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

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE not to be moved by the mass return of the “fifty-niners,” and it was impossible not to be troubled by it as well. In 1996 more than seventy percent of the people in Kigali and Butare, and in some rural areas of eastern Rwanda, were said to be newcomers. People who had never left the country—Tutsi and Hutu—often felt displaced in their own homes. Their complaints always came with the caveat “Don’t quote me by name.” Such requests for anonymity can have many meanings. They suggest an atmosphere of intrigue and fear, and a desire to speak truthfully in circumstances where the truth is dangerous. But they can also bracket secretive moments in a longer conversation, moments in which the speaker seems to doubt what he’s saying, or is getting personal, even petty, or is exaggerating wildly, perhaps lying outright, to make a point he knows he cannot fully defend. The recipient of such confidences must try to discern the calculation behind the request. With Rwandans, whose experience had taught them not to underestimate any fear, this could get very tricky. I was especially wary of anonymous remarks that attributed one or another quality to an entire group of people, including the speaker’s own. So when people who were speaking openly suddenly asked not to be quoted and then said terrible things about the Tutsi “fifty-niners,” as if the whole crowd were one person, I was skeptical. But I heard the same stories and attitudes hundreds of times.

A Tutsi survivor said, “They come here, they see us, and they say, ‘How did you survive? Did you collaborate with the interahamwe ?’ They think we were fools to have stayed in the country —and maybe we were—so they disdain us. They don’t want to be reminded. It shocks us to the bones.”

An anti-Habyarimana Hutu said, “The Tutsis were in trouble in last year’s massacres, and the army is now dominated by Tutsis. So we thought the survivors would be taken care of, that it would be the first task of the new government. But only those returning from outside are getting homes. And meanwhile, if these people from outside have a problem with a Hutu, they accuse him of committing the genocide they weren’t even here for.”

A Tutsi said, “We survivors find it very difficult to integrate into the present society and—I hate to say it—into the government, too. They have their own style from outside, and they don’t have much trust in us either. When they came they took the country as in a conquest. They thought it was theirs to look after. They said of us Tutsis who were here, ‘The smart ones are dead and those who survived are traumatized.’ The young RPF fighters all had their parents coming from outside the country and they were tired of the austerity of fighting, so they took homes and goods for their families and they didn’t like the survivors getting in the way. And they would say, ‘If they killed everyone and you survived, maybe you collaborated.’ To a woman who was raped twenty times a day, day after day, and now has a baby from that, they would say this. To a Tutsi who was intermarried or a child who was orphaned they would say this. Can you imagine? For us, it was too hard at first, finding that everyone was dead, that we didn’t know anyone. It didn’t occur to us to grab better houses, and now it’s we who are taking care of most of the orphans.”

A Hutu said, “They don’t know the country. They trust only each other. They weren’t here, and they can’t understand. Some of the influence is good. We needed change, fresh ideas. But there are many extremists among them. And many Hutus who were in trouble during last year’s killings are in trouble again under this regime. People who were targeted then for being RPF followers are now accused of being génocidaires. Some are in prison. Some run to another country. Some are killed. It’s the army that controls the government, and inside the army there is not enough control. Truly, if I could afford not to live under plastic sheeting in a camp with génocidaires, I would become a refugee.”

A Tutsi said, “Our women used to do collections to send Tampax to the women with the RPF when they were up in the mountains, and now when we are with our old Hutu friends, some of the people we’re closest to in the world, these people look at us like ‘Why are you always with this Hutu?’ And we say to ourselves, ‘We’ve lived together with Hutus all our lives, and we speak almost the same language, and we saw our families killed by Hutus, but you’re more racist than we are.’ It’s an enemy in their subconscious. Their idea of cohabitation is really very theoretical. For Hutus now, it’s like for us before the RPF came. Even if you live quietly, you can’t say many things, you can’t criticize a politician, you must live in fear. Of course, all the Hutus now have someone in the camps or in prison, and you can’t abandon your brother even if he killed people. So it’s a real problem, whom to trust. But the returnees don’t even want to discuss it.”

Even among the returnees there was a good deal of grumbling about other returnees. They had imagined they were one people engaged in a homecoming, only to discover that they were all kinds of people from all kinds of places. Those who had spent the past three decades in Uganda being called Rwandans were, in fact, deeply Ugandan, and people called Rwandans who had lived in Burundi seemed alien to them. They had no better reason to regard each other as kin than a child of Sicilians born in Argentina would have to feel related to a Milanese who had lived his entire adult life as an immigrant in Sweden. Adapting to life in Zaire under the capricious dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko and in Tanzania under the authoritarian socialism of Julius Nyerere had not been comparable experiences. Some of the returnees had lived in Francophone countries, others in Anglophone countries, and although most still spoke at least some Kinyarwanda, many were more at home in Swahili or some other foreign African language which other returnees didn’t speak.

Hutu Power created a world in which there was just us and them, and Rwanda was still generally regarded from within and without as a bipolar world of Hutus and Tutsis. But an elaborate grid of subcategories lay just beneath the surface. There were Hutus with good records, and suspect Hutus, Hutus in exile and displaced Hutus, Hutus who wanted to work with the RPF, and anti-Power Hutus who were also anti-RPF, and of course all the old frictions between Hutus of the north and those of the south remained. As for Tutsis, there were all the exiled backgrounds and languages, and survivors and returnees regarding each other with mutual suspicion; there were RPF Tutsis, non-RPF Tutsis, and anti-RPF Tutsis; there were urbanites and cattle keepers, whose concerns as survivors or returnees had almost nothing in common. And, of course, there were many more subcategories, which cut across the others and might, at any given moment, be more important. There were clans and families, rich and poor, Catholics, Muslims, Protestants of various stripes, and a host of more private animists, as well as all the normal social cliques and affiliations, including male and female, who were marrying each other at a fantastic clip, now that the war was over and it was allowed in the RPF, and now that so many had lost any other form of family.

It made one’s head spin. Even Rwandans didn’t claim to have it all mapped. For the most part, they stuck with the people they knew from before, and didn’t care so much if they made no new friends so long as they didn’t acquire new enemies. In the long view, it seemed to my American mind that there was some hope in the fact that a country which had been destroyed by a mad wish for every citizen to have exactly the same identity as every other—the identity of a mass murderer, no less—contained more diversity than ever. But that was taking a very long view. Intermarriage rates were at an all-time low, scoring another point for the génocidaires in the new, officially ethnicity-free Rwanda; and not a day went by without a new story going around on radio trottoir of an imminent Hutu Power invasion from Zaire.