His voice sounded very far away, as if he was speaking from down a long hallway.
“People have already started killing other people, ” the major told me. “They are stopping people at roadblocks and asking them for identification. Tutsis and those in the opposition are being killed with knives. It is very dangerous to go outside. I don’t think I can help you.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do if they come here looking for me?” I asked.
“Does your house have two doors?”
“Pardon me?”
“Does your house have more than one way to get inside?”
“Yes, of course. There is a front door and a backdoor. Why?”
“It is very simple. If the killers come looking for you through the front door, just leave through the backdoor.”
I thanked him for this advice and hung up.
It seemed that this was going to be all the help we would get from the United Nations tonight. I resigned myself to staying at home that night and hoping that nobody would come through either door.
My next phone call was to my friend John Bosco Karangwa, who was someone I could always count on for a good laugh. I knew he would be at home alone-his wife was in Europe for medical treatment. John and I had been in the moderate political party together-the Democratic Republican Movement, or MDR-and we shared a mutual dislike for Habyarimana. John hated him with a special passion. To tease John Bosco I sometimes referred to the president as his “uncle.” Even though I knew Habyarimana was a criminal, he had been ruling Rwanda for more than twenty years, and it seemed surreal that he was gone.
“Your uncle has been killed, ” I told John Bosco.
“What?” he said. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. They shot down his plane about an hour ago.”
“Let me confirm this before I start celebrating, ” he said.
We shared a little laugh, and then I got serious with him. I hated thinking about my friends according to their ethnicities or loyalties, but now was no time for reflection. A crude equation was now in effect. John Bosco was in the political opposition party and the assassination could spell only very bad things for him.
“Bosco, you could be killed tonight, ” I told him. “I want you to stay inside, keep your lights off, and let nobody inside your door.”
I am happy to tell you that I received John several days later as a refugee inside my hotel. He had been in hiding in his house as he had promised. A friend had delivered his younger brother’s three children into his care because the brother and his wife had been murdered. When I finally saw John Bosco, he hadn’t spoken above a whisper for days. We made no more jokes about the death of the president.
Pieces of the story started filtering in from the radio that night. President Habyarimana had been flying back from Tanzania, where he had been negotiating how to implement some provisions of the Arusha peace agreement. On the plane with him was the new president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira; the chief of staff of the Rwandan Army, Déogratias Nsabimana; and nine other staff members and crew. At approximately 8:30 in the evening, as the plane was approaching the airport, two shoulder-launched missiles were fired from near a grove of banana trees in the Masaka neighborhood. One of them struck the fuselage of the president’s Mystere-Falcon 50 jet, which had been a treasured gift from French president François Mitterrand. The fuel tank exploded and the fragments of the plane rained down over the Masaka commune. Some of it landed on the lawn of the presidential palace. There were no survivors.
It remains a mystery to this day who fired these missiles. One credible theory is that the rebel army had learned of the president’s flight plan and decided to take down the plane as a military tactic. We may never know for sure. But whoever did it must have known that the immediate effect on Rwanda would be catastrophic.
With the death of its president the nation of Rwanda was officially decapitated. Members of the akazu gathered around a conference table at Army headquarters and allowed Colonel Théoneste Bagosora-the father of the Interahamwe-to effectively take charge of the country. Romeo Dallaire was at this meeting and he urged the new crisis committee to allow the moderate prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, to take power, as she should have. They refused, calling her a traitor. But she was a problem they would not have to suffer for long.
Later that night Agathe called the UN detachment and asked for more security. She wanted to go to Radio Rwanda in the morning to tell the nation not to panic, that a civilian government was still in charge. How little she understood. Rwandan Army soldiers were already surrounding her home in the dark shadows of the jacaranda trees. When fifteen UN soldiers arrived in the hour just before dawn they were welcomed with a burst of gunfire that shredded the tires and wrecked the engines of two of their jeeps. The prime minister, frightened and screaming, climbed over her back wall into the house of a neighbor.
I was listening to the buildup of this disaster being broadcast live on Radio France International. It was preposterous and macabre and pitiful and terrifying. Agathe’s hiding place in the toilet was discovered and she was led outside in the midst of a cheering mob. There was a brief argument among the Rwandan soldiers over whether she should be taken prisoner or executed on the spot. The squabble ended when a police officer, who had been training to be a judical officer, stepped forward and shot the prime minister in the head at close range. The bullet tore away the left side of her face and she bled to death right there on the terrace in front of her house.
The UN soldiers, meanwhile, were persuaded to give up their weapons and led to Army headquarters near the heart of downtown, right across the street from the Hotel Diplomates, as it happened. Five of the soldiers were from Ghana and they were allowed to go free. Ten of them had the misfortune of being from Belgium -the colonial master country, the ones who had glorified the Tutsis and made them like kings. RTLM had been passing the sentence for the last few hours: The Belgians were already “suspected” of being the ones who had shot down the president’s plane. This was in conflict with the line that was already becoming like gospel on radio trottoir-that it was the RPF rebels who had sneaked into Kigali with a shoulder missile and hidden in the weeds near the airport, waiting for the wink of Habyarimana’s French jet in the eastern sky. But it was no matter. Logic was out the window. The Belgians and the rebels must have worked together. Of course.
A crowd of excited Rwandan soldiers set upon the Belgians and began clubbing them, some of them to death. A few of them managed to grab a loaded rifle and take refuge in a small concrete building near the camp entrance. They managed to fend off their attackers for a terrified hour before their holdout was stormed. They were tortured and mutilated horribly, their tendons sliced so they could not walk.
The secret plan to get the peacekeepers to leave-the one the UN knew about four months in advance-was being carried out according to the letter.
I tried not to listen to RTLM in those first hours, but it could not be avoided. Given the choice between listening to filth and missing potentially crucial information, I will choose the filth every single time.
But it was even worse than I could have imagined. The radio was instructing all its listeners to murder their neighbors.
“Do your work, ” I heard the announcers say. “Clean your neighborhood of brush. Cut the tall trees.”
I would hear variations on these phrases echoing countless times over the next three months. The “tall trees” was an unmistakable reference to the Tutsis. “Clean your neighborhood of brush” meant that rebel army sympathizers might be hiding among Tutsi families and so the entire family should be “cleaned” to be on the safe side. But somehow the worst phrase of all to me was “Do your work.” It made killing sound like a responsibility. Like it was the normal thing to do.