Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (6 page)

These colonial fantasies soon became engraved on the consciousness of the colonized, as well. The Tutsi elite, long favored under the Belgians, seized on the myths to justify their continued superiority, imbibing the stereotypes of Hutu—as espoused by a Belgian priest—as “the most common type of black, brachycephalic and prognathous, with agronomic taste and aptitudes, sociable and jovial ... with thick lips and squashed noses, but so good, so simple, so loyal .”
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Hutu dissidents, in the meantime, appropriated the stereotypes of Tutsi as a race of crafty herders from Ethiopia to rally support against “the foreigners.”

Where loyalty and power stirred General Rwarakabije, the masses were moved more by fear, ideology, and local politics. In the popular imagination, the RPF had been cast as subhuman, as demons. By the time the genocide began, the civil war had been raging for almost four years. Over a million people, mostly Hutu, had been displaced from the north of the country, and many of them had moved toward Kigali, where they spread the word of the rebels’ abuses. Hutu extremists preyed on this paranoia in their radio broadcasts. A Tutsi officer, having seized a village, was asked by one of the few Hutu who had stayed to lift up his shirt so the villagers could see if he had a tail, so sure were they that he was a devil.
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Even the sick and frail marched hundreds of miles to the border to escape the sure death they thought awaited them under the RPF. In the camps, refugees’ reluctance to return came at least as much from their fear of the RPF. The intimidation had become internalized.

Recent studies of the genocide have also revealed the importance of local politics in determining whether an area carried out genocide or not. Seasonal laborers and the landless, for example, were more likely to be manipulated by rural elites who stood to lose if the Hutu regime lost power.
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The local strength of more extremist political parties reinforced pressure to carry out killings, as did the presence of Burundian Hutu refugees who had fled violence in their home country. In total, some 200,000 probably took part in the killing for many reasons:
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Some were forced to do so by authorities; others sought economic gain; still others participated out of a mixture of social pressure and the belief that they would be killed themselves if they did not comply.
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In southwestern Rwanda, the Hutu flight was stalled by the deployment of a UN-mandated French military mission, dubbed Operation Turquoise, intended to protect the few remaining Tutsi in that region as well as aid workers. It was one of the many absurdities of the Rwandan crisis: The French government and its contractors had made thirty-six shipments of weapons to Habyarimana’s government between 1990 and 1994, worth $11 million, and had deployed seven hundred fifty French troops, who helped with military training, planning, and even interrogation of RPF prisoners.
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Just months after they had finished helping to train the Interahamwe, the French, wolves turned shepherds, announced a humanitarian intervention to bring an end to the killing.

The French troops did save Tutsi lives. They also, however, refused to arrest the Habyarimana government and army officials in their territory who were known to have organized massacres. Hate radio continued broadcasting unhindered from the area controlled by the French, exhorting the population to continue the extermination of Tutsi. Meanwhile, across the Zairian border in Goma, the base of French operations, at least five shipments of weapons from France were delivered to the ex-FAR leadership who had fled from Kigali.
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To add insult to injury, French president François Mitterrand personally authorized a donation of $40,000 to Habyarimana’s wife, one of the most extremist members of the president’s inner circle, when she arrived in Paris fleeing the violence in country. The donation was labeled as “urgent assistance to Rwandan refugees.”
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When Rwarakabije crossed into Zaire and arrived in Goma in July 1994, he spent a few days wandering about, disoriented and deflated. Goma, a town of 300,000, was inundated with goats, cars, and a teeming mass of people that surged in various directions, confused, without bearings. Rwarakabije had arrived in a truck with fellow officers, but everybody had dispersed to tend to their families. He finally managed to rent a house on the edge of town from a traditional chief for his wife and four children. Like all officers, he had benefited from the looting of state coffers before leaving Rwanda. They needed the extra cash, as the influx of refugees had sent prices in the markets skyrocketing. A kilo of meat was almost $10, five times the normal price.

Whereas the price of food had peaked, the value of weapons and ammunition had plummeted because of their abundance. At the border crossing, within sight of French troops, the fleeing Rwandan soldiers were supposed to give their weapons over to Mobutu’s presidential guard. Machine guns and rocket launchers piled up.

