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

“Fourteen meters deep,” Edmond said. He told me that his brother-in-law had been a fanatically religious man, and on April 12, 1994, when he was stopped by interahamwe at a roadblock down the street and forced to lead them back to his house, he had persuaded the killers to let him pray. Edmond’s brother-in-law had prayed for half an hour. Then he told the militiamen that he didn’t want his family dismembered, so they invited him to throw his children down the latrine wells alive, and he did. Then Edmond’s sister and his brother-in-law were thrown in on top.

Edmond took his camera out of a plastic bag and took some pictures of the holes in the ground. “People come to Rwanda and talk of reconciliation,” he said. “It’s offensive. Imagine talking to Jews of reconciliation in 1946. Maybe in a long time, but it’s a private matter.” The squatters had come out of the house. They stood together at a short distance, and when they grasped Edmond’s story they began sniffling.

On the way back to town, I asked Edmond if he knew the people living in his sister’s house. “No,” he said. “When I see people who live in a place that isn’t theirs, when there are survivors all around who have lost their homes, I know they’re miserable people. I want nothing to do with them. All I can think about is the people I’ve lost.” He reminded me that one of his brothers had been killed as well as his sister and her family. Then he told me that he knew who his brother’s killer was, and that he sometimes saw the man around Kigali.

“I’d like to talk to him,” Edmond said. “I want him to explain to me what this thing was, how he could do this thing. My surviving sister said, ‘Let’s denounce him.’ I saw what was happening —a wave of arrests all at once—and I said, ‘What good is prison, if he doesn’t feel what I feel? Let him live in fear.’ When the time is right, I want to make him understand that I’m not asking for his arrest, but for him to live forever with what he has done. I’m asking for him to think about it for the rest of his life. It’s a kind of psychological torture.”

Edmond had thought of himself as a Rwandan—he had identified with his people—but after the genocide he lost that mooring. Now, to prove himself his brother’s keeper, he wanted to fix his brother’s killer with the mark of Cain. I couldn’t help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city—and, although we don’t like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children.

ONE OF THE few things that the fleeing Hutu Power vandals left in ready-to-use condition was Rwanda’s central prison system, thirteen red-brick fortifications, built to house a total of twelve thousand inmates. During the genocide, the gates were opened so that convicts could be put to work, killing and collecting corpses, but the jails didn’t stay vacant for long. By April of 1995, a year after the killings, at least thirty-three thousand men, women, and children had been arrested for alleged participation in genocide. At the end of that year, the number had climbed to sixty thousand. Some prisons were expanded, new ones were built, and hundreds of smaller community lockups were crammed to overflowing, but the space could not keep up with the demand. By the end of 1997, at least a hundred twenty-five thousand Hutus accused of crimes during the genocide were incarcerated in Rwanda.

A few soldiers usually stood around the periphery of Rwanda’s prisons, but there were no guards on the inside. Prisoners and soldiers both considered themselves safer this way. But the government’s fear of sending soldiers into the prisons did not extend to foreign visitors, and I was always permitted to bring a camera. This puzzled me. Rwanda’s prisons had not elicited favorable press. They were widely viewed as a human rights catastrophe.

Although the tightly packed inmates were all accused of terrible violence, they were generally calm and orderly; fights among them were said to be rare, and killings unheard of. They greeted visitors amiably, often with smiles and with hands extended for a shake. At the women’s prison in Kigali, I found three hundred forty women lying around on the floor, barely clad in the stuffy heat of a few cramped cells and corridors; babies crawled underfoot, and two inmate nuns in crisp white habits said mass in a corner. At Butare prison, old men stood in a downpour with bits of plastic over their heads while young boys, scrunched together in a small cell, sang a chorus of “Alouette.” In the men’s block of Kigali prison, I was conducted past acrobatic and choral groups, a Scout troop, and three men reading Tintin by the captain of the prisoners and his adjutant, who wielded a short baton to clear a path through the tangled ranks of prisoners. The captain kept calling out, “Here’s a journalist from the United States,” and the huddled men, squatting at our feet, clapped mechanically and made little bowing motions. It occurred to me that this was the famous mob mentality of blind obedience to authority which was often described in attempts to explain the genocide.

Rwanda’s conventional hierarchies had reconstituted themselves behind the prison walls; “intellectuals,” civil servants, professionals, clerics, and merchants had the least uncomfortable cells, while the mass of peasants and laborers made do outdoors, crouching in the bony folds of their neighbors’ limbs in unroofed courtyards, and referred all questions to their leaders. Why did they put up with it? Why didn’t they riot? Why were attempted escapes so rare in Rwanda, when the guard system was so weak? A rampaging mob of five thousand prisoners could have easily overrun the walls of Kigali’s central prison and severely destabilized the capital, sparking a major crisis for the government they despised, even a general uprising if there was support for it. Nobody could entirely explain the passivity in the prisons; the best guess was that, having been assured that they would be slaughtered by the RPF, and finding themselves instead receiving regular visits from friendly international relief workers, reporters, and diplomats, the prisoners were simply astonished to be alive and did not care to push their luck.

Between my visits to the prisons, I stopped by to see General Kagame in his office at the Ministry of Defense. I was wondering why the government exposed itself to bad press about the prisons, and how he interpreted the prisoners’ apparent calm acceptance of their horrible conditions. Kagame answered my question with a question of his own: “If a million people died here, who killed them?”

“A lot of people,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Have you found many that admit they participated?”

I hadn’t. In the early days after the genocide, it had been easy for visitors to find perpetrators, in the jails and the refugee camps and also on the streets of Rwanda, who admitted to taking part in the killings, and even boasted about it. Yet by the time I began visiting Rwanda, the criminals had recognized that confession was a tactical error. In the prisons and the border camps, I couldn’t find anyone who would even agree that there had been a genocide. There had been a civil war and, yes, some massacres, but nobody acknowledged seeing anything. Every one of the scores of prisoners I spoke with claimed to have been arbitrarily and unjustly arrested, and of course, in any given case it was entirely possible. But many prisoners also told me they were confident that their “brothers” in the UN border camps would soon come to liberate them.

I once heard Kagame say that he suspected as many as a million people had particpated directly or indirectly in the genocide. His adviser, Claude Dusaidi, who liked to make extreme pronouncements, put the number at three million, which amounted to proclaiming every other Rwandan Hutu guilty. Such claims—impossible to prove or to disprove—struck many Rwandans and foreign observers as acts of intimidation, carefully calculated to place all Hutus under a cloud of suspicion; and this perception was only hardened when a UN-sponsored effort to honor those Hutus, like Paul Rusesabagina, who had protected Tutsis during the genocide was scuttled by infighting among Rwandan cabinet ministers. But Dusaidi insisted that Rwanda’s outrageously packed prisons did not reflect the outrageousness of the crime that had been visited on the country. “Sometimes one person could kill six people, and sometimes three people could kill one person,” Dusaidi said. “Pick any single film of the genocide, and just watch how they kill people. You’ll find a group killing a person. So there are many more killers still walking the streets than we have in prison. The number in prison is a dot.”