Road to a Genocide

...Did Museveni accept no responsibility for the bloodshed that followed...

...The pursuit of power is a life-and-death struggle...

...Nazi propaganda notwithstanding, there was no Jewish conspiracy to dominate Europe, nor was there ever...

...All too often, however, the calculated quality of Rwanda's genocide is cited to distinguish it from other, presumably more spontaneous African slaughters...

...We cannot have this blackmail...

...Racial stereotypes, envy, resentment, scapegoating, fear—all helped to make genocide possible, not inevitable...

...Rwanda was a textbook example of the destructive legacies of "indirect rule...

...He had waged an armed rebellion against Idi Amin, and then another against the successor regime of Milton Obote...

...In fact there is no such thing as a "simple tribal meltdown," not anywhere...

...Amply funded and armed by the French, who funneled huge quantities of weapons to Rwanda even during the killings of 1994, Habyarimana ran lucrative rackets in everything from development aid RWANDA to marijuana smuggling...

...enforcement was consistently arbitrary...

...Rwanda's Hutu elite, which excelled in this lawless culture, established a clear example of the state as a racketeering enterprise...

...The rule of the gun was paramount...

...In 1965, between five thousand and ten thousand Burundian Hutus were killed by a Tutsi-dominated army...

...He had backed Laurent Kabila's rebellion against Mobutu's tyranny in what was then Zaire...

...There is a widespread belief in the post–cold war era that ethnic conflict is a byproduct of "failed states...

...The slide toward genocide began in October 1990, after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel insurgency led by Tutsi exiles, invaded Rwanda from Uganda...

...Thousands more were murdered and exiled in subsequent waves of repression...

...Across the continent, indirect rule in the colonial era was a means by which minority groups and traditional chiefs were invested with power and privilege, educated, trained, and subcontracted to do the dirty work on behalf of the white man...

...In a lawless world, ethnicity is a badge of legitimacy and protection, even of justice...

...two million Hutus fled the country, including many of the genocidaires and their leaders...

...I asked Museveni about the law of unintended consequences...

...Who knows...

...It has often been remarked that Hutus and Tutsis—the latter make up just under 15 percent of Rwanda's population—meet none of the conditions normally associated with tribes...

...In Rwanda, the malignant consequences of indirect rule were magnified by an explicit racial ideology known as the "Hamitic Hypothesis...

...Tutsis killing Hutus, Hutus killing Tutsisthe common denominator in all this slaughter is the total absence of legal accountability for a single perpetrator at any stage over more than three decades...

...By some accounts as many people killed as were killed...

...Every dictator says, `If you attack me, I will kill you.' Before 1986, a hundred thousand children were dying of six preventable diseases in Uganda...

...That is the basis for deciding to resist a dictatorship...

...That slaughter turned out to be a premonitory sign of the awesome carnage of 1972, when upward of a hundred thousand Burundian Hutus—some say two hundred thousand—were killed...

...The latter could only be credible and effective—in the eyes of the tyrant as well as in those of his subjects— if there were many more regional actors prepared to support it, and if those actors were backed by the resources and prestige of outside powers...

...In the Hutu-led "social revolution" of 19591962, which drove out the Belgians and their Tutsi surrogates, upward of ten thousand Tutsis were murdered, and as many as three hundred thousand were driven into exile in neighborDISSENT / Winter 2002 n 69 RWANDA ing countries...

...No trial was imminent, Kaburame said...

...On the day of my visit there were 3,196 inmates, virtually all of them genocide suspects, including 112 women and 132 minors...

...KAGAME WAS not himself a defenseless victim...

...The rest of the DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 71 RWANDA RWANDA world paid no heed...

...The psychologist Ervin Staub, in his valuable book The Roots of Evil—The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, examined mass slaughters in this century, from the Turkish genocide of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust and Pol Pot's Cambodia...

...Lice, malaria, ringworm, typhoid, and dysentery were rampant...

