SEASON OF BLOOD

Fergal Keane OBE is one of the BBC's most distinguished correspondents, having worked for the corporation in Northern Ireland, South Africa, Asia and the Balkans. He has been awarded a BAFTA and has been named reporter of the year on television and radio, winning honours from the Royal Television Society and the Sony Radio Awards. He has also been named Reporter of the Year in the Amnesty International Press Awards and won the James Cameron Prize and the Edward R. Murrow Award from the US Overseas Press Association. His other books include The Bondage of Fear, Letters Home, Letter to Daniel and A Stranger's Eye. Season of Blood won the 1995 Orwell Prize.

Fergal Keane was born in London and educated in Ireland, where he keeps a small cottage on the south-east coast.

SEASON OF BLOOD

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The acknowledgements on pp. xi–xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page

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When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out, ‘stop!’

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible.

When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

– BERTOLT BRECHT

The grave is only half full. Who will help us fill it?

– RADIO MILLE COLLINES, Rwanda, April 1994

Acknowledgements

I found this a difficult book to write and am indebted to several people whose kindness and advice helped to make the task easier. First and foremost a thank-you to my wife, Anne, whose support and understanding was my mainstay. While the book is my own story, the Rwandan journey was, of course, a team effort. I am for ever grateful to my colleagues and travelling partners David Harrison, Glenn Middleton, Rizu Hamid and Hamilton Wende. They were good friends and total professionals. My thanks also to Chris Wyld at the BBC for suggesting that I go to Rwanda. Also to Vin Ray, Chris Cramer, Glenwyn Benson and Tim Gardam.

At the Panorama office in London, Lucy Crowe, Jim Baker, Faith Nyindeba and Ali Yusuf Mugenzi worked against the odds to ensure that our film on the genocide was edited and broadcast in record time. Thank you to Julia Bourhill in Johannesburg for making the all important travel arrangements.

I am also deeply grateful for the advice and information provided by African Rights, whose report on the Rwandan genocide is the most comprehensive account yet written. It provided invaluable source material on the roots of the genocide. Also to Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who have produced informative and insightful reports. In Rwanda, Lt Frank Ndore, information officer of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), was open-minded and helpful, and never sought to interfere with our journalistic freedom. Major Guy Plante of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) did his utmost to provide help and information.

Mark Doyle of the BBC and Aidan Hartley of Reuters were always kind and helpful in Kigali, my thanks to them both. Among other journalists whose work proved an inspiration were Chris McGreal of the Guardian, Mark Huband of the Observer, Sam Kiley of The Times and Robert Bloch of the Independent. My friend Eric Ransdell, of US News and World Report Magazine, provided vital advice on the ‘do's and don'ts’ of reporting in Rwanda. To Tony Lacey and Donna Poppy at Viking, the usual, eternal thanks for wise advice and patience. Similar thanks to my agent Gill Coleridge, whose timely faxes ensured I finished the book.

My greatest debt, however, is to the survivors of the genocide. They gave me their time and their stories, and I am humbled by the recollection of their quiet dignity in the face of appalling suffering. I will never forget them.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reproduce extracts from the following copyright works: to Reed Consumer Books for Poems 1913–1956 by Bertolt Brecht, translated by John Willett, published by Methuen London; to African Rights for Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, published by African Rights; to A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Michael Yeats for ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ by W. B. Yeats, first published in Poetry in November 1919, and included in Michael Robartes and the Dancer in 1921.

I do not know what dreams ask of us, what they come to collect. But they have come again and again recently, and I have no answers. I thought that after the bad nights of last summer the dead had abandoned me, had mouldered into memory. But the brothers and sisters, the mothers and fathers and children, all the great wailing families of the night are back, holding fast with their withering hands, demanding my attention. Understand first that I do not want your sympathy. The dreams are part of the baggage on this journey. I understood that from the outset. After all, four years in the South African townships had shown me something of the dark side, and I made the choice to go to Rwanda. Nobody forced or pressurized me. So when I tell you about the nights of dread, understand that they are only part of the big picture, the first step backward into the story of a journey that happened a year ago. So much for explanations.

