FLIGHT FROM DEATH

The violence in Rwanda was threatening to explode in Burundi, 
where the author’s Tutsi relatives live, and he knew he had to get them out.

BY ALEX SHOUMATOFF

    THE minibus sped past hundreds of deplacés walking along the road with mattresses, cooking pots, and bundles of possessions on their heads. “Africa and its interminable wars,” Jean Rwagasana, in the front seat beside me, muttered in French, the colonial lingua franca. These were people of Kamenge, which is a suburb of Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, a tiny, populous Central African country that has been convulsed with ethnic slaughter for thirty years. It was mid-April, and they were fleeing the Army, which was battling the rebels in Kamenge and, in its usual heavy-handed way, killing everyone in its path, including women and children of the Hutu ethnic group, to which both the rebels and the déblacés belonged. The Army and the country were dominated by Burundi’s other ethnic group, the Tutsis, though Tutsis were said to compose only about fifteen per cent of the population. In Rwanda, Burundi’s twin, just to the north, the Hutu majority was in control of the government; there, too, the Tutsis were said to compose fifteen per cent of the population—until a few weeks ago, when Hutu extremists slaughtered perhaps as many as half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in what was shaping up as a savage genocidal massacre. For now, Burundi was calmer, but, as Jean put it, “the tension is rising.” He went on to tell me, “Just yesterday, on a Street in downtown Bujumbura, a woman started screaming. Maybe she was being robbed, or maybe it was a ruse by bandits to create panic. Everybody started running, but nobody knew what he was running from, or where he was running to. I stopped a man and asked him why he was running, and he said, ‘Because everybody else is.’”

      Rwanda and Burundi are yoked by a common culture, language, and history. They are mirror images of a single nightmare, and they feed each other’s violence; most people felt that it was only a matter of time— weeks, months, a year at most—before the aftershock of Rwanda would hit Burundi. (In fact, the killings in Rwanda were partly a reaction to an underreported massacre last fall in Burundi, in which tens of thousands of people—perhaps even hundreds of thousands—were killed.) My wife, whom I married in Africa and who came to the United States seven years ago, is a Tutsi, and Jean’s mother, Pascaline, is a beloved relative of hers. I had come to get the Rwagasanas (as I have called them) out before the slaughter returned to Burundi.
There is a taboo in Burundi against ethnic hostility at the workplace or while sharing public transport, and the sixteen other passengers crammed into the minibus rode along in wary silence. Discreetly, I checked out the ethnic mixture. There were three obvious Tutsis. Tall, slender, with high foreheads, prominent cheekbones, and narrow features, they were a different physical type from the five passengers who were short and stocky and had the flat noses and thick lips typical of Hums. These differences, which are discernible in only about half the population of Rwanda and Burundi, were long ascribed to a now discredited racial classification: the Tutsis were Hamitic,” the Hutus “Bantu.” But they are the only differences between Hutus and Tutsis, apart from the fact that Hums are traditionally cultivators and Tutsis cattle-keepers. The people of these countries speak the same languages (Kinvarwanda and Kirundi, which overlap by about eighty per cent) and share the same customs and land base, so the Hums and the Tutsis are not tribes, as frequently mislabelled by Western writers, but somewhat physically differenti— ated social groups—loose, fluid castes, really. A Hum originally meant a ser— vant, a Tutsi someone rich and powerful. The Hutu-Tutsi group consciousness was exacerbated by the European colonizers.

     The rest of the passengers were indererminate. Nosewise, heightwise, or any otherwise, it was impossible even for Jean to tell what they were. The population of Burundi is very mixed. But they themselves knew what they were; in this part of the world, one is either a Hum or a Tutsi. The affluliation passes from father to son. This system had resulted in killings by Hums of fellow-Hums with Tutsi mothers whom they happened to resemble, and, the other day, in the killing of a Zairean caddie at the Bujumbura golf course who had made the mistake of going to Kamenge and was taken by the Tutsi soldiers for a Hum.
The road to the province where Jean lived ran almost dead straight for fifty miles. As we left the last of Bujumbura’s suburbs and the gleaming sheet of Lake Tanganyika, we began to pass thorn scrub studded with the cactuslike candelabra of euphorbia trees. Every fifteen minutes, we would come to a roadblock, and a tall, heavily armed soldier, in blue-and-black-spotted fatigues, would come up to the bus and say, “Karangamuntu’ (“Identify yourselves!”), and we would hand him our papers. About halfwav along the journey, a car was on fire in the middle of the road. Sooty flames were shooting thirty feet into the air. A man—a Hum—with a machete waved us onto a muddy track leading into desolate bush. I knew that Hums along this stretch of road had been putting up makeshift barriers, dragging Tutsis out of their vehicles, and hacking them to death with their pangas, or machetes, and that much of the time in recent months it had been unsafe for Jean and his family to travel to Bujumbura. “I don’t like this,” I whispered to Jean. We sat bolt upright in the clammy heat, as the track led to a village, but soon we were safely on the main road again, flying like a bat out of hell. “This little country is terrible,” said Jean, a genial, street-smart student at the University of Bujumbura. “One day it’s cairn, the next you see bodies all over the place. ça vient quandca veut—it has a will of its own.”
 