...At that time some 130,000 accused génocidaires were held in such places across the country...

...When I try to restrain him, he starts shooting passersby...

...Meek submission to tyranny would be unacceptable and nonviolent resistance almost certainly ineffectual...

...Four hundred were slaughtered in Kibilira in 1990, five hundred in Bigogwe in 1991, three hundred in Bugesera in 1992...

...For the next three decades, Hutu politicians, no more democratic than their Tutsi predecessors, justified their rule by building on and reinforcing Hutu fears of Tutsi perfidy...

...Conditions were said to have improved by the time I arrived, but disease, dehydration, and suffocation remained common...

...I met Museveni in his suite at the Waldorf Astoria, where he was staying during a visit for what turned out to be fruitless meetings of the UN Security Council to try to end the war in Congo...

...The climactic siege of Kigali was underway...

...To say there were hundreds would be an understatement...

...That support and backing, however, were entirely missing in the Rwandan case, where both the UN and the Clinton administration declined to intervene even after the massacres began...

...But at the time, because it was the government saying so, using the radio, and because I had not known the RPF before, I believed that the government was telling the truth...

...This was the criminal culture in which the genocide was hatched...

...The authors of the genocide are to blame...

...Staub found "certain characteristics of a culture and the structure of a society"—such as obedience and hierarchy—that enhance the potential for group violence...

...And in a way it is quite normal...

...The Hutus, by contrast, were dumb beasts of burden, ill-suited to be anything more than soil-tilling subjects...

...It is as if men like Corleone seized control not just of "turf' on the margins of society, but of the state itself and all its organs: police and army, secret police, the courts, the central bank, the civil service, the press, television, and radio...

...A key component of the plan was a virulent propaganda campaign—crafted by prominent Hutu intellectuals such as Ferdinand Nahimana (now in custody at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania)—that tapped into and inflamed old Hutu fears and resentments...

...So people in a bad system are dying every day...

...Museveni concluded with vehemence, "But I will not accept blackmail...

...I do my duty...

...You are the one who provoked him.' Don't you think that's a bit...

...The history is accumulating, and so is the bigotry...

...Emmanuel Kamuhanda, eighteen years old, wore a mangy, purple corduroy jacket, blue jeans, and plastic high-top sneakers...

...And then the journalist from New York says, 'Why did you try to restrain him...

...BILL BERKELEY, a reporter for the New York Times, is the author of The Graves Are Not Yet Full— Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa...

...This rigid hierarchy was not to be confused with the rule of law...

...Surely he was mindful that a Tutsi-led armed rebellion in Rwanda was likely to result in the mass murder of Tutsi civilians...

...Inflamed ethnic passions are not the cause of this Hobbesian war of all against all, but its consequence...

...For that matter, did he accept no responsibility for the bloodshed unleashed in response to his own war against Obote...

...Anarchy and Tyranny In July 1994 the Rwandan Patriotic Front finally routed the Hutu regime and ended the genocide that in a hundred days had taken some eight hundred thousand lives...

...Many were killed for refusing to kill, they said...

...Had it not occurred to Museveni and his friends, I asked, that armed rebellions provoke massive reprisals against defenseless civilians...

...In January 2000, I had an opportunity to pose the question about responsibility to Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda, who was Kagame's main ally in 1990 and after...

...That had been the pattern in both Rwanda and Burundi, not to mention Uganda itself...

...I can tell you in my village we killed fifteen people...

...Blackmail...

...There is a thief who grabs a briefcase in the street," he said, eyes alight, staring me down...

...These differences by no means absolve Hutus who participated in the genocide, but they underscore the recklessness of Tutsi refugees like General Kagame who, in 1990, thought the solution to their exile was an ethnically based armed insurgency against an entrenched and brutal, Hutu-dominated regime in Kigali...

...There were also 25 infants, growing up in confinement with their imprisoned mothers...

