ON AUGUST 8, 1993, a new radio station went on the air. It called itself Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines. I would come to wish that the name of this station wasn’t so similar to that of my beloved hotel.
The station broadcast at 106 on the FM dial and called itself by the call letters RTLM, in the American style. It billed itself as the very first private radio station in the country, and it was an immediate sensation. It started by playing Congolese music virtually nonstop. I am not a man who particularly likes to dance, but even I can tell you that this is a fun, bouncy, energetic type of music to which you cannot help but move your feet a little. RTLM then started to broadcast a few human voices, like a shy child finding its courage. The disk jockeys began to talk more. Then they started telling mildly dirty jokes. Then they started a call-in format in which ordinary Rwandans could hear their own voices broadcast over the air. People began calling in with road information, song dedications, complaints about local politicians, rumors, speculations, opinions, chatter. We have a saying here about the nature of neighborhood gossip. We call it radio trottoir-or, the “radio of the sidewalk.” RTLM was the radio of the sidewalk suddenly blasted out to the whole country.
I can’t begin to tell you how revolutionary this was. Unlike the dull government marginalia you usually heard on the official Radio Rwanda, RTLM was fresh. It was irreverent. It was fun. It constantly surprised you. It was giving us what we wanted but in a way that was lively and modern and American. Even those who were offended were hooked. It was the giddiness that comes with looking at your friend in shock and saying, Can he really say that? Yes, I think he just did.
Just as Rwandans are serious about history, we are also serious about news. You see small battery-powered radios everywhere in our country. They are playing on the edges of cornfields, inside taxicabs, in restaurants and Internet cafés, balanced on the shoulders of young men and old women and on the kitchen tables inside mud-and-pole houses on distant hills. Official announcements here can be as dry as sawdust, but we always pay attention. Perhaps it taps something in our national memory of the godlike pronouncements from the royal court of the mwami. It always amazes me how people in Europe and the United States can be so indifferent to the speeches of their chancellor or president, for these words from the top can be a wind sock for what might happen next.
RTLM pulled off another feat. It convinced ordinary citizens that it could be trusted to give a truthful account of what was really going on inside the nation. And it did this by taking a skeptical attitude toward the current president, Juvenal Habyarimana. For a people who had been raised on a diet of official propaganda, this was something new indeed. Any voice that was less than worshipful toward the president had to be independent. There was even an aura of crusading journalism about the station, which did not hesitate to publicize the names of the bureaucrats who were supposed to be responsible for paving a potholed road or prosecuting a market thief.
As the winter faded into the new year of 1994, the talk on the radio grew bolder and louder. Listeners couldn’t help but notice that almost every broadcast seemed to feature an overarching narrative. And that story was that the country was in danger from an internal threat and the only solution was to fight that threat with any means necessary. There were daily on-air debates that represented two sides-the extremist and the even more extremist. The station had helped gain credibility by shaming lazy government officials. Now it started to name ordinary citizens. And the tone began to change. A typical broadcast:
Jeanne is a sixth-form teacher at Muramba in Muyaga commune. Jeanne is not doing good things in this school. Indeed, it has been noted that she’s the cause of the bad atmosphere in the classes she teaches. She urges her students to hate the Hutus. These children spend the entire day at that, and it corrupts their minds. We hereby warn this woman named Jeanne, and indeed, the people of Muyaga, who are well known for their courage, should warn her. She is a security threat for the commune.
I wanted to stop listening to RTLM, but I couldn’t. It was like one of those movies where you watch a car speeding in slow motion toward a child in the middle of the road. It doesn’t seem real. You wince, you even want to scream, but you cannot look away.
In fact, when I think back on what we all heard on RTLM in those strange slow-motion months before April 1994 it seems impossible that we could not have known what was coming.
