Chapter 1
The convent was a cool respite from the heat and humidity outside. We had crossed a large, flat and well cared for lawn to reach the ex-colonial residence, home to members of this religious order of sisters. Just a few years before, dismembered bodies, some still in the pitiful throes of life, had surrounded this same red brick building, rather than the pleasing green expanse of well cut grass that now reassured in its tidiness and vibrancy. A place of inferno and murder had again become tranquil with the song of red grosbeaks and the gentle Rwandan breeze.
Sister Ignatia was the last European left here in this religious order. She sat, upright and dignified in what passed for a German living room circa 1930, with tapestries, books and bowls full of fresh fruit providing colour and domestic incidence. Lending an air of humour was her grey parrot, Edu, which peered down on proceedings from its window perch, looking faintly puzzled by these unexpected guests. The Sister herself was a striking looking woman in her late fifties, her vocation to the people of Rwanda reflected in her eyes. She calmly told us her story.
For the past 30 years she had lived in this rural area near Gikongoro in southwest Rwanda helping to run a health centre for a community without access to electricity or running water amid the all-embracing poverty that characterized the villagers’ subsistence lives. The local Tutsis, the minority ethnic group making up around 12 per cent of the population, had become more and more the target for a violent backlash from the extremists in the majority Hutu population. The Rwandan president, the Hutu Juvénal Habyarimana, who had seized power back in 1973, had continued an ‘apartheid’ system that all but banned Tutsis from working in the army, civil service and professional jobs. But, however terrible life under his despotic reign had been for his Tutsi subjects, his death on 6 April 1994 in a plane crash was the trigger for a 100-day genocide that left up to a million dead.
One day after Habyarimana’s death a Hutu priest turned up at the convent carrying a terribly injured young Tutsi, with deep machete wounds to his head and body. The Hutu extremist Interahamwe militia had beaten the priest for being a traitor for trying to help the child but the cleric was less badly hurt. Despite the Sisters’ medical help the boy died of his injuries soon afterwards. It was then that four local Hutu leaders arrived at the convent.
I was told I must be quiet about events which were happening because there were people who were disobedient. They [the officials] asked for money and fuel and one soldier for a room in the convent. I learnt afterwards that this team of four were the organizers of massacres in the area. The Tutsi were very frightened – there had been massacres before and rumours abounded that the extremists were planning similar ‘exterinations’ of these people they referred to as ‘cockroaches.’ Many Tutsi had trekked several kilometres with their families, avoiding roadblocks and constant attack to seek sanctuary at our church.
People streamed into here seeking refuge in the church, health centre and on the grass and outbuilding outside, and by 21 April there were more than 21,000 – mostly women and children. The church was packed and so was the school building. Many people were badly wounded, after being attacked by the militias as they fled. I hid our Tutsi staff here [in the convent itself] and closed all the doors and windows.
The soldier who we had allowed to stay knew that Tutsi staff were here but didn’t do anything – he said he guaranteed us [the sisters] there would be no problem. I later learned this was a lie – he was here to keep watch, and find out if any Tutsis were being hidden. A few local Hutus helped the refugees. Others robbed and beat them as they came to seek shelter here. Those inside the church were mostly old and very weak, many with terrified infants. They were camped on the grass outside too. During the nights we tried to help in the church by feeding the refugees and giving them medicines.
Already by 20 April this place was surrounded. The killers approached quietly and in the night – though we could hear them singing war songs. Some were wearing banana leaves as they approached. That night, 20 April, soldiers told us to go into the house [convent] and lock the doors and windows, and not to come out. If we did they could not guarantee our safety. At midnight we heard the Magnificat being sung in the church and the bells being rung and we asked each other what was going to happen. At 2.00 a.m. on the morning of the 21st I heard the sound of grenades exploding, guns being fired and the terrible cries of more than 22,000 men, women and children being killed.
The militia even went to the medical centre where there were around 100 patients. But they left after we told them they must kill my assistant and me before they could kill those in the beds. In the other health centres they killed everyone, small babies in cradles, mothers and the elderly too sick or injured to escape.
When there was no one left to kill, the head of the military came and asked for a caterpillar truck to move the bodies into a mass grave but I refused. In the end we paid 300 local Hutus to help bury the bodies properly.’