 

BURUNDI had been in a state of general panic since last October 21st, when Melchior Ndadaye, its first elected President—and, by no coincidence, a Hum—was assassinated by a group of Tutsi junior officers. This had triggered the worst bloodbath since 1972. Hutus in the countryside, egged on by inflammatory broadcasts from Rwanda, had started killing their Tutsi neighbors; then the Army had come in and had killed even more Hutus. Half of the country had been in flames. Observers flying in helicopters over Burundi’s hills reported hundreds of bodies scattered around smoldering huts. On one hill, Hums were slaughtering Tutsis; on the next, it was the other way around. How many were killed? “One cannot know the number,” a provincial governor told me. The government estimated the figure to be between eight and ten thousand, but other estimates ranged from twenty-five thousand to as high as two hundred thousand. The victims were both Tutsi and Hum; most of the eight hundred thousand or so refugees who poured into neighboring Rwanda, Zaire, and Tanzania were Hutu. The Rwagasanas were especially vulnerable, because they were Rwandan Tutsis who had fled during the last big pogrom there, in 1973. The Burundian Hutus usually make a point of going after the Banyarwanda, as these exiles are called, because the Banyarwanda have generally done well for themselves, and because many of their sons are fighting in the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which invaded Rwanda fourvears ago and now controls two-thirds of the country.

     My wife had reached Pascaline by telephone from upstate New York, where we live a few days after President Ndadaves funeral, on December 6th, which had incited a new spasm of butchery. Pascaline told us that since October the family had been sleeping in the bush, under a grass roof spanning two anthills,
because armed Hutus were on the prowl and it was unsafe to stay in the house at night.

    On New Year’s Day, we talked again. The simation hadn’t changed. Pascaline was a strong woman, whose family had already suffered every conceivable horror over the years, but this time she burst into tears. “This may be the last time we will be talking to each other,” she said. “If you can just get the children out and I die, it wouldn’t be so bad.” A few nights later, I was awakened by my wife’s sobbing. “I eat and sleep, eat and sleep, and feel so helpless,” she said. So we decided—my wife, three of her relatives who had already made it to the First World, and I—that I would go alone to Africa and try to get the Rwagasanas visas to America.
By late January, the killing had spread to the capital. Eight of Bujumbura’s eighteen quartiers populaires underwent violent, spontaneous ethnic cleansing. In four, all the Hums were driven out or killed, and their homes were torched with gasoline or blown up with grenades. Now, Jean told me, if a Hutu ventured into one of them, even a taxi-driver with a Tutsi passenger, the cry went up “Bord! Bord!” (quartier slang for “quarry,” or “game”), young Tutsis came running, and the Hum was stoned, beaten, or kicked to death on the spot. The same happened to a Tutsi who entered one of the four recently cleansed Hutulands. “If you get on the wrong bus, c’est fini pour toi,” Jean said. On March 19th, he recalled, he was remrning from a wedding in a bus full of Banyarwanda, and it was stopped by a makeshift barricade and surrounded by a gang of young Hums armed with pangas, knives, and hatchets. This was in the still mixed quartier of Bwiza; the assailants were probably Hutus who had been driven out of the adjacent, now completely Tutsi quartier of Nyakabiga. “They told the driver to let out all the Tutsis,” Jean recalled. “He refused. Then they broke one of the bus windows and started pulling a girl’s hair. Their leader ordered gasoline to be brought, so the bus could be set on fire with us inside. I thought my time had come. But just then a military patrol came by, and they all fled.”
Then, on April 6th, there was a spectacular double assassination in Rwanda, and that country, which had remained calm throughout Burundi’s bloodbath, exploded Rwanda's longtime President Juvenal Habvarimana, and Burundi’s new Presi . Cvprien N taryamira who had just taken twice were returning together in Habvarimana's plane to Kigali Rwanda capital—following a conferencc. in Dares Salaam, Tanzania, on the Certrai Aflican crisis—when the plane was apparently hit by rocket fire. It came down in garden of the Rwandan Presidential palace, and both Presidents were killed. At first, everyone thoughi that the plane bad been shot down by thc insurgent Rwandan Patriotic Front, bui the killers may have been extremists in Habvarimana's own party. Last August, at Arusha Tanzania, Habvarimana had reluctanlty agreed to form a transitional wernment and to integrate his Army  with the R.P.F. Since then, he had been using every delaying tactic in the book to avoid implementing the accords, but in recent weeks it had become clear to eeveryone that he had run out of excuses.

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