It always bothers me when I hear Rwanda ’s genocide described as the product of “ancient tribal hatreds.” I think this is an easy way for Westerners to dismiss the whole thing as a regrettable but pointless bloodbath that happens to primitive brown people. And not just that, but that the killing was random and chaotic and fueled only by brute anger. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There is a reason why Rwanda ’s genocide was the quickest one in recorded history. It may have been accomplished with crude agricultural tools instead of gas chambers, but eight hundred thousand people were killed in one hundred days with a calculated efficiency that would have impressed the most rigorous accountant.
Those “tribal hatreds” were merely a cheap way to motivate the citizen killers-not the root cause. It is phenomenally dangerous to dismiss Rwanda in this way, because it steals one of the most vital lessons all this bloodshed has to teach us.
Make no mistake: There was a method to the madness. And it was about power. What scared our leaders most was the idea that Rwanda might be invaded and their power taken away. And in the early part of the 1990s that threat was very real.
The Tutsis who had fled the mobs years earlier for the safety of neighboring countries had always dreamed of returning home. Under the leadership of General Fred Rwigema, and subsequently of Paul Kagame (the same child who had fled the country on his mother’s back in 1959) they organized themselves into a military force called the Rwandan Patriotic Front. These soldiers were far outnumbered by the Rwandan army, but they still constituted an impressively disciplined and effective band of fighters. On October 1, 1990, they crossed the border and started moving toward the capital. This was not the amateurish vandalism of thirty years earlier. This was a real invasion.
Three nights later, when the RPF was still a long way from Kigali, there was a clatter of gunfire all around the capital, including some mortar shelling. The next morning the government made a stunning announcement: Some rebels had managed to infiltrate their way into the heart of the nation and had staged a sneak attack. Only the bravery and talent of the Rwandan Army had saved the country from disaster, and only the deceit and cunning of traitors within the neighborhoods had made the attack possible.
It was all a charade. What really happened is that some trusted Army soldiers were dispatched to various neighborhoods and told to fire their weapons in the air and in the dirt. The effect of the “surprise attack, ” as you might guess, was to spread fear that an enemy was hiding among the population. It was a cheap but effective way for President Juvenal Habyari-mana to rally the people to his side and shore up his weakening hold on power. Thousands of innocent people, mostly Tutsis and those perceived to be their sympathizers, were rounded up and thrown in jail on trumped-up charges. The minister of justice proclaimed that the attack could not have happened without the collaboration of hidden ibyitso, or “accomplices, ” and a curfew went into effect on the streets of the capital.
I have said that a false view of history is a toxin in the bloodstream of my country. With the start of the civil war the myth-making machine went into high gear. There was suddenly no distinction between Tutsis and exiled RPF rebels; they were lumped into the same category of rhetoric. The war itself was cast as an explicitly racial conflict. And ordinary Rwandans started to arrange their lives around this idea.
My troubles with the president began when I refused to wear his picture on my suit jacket.
I suppose it was my private act of rebellion against President Juvenal Habyarimana, who I considered a criminal and a blowhard. He was a bit on the fat side, and walked with a slight limp that was said to be an old Army injury. He sparkled in his suits, which were all tailored in Paris. I was especially irritated by his habit of clearing out the national parks of tourists so he and his cronies could go on big game hunting trips. In my position it would have been incredibly unwise to give voice to these thoughts, so I kept them to myself. But I drew the line at those stupid portrait pins.
Like many African “big men, ”Habyarimana had a penchant for plastering his face on billboards and public spaces everywhere throughout the nation. I suppose it is a combination of vanity, insecurity, and old-fashioned advertising strategy that makes leaders do this. If enough people get used to associating his name with pomp and power over the years they’ll become reluctant to want to ever throw him out of office. Suffice it to say, Habyarimana loved his own face so much that he eventually decided that his subjects should carry it on their breasts. He designed medallions with his own photograph in the middle. These were sold to various people-commune administrators, priests, wealthy businessmen-with instructions to wear them while acting in their official capacities. The Roman Catholic archbishop of Kigali helped set the tone by wearing the portrait pin on his cassock while saying mass.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Rwanda ’s independence, a big state dinner was held at the Hotel Mille Collines. All the national big shots were there, as well as foreign dignitaries, including the king and prime minister of Belgium. I wore my best white suit for the occasion. But, of course, I had no portrait pin in my lapel.
