Habyarimana’s government formed them into “self-defense militias” that operated as a parallel to the regular Rwandan army and were used to threaten the president’s politicial enemies. They were also a tool for building popular support for the ruling regime under the all-embracing cloak of Hutu Power. The ongoing civil war brought a whole new flock of members. Most of the new recruits came from the squalid refugee camps that formed a ring around Kigali. It is difficult for me to describe just how terrible the conditions were inside these camps: no decent food, no sanitation, no jobs, no hope. There were several hundred thousand people crammed into these tumbledown wastelands, most of them chased away from their homes in the countryside by the advancing RPF army. Kigali itself held about 350, 000 people at the time-a city about the size of Minneapolis, Minnesota -and the strain on the infrastructure was very great. These refugees saw plenty of reasons to be angry at the rebels-and, by unfair extension, angry at each individual Tutsi. Plus, the militias were fun, in the same way that the hate radio was fun. They brought a sense of purpose and cohesion to an otherwise dreary life. It was like being in the Boy Scouts or a soccer club, only there was a popular enemy to hate and a lot of built-up frustration to vent. The boys were also hungry and full of the restlessness of youth. It was easy to get them to follow any orders imaginable.
The groundwork for the genocide went even deeper. In the fall of 1992 mayors in each of Rwanda’s hundred little communes were asked by the president’s political party to compile lists of people-understood to be Tutsis and people who were threatening to Habyarimana-who had left the country recently or who had children who had left. The implication was that these people had joined the ranks of the RPF. These lists could then be used to identify “security threats” in times of emergency. Tutsis throughout the country suspected their names were being entered into secret ledgers. Many tried without success to have their identity cards relabeled so that they would appear to be Hutu.
I used to be in the habit of stopping off at a bar near my home after work and buying a round for some of my friends from the old Gitwe days. One afternoon when I wasn’t there, a man wearing the uniform of a soldier tossed a grenade in the door and sped off on a motorcycle. The bar was destroyed. I started going straight home after that. The minister of public works, Félicien Gatabazi, was gunned down by thugs as he was entering his house. A taxi driver witnessed the assassination; she was shot as a precaution the next day. Her name was Emerita and she had been one of the freelance drivers who competed for fares in the parking lot of the Hotel Mille Collines. At least one hundred other innocent people would be killed in this fashion by the increasingly violent teenagers of the Interahamwe and also rebel soldiers who had infiltrated Kigali. People didn’t want to stand at bus stops or taxi stations anymore because the crowds were targets for grenade throwers.
A scary incident happened on the road. My wife, Tatiana, was driving our son to school when she was forced off the road by a man in a military jeep. He walked over to her door, took off his sunglasses, and bid her to roll down her window.
“Do you know me?” he asked.
“No, ” said my wife.
“My name is Étincelles, ” he said. It was the French word for “explosions, ” apparently his nom de guerre.
He went on: “Madam, we know your home. We know you have three big German shepherds in the yard for protection, as well as two gate guards. The Youth of the Democratic Republic Movement has said they plan to kidnap you. They will be trying to get ransom money from your husband. So I am telling you, if anybody should try to pull you over, don’t stop. Keep driving, even if you have to run somebody over. Do it for your own safety. I am telling you all of this because I come from the same part of the country as your husband and I don’t want to see any harm come to you.”
When my wife told me about this I searched my memory for anyone from my village who might be calling himself Étincelles. I couldn’t think of who it might be. To this day I have no idea if this was an actual kidnap plot or just an attempt to scare us. Regardless, we no longer felt comfortable living at home after that, and so I moved us all into a guest suite at the Diplo-mates. It felt awful to be governed by fear, but these were very dangerous times. I did not want anybody coming through my windows.
Life went on, even in the surreal twilight of that spring. At nights on the terrace I would share beers with the leaders of the militia movement, trying to keep quiet as I heard them talking of events in the neighboring country of Burundi. The president there, Melchior Ndadaye, had been assassinated by Tutsi officers in his own army. A series of reprisal killings followed. The international community had little to say about these massacres. Was it true the Tutsi were planning to do a similar thing here: take power and then start a campaign of genocide against the Hutu? I heard it said more than a few times over glasses of Carlsberg or Tuborg: “It may come down to kill or be killed.”
During that dangerous time I did something that had the potential to be my death warrant. The RPF leadership was looking for a place to give a press conference and every public venue in town had rejected them. When they approached me about a room at the Diplomates, I agreed to host them, and I charged them the standard rate of five hundred dollars. It wasn’t the profits I cared about. I really believed they deserved to have equal access like anybody else. It was not my place to discriminate based on ideology or what people would think of me. But I heard later that the government was unhappy with me. I suppose, in retrospect, it was like the incident with Habyarimana’s silly medals. These were symbolic stands, and probably foolish, but ones I thought were worth the risk.
I have said that those first months of 1994 were like watching a speeding car in slow motion heading toward a child. There was a thickness in the air. You could buy Chinese-made grenades on the street for three dollars each and machetes for just one dollar and nobody thought to ask why. Many of my friends purchased guns for themselves in the name of home protection. This was something I refused to do, despite the urging of my wife. In one tense conversation she told me I was acting like a coward for not acquiring a firearm. “You know that I have always said I fight with words, not with guns, ” I told her. “If you want to call me a coward for this, then I guess that is what I am.” She stared back at me, hurt and silent.
A few days later, I took her and our little son, Tresor, along with me to a manager’s meeting in Brussels that I had been scheduled to attend. With the other children at boarding school in Rwanda, it was just the three of us, and we made a little vacation out of it. We traveled by train through Luxembourg, Switzerland, and France. Walking amid the gray monuments and plazas, drinking the yeasty beer, and eating the starchy tourist food made it possible-almost-to forget the slow boil back at home.
After three weeks, I had to return to my job, and we arrived in Kigali on the red-eye on the morning of March 31. At that hour the city was quiet, the militias were mostly asleep and the tension that I had come to associate with Rwanda was at low ebb. The rolling green hills had never looked so good or so welcoming. Perhaps things were finally calming down. The United Nations had sent twenty-seven hundred troops to Rwanda a few months earlier to enforce the Arusha peace agreement, and it seemed the visible presence of the blue helmets was finally making a difference in keeping the militias contained. The UN seemed capable of maintaining the peace. They had given us hope.