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

In fact, during its first two years, the UN tribunal didn’t appear to be doing much. It was understaffed and systematically mismanaged, and its prosecutorial strategy appeared directionless and opportunistic. Most of its indictments followed the chance arrest on immigration charges of Rwandan fugitives in various African countries, and in some high-profile cases, like that of Colonel Bagasora, who was captured in Cameroon, the UN fought a Rwandan extradition request to advance its own. In this way, the tribunal ultimately wound up with an impressive sampler of Hutu Power masterminds in its custody. But it quickly became clear that the prosecutors had no intention of trying more than a few dozen cases. This only served to aggravate the feeling in Kigali that the UN court was not designed to serve Rwanda’s national interest, since the message to the vast majority of fugitive génocidaires was that they had nothing to fear: the international community would not help Rwanda get them, nor would it pursue them itself. “It’s a joke,” Kagame’s adviser, Claude Dusaidi, said to me. “This tribunal is now acting as a spoiler.”

The largest concentrations of Rwanda’s most-wanted were settled in Zaire and Kenya—states whose notoriously corrupt Presidents, Mobutu Sese Seko and Daniel arap Moi, had been intimates of Habyarimana and had taken to hosting his widow, Madame Agathe, at their palaces. Mobutu had called Habyarimana his “little brother,” and the slain Rwandan’s remains, which had been spirited across the border amid the mass flight to Goma, were entombed in a mausoleum on the grounds of Mobutu’s primary estate. When I asked Honoré Rakotomanana, a Madagascan who headed the UN’s prosecution team in Rwanda, how he expected to indict anybody from Zaire or Kenya, he said, “There are international treaties to which those countries are signatories.” But in nearly two years, before he was sacked in 1997, Rakotomanana never bothered to send a single investigator to Zaire. Meanwhile, in October 1995, Kenya’s President Moi assailed the tribunal as a “haphazard process,” and announced, “I shall not allow any one of them to enter Kenya to serve summonses and look for people here. No way. If any such characters come here, they will be arrested. We must respect ourselves. We must not be harassed.”

Watching the old-boy network of African strongmen protect its own, Kagame spoke of “a feeling of betrayal, even by our African brothers,” and he added, ominously, “We shall remind them that what happened here can happen elsewhere—it can happen in these other countries—and then I am sure they will run to us. It can happen tomorrow. Things have happened, and they can happen again.”

Even when genocidal leaders were eventually turned over to the tribunal, the problem remained that the UN had forbidden the court to recommend a death penalty. The Nazis at Nuremberg and the Japanese war criminals in Tokyo had faced the death penalty after World War II. Were the crimes committed against humanity in Rwanda lesser offenses than those which prompted the Genocide Convention to be written? According to Kagame, when Rwanda protested that the tribunal should carry the death penalty out of respect for Rwanda’s laws, the UN advised Rwanda to abolish its death penalty. Kagame called this advice “cynical.”

“The Rwandan people know this is the same international community that stood by and watched them get killed,” Gerald Gahima said. And his RPF colleague Tito Ruteremara, noting that Rwandans convicted by the tribunal were expected to serve their sentences in Scandinavia, told me, “It doesn’t fit our definition of justice to think of the authors of the Rwandan genocide sitting in a full-service Swedish prison with a television.” As it turned out, even those Hutu Power leaders who wound up in custody at Arusha found the croissants they were regularly served for breakfast a bit rich. After a while, the tribunal prisoners mounted a protest to demand a normal Rwandan breakfast of gruel.

“IN YOUR COUNTRY,” the RPA colonel said, “I think you have many comedians.” We were sitting on his porch, in the cool, drizzling night of the central Rwandan highlands, drinking beer and whiskey and eating boiled potatoes and brochettes of grilled goat. The colonel dragged a chunk of meat off his skewer with his teeth. He chewed on it for a while, then he said, “In my understanding, many of these comedians in America are black. Why do you think that is?”

I suggested that it might have to do with adversity. People who feel up against it sometimes develop a canny take on how the world works—the rawness of it, the absurdities—and sometimes, if they’re funny, they make fun of it.

“Those black guys are funny,” the colonel said.

I said, “The funny ones are.”

He coughed out a one-syllable chuckle and the other guys on the porch, his associates, followed him with some laughter. After a while, the colonel said, “No comedians in Rwanda. Plenty of black people, plenty of adversity—no comedians.”

“You must have jokes,” I said.

He said, “They’re not really funny.”

I asked him to try one on me. “Another time,” he said. There was a woman present, and the colonel poked his chin out in her direction. “Rwandan jokes,” he said, “are not decent.”

I was disappointed. I didn’t expect to have another time with this colonel, and the subject interested me broadly: not just jokes —art of any kind. Next door in the Congo, in Tanzania, in Uganda, there were great artistic traditions: visual arts and music predominated, and a literary culture had developed in postcolonial times. Even Burundi had world-famous drumming ensembles. Rwanda had a few spectacular costume dances, some traditional songs, and an oral literature of poems and tales that followed archaic forms from precolonial times, but no arts to compete with its neighbors. The closest modern Rwanda came to a cultural flowering was in the fascist agitprop of Hutu Power newspapers and radio, and in the ruffian chic of interahamwe pageantry and marching songs. New music was mostly imported, and while some Rwandans had written novels almost nobody read them.

I would have liked to ask the colonel about the poverty of Rwandan art, but I didn’t want to offend him. So the conversation moved on. Then the woman left, and the colonel said, “OK, I’ll tell you a joke.” The setup was simple: a Rwandan kid grew up in the hills, did well in school, went to Paris on a scholarship, and returned with a new set of manners—mod clothes, a grandiose vocabulary, a mincing accent, even a different way of walking, “like a little horse,” the colonel said. One day, the boy’s father, a simple old peasant, said, “Boy, what’s got into you? So you went to France. So what? Look at me. I’ve been screwing your mother for forty-five years, and I don’t walk around town like this.” The colonel’s hands went out, clutching the air in front of him, and he pumped his hips urgently, in the eternal fashion.

I laughed. But the Rwandans on the porch, the colonel’s associates, just nodded gravely. “You see,” the colonel said, “it’s not really a funny joke. It’s about logic. Rwandan jokes are like this, kind of intellectual. For instance, a guy gets what we call a French haircut—shaved on the sides, flat on top—and his friends say, ‘How can you have a French cut? You don’t even speak French.’”

This time the Rwandans laughed, while I nodded. “It’s about logic,” the colonel said again. “It’s a trick. You laugh at the guy with the haircut and you laugh at his friends—back and forth.”

It seemed to me that both jokes did have a logic, as all jokes must, but that what they were about was provincialism and foreign influence. They were about aspirations to the image and offerings of a broader modern world, and the opposing tug of traditional Rwandan insularity and conformity; about being caught between a past that you reject or at least want to escape and a future that you can only imagine in terms of imported styles, whose imposition you also reject and want to escape. They were jokes that seemed well suited to a country undergoing the most catastrophic decolonization process in Africa. I told the colonel as much, in a groping way, and he said, “Maybe this is why we have no comedians.” He sounded quite discouraged.