“No,” he said. “A former President.”

     “The biggest mistake is to draw parallels with Rwanda,” Bagaza cautioned, and he gave me his spin on the HutuTutsi conflict. “Our internal politics are very different. Our kingdom was much more egalitarian. We had many more Hutu chiefs and, later, during the colonial period, ministers and generals.

      The relationship between the two ethnic groups was not one of domination so much as one of trade between professional categories—pastoralists and agricultur— ists. But the colonial system always developed an intermediate class between the Europeans and the masses, and in both Rwanda and Burundi the Belgians made the Tutsis their intermediaries. The Tutsis were brought closer to modern life than the others. But on the eve of independence the elites of both countries adopted the anti-European rhetoric of African nationalism, and the Belgians turned on them. In Rwanda, radical Belgian priests helped the Hutus found PARMEHUTU, the Party for the Emancipation of the Hums, which overthrew the Tutsis. The Tutsis of Burundi saw what could happen to them, and they gradually took complete control of the government and the Army. In 1965, some Hum officers who felt oppressed by the reactionary King Mwambutsa and by the Tutsi high command attempted a coup, which led to the first massacre of Tutsis and then the repression of Hum political leaders who had been inciting the masses. Everything started there.”
       But if the polarization of the ethnic groups had been created largely by the party politics at independence, by “leaders who exploited passions to rise and gain power,” today’s ethnic conflict, he agreed, had become something personal in each family. (A woman who spent two years in Burundi with the Peace Corps told me,  “There is a hatred deep in the bones of these people that you and I will never understand. The rivers have run red too many times.”)

     “How do you end the cycles of vengeance?” I asked Bagaza. In Jean’s words, how do you “deracinate the mentality that someone who doesn’t mind the Tutsis is an enemy of the Hums,” and vice versa? How do you get people to see that they best honor their dead not by avenging them but by dedicating themselves to healing the social psychosis that started the killing?

     “There must be a big conference between the Hums and the Tutsis to study the problem of coexistence,” Bagaza said. ‘We must look for the solution within ourselves, and study the old ways when we coexisted harmoniously. No one can help us.”

     An African diplomat I spoke to in Bujumbura was in near-agreement, saying, “Burundi doesn’t need a thousand casques bleus”—United Nations peacekeeping troops, which the Hum-dominated, nominally governing party had been asking for to protect it from the Army. “What it needs is a thousand psychiatrists.”
Others maintained that the basic problem in Central Africa is not ethnic, but lapolitique du ventre—the politics of scarcity. Because these countries are so poor, the state is the only game in town; the only way to make something of oneself is to use a government post for personal gain. This was why the Burundian Tutsis were so reluctant to share their power and privileges with the Hutu majority, and it was the root cause of the apocalypse in Rwanda.

     That evening, Jean stopped by my hotel again: the children’s passports still weren’t ready. Nothing could be done over the weekend, and on Monday morning we still didn’t have them. That was the last day I could go with the Rwagasanas to the Embassy, because I was flying to Uganda that afternoon.

     WHEN I reached Kampala, the full horror of what had happened in Rwanda was just unfolding. The original figure for the number ofTutsis who had been hacked to death with pangas, blown up with grenades, and mowed down with Kalashnikovs—a hundred thousand—was “too optimistic,” a B anyarwanda intellectual living in Kampala told me. “That is only the number of those killed in Kigali.”
According to Human Rights Watch! Africa, there were one million one hundred thousand Tutsis in Rwanda before April 7th. Others estimate the number at seven hundred thousand, but no one really knows how many there were then, or how many there are now. Many Tutsis concealed their ethnicity, and the proportion of fifteen per cent that one keeps hearing for the Tutsis in both countries (which does not take into consideration the many mixed marriages) is an estimate dating from colonial times.

      The highest concentration was in the western province of Kibuye,” my informant went on. "I wonder if there is a single Tutsi left in Rwanda except in the part held by the R.P.F. Only those who managed to flee the country survived, and I doubt if they number more than fifty thousand. All the exits had been sealed. Rwanda is a small country and is easily administered if you are planning to commit genocide. The west is blocked by Lake Kivu, and those who tried to escape into Zaire and Tanzania found the borders closed. Payments seem to have been made to the governors of the adjacent provinces not to let any Tutsis in.” The borders were later opened for hundreds of thousands of Hutus, fleeing in terror of R.P.F. reprisals which turned out to be unfounded), in what the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees described as “the largest and fastest” mass exodus ever seen. Tens of thousands of Tutsis in Kigali fled south, hoping to escape to Burundi, but they never reached the border. It now looks as if tens of thousands may still be alive in Rwanda, trapped in seminaries and stadiums, like the thirtyeight thousand refugees— most of them Tutsi— on June 2nd by the R.P.F. from the Catholic compound at Kabgayi.