We left the convent on 15 June, and went south to Cyangugu and then to Bukavu where we saw the French soldiers. They refused to let us return to the convent as they said it was unsafe and our names were on a list of those the militia wanted to kill.
Eventually, Sister Ignatia did return, although all the other European sisters decided to depart to safer Western countries in an attempt to get over the trauma of the nightmare they had witnessed.1
Imagine the horror of having to listen to the sounds of mass killing – the shrieks of the injured, of mothers pleading for the lives of small children whose skulls were often smashed against the walls of the church to save the killers wasting a bullet. To walk out at dawn to a church, only metres away, congregated by butchered corpses and literally mounds of bodies, some still in the agony of death. The trauma of what must be a daily reliving of such barbarities is etched on the sister’s face, in her nervous hand gestures and in her calm but breaking voice as she recounted the horror. Every night, the same screams and cries haunt her efforts at sleep. It is an unending nightmare.
Opposite the church today there is a memorial to the crime that happened here. Rows of wooden, glass-topped cabinets inside an anonymous red brick building display the contorted bodies of small children and adults, often curled up in a fetal position as a last comforting gesture before death. Bookcases inside the doorway contain row upon row of skulls, the empty eye sockets staring out searchingly at the inquisitor. Around the walls the pictures are of the church and convent during and after the genocide – a true vision of hell.
Travelling around Rwanda today such memorials shatter the notion that this was an event best forgotten, as it was by all but France at the time. At Nyamata church, a few kilometres from Kigali, where up to 10,000 died, the altar is still covered by its bloodstained cloth, from the Tutsi ‘sacrifices’ made here one day in April 1994. The tabernacle and font are riddled with bullet and shrapnel holes. Inside the twisted iron doorway, which was blown apart by grenades, is a small room, ten foot across. Here the stench of death is pungent. Blue body bags lie half open. The contents sprawl out onto the floor – various barely recognizable body parts, some skulls, some decomposing limbs with rotten clothing clinging to them. They had been recently recovered from the latrines and ditches by the very killers who had put them there – part of their punishment after they were caught. Not content with blowing the terrified civilians apart by grenades or battering and bludgeoning them with their farming tools, the Interahamwe delighted in dousing some small children with petrol before setting them ablaze near the front door. One 12-year-old survivor spoke of seeing small children ‘writhing from the burns completely alive, truly. There was a strong smell of meat, and petrol.’2
Behind the church is another crypt. Descending down its darkened staircase ‘to the dead’ is a visit to hell under the earth. In the first dark, airless and stale-smelling room rows of seemingly endless skulls and bones are stacked high. A corridor leads along to a further 48 such rooms, each housing unknown numbers of smashed discoloured bones. Outside, the figure of the young taxi driver who has brought me here sits hunched by the white crypt stone entrance, his head in his hands, sobbing. Epimaque Rwema, my guide, tells me softly, ‘It is his first time here.’ Does it get better after 1000 times I wonder?
At Ntarama, a few kilometres away, the genocide site is hidden up a dirt track, beyond the ironically named ‘Nelson Mandela Peace Village’. A sign outside the church compound announces matter of factly, ‘Eglise Ntarama genocide plus/minus 5000 persons’. The guide is a middle-aged woman. Her parents, husband and four young children were slaughtered here. Now, as in some appalling Greek myth, she is forced to stave off starvation by daily revisiting the horror for visitors.
Inside the church, shafts of the midday sun break in through massive holes in the red brick walls. Most of the stained glass windows have also gone, blown out by the grenades the militia used on the terrified refugees inside. The wooden pews are still covered with the debris of those who once sought refuge here for several days before the killers came. Small yellow eating bowls, woollen hats, red plastic children’s shoes and school exercise books; a child’s comb balances on a tiny plastic blue necklace. Walking is almost impossible without standing on the clothing, bones or ‘relics’ of the dead. When the killers entered the church, shooting and hacking with their machetes as if cutting down sorghum plants, some Tutsis fled to other outbuildings, but these were set on fire with the families inside; today there are just blackened bricks, bones, discarded shoes and clothing – and sacks of skulls.