One of the president’s thugs came over to me just before the ceremony was to begin.
“You are not wearing your portrait of the president, ” he told me.
I agreed with him that this was the case.
He grabbed me by the collar, yanked me out of the receiving line, and told me that I would not be greeting the president that night. It took the well-timed intervention of my boss, the chairman of Sabena Hotels, to make things right. Either I would be restored to my place in the receiving line or the hotel would refuse right then to be the host of the Independence Day dinner. It was probably a bluff, but it worked. I went back into the line and shook the president’s hand without his face grinning up from my lapel.
The very next morning another of his goons showed up at the front desk of the Mille Collines and asked for me. When I didn’t appear he handed the headwaiter a brown envelope and told him to deliver it to me. It was stuffed full of Habyarimana medals.
“From now on, ” he told the headwaiter, “your manager will wear one of these every time he comes to work. We will be watching. The rest of these medals are to be given to the employees.”
The next morning I showed up to work without wearing a medal. A black car arrived at the front door roundabout and I was escorted over. They told me I now had earned “an appointment” at the office of the president. I followed them there in a hotel car and allowed myself to be led into a side office, where I was screamed at for several hours.
“You do not respect the boss, our father!” they screamed at me.
“What did I do wrong?” I asked, although I knew.
“You stupid man, you did not wear your medals! Why not?”
“I don’t see the benefit in doing that, ” I said.
It went around and around like this before they kicked me out of the office-with a literal foot planted on my butt-and a command to be back the next morning. And the next day, they screamed at me for hours and gave me another kick in the butt before they let me go.
It went on like this every day for a month. I was no longer working at the hotel, just reporting to the office of the president. His thugs became my daily escorts. We started to get used to each other and exchanged morning pleasantries before the daily screaming began. And I would always tell them the same thing: “I really don’t see why I should wear the medal.”
The irony of this show of muscle was that the president was not really in control of his own power base. Everybody who was well informed in Rwanda knew that he was essentially a hollow man, largely the pawn of his own advisers. He had risen up through the defense ministry and was put in charge of the purge against the Tutsis in 1973 that had been responsible for the deaths of dozens and wasted the futures of thousands more, including my friend Gerard. In the midst of all the chaos, Habyarimana launched a coup and took over the presidency of Rwanda, promising to bring an end to the violence. His real talent was squeezing money out of international aid organizations and Western governments while at the same time shutting down any internal opposition. He formed a political party called, without apparent irony, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development and conferred mandatory membership on the entire country. Every person in Rwanda was supposed to spend their Saturdays doing work for the government: highway repair, digging ditches, and other tasks. If it ever occurred to him that this was basically a repeat of the forced labor policies of the Belgians and the mwami he never showed much concern about it.
The people who benefited most were Habyarimana’s friends from the northwest part of the country. We called these people the akazu, or “little house.” Their main channel of access to the riches of government was actually not through the president but his strong-willed wife, Madame Agathe. If you weren’t from the northwest, or weren’t close with Madame, you stood little chance of advancing. I had discovered this unfortunate reality of life in 1979, when Tourist Consult had to use that strong-arm tactic so that I, a man from the south, could get a college scholarship. Having friends in the akazu became even more important after the world price of coffee plunged in 1989 and the Rwandan economy collapsed with it.
