid his army and government of Rwandans and to strip Rwandan ranchers of much of their land, he has often been accused of organizing the RPF himself. But the mass desertion of Rwandan officers and troops from his army at the time of the invasion in October of 1990 was a surprise and an embarrassment to the Ugandan leader. “I think at one point Museveni even called us treacherous,” Kagame told me. “He thought, ‘These are friends who have betrayed me, and never let me get involved.’ But we didn’t need anybody to influence us, and in fact the Ugandans were very suspicious of us. They didn’t even appreciate our contribution, the sacrifices we had made. We were just Rwandans— and really this served us very well. It gave us a push, and it helped some weak people in Uganda feel that they had solved a problem when we left.”

More astonishing even than the secrecy of the Rwandans within Uganda’s army was the RPF’s intensive international campaign to mobilize support in the Rwandan diaspora. “It was funny,” an Ugandan in Kampala told me. “In the late eighties, a lot of these Rwandans were becoming very involved with their heritage, organizing family gatherings. They would get everybody together and make a tree, listing every other Rwandan they knew: names, ages, professions, addresses, and so on. Later, I realized they were making a database of the entire community, and well beyond Uganda—through all of Africa, Europe, North America. They were always having fund-raisers here for engagements, weddings, christenings. It’s normal, but there was pressure to give a lot, and you couldn’t understand the money involved. At one wedding of two big shots, it was fifty thousand dollars. So you’d ask about the great parties they must be having with so much money, but no—everything was bare bones. Well, we didn’t get it at the time.”

From the start, the RPF leadership was made up of Hutus as well as Tutsis, including defectors from Habyarimana’s inner circles, but its military core was always overwhelmingly Tutsi. “Of course,” Tito Ruteremara said. “Tutsis were the refugees. But the struggle was against the politics in Rwanda, not against the Hutus. We made that understood. We told people the truth—about the dictator, about our politics of liberation and unity with debate—so we grew strong. Inside Rwanda, they were recruiting by force and coercion. For us it was everyone volunteering. Even the old women went to work on plantations to get some money. Even if you were a sick man who could only afford to say a small prayer —that was good.”

The Ugandan who had watched in puzzlement as Rwandans drew family trees and raised funds had a friend whose husband was Rwandan. “The morning of October 1, 1990, this woman’s husband said to her, ’This is going to be a very important day in history.’ He wouldn’t say more, just ‘Mark my words.’ She and her husband were very close, but it wasn’t until she heard on the news that night that Fred Rwigyema had gone over to Rwanda taking his people that she knew what he was talking about.”

Museveni responded to the RPF’s invasion of Rwanda by ordering the Ugandan army to seal the border and block the mass desertion of Rwandans, who were stealing every bit of equipment they could grab. He also contacted Habyarimana to urge negotiations. “We tried to bring peace,” Museveni told me. “But Habyarimana was not willing. He was busy mobilizing Belgium, mobilizing France. Then he started accusing me of starting it all. So then we left the thing to run its course.” Tito Ruteremara laughed when he recalled those first days of the war. “Habyarimana was a very stupid man,” he said. “When he blamed Museveni, he saved us. Now, instead of stopping us from crossing into Rwanda, Museveni closed the border from the other side—so we couldn’t turn back. So Habyarimana actually forced us to keep fighting him, even when we might have felt like we were losing.”

KAGAME FOLLOWED THE initial reports of the RPF invasion from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was enrolled as an Ugandan in an officer training course. On the second day of the war, Fred Rwigyema was killed. A story went around that he was assassinated by two of his officers, who were, in turn, courtmartialed and executed. Later, the RPF took to saying that Rwigyema was killed by enemy fire, and that the two officers were killed in an enemy ambush. However that may be, within ten days of Rwigyema’s death Kagame quit his course in Kansas and flew back to Africa, where he deserted his Ugandan commission and replaced his murdered friend as the RPF field commander. He was a few days shy of his thirty-third birthday.

I once asked if he liked fighting. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I was very annoyed. I was very angry. I will still fight if I have reason to. I will always fight. I have no problem with that.” He was certainly good at it. Military men regard the army he forged from the ragtag remnants of Rwigyema’s original band, and the campaign he ran in 1994, as a work of plain genius. That he had pulled it off with an arsenal composed merely of mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and, primarily, what one American arms specialist described to me as “piece of shit” secondhand Kalashnikovs, has only added to the legend.

“The problem isn’t the equipment,” Kagame told me. “The problem is always the man behind it. Does he understand why he is fighting?” In his view, determined and well-disciplined fighters, motivated by coherent ideas of political improvement, can always best the soldiers of a corrupt regime that stands for nothing but its own power. The RPF treated the army as a sort of field university. Throughout the war, officers and their troops were kept sharp not only by military drill but also by a steady program of political seminars; individuals were encouraged to think and speak for themselves, to discuss and debate the party line even as they were also taught to serve it. “We have tried to encourage collective responsibility,” Kagame explained. “In all my capacities, in the RPF, in the government, in the army, my primary responsibility is to help develop people who can take responsibility indiscriminately.”

In tandem with political discipline, the RPF earned a reputation for strict physical discipline during its years as a guerrilla force. Across much of Africa, a soldier’s uniform and gun had long been regarded—and are still seen—as little more than a license to engage in banditry. During the four years of fighting in Rwanda, marriage and even courtship were forbidden to RPF cadres; thievery was punished with the lash, and officers and soldiers guilty of crimes like murder and rape were liable to be executed. “I don’t see the good in preserving you after you have so offended others,” General Kagame told me. “And people respected it. It brought sanity and discipline. You don’t allow armed people freedom to do what they want. If you are equipped to use force, you must use it rationally. If you are given a chance to use it irrationally you can be a very big danger to society. There’s no question about it. Your objective is to protect society.”