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

The camps were cramped, smoky, and smelly, but so were the homes many Rwandans had fled; and unlike most Rwandan villages, the main thoroughfares of the big camps were lined with well-stocked pharmacies, two-story video bars powered by generators, libraries, churches, brothels, photo studios—you name it. Humanitarians showing me around often sounded like proud landlords, saying things like “Great camp,” even as they said, “These poor people,” and asked, “What are we doing?”

The profits from refugee commerce went in many directions, but large slices went straight through the political rackets into the purchase of arms and munitions. Richard McCall, chief of staff of the United States Agency for International Development, described Zaire as “an unfettered corridor for arms shipment” to the génocidaires. The UNHCR, more cautiously, made similar statements, but that never stopped it from asking for more money to keep the camps going.

Officially, the UNHCR’s policy in the border camps was to promote “voluntary repatriation.” At first, this was done by having people sign up a day or two in advance for buses that would take them back to Rwanda. When a number of the people who did that got beaten or killed before their departure date, it was decided simply to station idling buses in the camps every morning, and let those who wanted make a run for them. Not surprisingly, that program, too, was soon judged a failure. “What is voluntary?” General Kagame once asked me. “It normally means that somebody has to think and make a decision. I don’t think that even staying in the camps is a voluntary decision for the innocent people. I believe there is some influence. So how can we speak of them leaving voluntarily?”

In fact, influence against returning to Rwanda often came from within the very humanitarian community that was ostensibly promoting repatriation. “It’s not safe for them to go home,” I was told by one aid worker after another. “They could get arrested.” But what if they deserved to be arrested? “We can’t judge that,” I was told, and then, to finish the discussion, it was usually said, “Anyway, the government in Kigali doesn’t genuinely want them back.” Of course, very few of the people working in the camps had ever spent any time in Rwanda; their organizations did not encourage it. So, with time, there developed among them an epidemic of what diplomats call clientitis: an overly credulous embrace of your clients’ point of view. As soon as I crossed back over the border to Rwanda, I felt that I’d passed through a looking glass. At UNHCR Goma, I would be told that Rwanda was determined to prevent repatriation and that returnees were frequently harassed just to ensure that the rest of the refugees stayed away. But at UNHCR Kigali, I would be regaled with statistics and arguments demonstrating not only that Rwanda wanted the refugees home but that those who had come back were received with all due propriety.

In June of 1995, Zaire’s Prime Minister, Kengo Wa Dondo, visited Goma, and delivered a speech in which he said that if the international community wouldn’t shut down the camps, Zaire would be obliged to send the Rwandans home. That August, Zairean soldiers did move on the camps, and in traditionally roughshod manner—lots of shakedowns, and torched huts—they hustled about fifteen thousand Rwandans across the border in less than a week. That was more than the UNHCR had accomplished in the preceding six months. But the UNHCR opposed forced repatriation—unless, as Gerald Gahima at Rwanda’s Justice Ministry reminded me, you happened to be a Vietnamese boat person in Hong Kong. The UN refugee commissioner herself, Sadako Ogata, persuaded President Mobutu to call off his boys—it was widely rumored that he was paid cash—and the repatriation “deadlock” that she often decried to the Security Council promptly resumed.

Press coverage of the Zairean action stressed the numerous violations of international humanitarian law that the refugees—mostly older people, women, and children, who were unable to run away—had suffered. There were almost no follow-up stories from the Rwandan side of the border, and events there were rather dull: the refugees were smoothly resettled in their communities, arrest rates were below average, and the Kigali office of the UNHCR, impressed by the government’s handling of the matter, proclaimed it an auspicious demonstration of Rwanda’s sincerity in calling its people home.

“THERE’S NO WAY you can stop the international community from coming, given a situation like a genocide,” General Kagame once said to me. “But they may provide the wrong remedies to our problems. On the one hand, they admit that a genocide took place in Rwanda, but they don’t seem to understand that someone was responsible for it, that someone planned and executed it. That’s why we get confused when there are insinuations that we should negotiate. When you ask, ‘With whom?’ they cannot tell you. They can’t quite bring themselves to say that we should negotiate with the people who committed genocide. Of course, in the long run they create a bigger problem, because the genocide can be made to seem less and less visible as a very big crime that people should be hunted for and prosecuted.” What’s more, Kagame said, “there are some directly innocent people in those camps, and this has been a very bad situation for them. At least here in Rwanda, although some incidents may take place, there is some level of sanity. It may not be pleasant, it may not be the best, but it is the best in these circumstances.”

I told him I kept meeting Rwandans who said that Rwandans never tell the truth, that Rwanda has a culture of dishonesty, that to understand Rwanda one has to get inside that realm of mystification. I wondered what he thought.

“Maybe even those who’re saying that are not speaking the truth,” he said, and let out an unusually hearty laugh. Then he said, “I don’t think it’s our culture, especially since I don’t see a lot of honesty in politics in many other countries. But in some other countries, when you try to tell lies you are exposed by strong institutions that work to know what exactly has been happening.” He fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “Personally, I have no problem with telling the truth, and I’m Rwandan, so why don’t people also take me as an example of a Rwandan? People have even told me that perhaps, in politics, sometimes there are certain things you don’t say that I have been saying publicly. The more they tell me that, the more I get convinced I am right.”

In Kagame’s view, lying was not a Rwandan trait but a political tactic, and he thought it a weak one. That didn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep secrets; but secrets, even if they involve deception, aren’t necessarily lies—just truths you don’t tell. In a world where politicians were presumed to be liars, Kagame had found that one could often gain a surprise advantage by not being false. “Sometimes,” he said, “you tell the truth because that is the best way out.”

If there is one thing sure in this world, it is certainly this: that it will not happen to us a second time.

It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.

IN THE FOOTHILLS of the Virunga volcanoes, in the Masisi zone of North Kivu, Zaire, on a rise overlooking a lakeside peasant village called Mokoto, there stood the ruin of a monastery which might have been taken for a relic of medieval Europe. But this ruin was new. Until early May of 1996, Mokoto operated very much like an ancient cathedral town. While the villagers lived below, in huts made mostly of mud brick and thatch, Trappist monks on the hill lived in an imposing compound of masonry and fine woodwork, with a large church, a library, a hostel for visitors, a dairy with nearly a thousand cows, a motor-vehicle repair shop, and an electrical plant powered by a waterwheel. The monastery was the chief provider of social services to Mokoto and neighboring villages; the monks ran six schools and a dispensary, and they had designed a waterworks for the villagers, who had previously spent much of their time carrying buckets. In January and February of 1996, when hundreds of people began showing up at the monastery, seeking sanctuary from bands of attackers who had chased them from their homes, Father Dhelo, the Zairean superior at Mokoto, did not hesitate to take them in.