Let me tell you about the dream that comes back again and again, the ‘big bad one’, as I have started to call it. I am asleep and become aware of hands creeping up and down my body. They prod and probe until I am awake, and in a startled moment I realize that I am lying at the bottom of a pile of rotting corpses. But they are moving, like a mound of eels at the fishmarket, or like snakes, things that slip and slither. I am being passed up through the layers of the moving dead. That is why the hands are touching me, pulling and pushing me up to the top. But I do not want to go to the top. Because up there is a man with a machete. He is looking for me. He has spent all day looking for me and is sure that I am hiding in the pile of bodies. The corpses are intent on betraying me and I am paralysed with fear. There is nothing I can do; I am helplessly pushed up through the smell of the dead towards the sunlight, where a man is waiting to kill me. I thought I had survived. I thought I had made it through, that the killers had passed me by and gone on to another village. But Christ forgive the dead, they have called the knifeman back. ‘One of us still lives,’ they cry. ‘One of us still lives.’ And now, any second now, I am going to be delivered to the top of the pile, where a man with bloody eyes and beer on his breath will sweep me away. If I am lucky the blow will cut my skull in two, massive brain damage, instant death. If not, I will linger, moaning and gasping with thirst, breathing the last rotten breaths of life until death comes as a sweet mercy. As I am about to be handed up, I wake out of the dream, bolt upright, feeling the pillow wet, my t-shirt sodden, and the darkness close and warm.

I am not the only one who is troubled at night. Many of my friends who went to Rwanda speak of dreams in which the dead visit them. I know a few who say they can detach, separate it out from their ‘real lives’. I don't believe it. It touched us all in different ways. There are friends of mine who still mourn the dead of Rwanda, who cannot bare to watch the endless stream of horror stories dripping out of Central Africa. But like me they always end up watching, listening for scraps of news about the places they travelled through and the people they knew. How can I best describe it? It is a mixture of dread fascination, sorrow for what we learned and lost in the short weeks of chaos, a mind weariness that feeds itself by replaying the old tapes over and over. We reach for the off-switch but in the darkness cannot find it.

In my own case I have gone through a few different stages of escape and involvement. At first I determinedly avoided stories in the newspapers about Rwanda, changing the subject when people asked me, as so many did, ‘What was it like?’ Of late that has begun to change. I no longer run from the subject, although there is no way of conveying what it was really like without giving you my dreams. My journey into Rwanda was about following the lines of blood and history; about sleeping with the smell of death, fear and hatred; about exhaustion and loss and tears and in some strange ways even love. For me to make sense of that journey, however, I cannot write in terms of facts alone. So bear with me when the road runs down into the valleys of the heart and mind and soul. For this is a diary of an encounter with evil beyond any scope of reference I might have had when the journey began.

Although I had seen war before, had seen the face of cruelty, Rwanda belonged in a nightmare zone where my capacity to understand, much less rationalize, was overwhelmed. This was a country of corpses and orphans and terrible absences. This was where the spirit withered.

This book is the story of my own journey into the Rwandan genocide. During my journey in Rwanda I kept some diary notes and together with photographs and film they are my personal record of the several weeks I spent there. Much of what follows in this book is drawn from these sources, but a great deal more comes from memory. I have not found myself struggling for recall; the images and voices of that time are still terribly fresh in my mind. In writing about Rwanda, I am conscious that my words will always be unequal to the task of conveying the full horror of the crime of genocide. For what I encountered was evil in a form that frequently rendered me inarticulate. This was evil as a presence, not as a word or concept. I travelled to Rwanda in the first place to record a documentary for the BBC's Panorama programme. The team of four who made the journey with me were David Harrison, one of the BBC's most respected producers; Tony Wende, a sound recordist and novelist who was a friend from Johannesburg; Glenn Middleton, a cameraman who mixed rugged common sense with extraordinary sensitivity; and Rizu Hamid, a producer who grew up in Africa and whose bravery in dangerous situations was remarkable. I mention them here because they are an important part of this book. They shared the dangers and the darkness of the journey, and are part of my story and my survival. They were my saviours in different ways during and after the journey. As you come to know them in these pages I hope that their goodness comes shining through the gloom.

