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

“But the jokes are funny,” I said.

“No,” he told me, “it’s not funny. It’s going to take us a long time to overcome the old mentalities.”

SOMETIMES IT SEEMED that instead of fine arts, Rwandans had politics: the arts of statecraft, writ large and small, at the highest echelons of government and in the most basic negotiations of daily life. What, after all, was the struggle between proponents of a “new order” and adherents of the “old mentalities” if not a clash between two fundamentally opposed representations of Rwandan reality? After a century in which Rwandans had labored under the mystification and deceit of the Hamitic fable, whose ultimate perversity took the world-upside-down form of genocide, the RPF and its anti-Hutu Power allies described their struggle against annihilation as a revolt of realists. “Honesty” was among their favorite words, and their basic proposition was that greater truth should be the basis of greater power. Under the circumstances, the last best hope for Hutu Power was to assert—in its usual simultaneous onslaught of word and action—that honesty and truth themselves were merely forms of artifice, never the source of power but always its products, and that the only measure of right versus wrong was the bastardized “majority rule” principle of physical might.

With the lines so drawn, the war about the genocide was truly a postmodern war: a battle between those who believed that because the realities we inhabit are constructs of our imaginations, they are all equally true or false, valid or invalid, just or unjust, and those who believed that constructs of reality can—in fact, must—be judged as right or wrong, good or bad. While academic debates about the possibility of objective truth and falsehood are often rarified to the point of absurdity, Rwanda demonstrated that the question is a matter of life and death.

In the summer of 1995, a man sought me out in Kigali, saying he had heard that I was interested in the problems of his country. He had long been privy to the workings of Rwandan politics—first as an associate of Hutu Power, then as an oppositionist—and he was now attached to the new government. He told me that he wanted to be completely honest with me about the affairs of his country, but anonymously. “If you betray my name,” he said, “I will deny everything.”

My visitor was a Hutu, who traveled with a Kalashnikov-toting soldier in tow. “Listen,” he said, “Rwanda had a dictatorship, Rwanda had a genocide, and now Rwanda has a very serious threat on the borders. You don’t have to be RPF to understand what that means. You don’t have to fall into the old thinking—that if you’re not with these guys you’re with those guys.” He went on to explain at length his view that Rwandans can never be trusted. “Foreigners cannot know this place,” he said. “We cheat. We repeat the same little things to you over and over and tell you nothing. Even among ourselves we lie. We have a habit of secrecy and suspicion. You can stay a whole year and you will not know what Rwandans think or what they are doing.”

I told him that this didn’t fully surprise me, because I had the impression that Rwandans often spoke two languages—not just Kinyarwanda and French or English, but one language among themselves and an entirely different language with outsiders. By way of an example, I said that I had talked with a Rwandan lawyer who had described the difficulty of integrating his European training into his Rwandan practice. He loved the Cartesian, Napoleonic legal system, on which Rwanda’s is modeled, but, he said, it didn’t always correspond to Rwandan reality, which was for him an equally complete system of thought. By the same token, when this lawyer spoke with me about Rwanda, he used a language quite different from the language he would speak with fellow Rwandans.

“You talk about this,” my visitor said, “and at the same time you say, ‘A lawyer told me such and such.’ A Rwandan would never tell you what someone else said, and normally, when you told a Rwandan what you heard from somebody, he would immediately change the rhythm of his speech and close himself off to you. He would think that what he said to you might be passed on later. He would be on his guard.” He looked up and studied me for a moment. “You Westerners are so honest,” he said. He seemed depressed by the notion. “You say what you think, and you say what you’ve seen. You say, ‘A lawyer told me.’ Do you think there are many lawyers here?”

I said I’d met several and that the one whom I’d referred to had told me I was free to quote him by name. “Fine,” my visitor said. “But I’m telling you, Rwandans are petty.” I wasn’t entirely sure of the French word that he used for “petty,” which was mesquin . When I asked him to explain it, he described someone who sounded remarkably like Iago—a confidence man, a cheater and betrayer and liar, who tries to tell everyone what he imagines they want to hear in order to maintain his own game and get what he’s after. Colonel Dr. Joseph Karemera, a founding officer of the RPF and Rwanda’s Minister of Health, told me that there is a Kinyarwanda word for such behavior. Having described the legacy of thirty-four years of Hutu ethnic dictatorship as “a very bad mentality,” Karemera said, “We call it ikinamucho —that if you want to do something you are deceitful and not straight. For example, you can come to kill me”—he clutched his throat—“and your mission is successful, but then you cry. That is ikinamucho .”

My visitor liked the word mesquin. He used it repeatedly. I remarked that he didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of his people. “I’m trying to tell you about them without lying,” he said.

Shortly after our meeting, I learned that he had left Rwanda to join the leaders of Hutu Power in exile. I also learned that ikinamucho means “theater.”

DURING HER LAST year in medical school, in the early 1980s, Odette Nyiramilimo’s professor of pediatrics was a doctor named Théodore Sindikubwabo. “I was hugely pregnant when I took my exam with him, and he saw that I was suffering,” Odette recalled. “He took me to his office to drink a Fanta, then he drove me home. These were very human qualities, the genuine responses of a father. But he was a false man. During the First Republic, under President Kayibanda, he was the Minister of Health. When he saw Habyarimana taking power and imprisoning all the ministers, he went straight to Kigali Central Hospital, grabbed a stethoscope, and began practicing pediatrics. Then he became a deputy in the parliament. He loved to be important. He came from the south, he had a big house in Butare, which was anti-Power, and he was a Power man with the MRND—so very useful. He had this mentality like a chameleon. But I never thought he could be a killer.”

Three days after Habyarimana’s assassination, Sindikubwabo was installed as Rwanda’s interim President by Colonel Bagasora’s crisis committee. At that time, Butare was the only province with a Tutsi governor, and while other civic and political leaders led their constituencies to massacre, this governor, Jean-Baptiste Habyalimana, urged restraint. For the first twelve days of the killing, Butare was a haven of virtual calm, and Tutsis fleeing massacres elsewhere flocked to the region. Then, on April 19, 1994, Théodore Sindikubwabo visited Butare. He fired the governor (who was subsequently killed) and held a rally, where he delivered a call to arms that was broadcast throughout the country. The day after Sindikubwabo spoke, soldiers of the Presidential Guard were flown into Butare, buses and trucks carrying militia and arms arrived, and the slaughter began. The killings in Butare included some of the most extensive massacres of the genocide: in just two or three weeks, at least twenty thousand Tutsis were killed in Cyahinda parish and at least thirty-five thousand in Karama parish.