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

That possibility was all too obvious. Rwanda’s government since the genocide had staked its credibility on proving that systematic murder between Hutus and Tutsis was avoidable. The mass return from the camps, which the government presented as a triumph, was the great test of that claim. Yet Kagame, as always, regarded the victory as incomplete. “Yes, people have come back,” he said. “That’s one problem solved, and it has created another problem, which we also have to solve.” He then proceeded to name a lot of problems—housing, justice, the economy, education, the demobilization of thousands of ex-FAR soldiers returning from exile, and, above all, “this issue of ethnicity.”

A few months earlier, shortly before the fighting began in South Kivu, Kagame had told me two stories about men in his army. One soldier, he said, had recently written a letter, “telling me how he was left alone in his family, and how he knew that some people killed his family during the genocide, and how he has chosen not to hold anybody else responsible for that. Instead, he has decided to take his own life because he doesn’t see what his life means anymore.” The letter was found after the soldier’s suicide. As Kagame understood it, “he had somebody in mind to kill but instead of doing that he decided to kill himself.” The second story was about an officer who killed three people and wounded two in a bar. Some soldiers were about to kill him for his crimes, but he said, “Let me tell you what the problem is and then you can kill me.” So the soldiers arrested the officer, and he explained, “I’ve been seeing killers who’ve been allowed to live and just roam around and nobody takes action against them. Well, I decided I cannot take any more of that, so I killed them. Now, go ahead and do whatever you want with me.”

Kagame said, “Imagine what is going on in the mind of that person. I don’t know. He could have gone to a market and shot a hundred people. He could have killed anybody—such a person who does not even fear being killed. It means there’s some level of insanity that has been created.” He said, “People think this is a matter that we should have got over and forgotten, and—no, no, no, no, we are dealing with human beings here.”

I heard many such stories, of the temptations of revenge, the release of revenge, the dissatisfactions of revenge. Obviously, many survivors did not share Kagame’s view that it was possible to rehabilitate a human being who had followed the logic of the genocide. So after the return from Zaire, I asked him whether he still believed that killers could be successfully reintegrated into society. “I think you can’t give up on that—on such a person,” he said. “They can learn. I’m sure that every individual, somewhere in his plans, wants some peace, wants to progress in some way, even if he is an ordinary peasant. So if we can present the past to them and say, ‘This was the past that caused all these problems for you, and this is the way to avoid that,’ I think it changes their minds quite a bit. And I think some people can even benefit from being forgiven, being given another chance.”

Kagame also said, “We have no alternative.”

DRIVING BACK TO Taba a few days after we met Girumuhatse, Bosco asked me if I’d heard about the girl who’d been burnt alive in Kigali, recently. I hadn’t, so he told me. There was a girl—a woman, really—about Bosco’s age, an acquaintance of his. She was at a disco, and a guy came on to her. She turned him down. He said she’d be sorry. She laughed. He persisted. She told him to go away, to quit bothering her; she said he was crazy. He went away, then came back with a jug of petrol and a match. Four people were killed. The rejected suitor himself wound up hospitalized with burns. When he was asked why he killed four people, he said it was nothing to him after what he’d done in 1994—he could kill as many as he liked.

Bosco was surprised that I, a journalist, hadn’t heard this story before. I think I responded rather dully, less as a journalist than as a consumer of American journalism, where the tabloid curiosity of psycho killers who go berserk in public spaces poses only a distant sense of random menace to the public at large—like lightning, drunk drivers, or falling chunks of tall buildings. A great-grandmother of mine was finished off in her ninety-sixth year by a potted geranium plunging from a window ledge, and although it could happen to me, too, I don’t consider it a nearer danger because it happened to her. But Bosco’s story was different. In Rwanda, he was telling me, a person who says, “The genocide made me do it,” leaves everyone in the entire society with a sense of total jeopardy.

Laurencie Nyirabeza’s granddaughter, Chantalle Mukagasana, told me much the same thing. I had wanted to hear Nyirabeza’s reaction to Girumuhatse’s account of himself, but she was in a quiet mood when I returned to Taba, and Chantalle, a lank thirty-three-year-old who was widowed during the genocide and lost four of her five children—Marie, Marthe, Marianne, and Jonathan—filled the silence. “Even if he confesses, he’s an impostor,” she said of Girumuhatse. “He’s lying if he says he just followed orders.” According to Chantalle, the man was an unreserved Tutsi killer. She said he had overseen the murder of his wife’s parents, “just to have the pleasure of watching them killed,” and when he found his Tutsi wife feeding her brother, Girumuhatse had tried to kill his brother-in-law, too.

Nyirabeza had accused Girumuhatse of killing ten members of her immediate family. Chantalle held him personally responsible for the massacre of twenty-seven members of her extended household. He had been the leader, she said, and he also partook in the massacre, using a small hoe. Chantalle had escaped with her one-month-old daughter, Alphonsine, on her back, only because on the morning of the killings she had seen Girumuhatse murder a cousin of hers named Oswald with a machete. After that, Chantalle sought refuge at the nearby home of her godmother, a Hutu. While she was there, she heard Girumuhatse come and ask for tea—to give him strength, he said, to kill Chantalle’s father. She also said that her godmother’s son, who was one of Girumuhatse’s accomplices, “went behind the house to sharpen his machete, but his mother forbade him to kill me.” Later, the godmother told Chantalle that her son had killed Chantalle’s mother. And now the godmother and her son had come back from Zaire.

All the killing Chantalle described had happened within a few days in one small cluster of houses, on the hill that was under Girumuhatse’s command. She laughed when I told her that Girumuhatse said he only saw six people killed on his orders. “Oh, if I could confront him,” she said at one point, but in another moment she said, “Even if I denounced him, what can it change?”

After the genocide, Chantalle said, “I had to find my own clothes alone, and I had to find my food alone, and now these people return and are given food and humanitarian aid.” It was true; while the international community had spent more than a billion dollars in the camps, devastated Rwanda had gone begging for a few hundred million, and the tens of thousands of survivors, squatting in the ruins, had been systematically ignored. Once, Chantalle told me, someone had handed out hoes to Taba’s survivors. “That’s all,” she said. “Period.”

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to give survivors what they really wanted—their lost world as it was in the time they called “Before.” But did it have to be that those who were most damaged by the genocide remained the most neglected in the aftermath? Bonaventure Nyibizi was especially worried about young survivors becoming extremists themselves. “Let’s say we have a hundred thousand young people who lost their families and have no hope, no future. In a country like this if you tell them, ‘Go and kill your neighbor because he killed your father and your seven brothers and sister,’ they’ll take the machete and do it. Why? Because they’re not looking at the future with optimism. If you say the country must move toward reconciliation, but at the same time it forgets these people, what happens? When they are walking on the street we don’t realize their problems, but perhaps they have seen their mothers being raped, or their sisters being raped. It will require a lot to make sure that these people can come back to society and look at the future and say, ‘Yes, let us try.’”