Behind the customs offices, however, an arms market had spontaneously sprung up, where ex-FAR officers negotiated to buy back their arms. An AK-47 went for $40 to $50, a Russian-made rocket launcher for just under $100. Other weapons were never handed over to the Zairians. Rwarakabije saw tons of ammunition smuggled through in trucks, hidden under bags of rice and maize. “We gave the border guards some money to look the other way. All they wanted was money.”

Located on the northern tip of Lake Kivu, which forms most of the border between the Congo and Rwanda, and underneath the towering Nyiragongo volcano, Goma had been a prime tourist destination in its heyday. The local Belgian elite, Mobutu’s coterie, and adventurous backpackers filled its colonial-style hotels, which featured ceramic tiling, whitewashed exteriors, and lush, manicured gardens. The fertile hinterlands had provided a cheap supply of vegetables—including such Belgian favorites as broccoli, sweet peas, and leeks—and the dairies created by Belgian priests had produced famous cheese rounds that were exported throughout the region. Travel agencies had organized guided tours to Virunga National Park to the north, habitat of the rare mountain gorilla. A beer and soft drinks factory just across the border in Rwanda kept the numerous bars and nightclubs supplied with a steady stream of lager, Coke, and Fanta.

The decay of the Zairian state and the influx of refugees drew a somber curtain over those days. Now the hotels hosted guests of a different caliber. The defeated Rwandan army commanders and politicians began checking into Hotel des Grands Lacs and Nyiragongo, Karibu, and Stella hotels and renting sumptuous villas on the lake. Journalists, fresh from the death-strewn camps, sat with politicians and army officers in their mansions on fake leather couches behind bougainvillea-draped walls.

After several months of confusion, Rwarakabije attended a meeting of the former Rwandan army’s top brass in a Pentecostal church in Goma. Sitting with him in the church’s sacristy, under a large cross, were the dour faces of his remaining army staff. Morale had hit rock bottom. Most of the officers present had evacuated their families on chartered flights to Nairobi, Yaounde (Cameroon), and Paris. “We had lost the war,” Rwarakabije remembered. “Anyone who had enough money eventually left.” Rwarakabije himself was not so fortunate.

The exiled war council took urgent measures. It swiftly reorganized the armed forces into two divisions of 7,680 and 10,240 men, based in camps on the northern and southern end of Lake Kivu, respectively. Support units of 4,000 soldiers pushed their total to 22,000 soldiers. Rwarakabije became the commander of the several thousand soldiers who made up the Fourth Brigade.

The quality of the soldiers varied. The officers came from regular army units, and many had trained in Belgium and France; they set up rigid administrative structures with carefully typed budgets and circulars. But some troops had no military experience. Hundreds of prisoners were recruited; since they were among the only people who benefited from the mayhem, they tended to have high morale. Primary and secondary students, some as young as nine, were coaxed and coerced into training camps, forming the Twenty-Sixth Reserve Brigade.

When I prodded Rwarakabije about the feared Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militias, who had carried out much of the genocidal killing, he scoffed, deriding their lack of discipline. “They drugged themselves on marijuana and cheap liquor, robbed the population. They were thugs,” he remembered. “Many of them eliminated themselves in the war. They would stagger onto the battlefield like zombies, high and drunk, and get picked off by the enemy.” For him, there was a world of difference between the FAR’s discipline and objective of overthrowing the new government in Rwanda and the Interahamwe’s ethnic vendetta.

To raise spirits, the war council authorized the immediate payment of June and July salaries for all state employees and soldiers. They had brought with them the entire treasury of Rwanda, $30–40 million in Rwandan francs, which they stashed in a bank in downtown Goma. According to some reports, they were able to transfer over $100 million dollars in the early days of the genocide into private accounts; they had just collected the yearly taxes, and the coffers were flush with money.
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Most importantly, the commanders agreed on immediately launching guerrilla warfare against the new regime in Kigali. The expectations of the population were now especially palpable—the hopes of a million people, who were dying slow deaths in the camps, weighed on them. Since the Tutsi forces were known as
inyenzi
, or cockroaches, this offensive was dubbed Operation Insecticide.

Rwarakabije found pleasure, perhaps solace, in reciting troop strengths, names of commanding officers, and dates of battles, but he was reluctant to talk about the more human side of history: feelings, motivations, morality. The tragedy of the past decade was reduced to desiccated statistics.