...We were shown whom to kill on the list...

...My guide through Kibungo prison was the elected leader of the prisoners, a thirty-eightyearold former businessman named Joas Kaburame, himself accused of genocide...

...All too many Hutus, looking across that nearby border at what happened in Burundi, believed what they were told, and then did what they were told they had to do in order to survive...

...No rational person could have looked at the history of repeated mass slaughters in Rwanda and Burundi since 1959 and doubted for a moment that at least one likely outcome of such an invasion would be massive violence against defenseless Tutsi civilians...

...short, stocky, and darker skinned for the Hutu—are often blurred...

...After my village we went to other villages and killed many...

...Educational privileges for the Tutsis reinforced these stereotypes...

...In 1995, as many as nine prisoners per day were dying in Rwanda's prisons...

...As of now I don't believe this is true...

...Indeed there are legitimate parallels, and they help explain why policy makers in Washington in the years since the genocide have flinched at the thought of passing judgment on those who claim to be acting on behalf of Rwanda's Tutsis...

...Now he was backing an armed rebellion against Islamist tyranny in Sudan...

...In combination, they serve to explain why people followed, but they are not explanation enough...

...I did not want to kill," he told me...

...The country was divided into 12 prefectures led by prefets, 154 communes led by bourgmestres, 1,600 sectors led by conseilleurs, and tens of thousands of cellules—a top-down network of control rooted in the precolonial kingdom, codified by the colonizers, and preserved after independence...

...These radio broadcasts fabricated tales of harrowing massacres attributed to Tutsi guerrillas and civilians...

...Habyarimana was also implicated in the poaching of mountain gorillas, selling the valuable skulls and feet of baby primates...

...On April 6, 1994, Habyarimana's plane was shot down—most likely by his own hard-line "allies...

...in fact, 72 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 they are making rational calculations of their own self-interest or, more accurately, of their own survival...

...In June 1994, I interviewed six admitted members of the Interahamwe militia who had been captured days earlier by the Tutsi-led rebels...

...I felt guilty and I felt I was committing a crime," he replied...

...They are all products of calculated evil...

...The bigotry was there to be manipulated and exploited by cynical and desperate leaders...

...Fair enough...

...They said you must kill or you will be killed...

...We said stay there [in Rwanda...

...Rwanda is a nation of followers, people who "must obey the rules," and do...

...And the next time...

...Rwanda is a textbook case of ethnic conflict produced by tyranny, a prime example of the links between tyranny and anarchy and between ethnicity and organized crime...

...He points out that Westerners, not least Americans, have often resorted to violence to achieve their ends...

...Here was the culture of obedience at the heart of Rwanda's darkness: three thousand accused mass murderers packed in horrendous conditions like snakes in a bottle—and no violence...

...They may appear to be acting on mindless impulse...

...Not least, in 1990 Museveni had backed the Rwandan Patriotic Front's armed invasion of Rwanda from Uganda, led by men who were among Museveni's closest military confederates...

...A system of population registration— including ethnically based identity cards—cemented them...

...And it was this success that in 1994 made possible the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in barely three months, mostly with clubs and machetes...

...Sixty years of humiliating subjugation gave rise among the Hutus to what the French scholar Gerard Prunier, author of an outstanding history of the genocide, The Rwanda Crisis, has called "an aggressively resentful inferiority complex," upon which their leaders were keen to build...

...To begin with, the Jews of Europe were never armed...

...Prunier goes on to say, "[I]t is improbable that in late 1990 when Paul Kagame was working day and night to turn the RPF from an alienated band of exiles into an efficient fighting machine, he ever stopped to ask himself what was really going to happen...

...No one was ever held accountable...

...As many as fifty thousand Burundians—Hutus and Tutsiswere butchered after a failed Tutsi-led coup in 1993, and another hundred and fifty thousand have died in Burundi's continuing bloodshed since then...

