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

When the “chaos” began in Kigali, the pastor explained, he didn’t think it would reach Mugonero, and when Tutsis began going to the hospital, he claimed he had to ask them why. After about a week, he said, there were so many refugees that “things started turning a little weird.” So the pastor and his son Gerard held a meeting to address the question “What are we going to do?” But at that moment two policemen showed up to guard the hospital, and he said, “We didn’t have the meeting, because they had done it without our asking.”

Then, on Saturday, April 16, at seven in the morning, the two policemen from the hospital came to Pastor Ntakirutimana’s house. “They gave me letters from the Tutsi pastors there,” he said. “One was addressed to me, another to the mayor. I read mine. The letter they gave me said, ‘You understand they are plotting, they are trying to kill us, can you go to the mayor and ask him to protect us?” Ntakirutimana read this, then went to the mayor, Charles Sikubwabo. “I told him what my message from the Tutsi pastors said, and gave him his letter. The mayor told me, ‘Pastor, there’s no government. I have no power. I can do nothing.’

“I was surprised,” Ntakirutimana went on. “I returned to Mugonero, and I told the policemen to go with a message to the pastors to tell them, ‘Nothing can be done, and the mayor, too, said he can do nothing.’” Then Pastor Ntakirutimana took his wife and some others who “wanted to hide” and drove out of town—to Gishyita, which is where Mayor Sikubwabo lived, and where many of the injured refugees at Mugonero had received their wounds. “Gishyita,” he explained, “had killed its people already, so there was peace.”

Pastor Ntakirutimana said that he hadn’t returned to Mugonero until April 27. “Everybody was buried,” he told me, “I never saw anything.” After that, he said, “I never went anywhere. I stayed at my office. Only, one day I went to Rwamatamu because I heard that pastors had also died there, and I wanted to see if I could find even a kid of theirs to save. But I found nothing to save. They were Tutsis.”

The pastor made himself out as a great patron of Tutsis. He said he had given them jobs and shelter, and promoted them within the Adventist hierarchy. He lifted his chin and said, “As long as I live, in my whole life, there is nobody I tried to help more than Tutsis.” He could not understand how Tutsis could be so ungrateful as to make accusations against him. “It looks as if there is no justice anymore,” he said.

The name Ntakirutimana means “nothing is greater than God,” and the pastor told me, “I think I’m closer to God than I have ever been in my life.” He said, “When I see what happened in Rwanda, I’m very sad about it because politics is bad. A lot of people died.” He didn’t sound sad; he sounded tired, harassed, indignant. “Hatred is the result of sin, and when Jesus Christ comes, he’s the only one who’s going to take it away,” he said, and once more, he added, “Everything was chaos.”

“They say you organized it,” I reminded him.

He said, “Never, never, never, never.”

I asked him whether he remembered the precise language of the letter addressed to him by the seven Tutsi pastors who were killed at Mugonero. He opened the folder in his lap. “Here,” he said, and held out the handwritten original and a translation. His daughter-in-law, Genny, took the documents to make me copies on the fax machine. Dr. Ntaki wanted a drink, and fetched a bottle of scotch. The lawyer, Gorza-Gongora, told me, “I was always against this meeting with you.” Genny brought me the letter. It was dated April 15, 1994.

Our dear leader, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana,

How are you! We wish you to be strong in all these problems we are facing. We wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. We therefore request you to intervene on our behalf and talk with the Mayor. We believe that, with the help of God who entrusted you the leadership of this flock, which is going to be destroyed, your intervention will be highly appreciated, the same way as the Jews were saved by Esther.

We give honor to you.

The letter was signed by Pastors Ezekiel Semugeshi, Isaka Rucondo, Seth Rwanyabuto, Eliezer Seromba, Seth Sebihe, Jerome Gakwaya, and Ezekias Zigirinshuti.

Dr. Ntaki walked me out to my car. In the driveway, he stopped and said, “If my father committed crimes, even though I am his son, I say he should be prosecuted. But I don’t believe any of it.”

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after we met, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana was in his car, driving south on Interstate 35 toward Mexico. To the FBI agents who were tailing him, his driving appeared erratic—he would speed up, slow down, change lanes, and again accelerate abruptly. A few miles from the border, they pulled him over and took him into custody. The arrest went almost entirely unnoticed in the American press. A few days later, in the Ivory Coast, the pastor’s son Dr. Gerard was also arrested, and he was quickly transferred to the UN tribunal. But the pastor had a United States green card and the rights that came with it, and he retained Ramsey Clark, a former Attorney General, who specialized in defending politically repugnant cases, to fight his extradition. Clark argued, speciously, that it would be unconstitutional for the United States to surrender the pastor—or anybody else—to the tribunal, and Judge Marcel Notzon, who presided over the case in federal district court, agreed. On December 17, 1997, after fourteen months in a Laredo jail, Pastor Ntakirutimana was released unconditionally, and he remained a free man for nine weeks before FBI agents arrested him a second time, pending an appeal of Judge Notzon’s decision.

When I heard that Pastor Ntakirutimana had been returned to his family in time for Christmas, I went back through my notes from Mugonero. I had forgotten that after my meetings with survivors, my translator, Arcene, asked me to go with him to the hospital chapel, where there had been a lot of killing; he wanted to pay homage to the dead, who were buried nearby in mass graves. We stood in silence in the empty chapel with its cement pews. On the floor below the altar sat four memorial coffins, draped in white sheets, painted with black crosses. “The people who did this,” Arcene said, “didn’t understand the idea of a country. What is a country? What is a human being? They had no understanding.”

Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.

IN THE FAMOUS story, the older brother, Cain, was a cultivator, and Abel, the younger, was a herdsman. They made their offerings to God—Cain from his crops, Abel from his herds. Abel’s portion won God’s regard; Cain’s did not. So Cain killed Abel.

Rwanda, in the beginning, was settled by cave-dwelling pygmies whose descendants today are called the Twa people, a marginalized and disenfranchised group that counts for less than one percent of the population. Hutus and Tutsis came later, but their origins and the order of their immigrations are not accurately known. While convention holds that Hutus are a Bantu people who settled Rwanda first, coming from the south and west, and that Tutsis are a Nilotic people who migrated from the north and east, these theories draw more on legend than on documentable fact. With time, Hutus and Tutsis spoke the same language, followed the same religion, intermarried, and lived intermingled, without territorial distinctions, on the same hills, sharing the same social and political culture in small chiefdoms. The chiefs were called Mwamis, and some of them were Hutus, some Tutsis; Hutus and Tutsis fought together in the Mwamis’ armies; through marriage and clientage, Hutus could become hereditary Tutsis, and Tutsis could become hereditary Hutus. Because of all this mixing, ethnographers and historians have lately come to agree that Hutus and Tutsis cannot properly be called distinct ethnic groups.