Empty suit that he was, Habyarimana had managed to stay in power through the depression with the help of the government of France, and particularly because of the French president, François Mitterrand. These two presidents got along famously and shared many dinners. Mitterrand even gave our president his own jet airplane. Loads of development money and military assistance flowed to us from Paris throughout the years. When the RPF launched its attack in 1990 and the Rwandan Army exploded in size from five thousand soldiers to thirty thousand to counter the threat, France was there to help train the new recruits. In some cases white French soldiers came quite close to actually fighting the rebels, with some instructors aiming artillery cannons at RPF positions and stepping back to let Rwandan soldiers press the fire button. As much as twenty tons of armaments a day were airlifted into Kigali courtesy of Habyarimana’s friends in Paris.
The French love affair with Rwanda was, you might say, also a product of a pervasive national mythology. “France is not France without greatness, ” Charles de Gaulle had said, and the preservation of that status as a global leader defines much of the policy thinking in the offices of France’s Foreign Ministry on the Quai D’Orsay in Paris. Maintaining a strong web of economic and diplomatic interests in their former African colonies is seen as a key part of that strategy. And so in places like the Ivory Coast, the Central African Republic, and Chad, where the French tricolor flew until the 1960s, France has provided monetary support, trade links, and frequent military intervention almost from the day that these countries gained their independence. Its eagerness to play such a father-figure role earned it the nickname “the policeman of Africa.” The French army, in fact, has executed nearly two dozen military campaigns on the continent since the era of independence-a level of microinvolvement far out of proportion to any other great power. France never was much of a player in Rwanda during colonial times, but they now considered us worthy of attention for their own psychologically complicated reasons.
If Rwandans are obsessed with height, then the French are obsessed with tongues. A large part of that mystical greatness in the French mentality is centered on the preservation of the pure French language and the repelling of all attempts to marginalize it in favor of the international tongue of commerce, aviation, and diplomacy that is English. President Habyarimana and the Hutu elite were considered exemplary guardians of the French language and the kind of cultural values that it represented. At the urging of his French friends, our presidential “father” instituted new educational guidelines in schools, and new ways of teaching mathematics and the French language to young people.
The RPF invaders, by contrast, had spent most of their lives exiled in the former British colony of Uganda and were therefore English speakers, part of what amounted to a representation of the old Anglo-Saxon hordes that had been dogging France for the last thousand years. And I believe they were not entirely wrong-I believe the English speakers did have their own ambitions to achieve hegemony in the region and control the entire space between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. So at the Quai D’Orsay the logic went like this: If the RPF rebels should become strong enough to overthrow Habya-rimana it will spell the loss of a small but important Francophone ally in Central Africa, which could soon be speaking English as an official language, reviving unpleasant tribal memories of the Battle of Agincourt and the Hundred Years War. While the French publicly supported peace talks, they were, in reality, working behind the scenes to preserve Habyarimana’s shaky hold on power.
I am not saying this mentality is logical, but if there is anything that being a Rwandan has taught me, it is that most politics is an outgrowth of emotions that may or may not have any relation to the rational.
So when I decided not to wear the president’s portrait on my lapel I was putting my thumb in the eye of a very insecure man. My friends told me later that I had been taking a stupid chance. I should have just worn the stupid thing to make the flunkies happy and not risked my job or my family’s welfare on a symbolic matter. I knew Habyarimana and the akazu didn’t much care for me, anyway. It would have cost me a huge amount of self-respect to have worn that dictator’s face on my jacket. If this was a risk, it was a calculated one.
I never told my father about my run-in with the president. I didn’t want him to worry about my job-or my life. But if I had told him, I like to think it would have made him laugh.
While peace talks with the rebels dragged on the programs on RTLM got worse and worse. I do not know how I managed to keep listening to it. Perhaps it was out of a need to understand exactly where popular opinion was heading. Or perhaps it was just morbid fascination.
Either way, I began to hear the racial slur “cockroach” so frequently that it lost whatever power it had to shock. I heard myself being lumped in with those who were considered less than human. The enormously popular singer Simon Bikindi had recorded a song played over and over on RTLM called “I Hate These Hutus.” He was talking about people like me-those people of the majority group who didn’t have a taste for racial politics and refused to join in the crude political movement that became known as Hutu Power. To Bikindi they were nothing but traitors:
I hate these Hutu, these arrogant Hutus, braggarts who scorn other Hutus, de ar comrades.
