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

One of the first acts of the new government was to abolish the system of ethnic identity cards, which had served as death tickets for Tutsis during the genocide. But even without identity cards, everybody seemed to know who his neighbors were. In the aftermath of the genocide, the ethnic categories had become more meaningful and more charged than ever before. Rwanda had no police and no working courts; the great majority of its legal professionals had been killed or had themselves become killers, and while suspected génocidaires were arrested by the thousands, many Rwandans preferred to settle their scores privately, without waiting for the state to be established.

So there were killings; nobody knows how many, but you heard stories of new killings every few days. As a rule, the victims were Hutus, and the killers were unidentified. The RPA claimed to have jailed hundreds of indisciplined soldiers, but military secrecy tended to shroud these affairs. And it was a delicate matter when two soldiers were sentenced to death by an RPA tribunal for reprisal killings, and nobody had yet been brought to trial for crimes during the genocide. Still, from their places of exile, Hutu Power leaders greeted the news of reprisal killings in Rwanda with expressions of outrage that often sounded more like gleeful enthusiasm—as if with each Hutu murdered their own crimes were diminished. Hassan Ngeze had decamped to Nairobi and was again publishing Kangura, and he and countless other “refugee” pamphleteers cranked up a relentless campaign, aimed largely at Western diplomats, journalists, and humanitarians, proclaiming more loudly than ever that the RPF was Rwanda’s true genocidal aggressor.

“This gang made a genocide, then they say Hutu-Tutsi, Hutu-Tutsi, and everything is a genocide to them,” Kagame scoffed, adding, “Johannesburg alone has more crime than the whole country of Rwanda. Nairobi has more. I’m saying we have problems. I’m saying things are ugly. But I’m saying, let’s distinguish. If we take everything to be the same, then we are making a mistake.”

The paradox was not lost on Rwanda’s new leaders that the genocide had brought them greater power and at the same time poisoned their prospects for using it as they had promised. “We were compelled to take on a totally new, different situation—something we had not anticipated,” Kagame said. “The twist was so abrupt, and the magnitude of the problems that arose was so immense, that bringing people together and making the country whole became more difficult. You will find that in the army, about a third of the people, maybe slightly more, have lost their families. At the same time the people who are responsible are not being brought to justice effectively. I imagine this undermines one’s initial dedication and discipline. This is natural, absolutely natural, and it has its own consequences.”

A UNICEF study later posited that five out of six children who had been in Rwanda during the slaughter had, at the very least, witnessed bloodshed, and you may assume that adults had not been better sheltered. Imagine what the totality of such devastation means for a society, and it becomes clear that Hutu Power’s crime was much greater than the murder of nearly a million people. Nobody in Rwanda escaped direct physical or psychic damage. The terror was designed to be total and enduring, a legacy to leave Rwandans spinning and disoriented in the slipstream of their memories for a very long time to come, and in that it was successful.

I FELT TEMPTED, at times, to think of Rwanda after the genocide as an impossible country. Kagame never seemed to afford himself the luxury of such a useless notion. “People are not inherently bad,” he told me. “But they can be made bad. And they can be taught to be good.”

He always sounded so soothingly sane, even when he was describing, with characteristic bluntness, the endless discouragements and continued anguish that surely lay ahead. He spoke of all the woes of his tiny trashed country as a set of problems to be solved, and he seemed to relish the challenge. He was a man of rare scope—a man of action with an acute human and political intelligence. It appeared impossible to discover an angle to the history he was born into and was making that he hadn’t already reckoned. And where others saw defeat, he saw opportunity. He was, after all, a revolutionary; for more than fifteen years, his life had consisted of overthrowing dictators and establishing new states in the harshest of circumstances.

Because he was not an ideologue, Kagame was often called a pragmatist. But that suggests an indifference to principle and, with a soldier’s stark habits of mind, he sought to make a principle of being rational. Reason can be ruthless, and Kagame, who had emerged in ruthless times, was convinced that with reason he could bend all that was twisted in Rwanda straighter, that the country and its people truly could be changed—made saner, and so better—and he meant to prove it. The process might be ugly: against those who preferred violence to reason, Kagame was ready to fight, and, unlike most politicians, when he spoke or took action, he aimed to be understood, not to be loved. So he made himself clear, and he could be remarkably persuasive.

We always met in his office at the Ministry of Defense, a big room with translucent curtains drawn over the windows. He would fold his antenna-thin frame onto a big black leather chair, I would sit to his right on a couch, and he would answer my questions for two or three hours at a stretch with a quietly ferocious concentration. And what he said mattered, because Kagame was truly somebody of consequence. He made things happen.

Several times, when I was sitting with him, I found myself thinking of another famously tall and skinny civil warrior, Abraham Lincoln, who once said, “It is to deny what the history of the world tells us is true to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion as others have so done before them… whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or of enslaving freemen.” Kagame had proven himself quite effective at getting what he wanted, and if Kagame truly wanted to find an original response to his original circumstances, the only course open to him was emancipation. That was certainly how he presented it, and I didn’t doubt that that was what he wanted. But the time always came when I had to leave his office. Kagame would stand, we’d shake hands, a soldier with a side arm would open the door, and then I would step back out into Rwanda.

BONAVENTURE NYIBIZI AND his family were evacuated to the RPF zone from the Sainte Famille church in mid-June of 1994. Looking out from the convoy, he saw Kigali as a necropolis: “Just blood and”—he made a shivering sound, like a tire deflating—“pfffhhh-h-hh.”

In the RPF collection camps for survivors, Bonaventure sought news of his family and friends. It didn’t take him long to conclude that “it was unrealistic to hope that somebody had survived.” A sister of his was found alive, but three of her five children had been killed, as were his mother and everyone who lived with her. Most of his wife’s family and friends had also been wiped out. “Sometimes,” he said, “you met someone who you thought had been killed, and you learned that somehow they had managed to stay alive.” But the euphoria of such reunions, which punctuated the survivors’ gloom for months after the genocide, was tempered by the constant tallying of losses. “Mostly,” Bonaventure said, “you didn’t even want to hope.”

Around July 20, Bonaventure returned home, and sank into despair. “Kigali was difficult to believe,” he told me. “The place smelled of death. There were very few people whom you knew from before, and no water or electricity, but the problem for most people was that their houses were destroyed. Most of my house was destroyed. People were finding their furniture and belongings in the homes of neighbors who’d run away, or taking the neighbors’ things. But to me that was not important at all. I was not really interested in doing anything.”