...But sixty years of colonial rule followed by thirty-five years of Hutu domination (1959-1994) produced real distinctions: deep-seated stereotypes and even deeper reservoirs of envy, fear, and mistrust that were ripe for exploitation...

...You are mistaken...

...This was the line: they killed because they were forced to...

...The depth of their pre-existing prejudices may explain the potency of the symbols that their leaders choose to exploit, but it is the logic of their lawless environment that transforms those prejudices into terror...

...But after they went, we did not want them to come back...

...It was hard not to think that—guilty or not—these people were enduring a fate worse than death...

...DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 77...

...You will get it...

...Another said, "If someone was discovered, we would surround him with sticks and start beating him...

...Those who excel in this struggle distinguish themselves through nothing more exotic than boundless cunning and ruthlessness...

...In the years leading up to the genocide, Tutsis had been massacred across Rwanda with increasing frequency—and impunity...

...They must obey the rules...

...each one said he had never killed before this...

...Many people contributed to killing one person," one of them told me...

...Rwanda's border with Burundi is not much further from downtown Kigali than Coney Island is by subway from mid-town Manhattan...

...Bigotry alone does not explain mass slaughter...

...As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I became aware of hundreds of eyes peering out of the blackness from within inches of my face...

...Specialists on the region commonly protest that the distinctions between the two groups are artificial...

...In the absence of individual accountability for a single general, tyrant, militia leader, or gangster, and with no commonly agreed-upon set of historical facts, Tutsis and Hutus alike have blamed the other for the killing that has taken such a toll of both...

...Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining the velocity of a mass slaughter that was orchestrated from on high but implemented by tens of thousands of ordinary civilians at the grass roots...

...Some eight hundred thousand Tutsis and dissident Hutus were killed in the Rwandan genocide of 1994...

...There were no lights or toilet facilities...

...The sleeping quarters were pitch dark except for the light from slim window slats...

...A minority-led regime is compelled by circumstances beyond its control to govern indefinitely as a military dictatorship, in which even the best intentioned leaders are trapped by a kind of Macbethian logic, compelled to shed blood merely to survive...

...First the Germans and then the Belgians introduced a system of rule from a distance, whereby the Tutsi chiefs controlled the Hutu majority and extracted its labor on behalf of the colonial power...

...I was just compelled to kill by the leader of the militia...

...Many suppose that tyranny and anarchy are at opposite ends of a linear spectrum...

...But what of the RPF...

...An overpowering stench of weeks-old sweat, filth, and urine hit me as I pushed my way into the prison's densely packed dormitories...

...Because they feared the blood of the victim ["a guilty conDISSENT / Winter 2002 n 73 RWANDA science," my translator explained], each person was afraid to kill alone...

...Genocide was still unfolding in the South...

...Responsibility No one disputes that Rwanda's Hutu leadership must bear ultimate responsibility for the genocide...

...Rwanda represented the opposite: a state that was all too successful in mobilizing its people along rigidly hierarchical lines from the top down, from the head of state and his ruling clique of co-conspirators down to the last village mayor...

...Action carries with it its own logic, and in such situations men who stop to think for too long 76 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 are likely to end up dead...

...Resentments grew accordingly, nowhere more so than in Rwanda and neighboring Burundi...

...If you want to kill innocent people, that's your own responsibility...

...We did not conspire with the RPF in 1990," Museveni demurred...

...I asked this man if he felt any remorse...

...It was also fear of those whom they sought to exterminate...

...An old Tutsi man remarked to one of the young guerrilla fighters who had come to "liberate" him: "You want power...

...The victims of the genocide were unarmed...

...The plan worked...

...And there had been no Jewish-perpetrated genocides in, say, Austria, as there were Tutsi-perpetrated genocides against Hutus no fewer than three times in a generation in Burundi...

...They were forbidden to fight, and so they didn't...

...Rwanda is another case where culture and social structure worked together...

...But here we will all die...

