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

Beyond Sake, a dirt road rose sharply through the dense vegetation of the rain-soaked volcanic massif. We soon came to a clearing, and my driver gave me the name of a village. But there was no village, only plots of land where a village once stood, some charred beams, bits of smashed crockery, and sometimes a few bright flowers in a row that implied a human hand. We drove for an hour without seeing anyone—past the sacked homes of Hundes and the abandoned homes of Hutus, many of whom were said to have taken refuge with the Rwandans in the camps. Masisi was known as the breadbasket of Zaire, a zone so fertile, so temperate, and so moist that some crops would yield four harvests a year. Now the devastation appeared complete, except for occasional carefully tilled fields of vegetables, their greenery iridescent beneath low dark clouds that sporadically dumped a few minutes of bright rain.

Along steep, rutted switchbacks, the irregular hills tilted at obscure angles, opening at times into deep ravines with tumbling cataracts, then closing in with a forest of eucalyptus. It was a landscape well worth fighting for, but I couldn’t understand the endless procession of desolated villages. When you expel people and conquer territory, don’t you occupy it? Weren’t these hills supposed to be packed with Hutus? Or was the land just being prepared for the day when the money ran out in the camps? When at last we came to a village with a few people—Hutus and Zairean soldiers—my driver didn’t think it advisable to stop and ask what their long-term strategy was.

At the top of the escarpment the forests fell back and the vast alpine pastures of Tutsi herdsmen opened out, rolling over the domes of the hills and folding into the valleys. But there weren’t any Tutsis, and there weren’t any cattle. After four hours on the deserted road, we had covered about fifty miles and reached Kitchanga, a village where the Tutsis who fled from the Mokoto monastery had found temporary refuge. A large crowd stood outside a shack to buy pieces of a freshly butchered cow. The cow had also come from Mokoto—“escued,” villagers said, from the monastery’s dairy; there was suddenly so much beef in town that ten dollars could buy almost thirty pounds of it.

But ten dollars wasn’t enough to buy a Tutsi his life: the going rate for transport to the border was between twelve and fifteen dollars. Eight hundred of the Tutsis who had been attacked at Mokoto were now packed into a sodden and steaming thatch schoolhouse in Kitchanga, and they were too poor to pay for their own “ethnic cleansing.”

A FEW DAYS before I arrived in Kitchanga, a relief team from Doctors Without Borders had driven up to the Mokoto monastery and found the road blocked by two charred, naked corpses; the hands, feet, and genitals had been cut off, the chests had been opened, and the hearts had been removed. The relief workers counted ten corpses and smelled many more; they estimated the dead to number at least a hundred. While they were at the monastery, some wounded Tutsis came out of the bush where they had been hiding. One was a naked boy who had contrived to cover only the back of his neck. When he let the covering fall away, they saw that his head had been cut almost halfway off, exposing his spine and a patch of cranium. A doctor had sewed the boy back together, and I saw him walking tentatively around an emergency field hospital at Kitchanga.

A barefoot man in a tattered raincoat and shorts at the village school, who identified himself as “the captain of the Mokoto refugees,” said that many of the attackers had come from the UN camps. It was easy to identify them, he said, because “they spoke excellent Kinyarwanda and were well dressed,” while “we Zaireans are hill people, and feel more at home in Swahili.” He explained that some of his people had been able to flee when “the attackers, seeing others pillage, forgot killing to steal, and only came back later.” The Mokoto survivors had straggled into Kitchanga empty-handed, and a few old men were wrapped only in blankets because their attackers had stripped them naked, intending to kill them. No one could count on being so lucky again. The captain told me that the Hutu Power militias at Mokoto had chanted, “Kill, kill, kill,” and “This is how we fled our country.” Unlike the Zairean Tutsi refugees I had met in Rwanda, who said their only hope was to return to Zaire, the captain of the Mokoto Tutsis had given up. When he told me, “We want to go home,” he meant Rwanda. “We have no nationality here,” he said.

The Mwami of Kitchanga, the hereditary Hunde chief, a stout man in a brown velvet shirt, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a white baseball cap, agreed. “Truly,” he said, “the Hutus want to exterminate all the Tutsis.” His own people, too, were having a hard time protecting themselves: their fighters included boys of six and seven, and their arsenal consisted largely of spears, bows and arrows, and homemade rifles that fired nails. “It’s not an automatic,” the Mwami said of such a gun, “but it kills.” Kitchanga, which was formerly home to a mixed population of about two thousand people, was now an exclusively Hunde stronghold whose ranks had been swollen by an influx of thirty-six thousand displaced people. The Red Cross and the UN estimated that about half the population of Masisi, some three hundred thousand people, were displaced from their homes. Even the Mwami was living in temporary housing; his estate five miles out of town had been destroyed. I found him drinking banana beer in his “office”—a gazebo made of UN plastic sheeting—and he told me that Kitchanga was a very hospitable place, but that by giving shelter to Tutsis, it was making itself a magnet for a Hutu attack. He wanted the Tutsis out of there.

The Tutsis had to be evacuated or they would be killed. The problem was that the way to the Rwandan border ran through Hutuland and past the camps. The word in Kitchanga was that the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency, had promised to come with a convoy of trucks, accompanied by hired Zairean soldiers for security, to take the Tutsis away. But nobody really trusted that this would happen.

DURING THE NIGHT in Kitchanga, I heard the distant pop of gunfire, and in the morning heavy fighting between Hutus and Hundes was reported north of the village. I was told to return to Goma. As I left, three fat pillars of smoke were rising across the valley where Hunde fighters were sacking a Hutu village. Along the road, displaced Hundes were marching toward Kitchanga—women with armchairs bound to their backs, men toting troughs for brewing banana beer, and a slender young man with a spear in one hand and a double bed on his head.

On my return to Goma, I learned that it was true that the International Organization for Migration had planned an evacuation convoy to rescue the Tutsis in Kitchanga, but the plan had been scrapped. The IOM mandate did not permit it to assist “internally displaced” people in crossing international borders. The UNHCR and dozens of other humanitarian organizations that had the lucrative catering contracts for the camps in Goma all had similar limitations in their mandates, which prevented them from saving the Mokoto survivors. Most aid organizations prohibited themselves from transporting anybody anywhere, and could provide relief only on the spot; many refused to conduct operations that involved armed security, lest their “neutrality” should be compromised; still others maintained that it would violate their humanitarian principles to further the aims of “ethnic cleansing” by removing Tutsis just because Hutus threatened them. Individual aid workers I spoke with agreed that it was more humane to “ethnically cleanse” people than to leave them to be murdered. But it became clear that their organizations’ first commitment was not to protecting people but to protecting their mandates. “Everything is lies here,” Father Victor, the Mokoto monk, told me in Goma. “All these organizations—they will give blankets, food, yes. But save lives? No, they can’t.”