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

But Richardson had come to the Congo not only to offer American help but also to threaten to withhold it. Since midway through the war, international aid workers, human rights activists, and journalists in the eastern and northern Congo had been reporting that Rwandan Hutus who fled into the jungle after the breakup of the UN border camps were being killed, piecemeal and in massacres, by Kabila’s forces. The UN wanted to send a human rights investigation team, and Kabila was stonewalling. Richardson’s message was: Let the team come, or face international isolation and forget about the foreign aid you desperately need.

Kabila’s people were understandably prickly about the question of massacres. On the one hand, they denied the charges; on the other hand, they insisted that any killings of Hutus had to be placed in the proper context. A great many Rwandans from the camps who had remained in the Congo were not only fugitive génocidaires but active-duty fighters for Mobutu. Even during the pitch of battle, these combatants had, as always, kept themselves surrounded by their families and followers—women, children, and the elderly, whom they used as a human shield and who suffered accordingly. What’s more, the Hutu Power fighters themselves were reported to have committed massacres of Congolese villagers and of their own cohorts as they retreated westward. (I saw the aftermath of such a massacre at the Mugunga camp during the mass return in November of 1996: two dozen women, girls, and babies, chopped to death and left to rot in the middle of the camp—“because they came from another camp, looking for food,” according to a Mugunga resident, who seemed to think such killing unremarkable.)

At times, the UNHCR had managed to establish temporary camps for tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutus as they fled westward. One of the largest was at the village of Tingi-Tingi, in the eastern Congo. On television, it looked like any camp for wardispossessed refugees, but offscreen it was also a major Hutu Power military installation. Disgusted aid workers and bush pilots later told me that the ex-FAR and interahamwe maintained a regime of terror in the camp, killing noncombatants seemingly at random. The same forces controlled the airfield, where, mingled in among genuine aid agency flights, planes plastered with the logos of aid organizations regularly landed arms and took off carrying prominent génocidaires to Nairobi. Of course, much of the aid that did get through was appropriated and consumed by Hutu Power forces.

In mid-April of 1997, the front page of The New York Times carried an unusually ambivalent article about the refugee crisis in the Congo, which described a camp for Rwandan Hutus near the city of Kisangani: “While thousands of small children in the camps have distended bellies and limbs like twigs and seem near death by starvation, there are also a considerable number of strapping young men who look fit and healthy and well-fed.”

“When we get food, I eat first,” a “husky thirty-five-year-old father of three starving children” told the Times, and “aid workers said his situation was not uncommon.”

It was strange to read such a story, and at the same time to hear that Emma Bonino, the European Union’s Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, was accusing Kabila’s troops of committing genocide against the refugees, in part by obstructing “humanitarian access.” Even as she spoke, the UN was flying daily planeloads of Rwandan Hutus—many of them fit young men—to Kigali, for repatriation and resettlement, in a program sanctioned by Rwandan and Alliance officials. At least fifty thousand former camp residents were brought back to Rwanda in this fashion, while as many made their way over the borders to areas of Angola held by Mobutist-backed rebels, to the Central African Republic, and to the other Congo—the Republic of the Congo—where they were once again accommodated in camps, which were once again heavily militarized.

On the other hand, many Rwandan Hutus were clearly disappearing in the Congo, and many of the killings that were being attributed to Kabila’s backers appeared to have occurred in noncombat situations. Several appalling death-squad-style massacres were reported in detail. These killings dominated the international coverage of the Congo war and its aftermath, and the blame was directed primarily at Tutsi troops from the Congo and from Rwanda. Not long after the Times article about killer refugees at Kisangani appeared, the camp it was reported from was attacked and disbanded by a mixture of Alliance forces and local Zaireans. Stories circulated that thousands of its residents had been massacred—but nobody could be sure exactly what had happened because Kabila’s forces barred access to investigators.

AMBASSADOR RICHARDSON EMERGED from his meeting with good news: Kabila had promised to give the UN human rights probe unlimited access. In high spirits, Richardson flew on to visit a camp for Rwandan Hutus at Kisangani, not far from where some of the largest refugee massacres were reported to have occurred. The people in the camp were mostly women and children who had been straggling through the jungle for months, and they were in bad shape, some barely alive—crumpled skin clinging to skeletons. After a leisurely tour, Richardson stood near the camp gate, surrounded by camp residents, and read a prepared statement, which described the “humanitarian crisis in the Congo” as “a tragedy that dates back to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.” What’s more, he said:

The failure of the international community to respond adequately to both the genocide and the subsequent mixing of genocidal killers with the legitimate refugee population in the former eastern Zaire only served to prolong the crisis. This climate of impunity was further exacerbated by ethnic cleansing and conflict in the [North Kivu] region—and also by former President Mobutu’s policies of allowing these genocidal forces to operate, recruit and resupply on his territory. Tragically, this chapter is not yet closed. Reports of widespread killings continue. All of us, the new government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, its neighbors and the international community, have the responsibility to stop the killing of innocent civilians. We must also protect legitimate refugees, continue repatriation efforts and work to bring the genocidal killers to justice.

This was the highest-level official acknowledgment of reality and responsibility by an international statesman to date, and it was delivered before reporters of The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and several international television, radio, and wire services. Yet not one of those papers reported it. General Kagame later told me that he’d seen a typescript of the statement and wondered if it was a hoax. When I assured him that Richardson had really said those words, he called it an “important admission” and “something great in the whole situation,” adding, “Maybe somebody should slip it into the Internet or something.”

A few weeks after Richardson’s visit, the UN massacre investigation team arrived in Kinshasa, right on schedule. But it was never able to go about its business. Kabila threw up one hurdle after another, and even after Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed to find a new team leader and to expand the investigation’s scope to cover not only the eight months of the Congo war but the preceding four years—since Rwanda’s génocidaires first began filling the eastern Congo with mass graves—Kabila continued to stonewall. A great many African heads of state closed ranks behind him. Their feeling was that after sitting out the Rwandan genocide, the so-called international community had little credibility as moral referees in the war against the génocidaires.