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

Twelve days after the Mokoto massacre, Rwanda’s ambassador to the United Nations called on the Security Council to “take immediate action to prevent genocide in eastern Zaire.” Rwanda’s request referred specifically to Mokoto and to the Tutsis who remained at Kitchanga. The Zairean mission to the UN countered that the conflict in North Kivu was “a completely internal situation” and was therefore none of the Security Council’s business. The government of Zaire denied any problem pertaining to “Kinyarwanda-speaking Zairean nationals,” maintaining, absurdly, that “of the languages spoken in Zaire, Kinyarwanda is not one of them.” Zaire also advised the Council that “the word ‘genocide’ is not a part of Zaire’s political landscape.” The Security Council did nothing; it didn’t even register one of its boilerplate “expressions of concern.”

When I returned to Kigali, I learned that some Tutsi businessmen in North Kivu were organizing an evacuation to rescue the Mokoto survivors at Kitchanga, and at the end of May more than a thousand of them were brought to the Rwandan border. Throughout June and July, Tutsi refugees continued to arrive in Rwanda, and as the fighting spread in eastern Zaire, Tutsis from much farther north began fleeing to Uganda. By late August, the eradication of Tutsis from North Kivu was believed to be nearly complete.

ON MY RETURN to Kigali from visiting the survivors of the Mokoto massacre in May of 1996, I had asked Kagame what he thought would become of the Tutsi refugees who were being expelled from Zaire into Rwanda. “Perhaps, if the young men have to fight, we shall train them,” he said. A year later, he told me that the training had already been under way. Kagame had concluded that he could not fully dismantle the threat of the Hutu Power camps in Zaire unless “the kind of support they were getting from the Zairean government and the international community” was also brought to an end.

The world powers made it clear in 1994 that they did not care to fight genocide in central Africa, but they had yet to come up with a convincing explanation of why they were content to feed it. The false promise of protection represented by the camps placed Hutu civilians, as well as Tutsis and everyone else in the region, in mortal peril, and it was no comfort that this state of affairs was not brought about by a malevolent international policy in central Africa but by the lack of any coherent policy. In Washington, where 1996 was a presidential election year, one Clinton administration official was reported to have told a meeting of the National Security Council that the main policy concern in Rwanda and Zaire was that “we don’t want to look like chumps.” In Kigali, where the main concern was the threat of a Hutu Power invasion, Colonel Joseph Karemera, Rwanda’s Minister of Health, asked me, “When the people receiving humanitarian assistance in those camps come and kill us, what will the international community do—send more humanitarian assistance?” Sometimes, Karemera said, he couldn’t help feeling that “this international community is looking at us like we’re from a different generation of human evolution.”

In July of 1996, General Kagame visited Washington and explained once again that if the international community could not handle the monster it was incubating in the camps, he would. It was assumed that Kagame was bluffing; the thought of Rwanda invading Zaire was a bit like Liechtenstein taking on Germany or France. Mobutu sponsored invasions of his neighbors, not the other way around, and Mobutu was still Washington’s hope for the region. “Occasionally,” an American diplomat explained to me, “you have to dance with the devil to do the Lord’s work.” And in this, at least, Paris agreed. France remained Hutu Power’s biggest advocate. The attitude toward Kagame’s warnings among the Africa hands at the Quai d’Orsay seemed to be: let him try. (In 1995, the new French President, Jacques Chirac, had refused to invite Rwanda’s new President, Pasteur Bizimungu, to an annual conference of Francophone African leaders in Biarritz, which opened with Chirac presiding over a moment of silence to honor the memory of President Habyarimana—and not the dead of the genocide that had been committed in Habyarimana’s name.)

Shortly after Kagame’s visit to Washington, Burundi’s army moved to close all the camps for Rwandans on its territory. The UNHCR protested, but when Burundi refused to back down the refugee agency began to cooperate. Soon the refugees were jockeying to get on the trucks that shuttled back and forth across the border. In the course of a few weeks, two hundred thousand people were sent home, and the UN even took to describing the repatriation as voluntary. The Rwandan government broadcast the message that the returnees were to be welcomed in their communities and that they should get their homes back—and, as a rule, that was what happened. UN observers told me that arrest rates were lower than anticipated; in some cases notorious génocidaires were even denounced by fellow returnees.

I spent several days watching the convoys rolling in from Burundi. When I asked returnees if the repatriation was forced, they all said no. But when I asked why they had suddenly volunteered to come home, they said they’d had no choice. The answer was almost always the same: “Everybody was coming. We left together, so we returned together.” One man, a bricklayer, who stood barefoot in ragged clothing amid his six children, said, “There are superiors”—he turned his eyes skyward—“who concern themselves with politics and affairs of humanity, and there are the simple people like us”—his eyes rolled down to stare at his feet—“who know nothing of politics and merely work with our hands to eat and live.” The mass return from Burundi made it clearer than ever that the only obstacle to a comparable repatriation from Zaire was Hutu Power’s ability to intimidate not only the camp populations but also the entire international community.

“I think we’ve learned a lot about the hypocrisy and double standards on the part of the people who claim they want to make this world a better place,” General Kagame told me. “They turn it into a political problem, and say we cannot have the refugees back unless we forgive these fellows who committed the genocide.” Kagame was indignant. “I say to them, ‘We told you to separate those groups. You have failed. If you—the whole world put together—are unable to do this, how can you expect us to do much better? You hold us to a standard that has never existed on this earth. You want us to wake up one morning and have everything right—people walking hand in hand with one another, forgetting about the genocide, things moving smoothly. It sounds nice to talk about it.’”

At first, Kagame told me, he had assumed that dealing with “people who had committed serious crimes against humanity” would be “the responsibility of the entire international community.” He still thought it should be. “But that hasn’t happened,” he said. “So what remains is to turn around and fight another war.

SHORTLY AFTER THE RPF took Kigali in 1994, Kagame’s old associate, President Museveni of Uganda, had introduced him to a Zairean named Laurent Desire Kabila, who had been an anti-Mobutu rebel throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and who hoped to revive that struggle. Kagame, Museveni, and Kabila began establishing networks with Zaireans and other Africans who regarded Mobutu as a menace to stability and progress on the continent. “We used to say to the Zaireans, ‘We know you are brewing trouble for us, but we shall brew trouble for you,’” Kagame told me. “We said, ‘You need peace, we need peace, let’s work together, but if you do not work with us—well.’”