Standing behind time’s wishes
by Noel Rooney
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It is 12 years since the Rwandan genocide, 12 years of virtual silence; the world has largely forgotten the terrible series of events which, even at the time, were reported with incomprehension and incredulity. Evil, it seems, had sprung up like a virus, affecting an entire population; then almost as suddenly disappeared, leaving little behind but a vague numerical epitaph for the victims, a whole people.
Among the few observers who pointed out that it had happened before, and more than once, fewer still went beyond the assertion towards an explanation. The fact that few people would spontaneously recall the Rwandan tragedy now is a testament to the insouciance of the western media then and now; and testament too, perhaps, to the western veil (a patently corporate veil) drawn over the most shameful period in African history.
The tragedy of Rwanda was (and is) not the periodic descent into murderous barbarity of a part-time dysfunctional nation, vexed to nightmare by jealousy of their beautiful neighbours; this is merely the myth of the savage tied to a racist aesthetic (which sadly did not stop a considerable number of journalists trotting it out). But the real political reasons for the slaughter were ignored for a different form of politics, a smokescreen with which we are all familiar, and the media are very comfortable. Western reporting at the time was far more concerned with the stunning reluctance of the self-appointed international community to intervene.
The locus of this atrophy was the UN, by most accounts, and the purposeless horse-trade pow-wows which produced nothing. That this is a patently incomplete and dishonest account was of no import; the shadow play at the UN distracted the bulk of the media from reporting on the true situation. As a consequence, the hapless victims and survivors alike receded into a now-sentimentalised/now-demonised twilight, where they have remained. They are as damned as people as they are as data; and our ignorance alone is their ‘strangeness’.
The victims of the massacres associated with the Rwandan civil war and its aftermath number around three million. That is, 40% of the population at the outbreak of hostilities were killed; a considerably larger proportion of the Tutsi population were killed than Hutu, but that is ultimately actuarial (and we have no room here to discuss the effective extermination of the Twa, the forgotten third tribe of Rwanda) in the face of the brute fact that so many were murdered. There is no need for agonising over definitions here, like in the case of Darfur; this is genocide. Those responsible for this appalling slaughter are war criminals, and many of them are still in power, both in Africa and in the west.
Rwanda is an innocent victim (along with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Cote D’Ivoire, Uganda, Liberia, Nigeria, Sudan, Burundi, to name a few) in a proxy war for resources and influence fought between western powers (polities and corporations) over diamonds, coltan, cobalt, oil of course; and a whole host of commodities and resources vital to Africa’s economic and environmental well-being. The US is a prime player in this triagiste great game. France and Belgium are the lingering colonial powers, and thus the ‘enemy’; but most of the major powers are involved in manipulating millions of Africans into killing each other (and in the process starving millions of others, or killing them by exposure to preventable diseases, or ‘merely’ subjecting them to abject, rootless poverty in a devastated environment).
The baleful result of this outside intervention, in the region of Africa often known as ‘the five lakes’, is a succession of wars, conflicts, and massacres which include the specific subject of Jean Hatzfeld’s books. Hatzfeld is only concerned with ‘the’ Rwandan massacre; the attacks, in six dreadful weeks in 1994, by the Hutu majority on the Tutsis, in which 800,000 people, overwhelmingly Tutsi, were killed, most of them hacked to death with machetes. This narrowness of focus is entirely legitimate for, as one reads the testimonies, it becomes apparent that the iconic status of the episode is equally, if differently, mythologized in Rwanda as in the west.
But the broader picture has a bearing on our effort (our moral duty, as Susan Sontag insists in her foreword) to understand what happened in this specific episode of atrocity. This in turn may help us to understand why such industrial-scale slaughter is a salient feature of modern and contemporary culture. Plus there may be some readers who are still under the delusion that the Rwandan genocide was firstly this one episode alone, and secondly an incomprehensible episode of collective madness.
We have a further ticklish problem equating our preferred modes of killing with more physically intimate versions; thus it is easy to see the machete massacres as a primitive or barbaric act. But this was also industrialised killing, simply more labour-intensive. Before his assassination in 1994 (which sparked off the Hutu slaughter of Tutsis) President Habyarimana (presciently?) ordered a consignment of one million machetes. The machetes were paid for out of an IMF loan, through a holding bank in Belgium; it seems the ‘strict guidelines’ covering spending were inadequate in preventing Habyarimana from buying weapons (and not just machetes) in bulk.
Habyarimana’s military build-up was in response to the growing power and success of a Tutsi-led rebel army operating out of Uganda and neighbouring states. It was led by Paul Kagame, a former high-ranking officer in the Ugandan army, under the regime of Yoweri Museveni. This is not Kagame’s only connection with Museveni; along with John Garang, the rebel leader in southern Sudan, they have some interesting congruencies on their CVs. All were educated and militarily trained in the US (at the same military academy, in fact), and all have come to power and prominence during the US focus on its interests in Africa.