The killing sites cover Rwanda. Between April and mid-July 1994, while the world sat glued to the trial of O. J Simpson, mourned the death of depressed rock idol Kurt Cobain and gloried in the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first president, an estimated 937,000 innocent Africans died solely because of their ethnic group. Like all genocides, this one had been meticulously planned and organized up to two years in advance. It was not the work of ‘savages’ or ‘typical African intertribal warfare’, as most of the West consoled itself as it sat on its hands and justified doing nothing. It was a genocide that intelligent, professional, university educated people had masterminded.
The killing became a daily ritual throughout the country. Hundreds of thousands either took part or quietly looked on as their neighbours were murdered. For the ‘workers’ it became as typical as getting in the harvest, using the same equipment – machetes, hoes and axes, but this time cutting down limbs and lives instead of sorghum, banana and mango. Interahamwe militiamen, bedecked in their uniforms of banana foliage with manioc leaves entwined in their hair, were happy in their ‘work,’ often drunk on ikigage (sorghum wine) or the ubiquitous urwagwa (local banana wine), as well as the taste of blood. For some, forced into killing on pain of death, alcoholic oblivion was needed to machete their elderly, bed-bound neighbours, or the children and infants who had played happily in the dirt alleyways only days before. For other Interahamwe, there was great joy to be had in literally cutting proud Tutsis down to size; tall Tutsi women sometimes had their legs hacked off before being left to die as a way of ‘teaching them a lesson’ for their alleged superior size and manner.
Yet, despite the numbers involved, the killing in each commune was systematic, precise and structured. Transport was laid on for the murderers to travel swiftly to their place of ‘work’, and they were rewarded with food and endless drink. Husbands killed their Tutsi wives and in-laws. Hutu hate radio RTLM warned listeners that Rwanda’s troubles had begun by letting children and pregnant women survive the anti-Tutsi pogroms of the early 1960s. This time the laughing DJs demanded that no Tutsi should be allowed to live.
Where was the rest of the world? Much, rightly, has been made of the United Nations’ failure to give adequate resources to preclude the genocide. The United States, in the guise of President Clinton and his official adviser to the UN Madeleine Albright, stand accused of monumental arrogance and indifference as they prepared to watch Rwanda and its people burn for political and electoral reasons. John Major’s government in the United Kingdom also chose to turn its back on the unfolding tragedy, resulting in the killers effectively gaining a ‘green light’ from the international community to continue the slaughter.
However, one permanent member of the UN Security Council was heavily involved in Rwanda – before, during and after the genocide. France, the ‘protector’ of its former African colonies and the power behind some of the worst dictatorships on the ‘black continent’, is implicated to its core in the deaths at Nyanza, Ntarama and throughout the tiny central African nation. While apologies have been forthcoming in the past decade from nations that now ‘regret’ their inaction in the light of the immense suffering of which they were all too aware, the French government has remained silent.
In this book I uncover the untold story, a tale the Élysée would prefer to conceal, of how the politicians and military of a nation with a history of creative genius, invention and civilizing zeal chose to form an alliance with a genocidal regime and to arm, finance and train this regime and its soldiers.
Would the genocide have taken place without the support of Mitterrand and of the government he backed in Kigali? A Human Rights Watch report on the arms trade concluded:
The people wielding the machetes in Rwanda operated in an environment in which a heavily armed movement (a combination of government and militias) provided the necessary protection and encouragement for the killers. If this environment had been different, if the government and allied militias had not been so well armed ... there might have been a nasty conflict perhaps but not a genocide.
As the Canadian general, Romeo Dallaire, who commanded the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR) during the genocide, pointed out, Rwanda just did not matter. While the Bosnian crisis provoked full-scale diplomacy by the West and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of NATO and UN troops, the same countries treated Rwanda with indifference. This left the way open for Mitterrand to use it as a pawn in his francophone game, a pawn that could easily be damaged or smashed without consequences because it was in Africa and the rest of the world was not interested. The charge France faces of being implicated in the deaths of a million civilians is serious, and explains why politicians have fought shy of bringing the matter to light.