I hate these Hutus, these de-Hutuized Hutus, who have disowned their ident ities, dear comrades.
The anger on the airwaves became so common that it didn’t seem particularly out of line when RTLM broadcast the tape of an address made at a political rally in the northwest town of Gisenyi. The speaker was a government official named Leon Mugesera and, I have to say, he knew how to whip up a crowd. Copies of this speech had already been circulating around the country like bootleg treasures, with people commenting favorably that here was a man who really understood the threat to Rwanda. “Do not let yourselves be invaded, ” he kept exhorting the crowd, and it gradually became clear he was making an allusion to the ruling party being “invaded” by moderates who wanted to engage in peace negotiations with the predominately Tutsi rebels. In words that would become widely repeated throughout Rwanda, he also recounts a story of saying to a Tutsi, “I am telling you that your home is in Ethiopia, that we are going to send you back there quickly, by the Nyabarongo.” Nobody in Rwanda could have missed what he was really saying: The Tutsis were going to be slaughtered and their bodies thrown into the north-flowing watercourse.
His final exhortation to the crowd could have served as a summary of the simpleminded philosophy of those who were screaming for Hutu Power the loudest: “Know that the person whose throat you do not cut will be the one who cuts yours.” He was preaching an ideology-and an identity-based on nothing more than a belief in the murderous intentions of the enemy.
I think that was the most seductive part of the movement. There is something living deep within us all that welcomes, even relishes, the role of victimhood for ourselves. There is no cause in the world more righteously embraced than our own when we feel someone has wronged us. Perhaps it is a psychological leftover from early childhood, when we felt the primeval terror of the world around us and yearned for the intervention of a mother/protector to keep us safe. Perhaps it makes it easier to explain away our personal failures when the work of an enemy can be blamed. Perhaps we just get tired of long explanations and like the cleanliness of an easy solution. It is for wiser people than me to say. Whatever its allure, this primitive ideology of Hutu Power swept through Rwanda in 1993 and early 1994 with the speed of flame through dry grass.
The grand purpose, as I have said, was not really to avenge the slights committed by the Tutsi royal court sixty years earlier. That was merely the cover story, the cheap trick that could rouse a mob into supporting the strong men. And that was the true purpose of all the revolutionary rhetoric: It was all about Habyarimana and the rest of the elite trying to keep a grip on the reins of government. It seemed almost irrelevant to point out that Hutus had been in a position of undisturbed power for thirty-five years and that the Tutsi were in a position to affect very little of Rwanda’s current miserable situation-even if they had wanted to. It was a revolution, all right, but there was nobody to overthrow.
The Hutu government wanted all the anger in Rwanda pointed toward any target but itself. RTLM was officially a private venture with an independent editorial voice, but the extent to which it was an arm of the government was kept a secret from most Rwandans. Few people knew, for example, that the station’s largest shareholder was actually President Habyarimana himself. The other financiers had close ties to the akazu. They included hundreds of people, including two cabinet ministers and two bank presidents. The station was officially in competition with the government station, but was allowed to broadcast on their FM 101 frequency in the mornings. Like most radio stations, RTLM had an emergency power source in case of blackouts, but this one was not a generator on the back lot. It was apparently an electrical line that led straight into the house across the street, which happened to be the official residence of none other than President Habyari-mana.
I have mentioned those talk radio “debates” on RTLM that were really just shouting matches between two people who only disagreed about the best way to make the Tutsis suffer. You might wonder how any audience could stand to listen to such obvious garbage. How could the Tutsis-and those who loved them-not have made a protest or at least fled the country when they heard such irrational anger growing stronger and stronger? Could they have not read the signs and understood that hateful words would soon turn into knives?