Unsurprisingly, all are still supported, openly or otherwise, by the US; and all reciprocate by carrying out US policy by franchise in the region, which seems mainly to involve continual conflict. Kagame and his army are popularly credited with stopping the massacres, and certainly the killing stopped soon after Kagame had assumed power. On the other hand, it was in all probability Kagame who ordered the missile attack on Habyarimana’s plane, which triggered the slaughter in the first place.
There is a current of thought among African commentators that the west, and the US in particular, is operating a policy aimed at keeping Africa in a state of de-population, starvation and strife. Some think that total de-population is the eventual aim. All the loans and debt ‘relief’ and aid are employed to this end. As crazy as it sounds at first reading, the argument is eerily plausible. Certainly we are at best failing Africa miserably, and the outcomes are palpable.
If the Rwandan genocide is not the epitome of this supposed policy, it is a monstrous epiphany of it. The scale of the killing, in such a short time, and the number of people involved in killing their neighbours, is breath-taking. The speed with which an explicable atrocity was reduced to a fetishised icon of strangeness is a tribute to the warp speed of media miasma. And the scars left by a tragedy incidental to the core business of the people who contrived it will endure well beyond the shelf life of the idiot economics driving Africa’s destruction.
Jean Hatzfeld has listened to the stories, the testimonies, of both the killers and the survivors of the six weeks of carnage in 1994. Properly speaking, no one else from outside Rwanda has ever done so. He describes his interviewees briefly, but mostly leaves it to them to tell their tales. Incidentally (for Hatzfeld, but not for poor Rwanda), his interviews are an archive of a disappearing language: Rwandan French, a biblically beautiful dialect, is being replaced brusquely by English at all levels.
The obvious polarities between the two groups involved are exaggerated a little by force of circumstances; the only killers Hatzfeld can get access to are a group of friends in a prison camp, while the survivors he finds are more often lone and lonely figures. But this only enhances the resonance of the testimonies. The two worlds are intimate at only one point; where they are joined across the terrible bridge of the machete, briefly, brutally.
There is a common legendary framework for the two sets of narratives. There is the pregnant time between the death of the last Tutsi monarch, or Mwami, and the downing of Habyarimana’s plane. There is the brief period, a few days, while preparations are made for the slaughter. Then there is the time of cutting, as it is constantly described.
Then time splits: for the Tutsis, a surreal rescue by the Inkotanyi, the invincibles, Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front, and an even more surreal transition back to living beside the same neighbours whose sons had murdered five out of six Tutsis in the region; for the killers, and for Hutus in general, a time of panic, fleeing through the jungle to neighbouring countries, there to be slaughtered, or starve, or face capture and trial, followed by (effectively) mass pardons, and an equally surreal return to living near the people whose families they had resolutely slaughtered.
The survivors lived in hell for six weeks, and it appears they must live in purgatory for the rest of their lives. Their stories are told without hope, in the main, and universally without ego. As one survivor puts it, they ‘are in the why of it’. The voices in this volume are dispassionate, and distrustful of everything.
The story they tell is grimly consistent. The details of atrocities are germane only for the survivors; they are analogous to pornography for the rest of us. Hatzfeld does not dwell on physical details, but then the victims do not do so either, at least not with outsiders; with other survivors, they can sometimes express the exact images engraved in them. They lived, hiding for the most part in swamps, waiting for death, watching neighbours, friends and family succumb to the blade.
They all have an air of resigned puzzlement about them, as if they realise that the questions they have will never be answered. The lacuna where resolution ought to be has become an arcane, mystical form of nihilism, devoid of harm because harm, like all other motivations toward others, has been drained out of them in the swamps. So when they do express their resentment at the event itself, the perpetrators, and the lack of justice which followed, the resentment seems oblique. I was reminded, in a curious way, of the people who Oliver Sacks describes, as they woke from sleeping sickness; except these people are neither awake nor asleep.
The killers have other points of reluctance; describing the process of killing is not one of them. All talk as if they took pride in a job well done, and were conscientious killers in the way they had been conscientious farmers before. They are as uncomprehending of their victims as their victims are of them – more so in fact. Although each of them at some point expresses remorse, and acknowledges the scale of his crimes, none sound convincing. It is painfully clear that the period of slaughter was the most intensively lived period of each man’s life.
The fear which haunts all of these men is of course fear of retribution; at the same time, the killers seems confident that retribution is unlikely in the current circumstances, and history looks like bearing them out. They have more expectations of life returning to normal; that is, they bizarrely expect to see a time when they get on with the neighbours they tried to exterminate.
None of the testimonies, from either side of the genocidal divide, suggest that the population of Rwanda are any more informed about the wider circumstances of their collective tragedy than we are. At first, I found this surprising and nettling. Later it occurred to me that I was asking the wrong people for an explanation. At the long wrong end of a telescope of isolation upon isolation, the forgotten people of Rwanda live only with the past, and with each other. What else can they do?