The reaction in France to its Rwandan policy has been muted, though not avoided. Several key pressure groups, including the Paris-based Survie, academics and African analysts such as Gerard Prunier, David Ambrosetti, François-Xavier Verschave and Antoine Jouan have all investigated this subject in great depth. The French media have also become increasingly involved in exposing areas of its national policy that are both painful and distressing to a nation steeped in a tradition of freedom and justice. Journalists and publishers such as Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, Mehdi Ba, Belgian writer Colette Braeckman and Jean-François Dupaquier have all contributed substantially to the debate by use of their eyewitness accounts, in the case of de Saint-Exupéry, or by uncovering new and important sources. Yet, while this subject has been exposed to the French public for the past 12 years, it has rarely made any impact or impression on the English-speaking world, which perhaps is all too anxious with its own current foreign policy headaches and skeletons to want to look too closely at those of François Mitterrand.
There are important lessons to be drawn from the Rwandan genocide for both France and the West. The present situations in parts of Africa and the Middle East show how easy it is for Western governments, with their own private geostrategic and monetary agendas to inflame rather than solve the difficulties of states they earmark for political or military ‘solutions’. The question is who is such a solution really for? In Rwanda, the French intervention in 1990 was very much aimed at ensuring the continuity of French influence in the country, and the continuation of a brutal, corrupt and ‘apartheid-based’ regime. At the base level of every such intervention, every such ‘solution’, though rarely at the forefront of the political minds that carry them out, are the civilian men, women and children who inevitably carry the brunt of any conflict. In the dehumanizing eyes of some Western political and military chiefs, such people become mere ‘collateral damage’: in Rwanda, such ‘collateral damage’ from the resulting genocide stands as a lesson of a cynicism gone mad.
* * *
Le pays des mille collines, the land of a thousand hills, is one of Africa’s treasures. Unlike its neighbours Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Tanzania and Uganda, Rwanda is a tiny country, the size of Wales, insignificant at first sight on the African and, indeed, world stage. Bordered by Lake Kivu and the Volcano National Park to the north and west, most of its eight million people survive their daily battle with poverty by relying on agricultural subsistence. Its only claim to fame before the 1994 genocide was through the highly dedicated and eccentric naturalist Dian Fossey and her attempts to save mountain gorillas in the beautiful northern rain forest.
Life in Rwandan villages is often short and always hard for the average 48 years each man can hope to live, or for the ‘more fortunate’ women who can expect to survive an extra two years of toil. The small huts that dot the lush green valleys and hills, with scarcely a flat plateau in sight, are a picture of the world of yesterday. No televisions, no cars, no computer games for the children who instead run around playing happily with discarded tyres. Water is more often than not carried up from the valleys to homes on the slopes by a mixture of the old and young. There is no retirement here and no social services to bail out the sick or elderly. In 1990 small holdings growing beans, bananas, plantain, rice and vegetables, eked out with very occasional meat all cooked on charcoal fires, provided families with their essential food. While the population has grown in the urban areas – the capital Kigali in the centre of the country, Ruhengeri and Gisenyi in the north and the university town of Butare in the south – Rwanda is primarily a rural economy. It relies on its tea and coffee plantations for commerce and on tourists coming to see gorillas and the incredibly diverse and beautiful Akagera and Volcanoes national parks and the Nyungwe forest. It has no mineral or diamond riches with which its neighbour the Democratic Republic of Congo has bee n blessed, or some may say cursed.
To add to the mix of poverty and deprivation, Rwanda has become synonymous with the myth of ethnic division. Most Europeans who know anything about the genocide will venture the statement ‘that was something between Tutsi and Hutu wasn’t it?’ as a catch-all summary of the disaster. While Rwanda is made up of three ethnic groups, the Hutu majority of around 85 per cent, the Tutsi minority of roughly 12 per cent and the Twas, about 3 per cent, the reality is that there is no intrinsic difference between them. It took the introduction of identity cards bearing a person’s ethnic grouping by Belgian colonizers in the 1930s to distinguish accurately between Hutus and Tutsis. And this was for political reasons – part of the classic ‘divide and rule’ tactic so beloved of colonizers everywhere. While the European stereotype places the majority Hutu people as short and stocky and the Tutsis as tall and lean, outside ancient anthropological and racial theory text-books such distinctions are meaningless. A trip to any Kigali or Butare market will quickly prove that centuries of intermarriage have blurred any easy distinctions. Instead, the Rwandan people – Hutu, Tutsi and Twa – have been bound together for centuries, speaking their own language, Kinyarwanda, tilling the same soil or breeding cattle and worshipping the same ancestral deities – or more recently the Christian God.
