Two factors must be taken into account. The first is the great respect we Rwandans have for formal education. If a man here has an advanced degree he is automatically treated as an authority on his subject. RTLM understood this and hired many professors and other “experts” to help spread the hate. The head and cofounder, in fact, was a former Ph.D. professor of-what else?-history.
The other thing you have to understand was that the message crept into our national consciousness very slowly. It did not happen all at once. We did not wake up one morning to hear it pouring out of the radio at full strength. It started with a sneering comment, the casual use of the term “cockroach, ” the almost humorous suggestion that Tutsis should be airmailed back to Ethiopia. Stripping the humanity from an entire group takes time. It is an attitude that requires cultivation, a series of small steps, daily tending. I suppose it is like the famous example of the frog who will immediately leap out of a pot of boiling water if you toss him into it, but put it in cold water and turn up the heat gradually, and he will die in boiling water without being aware of what happened.
RTLM was not the only media outlet turning up the heat while the rebel army inched across the countryside. Mugesera’s throat-cutting speech was played on Radio Rwanda. And in 1990 a new newspaper called Kangura (Wake It Up) started publishing. It was essentially RTLM in print-populist, funny, and completely obsessed with “the Tutsi question.” Its publisher was Hassan Ngeze, a former soft-drink vendor from Gisenyi who most people considered a loudmouth and a boor. He bragged about fictional deeds in his past, exaggerated the circulation numbers of Kangura, and obtained many of his scoops from his connections in government ministries. But he had an amazing talent for crystallizing people’s dark thoughts and splashing them on the pages in an entertaining way. And just as RTLM was bankrolled by wealthy people close to the president, this rag was secretly funded by members of the akazu.
By August 1993, the rebel army had scored several convincing military victories in the north and put Habayrimana in a position where he was forced by France, the United States and other Western countries into signing a peace treaty known as the Arusha Accords. He surely must have recognized it as his political obituary. It laid the foundations for a power-sharing government. Habyarimana would be allowed to stay on as president, but only in a ceremonial sense. And in a special insult to all those who hated the Tutsi, a battalion of six hundred RPF soldiers was allowed to occupy the grounds of the parliament building in preparation for the formation of the transitional government. Kangura portrayed these troops as the point of a spear aimed straight at the heart of the Hutu majority. The paper also made a curious prediction: President Habyarimana would not live out the year. He would be assassinated, said the paper, by a rebel hit squad. It would then be the duty of every good and patriotic Hutu to seek revenge. Otherwise, the rebel army would start killing innocents.
In a February 1994 article headlined “Final Attack, ” Ngeze wrote:“We know where the cockroaches are. If they look for us, they had better watch out.” Other features were not as subtle.
“What weapons shall we use to conquer the cockroaches once and for all?” queried the caption of one illustration. The answer was pictured to the side: a wood-handled machete. Children were clearly enemies, too. “A cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly, ” proclaimed one story. Another diatribe went like this: “We say to the cockroaches that if they lift up their heads again, it will no longer be necessary to fight them in the bush. We will start by eliminating the internal enemy [my italics]. They will be silenced.”
This farce of a paper had a small circulation but an enormous reach. Copies were sent out to the villages and passed around gleefully. It seemed a welcome break from the usual tired and boring news out of the capital. Here at last, said many people, is a paper that really says the ugly truth-that the Tutsis are going to kill us when they invade.
Before it stopped publishing two months before the genocide Kangura editorialized: “We must remark to the cockroaches that if they do not change their attitude and if they persevere in their arrogance, the majority people will establish a force composed of young Hutu. This force will be charged with breaking the resistance of the Tutsi children.”
What the newspaper did not say was that just such a force had already been put into place and was busily preparing itself to murder children throughout Rwanda.
In early November 1993, a shipment of cargo was trucked into Kigali. The wooden crates bore import papers announcing that they had been received from China at the seaport at Mombasa in Kenya. Inside were 987 cartons of inexpensive machetes. This was not enough to cause alarm by itself. The machete is a common household tool in Rwanda, used for all manner of jobs-slicing mangoes, mowing grass, harvesting bananas, cutting paths through heavy brush, butchering animals.
If anybody had been paying attention, however, the shipment might have seemed curious when matched with other facts. The recipient, for example, was one of the primary financial backers of the hate-mongering radio station RTLM. Those cartons from China, too, were but a small part of what amounted to a mysterious wave. Between January 1993 and March 1994, a total of half a million machetes were imported into my country from various overseas suppliers. This was a number wildly out of line with ordinary demands. Somebody obviously wanted a lot of sharp objects in the hands of ordinary Rwandans. But nobody questioned the sudden abundance of machetes-at least not publicly.
If those imports were quiet, the formation of the youth militias was obvious. It was hard to miss those roving bands of young men wearing colorful neckerchiefs, blowing whistles, singing patriotic songs, and screaming insults against the Tutsis, their sympathizers and members of the opposition. They conducted military drills with fake guns carved from wood because the government could not afford to give them real rifles. They were known as the Interahamwe, which means either “those who stand together” or “those who attack together, ” depending on who is doing the translating.
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.