...A third put it this way: "I did not believe the Tutsis were coming to kill us and take our land, but when the government radio continued to broadcast that the RPF is coming to take our land, is coming to kill the Hutu—when this was repeated over and over, I began to feel some kind of fear...

...Even the most rigidly institutionalized tyrannies— Rwanda was one, South Africa during apartheid another—rely above all on the radical absence of lawful accountability for the criminal abuse of power...

...General Paul Kagame, leader of the Tutsidominated rebel army that invaded Rwanda in 1990 and now the president of Rwanda, is keen to draw parallels between the Tutsis' experience of genocide and that of the Jews...

...Even that old man hiding in the sorghum plantation—when we discovered him, Leonard, the militia leader, ordered everybody to hit him...

...There were elements in Rwanda that distinguished it from other African calamities, but calculation was not among them...

...Perhaps those who had the lists know better...

...Yet when I asked Emmanuel why he was forced to kill, his reply suggested that he understood the reasons for killing, and that they made sense to him: he believed in what he was doing when he was doing it...

...Fear, not hatred, may have driven them to kill, but it was fear not just of their leaders...

...the tyrants turn lawlessness and terror, murder and rape, arson and theft into instruments of rule...

...All of Africa's present-day conflicts are orchestrated from on high...

...Many advocates for justice in Rwanda, including supporters of the International Tribunal, believe that justice will lead to "healing" and "reconciliation" between Hutus and Tutsis...

...There were no beds or mattresses...

...That is an unrealistic goal...

...Sullen and withdrawn, he spoke very quietly, and did not look me in the eye...

...In 1988, Burundi's army killed twenty thousand Hutus, and another three thousand in 1991...

...It is the stakes in Africa that are different— multiplied exponentially in circumstances where the state itself is a gang and the law doesn't exist...

...The government always told us that the RPF was Tutsi, and if it wins the war all the 74 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 Hutus will be killed," he said...

...In a familiar pattern, the latter re-armed, using UN refugee camps as a base, and they have been fighting ever since to return to power and finish what they started...

...Streams of fresh sewage dribbled around me...

...Yes, Rwanda was a land of followers, but they were followers prepared to hate and fear...

...We need to look more closely at Rwanda's slide into genocidal conflict...

...O ONE REALLY knows what proportion ...._ of Rwanda's Hutus participated in the genocide...

...For centuries they have spoken the same language, lived on the same hillsides, and intermarried to such an extent that the physical characteristics stereotypically attributed to each—tall, thin, and lighter skinned for the Tutsi...

...The Tutsis of Rwanda were held up as just such a superior race: intellectually gifted, morally uplifted, born to rule...

...Habyarimana's brother-in-law was the principal suspect in the murder of the American anthropologist Dian Fossey...

...Now he was backing rebels fighting against Kabila's tyranny, in a war that, as of this writing, had claimed as many as two and a half million civilian lives...

...He and his fellow Tutsi generals point to Israel's conduct in the Middle East as a model for their own behavior...

...There are too many other factors in play, like the ongoing civil war, that are hardening mistrust...

...Then the rest would come with sticks and machetes and finish him off...

...The real question is, what sort of environment spawns such leaders in the first place and then rewards their tactics...

...Defeated, scared, disheveled, wearing grimy secondhand clothes and sneakers or rubber flip-flops, they spoke in dull monotones under the watchful eyes of their Tutsi captors...

...This was the pretext for the massacres to begin...

...Habyarimana's assassination was immediately blamed on the Tutsis...

...It could be true, I thought...

...But often they are side by side on what might better be described as a circle: the one is a product of the other, and vice versa...

...To suggest that he was would be to adopt the same logic that informed the genocide, namely that a Tutsi is a Tutsi is a Tutsi, whether armed or unarmed...

...It is by now well established that Rwanda's catastrophe was "more than a simple tribal meltdown," as Time magazine put it...

