Appointment With Genocide

By AM Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Share Tweet Share Share Email

Some years ago in Belfast I farmed out Philip Gourevitch’s seminal book on the Rwandan genocide, with its most unwieldy title, to a friend. On returning it he seemed uneasy about it, explaining that it was a harrowing read. One scene which he described was so graphic it left me apprehensive about reading the book now unsafely back in my possession. A delayed action mechanism seemed to kick in and I postponed reading it. That went on for a few years.

I had been through films and other books on this particular holocaust including factual works by Linda Melvern, Fergal Keane and Romeo Dalliare as well as Gil Countermarche’s brilliant novel, A Sunday By the Pool in Kigali, before tackling Gourevitch. To my dismay, in my reading experience there is no book so far encountered about the horrors of Rwanda that makes for easy reading. As Publishers Weekly asked about this one ‘who will read such a ghastly chronicle?' Each book, in their own way, narrates a story, to use a well clichéd term, of man’s inhumanity to man.

In Germany’s Willing Executioners Daniel Goldhagen sought to implicate the entire German people in the genocide against the Jews. He managed it much less successfully than Gourevitch did with his treatment of Rwanda. There, responsibility seemed much more collective, there were more people involved and not merely the Rwandan equivalent of the SS, even if the murderous Interhamwe were content to function with as much energy if less cohesion than Himmler’s Schutzstaffel.

A few lines into his book Gourevitch warns his reader that ‘it was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’ All of it carried out to advance the agenda of Hutu Power. The genocide was of course prosecuted without the technology that went with those bombs. The rich nations commit hi-tech mass slaughter while the poor do it with machetes. The thought struck me that maybe Rwanda was less brutal in its holocaust than the US had been in 1945 when it rained death from the skies upon numerous Japanese civilians. In Rwanda the killing was face to face. Most people died in the first encounter and whatever ‘stragglers’ were left to agonisingly expire from, it was not the effects of radiation.

The history of Rwanda has been well documented elsewhere and is straightforward enough. The Belgians and the Catholic hierarchy between them ran the country for decades. Belgium introduced a rigid but false ethnicity of Hutu and Tutsi. Still, it was not until 1959 that real tension between the two groups took place. By the time of the genocide in 1994 Rwanda was a totalitarian society with the sinister akazu functioning as the strategic intelligence driving the totalitarianism of Hutu Power. Its management lay in the hands of the wife of the country’s Hutu president and her brothers. Gourevitch had his own particular description for her: ‘the Lady Macbeth of the Rwandan genocide.’ After the Arusha Accords were signed in 1993 and a power sharing arrangement devised, Hutu Power accused President Habyarimana of treason despite the presence of his fingerprints all over the genocide plan. When his plane was brought down by a rocket as it was descending into Kigali Airport it was the signal the genocidaires had been waiting for. The murders of Tutsis and Hutu moderates began immediately.

Gourevitch seeks primarily to have people talk. But his is not a neutral observation. He comes down firmly on the side of the brilliant Tutsi general and current Rwandan leader Paul Kagame. And some of those voices reveal so much. A survivor spoke of how Tutsis were psychologically conditioned for death:

When you’re that resigned and oppressed you are already dead. It shows the genocide was prepared for too long. I detest this fear. These victims of genocide had been psychologically prepared to expect death just for being Tutsi. They were killed for so long that they were already dead.

The army, police and organised death squads all played a methodical role. The men of god were up to their necks in it too. Rwanda was the most Catholicised country in Africa. 65 per cent of Rwandans were Catholics, 15 per cent Protestant. ‘Appearances’ of the virgin Mary were interpreted as urging genocide. Many clerics organised the mass murders. Others died defending their flocks. Seven Tutsi pastors worked to protect their congregation. They prayed to their god who duly ignored them and abandoned them to their fate at the hands of their fellow Christian. It is a letter written by one of them from which the book takes its name, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with out families. Pastor Ntakirutimana announced to them ‘you must be eliminated. God no longer wants you.’ This monstrous man of god would later tell Gourevtich ‘I think I am closer to God than I have ever been in my life.’ I am sure he was. The infamous killer priest Father Wenceslas has received the backing of the Catholic Church. Bishop Misago the most senior member of the Church to be charged was eventually acquitted after pressure from the Vatican and letters to the court from the then pope, leaving survivors furious. Numerous nuns, priest and members of holy orders were through the jails for their role in butchering their neighbours. The sole community credited by one Christian leader with behaving quite well during the genocide was the Muslim. As a group it played no part in the genocide while the Christians slaughtered all round them. Its members tried to save the lives of Tutsis. So much for the evils of Islam that the decent Christian gentlemen of the West so insist upon being rooted out.