Two factors must be taken into account. The first is the great respect we Rwandans have for formal education. If a man here has an advanced degree he is automatically treated as an authority on his subject. RTLM understood this and hired many professors and other “experts” to help spread the hate. The head and cofounder, in fact, was a former Ph.D. professor of-what else?-history.
The other thing you have to understand was that the message crept into our national consciousness very slowly. It did not happen all at once. We did not wake up one morning to hear it pouring out of the radio at full strength. It started with a sneering comment, the casual use of the term “cockroach, ” the almost humorous suggestion that Tutsis should be airmailed back to Ethiopia. Stripping the humanity from an entire group takes time. It is an attitude that requires cultivation, a series of small steps, daily tending. I suppose it is like the famous example of the frog who will immediately leap out of a pot of boiling water if you toss him into it, but put it in cold water and turn up the heat gradually, and he will die in boiling water without being aware of what happened.
RTLM was not the only media outlet turning up the heat while the rebel army inched across the countryside. Mugesera’s throat-cutting speech was played on Radio Rwanda. And in 1990 a new newspaper called Kangura (Wake It Up) started publishing. It was essentially RTLM in print-populist, funny, and completely obsessed with “the Tutsi question.” Its publisher was Hassan Ngeze, a former soft-drink vendor from Gisenyi who most people considered a loudmouth and a boor. He bragged about fictional deeds in his past, exaggerated the circulation numbers of Kangura, and obtained many of his scoops from his connections in government ministries. But he had an amazing talent for crystallizing people’s dark thoughts and splashing them on the pages in an entertaining way. And just as RTLM was bankrolled by wealthy people close to the president, this rag was secretly funded by members of the akazu.
By August 1993, the rebel army had scored several convincing military victories in the north and put Habayrimana in a position where he was forced by France, the United States and other Western countries into signing a peace treaty known as the Arusha Accords. He surely must have recognized it as his political obituary. It laid the foundations for a power-sharing government. Habyarimana would be allowed to stay on as president, but only in a ceremonial sense. And in a special insult to all those who hated the Tutsi, a battalion of six hundred RPF soldiers was allowed to occupy the grounds of the parliament building in preparation for the formation of the transitional government. Kangura portrayed these troops as the point of a spear aimed straight at the heart of the Hutu majority. The paper also made a curious prediction: President Habyarimana would not live out the year. He would be assassinated, said the paper, by a rebel hit squad. It would then be the duty of every good and patriotic Hutu to seek revenge. Otherwise, the rebel army would start killing innocents.
In a February 1994 article headlined “Final Attack, ” Ngeze wrote:“We know where the cockroaches are. If they look for us, they had better watch out.” Other features were not as subtle.
“What weapons shall we use to conquer the cockroaches once and for all?” queried the caption of one illustration. The answer was pictured to the side: a wood-handled machete. Children were clearly enemies, too. “A cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly, ” proclaimed one story. Another diatribe went like this: “We say to the cockroaches that if they lift up their heads again, it will no longer be necessary to fight them in the bush. We will start by eliminating the internal enemy [my italics]. They will be silenced.”
This farce of a paper had a small circulation but an enormous reach. Copies were sent out to the villages and passed around gleefully. It seemed a welcome break from the usual tired and boring news out of the capital. Here at last, said many people, is a paper that really says the ugly truth-that the Tutsis are going to kill us when they invade.
Before it stopped publishing two months before the genocide Kangura editorialized: “We must remark to the cockroaches that if they do not change their attitude and if they persevere in their arrogance, the majority people will establish a force composed of young Hutu. This force will be charged with breaking the resistance of the Tutsi children.”
What the newspaper did not say was that just such a force had already been put into place and was busily preparing itself to murder children throughout Rwanda.
