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

At the end of the war, in July of 1994, even many international aid workers regarded the RPF with awe and spoke with stirring conviction of the righteousness of its cause and conduct. The RPF had hardly gone to war for humanitarian reasons, but it had effectively been the only force on earth to live up to the requirements of the 1948 Genocide Convention. That RPF elements had carried out reprisal killings against alleged génocidaires, and committed atrocities against Hutu civilians, was not in dispute; in 1994, Amnesty International reported that between April and August “hundreds—possibly thousands—of unarmed civilians and captured armed opponents” had been killed by RPF troops. But what most vividly impressed observers in the waning days of the genocide was the overall restraint of this rebel army, even as its soldiers were finding their ancestral villages, and their own families, annihilated.

“The RPF guys had this impressive clarity of purpose about them,” James Orbinski, the Canadian doctor who worked in Kigali during the genocide, told me. “They had ideas of right and wrong that were obviously flexible—I mean they were an army—but basically their ideas and actions were a hell of a lot righter than wronger. Armies always have a style. These guys—their uniforms were always ironed, they were clean-shaven, and their boots were shined. You’d see them walking around behind their lines, two guys holding hands, sober, proud to be there. They fought like hell. But when they came into a place, you didn’t see the usual African looting. I remember when Kigali fell, a guy took a radio from a house, and he was immediately taken out and shot.”

A Hutu businessman told me a different story: “They were very organized, very tight, and they looted like hell. True, it wasn’t just every man for himself. It was mostly quite orderly, with a command structure. But what they needed, or wanted, they took, top to bottom. They came to my shop with trucks, and stripped it. I didn’t like it, but at the time I was happy to keep quiet. I considered it more or less a tax for the liberation—at the time.”

HEROES, SAVIORS, HERALDS of a new order. Kagame’s men—and boys (a lot of them weren’t clean-shaven, just too young for a razor)—were all those things in that moment. But their triumph remained shadowed by the genocide, and their victory was far from complete. The enemy hadn’t been defeated; it had just run away. Everywhere one went, inside Rwanda and in the border camps, to RPF leaders and to Hutu Power leaders, to relief workers and to foreign diplomats, in the hills, in cafés, even inside Rwanda’s packed prisons, one heard that there would be another war, and soon. Such talk had begun immediately after the last war, and I heard it almost every day on each of my visits.

It was strange to be waiting for a war, which is what I felt I was doing along with everyone else during much of the time I spent in Rwanda. The more certain you felt it was coming, the more you dreaded it and the more you wished it would hurry up and get itself over with. It began to feel almost like an appointment. The only way it might be avoided was for a no-nonsense, battle-ready international force to overwhelm and disarm the fugutive Hutu Power army and militias in the UN border camps, and that was never going to happen; instead we were protecting them. So one waited, and wondered what the war would be like, and with time it occurred to me that this anxious expectation was a part of it: if the next war was inevitable, then the last war never ended.

In this climate of emergency and suspense, neither at war nor at peace, the RPF set out to lay the foundations of a new Rwandan state, and to create a new national narrative that could simultaneously confront the genocide and offer a way to move on from it. The Rwanda that the RPF had fought to create—with all Rwandans living peacefully inside the country for the first time since independence—was a radical dream. Now, the existence of a rump Hutu Power state in the UN border camps forced that dream to be deferred, and even before Kibeho, Kagame began saying that if the international community would not sort out the génocidaires in Zaire from the general camp population and send the masses home, he would be prepared to do it himself. “We want people back,” he told me, “because it is their right and it is our responsibility to have them back, whether they support us or not.”

In the meantime, all talk of reconciliation and national unity ran up against the fact that the next war would be a war about the genocide. For, while the RPF and the new government required that the genocide be recognized as, in Kagame’s words, “the defining event in Rwandan history,” Hutu Power still sought to make its crime a success by making it indistinguishable from the continuum of Rwandan history.

KAGAME ONCE TOLD me that after signing the Arusha Accords, in the summer of 1993, he had talked about retiring from the hght—“to go to school, or somewhere, and just have a rest.” But, he said, “after a few weeks it turned into a political problem. Some people came from Kigali and said, ‘You know, everybody’s worried. They think when you mentioned getting out you were planning something.’” Kagame laughed, a high, breathy chuckle. “I said, ‘Look, you are really unfair. When I stay in, I’m a problem. When I say I’m getting out, I’m a problem. If I wanted to be a problem, I would actually be a problem. I don’t have to dance around weeping, you see.’” Of course, the peace never lasted long enough for Kagame to relax. “My business was to fight,” he said. “I fought. The war was over. I said, ‘Let’s share power.’ And it was sincere. Had it not been, I would have taken over everything.”

It annoyed Kagame and his RPF colleagues that Rwanda’s new government was routinely described in the international press as his government, and labeled “Tutsi-dominated” or, more pointedly, “minority-dominated.” A moratorium had been imposed on political party activities, but in the spirit of the Arusha Accords the government included many members of the old anti-Hutu Power opposition parties in top posts. What’s more, sixteen of the twenty-two cabinet ministers, including the Prime Minister and the Ministers of Justice and the Interior, were Hutus, while the army, which was quickly doubled in size, to at least forty thousand men, included several thousand former officers and enlisted men from the ranks of Habyarimana’s old army and gendarmerie. As President Pasteur Bizimungu, who was Hutu, told me, to speak of Tutsi domination echoed “the slogans or the way of portraying things of the extremists,” when, for the first time in the hundred years since colonization, “there are authorities in this country, Hutu and Tutsi, who are putting in place policy so that people may share the same fundamental rights and obligations irrespective of their ethnic background—and the extremists don’t feel happy about that.”

Kagame, for whom the office of Vice President was specially invented, did not deny that the RPF formed the backbone of the regime, and that as its chief military and political strategist he was the country’s most powerful political figure. “He who controls the army controls all,” Rwandans liked to say, and following the total destruction of the national infrastructure during the genocide this seemed truer than ever. But Kagame imposed institutional checks on his own power—who else could impose them?—and when he said that he could remove those checks, he was only stating the obvious. He may even have been overstating the case, since it was never clear, after the genocide, that he had complete control of the army, but he was trying to explain what it meant that he had chosen not to be an absolute leader in a country that had no experience of anything else. And he said, “I never had any illusions that these political tasks were going to be simple.”