     The papers in Africa and abroad were full of grisly details. A man was heard crying weakly for water, water” and was pulled out of a pit where he had spent four days among hundreds of corpses. A baby was found still alive at her dead mother’s breast. Bleached, bloated, mutiErred bodies floated by on the Kazera River, which describes the Rwanda Tanzania border, at the rate of one every five minutes. Thousands of corpses washed into Lake Victoria, two thousand or so at the fishing village of Kasensero, in Uganda. According to a Ugandan official, the people who buried the first few bodies have become “mentally deranged.” At a hospital in Butare, Rwanda’s second-largest city, a hundred and seventy staff members and patients were killed by interahamwe in front of foreign doctors. Throughout the country, the panga was the murder weapon of choice, but screwdrivers, saws, hammers, and hatchets were also used. A full panga job took about twenty minutes. First the hands were chopped off, then deep gashes were scored in the back, and finally the head was whacked. If you preferred a quick death, by a bullet, you had to pay for it. The going rate was five thousand Rwandan francs, or about thirty-five dollars. The “tribal” identity card, introduced by the Belgians and supposed to have been phased out in 1991, was useful for telling who was who, There is video footage of interahamwe stopping citizens on a road, checking their identity cards, and executing those who were Tutsis on the spot. Grenades and other weapons had been distributed to the Hutus in each commune, and each person knew which Tutsis he had to kill. Immediately after Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, the radical Hutu Radio des Mule Collines (which in October had urged the Hutus of Burundi to avenge President Ndadaye’s assassination) began to call on the Hutus of Rwanda to take revenge on the Tutsi assassins of their beloved leader (who had probably been killed by Hutu extremists like themselves) and on all Tutsi sympathizers. “When you are killing the wives, don’t spare those who are pregnant,” the station urged. “The mistake we made in 1959 was not to kill the children. Now they have come back to fight us.” Among the most common massacre sites were the churches, in which the Tutsis tried to take sanctuary. 
On May 24th, at a meeting in Geneva of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, our State Department belatedly issued a statement saying, “We feel strongly that acts of genocide have been committed.”

     MY wife begged me over the phone not to go to Rwanda. She said her mother, in Kampala, had talked to a soothsayer, and the soothsayer had told her that if I went to Rwanda I would be killed. But I did go, with two of my wife’s nieces, Claudar and Igisetsa, each of whom had a brother in the R.P.F. Having been born in Ugandan refugee camps, neither had ever been to Rwanda. We took a bus to the city of Kabale, in the southwestern corner of Uganda, and hired a taxi to take us over the Rwanda border to the R.P.F.’s headquarters, in Mulindi. “Our land. Our promised land,” seventeen-year-old Claudar said in awe as we drove through a hauntingly beautiful hut eerily empty landscape of luminous green hills and lush valley doors. The entire population had tied: terraced hillsides were reverting to the wild: the tea plantations in the val1ev had been let go. and their unkempt hushes were twice their usual height. "Our country. twenty-three-year-old Igistsa sighed. “So quiet.” Glossy ibises and dusky, primitive-looking hammerkops. with swept-back crests and stout hills, probed in mudfiats. We passed through the commune of Mukaranje, where my father-in-law had been an umutware, or subchief, under the Belgians. He had been imprisoned in 1959, but his sans had busted him out with the help of his Hum servants, and they had all tied Uganda.

    We pulled into Mulindi and greeted the R.P.F. soldiers, who wore green camoufiage uniforms, black Welling-tons, and berets, and looked less like brutat soldiers than like sensitive intellectuals. which some of them were. The R.P.F. was basically ten thousand Tutsi exiles whom nobody had given the time of day to for thirty years and who, in 1990, decided to claim the right to return to their homeland—to have a country—in much the same spirit as that of the Jews who created Israel. Half of them, it seemed, were my wife’s relatives, among them my best man and the Rwagasanas’ oldest son, of whom we had had no news. The R.P.F. was in the best position, as far as I could see, to set things right in Central Africa. They were disciplined, and their ideology was sound: what they wanted was a Rwanda in which all citizens—Hutus, Tutsis, and Twa (Pygmies, who account for something like one per cent of the population)— had the same rights. They were not a Tutsi supremacist movement; more than a third of them were Hutus. The sad thing, I observed to a young lieutenant, was that more Tutsis had probably just been killed in Rwanda than were ever going to be repatriated. The R.P.F.’s military and political success had precipitated the genocide—just as, in the sixties, the government had slaughtered Tutsi civilians after offensives by an earlier rebel group, the Inyenzi, or Cockroaches. ‘We can’t stop fighting because people are being killed,” the lieutenant said grimly. “It makes you want to finish the job.”

     Many people, including a growing segment of the international community, felt that the R.P.F. should be allowed to finish taking over Rwanda without outside interference. There was a lot of bitterness in the R.P.F., because the United Nations peacekeeping troops who were already in Rwanda td enforce the ceasefire signed at Arusha hadn’t done anything to stop the massacres, and now United Nations Secretary-General Boutros BoutrosGhali wanted to send fifty-five hundred more troops. “Who needs them now?” the lieutenant asked. “Who is it they are going to protect? The assassins and the cadavers?”

   We spent two days at Mulindi, stranded by torrential rain. I asked Wilson Rutayisire, the R.P.F.’s commissioner of information, how the R.P.F. planned to run the conntry since all the ninderate Hutus it could have worked with had been killed, and so many machete-wielding crazies were still at large. Were there any plans to politicize the extremist Tutsis in Burundi?

     “That’s not our responsibility,” he said. “Our efforts now are devoted to the problems of genocide, lawlessness, ending the war, and grappling with relief and casualties. About the future we can only say that we will put in a broad-based arrangement that will maintain the spirit of the Arusha accords, whose modalities will be worked out.”

     “What are you going to do with the interahamwe?”
     “They will be brought to justice— tried and sent to prison.” There have been some summary executions, but, he emphasized, “our men are under strict orders not to engage in any revenge killing, especially of Hum civilians.”
 

click here to read the next page