It had been so long since we had been to our house that we decided to go straight there instead of to our suite at the Diplo-mates. For the first time in almost two years we felt good about the future.
FIVE
I STILL REMEMBER the sunset on that night of April 6, 1994. There was no rain. The sky was hazy with spring moisture and dust and the slanted dying light made the bottoms of the clouds turn blood orange. The colors deepened and darkened as the sun went lower, reaching for the hillcrest in a nimbus of purples, violets, and indigos, the colors of oncoming night. Around town some people paused to watch, cocking their heads to the west. It was a moment of beautiful stillness.
I have been told that it is common for people to mark exactly where they are when they learn of death on a grand scale. I have met Americans, for example, who can tell me in detail which suit they were putting on or what highway they were driving down at the time of the suicide jet attacks on the World Trade Center. Perhaps it is a way to link our own small presence to the great bloodstained currents of history for just a moment. I suppose this is also a way of feeling a part of an overwhelming fatal event, a slight flirtation with the finality that awaits us all-a rehearsal for our own deaths, you might say.
I know with certainty that you will find nobody living in Rwanda today who does not remember what they were doing in the early evening hours of April 6, 1994, when the private jet of President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down with a portable missile as it approached for landing at Kigali Airport.
As it happened, I was in my usual place for that time of day. I was eating a dinner of panfried fish on the terrace of the Diplomates Hotel. Sitting next to me was my brother-in-law. We were celebrating a small victory-I had helped his wife get a job as a saleswoman for a Dutch car dealer named NAHV.
The airport is about ten miles away and so we heard nothing out of the ordinary. Less than a minute after the crash, however, the waiter came over with a house telephone. It was my wife on the line.
“I have heard something I have never heard before, ” she told me. “Get home as fast as you are able.”
I couldn’t have known it then, but phones were ringing all over the city and would continue to ring all night long.
On the way out to the parking lot we talked to an Army major who had been listening to his radio. Roadblocks were going up all over town, he told us, though he could not explain why. Don’t take the Gikondo road, he said. Take the one that leads past the Parliament. Oddly, this was where the rebel army had its local stronghold. My brother-in-law shook hands in the parking lot and we urged each other to be careful. I could not have known it then, but I was shaking his hand for the last time.
I drove on the Boulevard of the Organization of African Unity through Kigali, which was unnaturally deserted. The power had been cut off and all the street lamps were off. There was virtually nobody on the streets. I saw glimpses of cooking fires flickering behind adobe walls, an occasional face mooning out from the shadows. It occurred to me that a coup d’état might be taking place, or perhaps the long-awaited RPF invasion. But I was calm. For some reason it did not occur to me to be frightened.
I drove slowly and carefully, but passed no other drivers. Kigali was like a city battening down before the arrival of a hurricane. It was 8:35 P. M.
The killing could have ended right there. It all could have been stopped quite easily at this early stage with just a small fraction of the police department of any midsized American city. Rwandans have always shown respect to authority figures-it is part of our national personality-and a brigade of international soldiers would have found it surprisingly easy to keep order on the streets of Kigali if they had had the guts to show they meant business about saving lives. But they didn’t.
A force of twenty-seven hundred United Nations peacekeeping soldiers was already inside the country. But they were ill equipped and under strict orders from UN headquarters not to fire their weapons except in defense of themselves. “Do not fire unless fired upon” was the mantra. The recent U.S. disaster in Somalia, in which eighteen Army Rangers had been killed by street mobs, had made the idea of “African peacekeeping” a poisonous concept in the minds of many diplomats in the American State Department and the UN Security Council. They saw nothing to gain from it and everything to lose.
The leader of the UN troops in Rwanda was a lantern-jawed general from Canada named Romeo Dallaire. None of us knew it at the time, but he was handcuffed by a lack of resolve from his bosses in New York. He and his troops also had no idea what they had gotten into. In terms of background intelligence, Dallaire had only a map of Rwanda ripped out of a tourist guide and an encyclopedia entry hastily photocopied from the Montreal Public Library. But he got a quick and nasty education about Rwanda after an informant from a high level of the Hutu Power movement sneaked over to the UN compound one night, that winter. This man, later nicknamed “Jean-Pierre, ” came with a story that would have seemed incredible to anyone who hadn’t been watching the frog slowly boiling for the last year. Up to seventeen hundred Interahamwe members had apparently been trained to act as an extermination squad against civilians. There were secret caches of arms scattered all around Kigali-stores of Kalashnikovs, ammunition, and many more of those damnably cheap grenades-to supplement the militia’s arsenal, which consisted largely of traditional Rwandan weapons like spears and clubs. Jean-Pierre himself had been ordered to register all Tutsis and opposition elements living in a certain area, and he strongly suspected it was being prepared as a death list. Those who were planning the genocide expected there to be some half-hearted resistance from the UN at the beginning, said Jean-Pierre. And there was a strategy to cope with this-a brutal attack aimed at Belgian soldiers serving with the UN mission. It was thought that the Europeans would have no stomach for taking casualties and quickly withdraw their troops, leaving Rwandans to shape their own destiny.
In disregard of his UN superior in Rwanda, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, Dallaire had not sat on this news. On January 11, 1994, he had sent a cable to his superiors in New York informing them of his intention to raid the arms caches. It would have put only the tiniest dent in the amount of sharp-edged killing weapons being stockpiled around Rwanda, but I believe that it would have inflicted a devastating psychological blow to the architects of the genocide. They would have seen that somebody was paying attention and that genocidal actions would be met with reprisals. But the response Dallaire received from his UN bosses nicely summarized just about every cowardly, bureaucratic, and incompetent step this organization was to make in a nation on the brink of mass murder. Stockpiling of weapons may have violated the peace accords, Dallaire was told, but going after them was “beyond the mandate” of the United Nations. He was instead encouraged to take his concerns to a man who surely would be the last one in the world to care: President Habyarimana.
The UN official who directed General Dallaire to take this deferential action was the chief of peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, who would one day serve as secretary-general.
Jean-Pierre’s warnings were effectively brushed off. Nobody from the UN ever heard from him again.
So it did not stop.
The guards opened the gate for me at my house, and I walked through my front door to the sound of a ringing telephone. It was Bik Cornelis, the general manager of the Hotel Mille Collines-my counterpart at Sabena’s other luxury hotel. He was a colleague and a friend, and not one to waste time when something was pressing.