Colonization by Germany in the 1890s, then by Belgium after the First World War until independence in 1962, had a devastating effect on dividing Rwandans. A country that until 1880 was ruled by a king (Mwami), with the help of a village hierarchy and ancestral tradition, was split apart 100 years later by a ‘modern’ world in pursuit of geo-strategic, economic and political ambitions.
The Belgian rulers favoured the Tutsi, who took advantage of the imbalance to gain increased land and local prestige. Shortly before Belgium pulled out of the country and independence was declared on 1 July 1962, the legacy of its policy of ethnic partiality became apparent. Belgium and the Catholic Church switched their hand to supporting the majority Hutu ‘underclass’, thereby creating a counter elite. Recognizing the political expediency of allowing the majority to be in control once the state became independent, Belgium stood idly by as its former colony was bathed in a frenzy of killing from 1959 to 1962. Hutus ‘settled scores’ with their Tutsi masters who had been given control under the colonial system. Hundreds of thousands were killed or fled to neighbouring Uganda, Tanzania and Burundi, a problem that was to return to haunt Rwanda in 1990. An estimated 700,000 Tutsis ended up in or around refugee camps.3
After Belgium’s withdrawal in 1962, there was a slow but steady incorporation of Rwanda into la Francophonie, the loose collection of former French colonies now part of a ‘French-African commonwealth’. With its former colonizers now more interested in a pure economic aid relationship than in political and military links, France moved in to take advantage of the cultural and linguistic roots already in place.
The French Cultural Centre and embassy in Kigali encouraged continued reliance on Paris for all areas of life – language, arts, finance and military. Basic areas of society became saturated with the trappings of the richer Western country. Like other such African countries, Rwanda became ‘a little island of France, where French papers are available on the day they are printed, and everything else, from telephone systems and tanks to paté, are French’.4 The pre-1990 Rwandan army took part in training exercises with French legionnaires and relied on its Western counterpart for support should a war break out.5 In almost every aspect of Rwandan life, France made sure it was present. It was classic neocolonialism – the tiny African state becoming a ‘victim of an indirect and subtle form of domination by political, economic, social, military or technical means’.6
On 20 October 1962 President de Gaulle and Rwandan head of state Grégoire Kayibanda signed an agreement of ‘friendship and cooperation’, which was broadened to include civil cooperation clauses (economic, cultural and technical) by the end of that year. The Rwandan president, a former teacher turned journalist whose anti-Tutsi pogroms had already caused some horrific massacres that continued until he was overthrown in 1973, made an official visit to France in 1962, where he was effusive in his praise of de Gaulle. A French ambassador to Rwanda was appointed in 1964 and, within ten years of independence, Rwanda had become a fully-fledged Parisian suburb.
French intervention in Rwanda in the late 1980s and early 1990s was first and foremost an attempt by Paris to keep its beloved francophonie intact. It was symptomatic of 30 years of military intervention by Paris on the continent. Despite appalling human rights abuses by its ‘client’ African governments, France has continued to support dictators and regimes whose murderous policies towards their own people have been well documented. The continuity of this policy is as striking as its longevity through Presidents de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand, and has survived changing times, values and world politics. Indeed, the term François-Xavier Verschave coined to highlight the connection between France and its ‘client’ African states – la Françafrique – is not without irony, with ‘fric’ being French slang for money. Speaking in 1996, a diplomat in the Ivory Coast summed up the equation, ‘You could talk about the French presence for hours and hours but it comes down to two things – prestige and business.’7
A number of different government departments in Paris, not all advocating the same strategy, worked out French policy towards Rwanda and other client francophone countries. Institutional competition was endemic in the politics of African affairs. The ministries of defence, foreign affairs, cooperation and the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) – the secret service – all vied for their own budgetary and bureaucratic well-being and influence in policy making. The Ministry of Cooperation had been set up precisely to decide on and to implement policy towards the newly independent states. Known somewhat sarcastically as the ‘Ministry of the African Neo-Colonies’,8 its decisions seemed to reflect the interests of French politicians rather than the good of the states in which it operated. In fact, the real power behind African policy lay with the president at the Élysée. Decisions were based on his judgement or that of his personally appointed adviser at his special consultative body, the secret Africa Cell, also embedded at the Élysée Palace. This ‘individualistic’ diplomacy was given a public display of openness at the francophone political summits, when the French president invited friendly African heads of state to a show of unity and hospitality.