When the genocide started on the night of 6 April 1994, I was sitting at home in Johannesburg preparing for the multi-racial elections in South Africa. To be frank I paid only scant attention to the news reports emerging from Kigali. I have vague recollections of news bulletins describing how the aircraft carrying Juvénal Habyarimana, the president of Rwanda, and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the president of Burundi, had crashed in the grounds of the presidential palace in Kigali. In the days that followed there came a succession of stories about massacres across Rwanda. I was too preoccupied with the dramatic events unfolding in South Africa to give the matter anything more than cursory attention. Colleagues from London and Nairobi were being dispatched to Rwanda, and there didn't seem much point in my becoming sidetracked. The world's attention was focused on the elections and, having spent four years preparing for that moment, I was in no mood to head for Rwanda. In the second week of April film began to arrive in Johannesburg for transmission to British and American television networks. Much of the material seemed to be coming from the border between Rwanda and Tanzania, the Rusomo Falls Bridge, across which tens of thousands of refugees were pouring each day. There were some fearful pictures coming out of Kigali: mounds of bodies and roadblocks manned by machete-wielding gangs. The general consensus among those of us watching the pictures and those who had taken them was that Rwanda was a madhouse, a primitive torture chamber where rival tribes were busy settling ancient scores. I could not, watching the apocalyptic images unfolding on the video screens, imagine Rwanda as a country in its own right – a place with cities and schools and universities, with a wide diversity of media and political organizations, a country with musicians and poets. The idea that the madness might have been planned, that it was the direct result of political scheming, was far from my thoughts. I knew only that large-scale violence had been a feature of Rwandan life since independence. Both Rwanda and its neighbour Burundi had seen frequent massacres of one ethnic group or another. To most in the international community the words ‘Tutsi’ and ‘Hutu’ were synonymous with tribal slaughter.

The mass of early reporting of the Rwandan killings conveyed the sense that the genocide was the result of some innate inter-ethnic loathing that had erupted into irrational violence. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that major news organizations visited Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi only when there was major violence: in for a week or two to cover the slaughter and then back out again. A friend of mine, Sam Kiley of the London Times, rightly describes this as the ‘kids in the fridge school of journalism’ – in other words, a journalism driven by stories of horror but markedly lacking in analysis or historical context.

The coverage of violence in Central Africa, beginning with the horrors of the Congo in the sixties and seventies, has followed a predictable pattern. As soon as news of the killings begins to spread, the cameras arrive and the focus of attention is almost universally on the body count and the plight of the survivors. If there are Europeans to be rescued they are invariably the main news priority. The political, social and psychological factors that play a part in shaping the madness are given little analysis.

Much of the coverage of Rwanda in the early days neglected the part that power and money had played in the calculations of those who launched the genocide. Where television is concerned, African news is generally only big news when it involves lots of dead bodies. The higher the mound, the greater the possibility that the world will, however briefly, send its camera teams and correspondents. Once the story has gone ‘stale’, i.e. there are no new bodies and the refugees are down to a trickle, the circus moves on. The powerful images leave us momentarily horrified but largely ignorant, what somebody memorably described as having ‘compassion without understanding’. Thus a well-planned campaign of politically and materially motivated slaughter can come to be explained away as an ancient tribal conflict because the men and women on the ground have been moved on before there is time to investigate properly. This is more true of television than of any other media, but several of the world's leading newspapers also bought the line, in the initial stages, that the killings were a straightforward ‘tribal war’.

Rwanda's genocide was not a simple matter of mutual hatred between tribes erupting into irrational violence. Neither were the mass killings the result of a huge and sudden outpouring of rage on the part of Hutus following the murder of their president. The killings – and there is ample documentary evidence to prove this – were planned long in advance by a clique close to President Habyarimana himself. This clique – which included members of the president's immediate family and his in-laws – bitterly resented the prospect of power-sharing with the Tutsi minority. Any democratization of Rwanda's effective one-party state would have had disastrous consequences for the clique, who had powerful backers in the army and who had created their own civilian militia – the Interahamwe – to prepare for the day of vengeance against those who would seek a share of power. For several years prior to the genocide Hutus were exposed to an ongoing and virulent campaign of anti-Tutsi brainwashing. The report of the human rights group African Rights (Death, Despair and Defiance) provides a comprehensive and damning account of this process of brainwashing and is recommended reading for anyone who doubts that the genocide was well planned.

The ostensible targets of the hatred were the rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), who had launched an invasion of the country from neighbouring Uganda in October 1990. But the subtext of the numerous public condemnations of the RPF was clear enough: no Tutsi was to be trusted. All were members of a fifth column planning to reimpose a Tutsi autocracy on Rwanda. To peasants with a long folk memory of past Tutsi misrule, the warnings and the increasingly hysterical propaganda had a powerful effect. Tens of thousands became infected – and I can think of no other word that can describe the condition – by an anti-Tutsi psychosis; they were convinced through newspapers, radio and the frequent public speeches of Habyarimana's closest supporters that the Tutsis were going to turn them into beasts of the field once again.