...Once Hutus vanquished the Tutsi elite in the early 1960s, their leaders took over the pre-existing social structure and used it to exercise total control over the populace...

...The Rwandan government was estimating that at the current rate it would take four hundred years to try all those accused of participation or complicity in the genocide...

...But Kagame, no less than the West, must bear a measure of responsibility for the unintended consequences of legitimate ends pursued through violent means...

...But further questions yielded a more complicated picture...

...In the eastern province of Kibungo, the main prison is a squat brick edifice built to house 1,000 detainees...

...The broad participation of tens of thousands of ordinary Hutus undoubtedly was a function of Rwanda's bynow notorious culture of obedience...

...Museveni had a point of course...

...But the social structure was more complex than is generally understood...

...The result is the present intractable situation...

...There had been no Jewish tyranny in Germany, as there were Tutsi feudal tyrannies in both Rwanda and neighboring Opposite: Instruments of genocide: machetes left at the border of Zaire and Rwanda by retreating Hutu militia in 1994...

...he surely did not intend his rebellion to provoke a genocide...

...Generations of European and Rwandan Tutsi intellectuals elaborated on a pseudo-anthropology of Tutsi superiority and Hutu incompetence...

...Amin said on the radio, `Museveni will be killed...

...RWANDA Museveni was plainly contemptuous of this line of questioning...

...For them, anarchy is a way of governing...

...I asked...

...Gerard Prunier tells the story of the RPF occupation of a town in Western Rwanda during the early stages of the war...

...There are no fights," he replied matter-offactly, without a trace of irony...

...Photograph by Antonin KratochvilNll RWANDA Burundi...

...The most successful of all become tyrants, and the anarchy in which they thrive is called tyranny...

...Tutsis, not surprisingly, embraced these myths as justification for their privileged position...

...Hundreds of dazed survivors of the massacres, some of them wrapped in gauze bandages that barely concealed their ghastly machete wounds, lingered amid the wreckage of their lives in the looted and gutted ruins nearby...

...When those consequences are foreseeable, as surely they were in Rwanda and Congo, as well as in Sudan, aren't the rebels responsible for protecting those who bear the brunt of the tyrant's repression...

...He and his in-laws operated the country's sole black-market foreign exchange bureau in tandem with the central bank...

...But I had to save myself...

...The people who are killed in reaction to resistance are not as many as by dictatorship itself...

...We sat on benches in the filthy remains of an abandoned corner store in Kabuga, a rubble-strewn, rebel-held town on the outskirts of Kigali...

...When I asked how many people he had killed, Emmanuel replied, "There were many...

...I had only to do as I was told...

...These tyrannies harness the forces of anarchy to their own ends...

...He shook his head incredulously...

...They warned Hutus that Tutsiled rebels were bent on re-imposing feudalism, wiping out all the Hutus, and taking all their land...

...Like gangsters and despots through the ages, Habyarimana apparently was destroyed by the monster he created, and then the monster went on to ever greater destruction...

...Each has been prepared to believe the worst about the other's intentions in times of chaos, making Tutsis and Hutus alike vulnerable to the machinations of the propagandists and eager to seek the protection that those wearing the badge of ethnicity claimed to afford...

...It is the bond by which people high and low adhere to a vigilante code...

...The threats to my family should not doom resistance to dictatorship...

...ETHNIC CONFLICT in postcolonial Africa is also a form of organized crime...

...Evidently calculating that it was pointless, and might be fatal, to deny their crimes, they spoke with surprising candor about joining up with the "Igitero"—a group of attackers, leaders and led as one...

...Kagame and his RPF confederates were armed...

...Most of them had spent their entire lives cultivating sorghum and sweet potatoes on the steep mountain slopes of Kibungo Prefecture in eastern Rwanda...

...Even the best intentioned of Africa's leaders—and Paul Kagame is one of them—must choose between painful alternatives...

...Prisoners used chamber pots to relieve themselves...

