Some of those people who lived through the genocide with me have gone on to what might be called happiness, or at least a future without too much pain or fear. Odette Nyiramilimo became close to the new government and was appointed to secretary of state for the Department of Social Affairs. She is now a senator in the Parliament of Rwanda. Her husband, Jean-Baptiste, reopened his clinic in the heart of Kigali and continues to see patients every day. My journalist friend Thomas Kamilindi took a job with the British Broadcasting Company as a correspondent in Rwanda, where his honest and unflinching news reports continued to irritate those in power. He recently accepted a fellowship at the University of Michigan.
For others, the future was bleak. My other journalist friend Edward Mutsinzi, who swore a blood oath in Room 126 to protect my children, was captured and tortured by RPF soldiers shortly after the liberation of Kigali. For some reason, they thought he had useful information. They beat him to a pulp and left him for dead. A squad of Australian soldiers attached to the United Nations found him lying in the dirt and helped save his life. He lives today in Belgium, blind and unable to work. Another man who swore that oath with me, John Bosco Karangwa, grew sick and died in 2001. His wife and children live nearby and I visit them when I can.
Aloise Karasankwavu, the bank executive who tried to persuade me to flee with him to Murama, wanted to help rebuild my country at the end of the civil war. He had just passed an exam to be the director of one of the nation’s largest banks, BCDI, when he was thrown in jail on bogus charges of helping carry out the genocide. He died in his cell one night of suspicious causes. No autopsy was performed.
The top architects of the genocide have mostly been rounded up and taken before the International Criminal Tribunal in Tanzania. The colonel accused of planning the genocide, Theoneste Bagosora, is still on trial as I write this. So is the head of the national police, Augustin Ndindiliyimana. My friend Georges Rutaganda, the vice president of the Interahamwe and the main supplier of beer and toilet paper to the Mille Collines, was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity in 1999. He was specifically charged, among other things, with organizing the massacre at the Official Technical School where the killings began minutes after the UN jeeps disappeared down the road. As for the priest who wore a gun instead of his robes, Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, he now lives in exile in France. A judge there brought charges against him in 1995 for the crime of genocide. His case is still caught in the slow gears of the French judicial system and may never be resolved.
I have no idea what happened to that neighbor of mine I called Marcel, the clerk I saw wearing a military uniform and carrying a machete on the morning of April 7, 1994. As far as I know, he has melted back into a normal life and is now going to work, paying his taxes, and raising his children.
General Romeo Dallaire suffered emotional stress and was voluntarily relieved of his command the month after the end of the war. Back in Canada, he wrestled with posttraumatic stress disorder and was found one night in 1997 curled in a fetal position under a park bench, drunk and incoherent. Dallaire has since found a new life as an author and a lecturer and is now a fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His old boss, Kofi Annan, is now the secretary-general of the United Nations.
President Bill Clinton stopped over in Rwanda on March 25, 1998, and offered an apology for America ’s failure to intervene. He stayed for approximately three hours and did not leave the airport.
The daughters of Tatiana’s brother now live in our home in Brussels. We raised them as our own children and they are both healthy and doing well in school. They have no memories of the violence and the awful ordeal they had been through, for which I am grateful. But they will never know their parents. My brother-in-law and his wife vanished without a trace after that first night when the president was assassinated. We can only assume they were slaughtered and their bodies are now in an anonymous mass grave somewhere. I hope their ending came without much suffering, and I also hope that wherever they are they might know what lovely girls their babies would one day become.
Our relatives in Rwanda tried the best they could to begin life anew. They still raise cows and bananas in the hills near Nyanza. We decided not to remove my mother-in-law and her grandchildren from the banana pit where they had been buried, but placed a memorial stone on top of it instead. I can only hope they are resting in peace wherever they are. The house knocked over by the militia was never rebuilt. A pile of rubble stands there today and weeds grow over it. As for my own family, I have lost four of my eight siblings. One died of illness, one died in a car accident, and two were killed by the rebel army. For a Rwandan family, this is a comparatively lucky outcome.
My children sometimes ask me why it all happened and I don’t have any final answers for them. The only thing I am able to do is to keep talking to them about what they have seen and how they feel about it. I will listen to them for hours and hours into the night, and sometimes they listen to me and my own bad memories. Roger and I both know, for example, what it is like to face a former friend across the divide of ethnicity. And all of us know what it is like to see people we knew stacked in heaps by the side of the road and to feel that awful helplessness in the face of evil. I did not grow up with any understanding of modern psychology, but I do feel the best way to get rid of bad memories is to speak them out loud and not keep them fermenting inside. It is the best therapy. Words can be instruments of evil, but they can also be powerful tools of life. If you say the right ones they can save the whole world. I thank God that my own father never had to experience the genocide and see the hatefulness in the heart of his country, but I also think he would have known how to use words against the darkness that comes and keeps coming long after the killing is over.
With hard work and a lot of early mornings I earned enough money to buy a second taxi-this one was a Mitsubishi-and hire another driver. The cash flow was slow but steady, and I eventually accumulated enough capital to branch out. I felt strongly that I wanted to invest in Africa. But Rwanda was not a possibility because I could not travel freely there. Through some friends I learned of an opportunity to buy into a trucking company in the nation of Zambia, a former British colony many miles south of Rwanda. It is an English-speaking country, so I am able to do business there easily. We now have a fleet of four trucks that haul canned goods, beer, soda, and clothing to rural villages from the capital city of Lusaka. Our trucks can haul most anything imaginable, and it always makes me happy to sign a contract with an international aid organization bringing something to a needy area.
My income was good enough for us to buy a slim postwar town house just fifty meters outside the city limits of Brussels proper. It is something of a joke among my friends that I take such pride in this geographical detail, for it allows me to say I live in a “suburb of Brussels.” After so much angst as a young man over the idea of living in a city I have finally come to rest in suburbia. Diane married a man who works for a company that manufactures hospital equipment and Lys married a self-employed businessman. Roger has gone to work for Accor hotels and may one day become a manager like his father. Tresor is still in school. In the afternoons I drive him to his soccer games and we practice his English in the car. It is getting quite good. I keep trying to lose weight, but I have a taste for steak and potatoes and the French wines whose names and qualities I first learned in college. My doctor has told me to stop drinking so much coffee because it makes my blood pressure go up. Most of the time I listen, but sometimes I sneak a cup more than I should. Pictures of my family are on the fireplace mantle, and there is a basketball hoop mounted in the backyard.