The Hutu extremists, most of them members or supporters of the ruling party, produced a set of Ten Commandments that dictated how Hutus should treat their Tutsi neighbours. Among other things it described as ‘traitors’ any Hutus who married, befriended or employed Tutsis; all Tutsis were dishonest and they were to be excluded from business and from positions of influence in education; crucially the Commandments – given wide circulation in Rwanda – urged Hutus to ‘stop having mercy on the Batutsi’. This last injunction was to be obeyed by thousands of Hutu peasants when the genocide began. The theology of hate espoused by the extremists was remarkably similar to that of the Nazis in their campaign against the Jews prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. It was designed to marginalize the Tutsis and create an atmosphere in which their mass destruction would be acceptable, almost inevitable.

The role of the privately owned radio station Radio Mille Collines has been widely mentioned in reporting of the Rwandan genocide. Controlled by Hutu extremists with close links to Habyarimana's family, it was also financially supported by the president. On 6 April, the day of the plane crash, Radio Mille Collines told its audience that ‘Tutsis needed to be killed’. The theme was to dominate the station's broadcasts for weeks. The official state radio was only marginally less virulent, constantly calling on the Hutus to rise up and defend Rwanda against the invasion of the inyenzi, or ‘cockroaches’. Several privately owned newspapers and journals were harnessed for the task of disseminating hate propaganda. As far as the training of the militia is concerned, there is abundant evidence implicating senior government ministers and government officials with responsibility for its genocidal agenda. Foreign diplomats, a few visiting journalists and human rights experts had been warning for several months about the training of large groups of armed Hutu extremists. Given the kind of hatred being spewed out on radio and in the newspapers, nobody could have doubted what the militia was being prepared for. The United Nations, African Rights and the new Rwandan government have prepared lists of ministers and army officers and local officials for the purpose of war crimes trials. Nearly all had been active in promoting Hutu nationalism and obsessive anti-Tutsi propaganda long before the genocide actually occurred. At its most obvious this could take the form of simple murder – attacks on isolated Tutsi communities as practice runs for the final solution. More often than not, it simply involved spreading the word of hatred far and wide.

Before we travel on, it is instructive to consider Rwandan history and the precise definitions – in so much as there can be precision – of the words ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’. For if I learned anything in Rwanda it is that a ‘pure’ ethnic divide is a myth. In southern Rwanda in particular there was extensive intermarrying between Tutsis and Hutus, and, as I shall detail later, there is a long history of people exchanging identities. The leader of the Interahamwe militia, Robert Kajuga, was a Tutsi whose father had succeeded in changing the family's identity to Hutu.

The historical records indicate that Rwanda's first inhabitants were hunter–gatherers, more commonly known as Twa, or pygmies. Successive migrations from north and east brought groups of farmers and cattle herders. Eventually one clan of cattle herders, members of what is now called the Tutsi tribe, appear to have succeeded in dominating much of the centre of what is now known as Rwanda. As the centuries advanced this clan consolidated its power, although in custom and tradition it absorbed much of the culture of the Hutu farmers it dominated. Today Tutsi and Hutu share a common language, diet and cultural heritage.

What separated Tutsi and Hutu in the past was primarily a matter of occupation and wealth. Thus the Tutsi clan owned large herds of cattle, while their Hutu subjects farmed the land and the Twa subsisted on what they could gather in field and forest. As time progressed many Hutus bought cattle and were assimilated into the Tutsi aristocracy. Some Tutsis became poor and lost their privileged position. In pre-colonial Rwandan society – as in so many other parts of the world – cattle were identified with wealth. Ownership of large herds of cattle allowed the Tutsi nobility to raise armies and to draw vast numbers of Hutus into the web of clientelism (for example, a Hutu peasant would be given a cow, in return for which he would make himself available for work on the land of his patron). Not every Tutsi landowner exploited his Hutu vassals, but there evolved over time a dangerous sense of second-class citizenship among the Hutus. The Tutsi nobility that dominated the centre of Rwanda stressed the importance of physical stature, that is, they claimed their tallness and aquiline facial features were synonymous with superiority. Those who were short and stocky, who worked the land, and who had neither cattle nor ties to the nobility became a distinct second class in Rwandan society. Journalists who have interviewed Hutu peasants have frequently been told that Tutsis look down on them as ‘subhumans’. Any peasants who opposed the evolving order were treated with unmitigated harshness. Tutsi nobles showed no hesitation in massacring the occupants of rebellious villages and confiscating their property. A peasant farmer would be advised to bide his time, to save what he could in the hope of someday purchasing enough cattle to allow for his assimilation into the ruling class. He did not need to be tall or slim to gain entrance into the higher ranks of society: in that sense pre-colonial Rwandan society was solidly materialistic. But the economic realities tended to keep the majority of Hutus in a subject position, whatever their aspirations.