French policy in Africa has always been based on personal ties between respective presidents, their ministers and business leaders. In Rwanda it was these personal ties that were to lead Paris into the heart of genocide. The red carpet welcome that greeted the Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana on his many visits to the French capital, with banquets, shopping trips and business deals to cement relations, was symptomatic of how policy was made. Mitterrand’s son, Jean-Christophe, made personal links with African elites when his father appointed him head of the Africa Cell. Such high level ‘cronyism’ gave the president a secure, uncritical voice in African affairs. Jean-Christophe, now with the rather appropriate nickname papa m’a dit (daddy told me to), claimed that the difference between the French and Anglo-Saxon way of dealing with Africa was down to the hot-blooded Gallic nature. ‘The French culture corresponds better with the Africans’ than the English culture does – it’s our Mediterranean side. Our ties are so much more personal.’ His successor in the Africa Cell office, Bruno Delaye, romantically reflected, ‘France and Africa are like an old couple. We argue, we disagree, but in the end we cannot separate. We have too much, too many friends, in common.’9 For both men, and indeed the whole edifice of francophone Africa, personal ties, deals done over bottles of wine and contacts made in Paris clubs and Brazzaville mansions were the way to unlock the many benefits that such close relationships had to offer.
The personal, political, military and economic justification for intervening in this far-off region was to be found in a cultural and linguistic heritage. In the Rwandan tragedy Paris was fearful not just of losing a client government with which it could do business, but of having it replaced by that most vilified of projected rivals ‘les anglais’. The anxiety that French Africa is under constant threat from the Anglo-Saxons pushing a zone of influence from Ethiopia to South Africa has become almost pathological. It is an area of policy that continues to unite socialist and Gaullist political groups and seems to override all other political, military and strategic viewpoints and, in the case of Rwanda, human rights and morality as well.
This latter-day fear of Anglo-Saxon encroachment had its origins in the events at Fashoda a century earlier. In 1898, rather than risk war with Britain over its African dependencies, the French government had faced a humiliating climb-down by withdrawing its garrison under Commander Marchand from the Sudanese town of Fashoda in the face of Kitchener’s British expedition. Since then a sense of ‘never again’ has motivated the policy of the Élysée, the French foreign office at Quai d’Orsay and the military. It is a mindset, not official policy, but it cannot be ignored. Central Africa was a francophone zone and Rwanda, the perceived border of this French-speaking area, became in French official thinking a ‘Rubicon’ that might allow an entry into la Françafrique for perfidious Albion, and more importantly the United States.
This rivalry, born in the colonial era, has been exacerbated by French military defeats in Indo-China and North Africa and the systematic march of American culture and the English language around the world. François Mitterrand, as minister of justice in 1957, declared, ‘All problems that we French have had in West Africa are not to do with a desire for independence, but with a rivalry between French and British areas. It is British agents who have made all our difficulties.’10 Rwanda became a ‘linguistic Maginot line’.11 One French commentator compared France with:
a large hen followed by a docile brood of little black chicks. ... The casual observer imagining that money is the cement of the whole relationship would have the wrong impression. The cement is language and culture. Paris’s African backyard remains its backyard because all the chicks cackle in French. There is a high symbiosis between French and francophone African political elites. It is a mixture of many things: old memories, shared material interests, delusions of grandeur, gossip, sexual peccadilloes, in short a common culture.12
A French journalist commented wryly, ‘In Africa, France does not have a policy, only bad habits.’13 In Rwanda’s case, this ‘bad habit’, which politicians and the public in Paris shrugged off, resulted in corpses decomposing outside Nyambuye and throughout the tiny insignificant country. Ten years after the killing Sister Ignatia still sits in her convent, reliving daily the screams of the murdered. ‘I don’t understand how people can hate each other so much,’ she sighs. ‘God created all men equal.’