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

Such was the mood on much of the continent in the early summer of 1997. In July, Kenya’s aging strongman, Daniel arap Moi, who had broken off relations with Rwanda after the genocide, received General Kagame for a state visit. Two days later, Kenya arrested and turned over to the UN tribunal at Arusha seven of the most-wanted masterminds of the genocide. Moi denounced these former friends of his as “foreign spies and criminals,” and arrests continued. Among those caught were General Gratien Kabiligi of the ex-FAR, who had until recently commanded the Hutu Power forces in the Congo; Georges Ruggiu, the Belgian broadcaster for the genocidal radio RTLM; and Hassan Ngeze, who had published the Hutu Ten Commandments and forecast President Habyarimana’s death in the newspaper Kangura.

ONCE, WHEN WE were talking about the genocide and the world’s response to it, General Kagame said, “Some people even think we should not be affected. They think we are like animals, when you’ve lost some family, you can be consoled, given some bread and tea—and forget about it.” He chuckled. “Sometimes I think this is contempt for us. I used to quarrel with these Europeans who used to come, giving us sodas, telling us, ‘You should not do this, you should do this, you don’t do this, do this.’ I said, ‘Don’t you have feelings?’ These feelings have affected people.” Kagame aimed a finger at his skinny body and said, “Maybe that’s why I don’t put on a lot of weight—these thoughts keep consuming me.”

In early June of 1997, just after Richardson’s visit to the Congo, I went to Kigali for a day to see Kagame, and ask him about the reported massacres of Rwandan Hutus in the Congo. “I think there is a bit of exaggeration,” he said, “in terms of systematic extermination, systematic killings of refugees, or even possible involvement of high authorities of different countries.” Then he added, “But let’s go back a little bit, if people are not to be hypocrites…. First of all, again, I want to bring out the involvement of some countries in Europe. Remember the Zone Turquoise ?”

Kagame spent more than an hour describing the resurgence of Hutu Power after the RPF’s victory in 1994, starting with the arrival of French forces during the last weeks of the genocide, and running through the activities of the génocidaires in the camps— the rearming, the training, the alliance with Mobutu, the killings and expulsions in North Kivu, the constant attacks against Rwanda, and the campaign to eradicate the Banyamulenge Tutsis from South Kivu. He rattled off the names of towns in the Congo where major battles had been joined during the Alliance’s march to Kinshasa, and described the massive troop involvements of Hutu Power forces. “It becomes extremely difficult for me to imagine that the whole world is so naive as not to see that this was a real problem,” he said. He could only conclude, he added, that “there was some high-level conspiracy” in the international community to protect the killers and, perhaps, to assist them toward an ultimate victory.

But why would any of the major powers have pursued such an insane policy? “To fight off their guilt after the genocide,” Kagame said. “There is a great amount of guilt.”

This was the same conversation in which, at the outset, Kagame told me that Rwanda had had no troops in the Congo, as he had been telling everyone for eight months, and in which he wound up telling me that in fact he had initiated the whole campaign, and his troops had been there all along. The total reversal surprised me more than the information, and I was left to wonder why one of the shrewdest political and military strategists of our times was taking credit for the war at just the moment when he was being heaped with blame for war crimes.

Reviewing the tapes of our conversation, I realized that Kagame’s reasons were clear. He was not denying that many Rwandan Hutus had been killed in the Congo; he told me that when revenge was the motive, such killings should be punished. But he considered the génocidaires responsible for the deaths of those they traveled with. “These are not genuine refugees,” he said. “They’re simply fugitives, people running away from justice after killing people in Rwanda— after killing. ” And they were still killing.

The brief period of calm in Rwanda that followed the mass return from the UN camps at the end of 1996 had quickly broken down, and since February the systematic killing of Tutsis had been steadily on the increase. Much of the northwest was in a state of low-level war. The eastern Congo, too, remained in turmoil, and sizable concentrations of Hutu fighters who had refused every chance for repatriation continued to operate across the area. Kagame was especially concerned about the tens of thousands of génocidaires who had fled to the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, and rebel-held areas of Angola.

“Even now, these fellows are crossing our borders, ex-FAR and militias, mixed with maybe some of their family members,” Kagame said. “They are armed with rocket-propelled grenades, with machine guns, they are killing people as they move, and this is nothing to the international community. What is a thing is that Tutsis were killing refugees. There’s something extremely wrong here. This is why I think there’s this terrible guilt on the part of some people, which they are trying to fight off by always painting a picture of Tutsis being on the wrong side and Hutus being victims. But there is no amount of intimidation or distortion that can defeat us on this. It will cause us problems, but we are not going to be defeated.” He sounded angrier than I had ever heard him. “There are a lot of them left,” he said of the génocidaires, “and we will have to keep dealing with that situation for as long as it lasts. We are not really tired of dealing with that at all—it’s they who will get tired, not we.”

A grim prospect, but Kagame was trying to explain why the war in the Congo had happened as it had happened—in order, he said, that Rwanda should not “be rubbed off the surface of the earth.” That was how he saw his choice, and it explained the startling coolness of his speech. But although his voice and his manner were as contained as ever, he was clearly indignant to find his troops accused of destroying what he regarded as an army bent on Rwanda’s annihilation. Kagame’s defiance and his sense of injury added up to an Ahab-like wrath. He didn’t just want the world to see things his way; he seemed to believe that the world owed him an apology for failing to accept his reasoning.

Ideally, he told me, an investigation would be the best way to clear up the story of massacres in the Congo. “But,” he said, “because of this background, which I have already described to you, because of this partisan involvement, because of these politically motivated allegations even at the high levels in the international community, you see here that we are dealing with judges who cannot be judged. And yet they are terribly wrong. This is the bad thing about the whole thing. I have lost faith. You see, the experience of Rwanda since 1994 has left me with no faith in these international organizations. Very little faith.

“In fact,” Kagame went on, “I think we should start accusing these people who actually supported the camps, spent a million dollars per day in these camps, gave support to these groups to rebuild themselves into a force, militarized refugees. When in the end these refugees are caught up in the fighting and they die, I think it has more to do with these people than Rwanda, than Congo, than the Alliance. Why shouldn’t we accuse them? This is the guilt they are trying to fight off. This is something they are trying to deflect.”