It suited the early colonists to believe in and foster the myth of the Tutsis as black Aryans, men not too dissimilar to Europeans, more noble than savage, who could be trusted to carry out the orders of the white men. Thus grew up the notion of Tutsis (described as Hamites by the colonists) as proto-Europeans, pastoralists who had come down from the north, possibly Ethiopia, into the dark and savage lands in the heart of Africa to impose their superior civilization. The truth is that nobody really knows where the Tutsi clans came from, but it probably wasn't Ethiopia and certainly nowhere remotely close to Europe. The obsession with physical appearance, aided and abetted by the Tutsi ruling class, led the Europeans to all manner of humiliating folly: measuring of skulls and noses and all the discredited junk of the race theorists who thrived in the heyday of African colonialism. One Belgian doctor wrote:

The Hamites… have a distant, reserved, courteous and elegant manner… The rest of the population is Bantu, the Bahutu. They are negroes with all the negroid characteristics… they are childish in nature, both timid and lazy, and as often as not, extremely dirty.

The respected American writer John Gunther, whose book Inside Africa contains a wealth of information on pre-independence Africa, visited Rwanda in 1954. His description of the Tutsi ruling class in Rwanda, while repeating the Ethiopian myth, gives an interesting flavour of the atmosphere of the time.

They are not negroes though they may be jet black. A Hamitic or Nilotic people, they were pastoral nomads and cattlemen who came down from the north, and they startlingly resemble Ethiopians – except that I have never seen an Ethiopian seven feet tall… they are proud, sophisticated and not particularly energetic. Several times we saw Watutsi lords sitting on bicycles and being pushed by their vassals… no anthropologist has ever explained why the Watutsi are so tall. Possibly diet has something to do with it. In any case tallness is the symbol of racial exclusiveness and pure blood.

The ‘Ethiopian factor’ was to be a recurring theme in much of the journalistic and academic analysis of the Tutsi/ Hutu divide. In more recent times the Africa correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, David Lamb, gave this description of the population of Rwanda's neighbour Burundi (the ethnic mix is roughly the same as in Rwanda, 80 per cent Hutu, 15 per cent Tutsi and 5 per cent Twa):

The short stocky Hutus… are mostly farmers of Bantu stock, with dark, Negroid features. The Watutsi, who migrated to Burundi in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the north, probably Ethiopia, are cattle people; they are tall, sometimes well over six feet, with long, narrow facial features and their skin is slightly lighter than that of most Africans.

The references to Ethiopia, the inference that the Tutsi were immigrants, were to recur frequently in the period leading up to the genocide and during the killings. Senior Hutu extremists would exhort their followers to send the Tutsis ‘back to the Ethiopia’ via the nearest river. This was one reason why rivers became such passageways of death during the massacres. The Hutus were, as can be seen from the Gunther extract, cast in the role of dumb serfs. I never saw any evidence in Rwanda or Burundi to support the proposition that Tutsis were lighter skinned than Hutus. Like much else that has been written about the two groups, it appears to be fanciful nonsense, a carry-over from the colonial era. The downgrading of the Hutu peasantry into a subclass was reinforced by the colonial education system and a political structure which placed the king, or Mwaami (a Tutsi of course), at the top and layers of Tutsi notables below him.

An early Belgian colonial film – paid for by the government in Brussels – described the Hutu as creatures with ‘souls sad and passive, ignoring all thought for the morrow’. These were people who regarded ‘their Tutsi overlords as demi-gods’. The implication of Belgian policy and public utterance was clear enough: the Hutus were a peasant majority and in no way suitable partners in the exploitation of Rwanda. By contrast the Tutsis, with their elitist background, were a minority who had every interest in keeping the country in its existing state. For the colonists it was a perfect partnership.

SEASON OF BLOOD

Contents

Acknowledgements