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

Rwandans, too, advised me against travel. Even when I wanted to go back to Taba—just a half hour’s drive south from Kigali along good roads—to see what had become of Laurencie Nyirabeza and the killer Jean Girumuhatse, I was told that nobody would hesitate to call me a fool if I got killed. The night before I flew into Kigali, a minibus taxi had been stopped by a tree placed across the main road twenty miles north of the city. The vehicle was quickly surrounded by armed men, who made the passengers get out and separate—Tutsis here, Hutus there—then opened fire on the Tutsis, killing many of them. At a bar in Kigali, I listened to a mixed group of Hutus and Tutsis discussing the incident. What seemed to disturb them most was that none of the Hutu minibus passengers, all of whom were left unharmed, had voluntarily come forward to identify themselves and report the attack.

Similar acts of terror continued, on an almost daily basis, throughout 1997 and the early months of 1998. In a good week, only one or two people might be killed, and in some weeks hundreds were killed. On at least half a dozen occasions, bands of more than a thousand well-coordinated Hutu Power fighters engaged the RPA in pitched battles for several days before retreating and melting back into the villages of the northwest, where they made their bases. As in the old UN border camps, the génocidaires lived indistinguishably intermingled with civilians, and thousands of unarmed Hutus were reported killed by RPA troops. The RPA was sensitive enough to these charges that it arrested hundreds of its own soldiers for committing atrocities against civilians, while Hutu Power’s policy was to slaughter civilians who failed to join them in committing atrocities.

That was the choice in Rwanda’s new-old war. In their wake the génocidaires left leaflets, warning that those who resisted them would be decapitated. Other leaflets told Tutsis, “You will all perish,” and, “Good-bye! Your days are numbered.” Hutus, for their part, were called upon, in the spirit of John Hanning Speke’s Hamitic hypothesis, to drive all Tutsis “back to Abyssinia,” and advised, “Whoever collaborates with the enemy, works for him, or gives him information, is also the enemy. We will systematically eliminate them.”

One day, I stopped by the Justice Ministry to see Gerald Gahima. “How’s justice?” I asked. He shook his head. For months, government ministers had been traveling around the country, from prison to prison, distributing copies of the special genocide law, and explaining its offer of sentence reductions for the vast majority of prisoners, if they wished to confess. But prisoners refused to come forward. “It’s deliberate sabotage,” Gahima said. “Their leaders have them brainwashed. They still wish to maintain that there was no genocide in this country, when the fact of the matter is the genocide is still going on.”

I wondered if the government regretted having the people home from the camps. “Never,” Gahima told me. “The international community would have kept feeding them until we were all dead. So now just some of us die. We cannot be happy. We can only fight to live in peace.” He smiled, a bit wearily, and said, “We have no exit strategy.”

AFTER ONLY A few days in Kigali, I experienced the sense of total exhaustion that on previous trips had taken weeks, sometimes months, to overwhelm me. I booked a seat on the next flight out, and spent my days on a friend’s porch, surrounded by bird-of-paradise flowers, listening to songbirds, watching the towering clouds over the valley collide and shred, and I escaped into a hundred-year-old novel about a dentist in San Francisco. The book was McTeague, by Frank Norris, and its final pages told of two men, once the brotherly best of friends, who meet and fight in the alkaline desolation of a lonely desert; one kills the other, but in their struggle, the dead man has handcuffed their wrists together.

I put the book down and went to have a beer with a Rwandan friend. I told him the story I had just read, that ultimate image: one man dead, the other locked to the body—in the desert.

“But, Philip,” my friend said, “let’s not be idiots. Where there are handcuffs, there’s a key.”

I reminded him that there was no key to unlock the vast desert in which the surviving man was stranded. I used Gahima’s phrase, “No exit strategy.”

“Novels are nice,” my friend said. “They stop.” He waggled his fingers to make quotation marks in the air. “They say, ‘The End.’ Very nice. A marvelous invention. Here we have stories, but never ‘The End.’” He drank some beer. Then he said, “I’ve thought a lot lately about Jack the Ripper, because the Tutsis now say, ‘Jack is in.’ They don’t say it, but that’s the thought since this return from Zaire. They don’t tell you that they haven’t slept all night because there are assassins in the wall. But think of what happens in the conscience of a Tutsi who expects the arrival of his killer.”

I thought about it, and what came to mind was the letter that Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, the former Adventist church president of Kibuye, gave me in Laredo, Texas—the letter he had received on April 15, 1994, from the seven Tutsi pastors who were among the refugees at Mugonero hospital telling him they would be killed on the morrow, and saying, “your intervention will be highly appreciated, the same way as the Jews were saved by Esther.”

Esther was the wife of Ahasuerus, a Persian emperor, whose dominion stretched from India to Ethiopia, two and a half thousand years before the massacre at Mugonero. The essence of the story is well known to readers of the Bible: how Esther marries Ahasuerus without telling him that she is an orphaned Jew, raised by her uncle, Mordechai; how Ahasuerus’s chief deputy, Haman, despises Mordechai because the Jew refuses to bow down before him; how Haman persuades Ahasuerus to issue a decree calling on his subjects throughout his realm “to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate all Jews, young and old, women and children, in one day… and to plunder their goods”; how Esther reveals her identity to her husband, and pleads with him to spare her people; and how the wicked Haman is ultimately hanged on the very gallows he had built for Mordechai. But there is a final, less widely remembered chapter to this heartening story of genocide averted: when Ahasuerus rescinds his earlier order of extermination, Esther has him add a clause allowing Jews “to gather and defend their lives, to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, with their children and women, and to plunder their goods.” In all, the Bible reports, Jews and their allies slew some seventy-five thousand eight hundred “enemies” before peace was restored to the empire with a day of “feasting and gladness.”

The Tutsi pastors at Mugonero would have known their Scripture. Did they, as they waited to be slaughtered, yearn not only to be spared but also to see the enemies of Rwanda’s peace liquidated? The hopes for redemption that stories like Esther’s have inspired among persecuted peoples invariably carry a faith in the restorative power of avenging justice. “Pharaoh’s army got drownded—oh, Mary, don’t you weep,” recalled the old American slave song, just as Homer sang of the sack of Troy and Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors at Ithaca.

By the late twentieth century, of course, we liked to imagine that there were better ways to make righteousness prevail against the wicked in what used to be called “international society” and today goes by the more inclusive term “humanity.” My friend felt that the rest of humanity had betrayed Rwanda in 1994, but he had not lost his faith in the idea of humanity.