...The prisoners slept shoulder to shoulder on flattened cardboard boxes arrayed on shelves akin to a chicken coop...

...Conditions were typical of prisons across Rwanda, which is to say, unspeakable...

...His confederate added, "They were always telling people that if the RPF comes, it will return Rwanda to feudalism, that they would bring oppression...

...Tutsi chiefs were overlords, but ethnic distinctions were fluid and social mobility commonplace...

...It's forbidden 70 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 RWANDA to fight...

...They appeared to be men of the herd...

...The top leaders of the militia, when they marched us to kill, they had a list of the victims...

...What was he thinking in 1990...

...But extremists within Habyarimana's embattled regime had already begun formulating a plan to subvert the agreement and destroy the rebels by exterminating their base of support—the internal Tutsi population...

...Their clothes and other belongings hung like stalactites from the ceiling...

...Juvenal Habyarimana had governed Rwanda for twenty-three years after the model of his mentor, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire...

...There is a responsibility of regional actors to attack dictatorship...

...Anarchy is a vacuum that brings out the worst in socialized and acculturated men and women and selects the worst among them...

...The "culture" driving Africa's conflicts is akin to that of the Sicilian Mafia or of the Crips and Bloods in Los Angeles, with the same imperatives of blood and family that bind all such gangs together...

...Does one who engages in violent rebellion—even justified armed rebellion against tyranny bear no responsibility for the unintended consequences of his rebellion...

...I used a club...

...I encountered a chilling illustration of this phenomenon in 1998, four years after the genocide, when I visited one of the provincial prisons...

...But the parallels between Central Europe and Central Africa are not exact, and they may obscure more than they illuminate...

...What measure of responsibility do Rwanda's rebels bear for provoking what, in the context of Central Africa, was surely a foreseeable mass slaughter...

...Ventilation was nil...

...His family will be killed.'" The president was recalling his first armed rebellion in Uganda, against Idi Amin...

...We would kill in groups...

...Kagame can argue that armed rebellion was his only alternative under the circumstances...

...He told me he was framed by a former lover who was jealous of his marriage to another woman...

...These militiamen were illiterate peasants— husbands and fathers—with thickly callused hands...

...Three years of fighting ended in stalemate, and President Habyarimana was forced to enter into a power-sharing agreement with the Tutsi rebels...

...Rwanda was a model of order...

...I had never killed before, so I did not feel comfortable to kill, because I knew these people had committed no crime...

...Elitism evolved into racism, and a myth of historic Tutsi domination—and cunning— came to be broadly accepted by Hutus and Tutsis alike...

...Their aim was to pressure the Hutu government of President Juvenal Habyarimana to allow Rwanda's exiled Tutsis to return...

...Even after he was dead, everybody was supposed to take part in the killing...

...The prison yard was packed to overflowing, covered with a coat of soot from smoke billowing out of the cooking tent at one end of the courtyard, where inmates stirred massive vats of beans and rice...

...I asked Kaburame what seemed to me an obvious question: was there ever any violence in this awful place...

...FEAR, NOT HATRED, was the dominant theme of the Hutu propagandists in Rwanda, who relentlessly terrorized their listeners on two state-owned radio stations both before and throughout the genocide of 1994...

...European racial theorists concocted the "scientific" notion that "white Africans" from the northeast had brought civilization to the rest of the primitive continent...

...The fact that leaders manipulated ethnic divisions for their own cynical ends does not change the fact that the divisions were there to be manipulated, in the hearts and minds of those below...

...If you resisted, they would threaten you...

...Fear Above All The genocide of 1994 had its predecessors...

...Africa's warring factions are best understood not as tribes but as racketeering enterprises, their leaders calculating strategy after the time-honored logic of Don Vito C orleone...

...Is it worth it to you...

...That was blackmail— if you resist dictatorship, your family will be killed...

...Before colonialism, it was a highly organized feudal kingdom...