In early November 1993, a shipment of cargo was trucked into Kigali. The wooden crates bore import papers announcing that they had been received from China at the seaport at Mombasa in Kenya. Inside were 987 cartons of inexpensive machetes. This was not enough to cause alarm by itself. The machete is a common household tool in Rwanda, used for all manner of jobs-slicing mangoes, mowing grass, harvesting bananas, cutting paths through heavy brush, butchering animals.
If anybody had been paying attention, however, the shipment might have seemed curious when matched with other facts. The recipient, for example, was one of the primary financial backers of the hate-mongering radio station RTLM. Those cartons from China, too, were but a small part of what amounted to a mysterious wave. Between January 1993 and March 1994, a total of half a million machetes were imported into my country from various overseas suppliers. This was a number wildly out of line with ordinary demands. Somebody obviously wanted a lot of sharp objects in the hands of ordinary Rwandans. But nobody questioned the sudden abundance of machetes-at least not publicly.
If those imports were quiet, the formation of the youth militias was obvious. It was hard to miss those roving bands of young men wearing colorful neckerchiefs, blowing whistles, singing patriotic songs, and screaming insults against the Tutsis, their sympathizers and members of the opposition. They conducted military drills with fake guns carved from wood because the government could not afford to give them real rifles. They were known as the Interahamwe, which means either “those who stand together” or “those who attack together, ” depending on who is doing the translating.
Habyarimana’s government formed them into “self-defense militias” that operated as a parallel to the regular Rwandan army and were used to threaten the president’s politicial enemies. They were also a tool for building popular support for the ruling regime under the all-embracing cloak of Hutu Power. The ongoing civil war brought a whole new flock of members. Most of the new recruits came from the squalid refugee camps that formed a ring around Kigali. It is difficult for me to describe just how terrible the conditions were inside these camps: no decent food, no sanitation, no jobs, no hope. There were several hundred thousand people crammed into these tumbledown wastelands, most of them chased away from their homes in the countryside by the advancing RPF army. Kigali itself held about 350, 000 people at the time-a city about the size of Minneapolis, Minnesota -and the strain on the infrastructure was very great. These refugees saw plenty of reasons to be angry at the rebels-and, by unfair extension, angry at each individual Tutsi. Plus, the militias were fun, in the same way that the hate radio was fun. They brought a sense of purpose and cohesion to an otherwise dreary life. It was like being in the Boy Scouts or a soccer club, only there was a popular enemy to hate and a lot of built-up frustration to vent. The boys were also hungry and full of the restlessness of youth. It was easy to get them to follow any orders imaginable.
The groundwork for the genocide went even deeper. In the fall of 1992 mayors in each of Rwanda’s hundred little communes were asked by the president’s political party to compile lists of people-understood to be Tutsis and people who were threatening to Habyarimana-who had left the country recently or who had children who had left. The implication was that these people had joined the ranks of the RPF. These lists could then be used to identify “security threats” in times of emergency. Tutsis throughout the country suspected their names were being entered into secret ledgers. Many tried without success to have their identity cards relabeled so that they would appear to be Hutu.
I used to be in the habit of stopping off at a bar near my home after work and buying a round for some of my friends from the old Gitwe days. One afternoon when I wasn’t there, a man wearing the uniform of a soldier tossed a grenade in the door and sped off on a motorcycle. The bar was destroyed. I started going straight home after that. The minister of public works, Félicien Gatabazi, was gunned down by thugs as he was entering his house. A taxi driver witnessed the assassination; she was shot as a precaution the next day. Her name was Emerita and she had been one of the freelance drivers who competed for fares in the parking lot of the Hotel Mille Collines. At least one hundred other innocent people would be killed in this fashion by the increasingly violent teenagers of the Interahamwe and also rebel soldiers who had infiltrated Kigali. People didn’t want to stand at bus stops or taxi stations anymore because the crowds were targets for grenade throwers.
A scary incident happened on the road. My wife, Tatiana, was driving our son to school when she was forced off the road by a man in a military jeep. He walked over to her door, took off his sunglasses, and bid her to roll down her window.