In a country where genocide was not regarded as a crime but the law of the land, five and a half lives were snuffed out every minute. Pygmies were on occasion used by the Hutu killers to rape Tutsi women, just to add an extra degree of humiliation to the victims before the machetes bore down on them to end their lives. ‘Doctors killed their patients and schoolteachers killed their pupils.’ Dante would have had difficulty conceiving it.

Despite the attempts of UN commander in Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire to alert the UN of what was about to come he was ignored. The UN deserted the victims. Dalliare said with 5000 men he could halt the genocide but his pleas went unheard. Gourevitch comments acerbically:

Rwanda had presented the world with the mot unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler’s war against the Jews, and the world sent blankets beans and bandages to camps controlled by the killers apparently hoping that everybody would behave nicer in the future.

Those so intent on bombing Libya today were conspicuously less committed to a humanitarian strike when the case for it could be made with greater effect than it could against the Gadaffi regime. The role of the French under Mitterand was disgraceful. Throughout the genocide France supplied the Génocidaire with weapons. When in the early 1990s it was clear that Hutu Power was carrying out ‘dress rehearsals’ for what Hutus called the ‘final solution’ the French along with Egypt and apartheid South Africa maintained the shipments. ‘From the moment they arrived and wherever they went the French forces supported and preserved the same local political leaders who had presided over the genocide.’

While President Sarkosy of France may today claim ‘a form of blindness when we failed to discern the genocidal dimension’ it grates that he can currently lead the bombing of Libya when his country’s recent history is one of conspiring with Hutu Power while strenuously working to depict the genocide as an act of anger: Rwandans were just killing Rwandans as they were inclined to do. Mitterand would say ‘in such countries genocide is not too important.’ Not even to those on the receiving end it seems.

Despite it being worst act of genocide since World War 2, there is no instantly recognisable face to put on it. That might help explain why ‘something immense happened, then vanished from our consciousness’ as Gourevitch told the Economist in 2010. It has become an amorphous black mass, reinforcing the myth that it is tribe against tribe and hardly the white man’s burden. No Hitler, no Milosevic, no Cromwell. Yet it was as well coordinated as anything the aforementioned triumvirate of butchers put its hand to. Theoneste Bagosora the prime mover is hardly a name that will register in many minds. And in this work Gourevitch does little to bring him to the fore, preferring to spend more time profiling Paul Kagame. How many biographies have appeared about this vile individual?

It is where Gourevtich seeks to endorse Kagame that he introduces a disquieting theme into his critique. He is critical of the human rights perspective that blaming all sides equally for atrocities may not be as sound a judgement as applying political judgement. This has added wind to the sails of those writers termed ‘genocide deniers’ such as Barrie Collins, whose questioning of the genocide narrative is facilitated by a failure to address the crimes of the Kagame led forces: ‘by seizing power, the RPF put an end to the militias’ killings of Tutsis, but they did not put an end to their own killings.’ Yet it is not merely genocide deniers who question the narrative of the Kagame regime. Four former senior members of the Kagame regime in a document called ‘Rwanda Briefing’ made the following damning indictment. Rwanda it boldly stated:

is a one-party authoritarian state, controlled by President Kagame through a small clique of Tutsi military officers and civilian cadres of the RPF from behind the scenes. The majority Hutu community remains excluded from a meaningful share of political power. State institutions are as effective as they are repressive. The government relies on severe repression to maintain its hold on power … Rwanda is less free today than it was prior to the genocide. There is less room for political participation than there was in 1994. Civil society is less free and effective. The media is less free. The Rwanda government is more repressive than the one that it overthrew.

This poses a challenge to the Gourevtich account because it seems likely that once the lopsided handling of human rights becomes entrenched a situation would develop where only some humans would have rights. A special brand of human would have emerge who would have more rights than anybody else. One outcome would surely flow from that. While there is probably not enough probing of Kagame’s role in this work Gourevtich was writing at a time when it was much harder to be definitive. Work since published has helped add the mosaic of complexity to an otherwise black and white board.

The planned genocide, which did happen and which can only be denied with the same power of logic that denies gravity, took place almost two decades ago. This book was published four years after it, but it continues to hold its own in terms of conveying horror. The Economist claims that it is taught in universities and remains a steady seller in Africa.

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. By Philip Gourevitch. Picador 1998