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

This was one of the great mysteries of the war about the genocide: how, time and again, international sympathy placed itself at the ready service of Hutu Power’s lies. It was bewildering enough that the UN border camps should be allowed to constitute a rump genocidal state, with an army that was regularly observed to be receiving large shipments of arms and recruiting young men by the thousands for the next extermination campaign. And it was heartbreaking that the vast majority of the million and a half people in those camps were evidently at no risk of being jailed, much less killed, in Rwanda, but that the propaganda and brute force of the Hutu Power apparatus was effectively holding them hostage, as a human shield. Yet what made the camps almost unbearable to visit was the spectacle of hundreds of international humanitarians being openly exploited as caterers to what was probably the single largest society of fugitive criminals against humanity ever assembled.

Aid agencies provided transportation, meeting places, and office supplies to the RDR and paramilitary groups that masqueraded as community self-help agencies; they fattened the war coffers of the Hutu Power elites by renting trucks and buses from them, and by hiring as refugee employees the candidates advanced through an in-house patronage system managed by the génocidaires . Some aid workers even hired the Hutu Power pop star Simon Bikindi—lyricist of the interahamwe anthem “I Hate These Hutus”—to perform with his band at a party. In the border camps in Tanzania, I met a group of doctors, recently arrived from Europe, who told me how much fun the refugees were. “You can tell by their eyes who the innocent ones are,” said a doctor from —of all places—Sarajevo. And a colleague of hers said, “They wanted to show us a video of Rwanda in 1994, but we decided it would be too upsetting.”

ONCE THE CHOLERA outbreak in Goma had been contained, the camps had ceased to offer a solution to the refugee crisis and became a means of sustaining it; for the longer the camps remained in place, the greater was the inevitability of war, and that meant that rather than protecting people, the camps were placing them directly in harm’s way.

Throughout 1995 and 1996, the Hutu Power forces in exile continued their guerrilla war against Rwanda, with raiders from the camps slipping over the borders to mine a road, blow up a power pylon, or attack genocide survivors and witnesses. In addition, the ex-FAR and interahamwe from the Goma camps fanned out through the surrounding province of North Kivu, which was home to a sizable population of Zaireans of Rwandan ancestry, and began recruiting, training, and arming Zairean Hutus to fight with them for ethnic solidarity on either side of the Rwanda-Zaire border. Reports soon circulated of Hutu Power raiders getting on-the-job training—attacking Tutsi ranchers and pillaging their cattle—in the rich highland pastures of the Masisi region of North Kivu. By mid-1995, as Zairean tribal militias mounted a resistance, Masisi became known as a combat zone. “This is a direct consequence of the camps,” a security officer at UNHCR headquarters in Goma told me, “and there’s nothing we can do but watch.”

Such expressions of helplessness were common among the relief workers who maintained the camps. The UNHCR’s Jacques Franquin, a former theater director from Belgium who supervised camps that held more than four hundred thousand Rwandan Hutus in Tanzania, told me that he knew a number of génocidaires among them. “But don’t ask me to sort them out,” he said. “Don’t ask me to take the criminals out of the camps and put humanitarian workers in danger.” What he meant—and what I heard repeatedly—was that so long as the major powers that sat on the Security Council and funded most humanitarian aid lacked the will to act against Hutu Power, humanitarians could not be blamed for the consequences.

“Food, shelter, water, health, sanitation—we do good aid,” a relief agency boss in Goma told me. “That’s what the international community wants, and that’s what we give it.” But if the faults of the international response did not originate within the relief industry, they quickly took up residence there. Even if not taking sides were a desirable position, it is impossible to act in or on a political situation without having a political effect.

“The humanitarian mind-set is to not think—just to do,” said a French UNHCR officer at the Rwandan camps in Burundi. “We’re like robots, programmed to save some lives. But when the contracts are up, or when it gets too dangerous, we will leave and maybe the people we saved can get killed after all.” Humanitarians didn’t like to be called mercenaries, but “not to think—just to do,” as the UNHCR worker put it, is a mercenary mind-set. As a Swiss delegate for the International Committee of the Red Cross told me, “When humanitarian aid becomes a smoke screen to cover the political effects it actually creates, and states hide behind it, using it as a vehicle for policymaking, then we can be regarded as agents in the conflict.”

ACCORDING TO ITS mandate, the UNHCR provides assistance exclusively to refugees—people who have fled across an international border and can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their homeland—and fugitives fleeing criminal prosecution are explicitly disqualified from protection. The mandate also requires that those who receive UNHCR’s assistance must be able to prove that they are properly entitled to refugee status. But no attempt was ever made to screen the Rwandans in the camps; it was considered far too dangerous. In other words, we—all of us who paid taxes in countries that paid the UNHCR —were feeding people who were expected to try to hurt us (or our agents) if we questioned their right to our charity.

Nobody knows exactly how many people were in the Zaire camps because no thorough census was ever attempted, and piecemeal efforts were programmatically, often violently, sabotaged by the génocidaires, who had a political interest in keeping numbers radically inflated, and liked the extra rations. The birth rate in the camps was close to the limit of human possibility; breeding more Hutus was Hutu Power policy, and the coerced impregnation of any female of reproductive age was regarded as a sort of ethnic public service among the resident interahamwe. At the same time, roughly half a million people had succeeded in returning to Rwanda from Zaire of their own accord in the first year after the genocide. Thereafter, the UNHCR claimed that the camp population stabilized at about a million and a quarter Rwandans, but a number of UNHCR staffers told me that its estimates were at least twenty percent too high.

The one sure statistic about the Zaire camps was that they cost their sponsors at least a million dollars a day. A dollar per person per day may not sound like much, especially when one considers that at least seventy percent of that money went right back into the pockets of the aid teams and their outfitters, in the form of overhead, supplies, equipment, staff housing, salaries, benefits, and other assorted expenses. But even if just twenty-five cents a day was being spent on each refugee, that was nearly twice the per capita income of most Rwandans. The World Bank found that Rwanda after the genocide had become the poorest country on earth, with an average income of eighty dollars a year. Since thousands of people in Rwanda were making thousands of dollars a year, at least ninety-five percent of the population was probably living on an average income closer to sixty dollars a year, or sixteen cents a day.

Under the circumstances, living in a refugee camp was not a bad economic proposition for a Rwandan, especially for one plugged into the Hutu Power patronage network. Food was not only free, but ample; malnutrition rates in the camps were far lower than anywhere else in the region, on a par, in fact, with those of Western Europe. General medical care was also as good as it got in central Africa; Zaireans who lived in Goma spoke enviously of refugee entitlements, and several told me they had pretended to be refugees in order to gain admission to camp clinics. After having all essential living expenses covered by charity, camp residents were free to engage in commerce, and aid agencies frequently provided enticements—like agricultural supplies—to do so. The major camps in Zaire quickly became home to the biggest, best-stocked, and cheapest markets in the region. Zaireans came for miles to shop chez les Rwandais, where at least half the trade appeared to be in humanitarian-aid stuffs—beans, flour, and oil, spilling from sacks and tins stamped with the logos of foreign donors. And, as the interahamwe and ex-FAR stepped up their attacks on the Tutsi herdsmen of North Kivu, the Goma camp markets became famous for incredibly cheap beef.