“Do you know me?” he asked.
“No, ” said my wife.
“My name is Étincelles, ” he said. It was the French word for “explosions, ” apparently his nom de guerre.
He went on: “Madam, we know your home. We know you have three big German shepherds in the yard for protection, as well as two gate guards. The Youth of the Democratic Republic Movement has said they plan to kidnap you. They will be trying to get ransom money from your husband. So I am telling you, if anybody should try to pull you over, don’t stop. Keep driving, even if you have to run somebody over. Do it for your own safety. I am telling you all of this because I come from the same part of the country as your husband and I don’t want to see any harm come to you.”
When my wife told me about this I searched my memory for anyone from my village who might be calling himself Étincelles. I couldn’t think of who it might be. To this day I have no idea if this was an actual kidnap plot or just an attempt to scare us. Regardless, we no longer felt comfortable living at home after that, and so I moved us all into a guest suite at the Diplo-mates. It felt awful to be governed by fear, but these were very dangerous times. I did not want anybody coming through my windows.
Life went on, even in the surreal twilight of that spring. At nights on the terrace I would share beers with the leaders of the militia movement, trying to keep quiet as I heard them talking of events in the neighboring country of Burundi. The president there, Melchior Ndadaye, had been assassinated by Tutsi officers in his own army. A series of reprisal killings followed. The international community had little to say about these massacres. Was it true the Tutsi were planning to do a similar thing here: take power and then start a campaign of genocide against the Hutu? I heard it said more than a few times over glasses of Carlsberg or Tuborg: “It may come down to kill or be killed.”
During that dangerous time I did something that had the potential to be my death warrant. The RPF leadership was looking for a place to give a press conference and every public venue in town had rejected them. When they approached me about a room at the Diplomates, I agreed to host them, and I charged them the standard rate of five hundred dollars. It wasn’t the profits I cared about. I really believed they deserved to have equal access like anybody else. It was not my place to discriminate based on ideology or what people would think of me. But I heard later that the government was unhappy with me. I suppose, in retrospect, it was like the incident with Habyarimana’s silly medals. These were symbolic stands, and probably foolish, but ones I thought were worth the risk.
I have said that those first months of 1994 were like watching a speeding car in slow motion heading toward a child. There was a thickness in the air. You could buy Chinese-made grenades on the street for three dollars each and machetes for just one dollar and nobody thought to ask why. Many of my friends purchased guns for themselves in the name of home protection. This was something I refused to do, despite the urging of my wife. In one tense conversation she told me I was acting like a coward for not acquiring a firearm. “You know that I have always said I fight with words, not with guns, ” I told her. “If you want to call me a coward for this, then I guess that is what I am.” She stared back at me, hurt and silent.
A few days later, I took her and our little son, Tresor, along with me to a manager’s meeting in Brussels that I had been scheduled to attend. With the other children at boarding school in Rwanda, it was just the three of us, and we made a little vacation out of it. We traveled by train through Luxembourg, Switzerland, and France. Walking amid the gray monuments and plazas, drinking the yeasty beer, and eating the starchy tourist food made it possible-almost-to forget the slow boil back at home.
After three weeks, I had to return to my job, and we arrived in Kigali on the red-eye on the morning of March 31. At that hour the city was quiet, the militias were mostly asleep and the tension that I had come to associate with Rwanda was at low ebb. The rolling green hills had never looked so good or so welcoming. Perhaps things were finally calming down. The United Nations had sent twenty-seven hundred troops to Rwanda a few months earlier to enforce the Arusha peace agreement, and it seemed the visible presence of the blue helmets was finally making a difference in keeping the militias contained. The UN seemed capable of maintaining the peace. They had given us hope.
It had been so long since we had been to our house that we decided to go straight there instead of to our suite at the Diplo-mates. For the first time in almost two years we felt good about the future.