Chilling ghost of Rwanda genocide lives on two decades later

A horrifying picture after the genocide. [PHOTOS: FILE STANDARD]

By TONY MOCHAMA

KIGALI, RWANDA: On Monday, Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta offered the country’s first formal apology to Kigali for Kenya’s laissez faire attitude during the 100-day genocide that claimed more than a million Rwandese lives.

The apology came at the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the genocide, what the French would call ‘c’est le commencement de la fin’ (the Beginning of the End) and that will formally end on July 20th, the day the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) chased the Rwandese army and genocidal militias out of the country into Goma, Zaire.

On the evening of April 6 1994, the genocide in Rwanda began and by the time it stopped 100 days later, it had claimed the lives of 800,000 Tutsis and 300,000 moderate Hutus.

That is 10,000 people being slaughtered on a daily basis, or more than 400 human beings an hour, or 60 souls slain every minute for 100 days.

Hounds of Hell

Rwanda is a real life horror story whose ghost from 20 years ago still haunts the region.

Thomas Kalimindi, a Rwandese, had just turned 33 and was about to celebrate both his birthday and his quitting of a biased ‘Radio Rwanda’, where he had worked for a decade.

His wife Jacqueline had baked him a cake.

Kalimindi was in the bathroom when his wife came pounding at the door, telling him hate radio station RTLM had just announced the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana, whose plane had been shot down by a missile, sending it to crash into his own palace’s backyard.

Man and wife listened in chilled fear as radio RTLM went on to warn listeners to expect ‘the sound of bullets and grenades exploding here and there over the next three days.’

After the 10pm bulletin, the radio did not go off air as normal and instead played music all night, a sure sign that the worst hounds of hell had been loosed in Rwanda. (Why is it that during coups, the murderous juntas want music played nocturnally on the radio?)

In another, more affluent neighbourhood, a Tutsi couple, Odette and Jean Bapiste, were having a whiskey with a disabled neighbour, Dusabi, who was celebrating his acquisition of a new TV set and VCR player. “Honestly, I was going to die if I did not have a TV to watch,” Dusabi kept saying happily, presumably with the 1994 World Cup coming up in two months’ time, then.

At 8.14am when the news of the death of the Rwandan president broke, Jean Baptise had the premonition to get his wife and children into his jeep immediately and flee to Butare, which had a Tutsi Governor.

Unfortunately, Dusabi never got to watch his TV, as he was one of the Tutsis murdered by Hutu Interahamwe that very ‘first’ night of April.

Paul Rusesabagina, General Manager of Air Sabena-owned Hotel des Mille Collines, has spoken of the hour after the felling of President Habyarimana.

“At first, the streets were eerily deserted. But within an hour, just an hour, roadblocks had been set up all over Kigali and the killings began in earnest.”

RTLM radio’s regular phrase over the next week became the exhortation: “The graves are ready but they are empty. Who will help us fill them up?”

The suspected master co-ordinator of the Rwandese genocide was one Colonel Theoneste Bagasora, now serving 30 years behind bars for his role in the chaos.

The colonel was a close intimate of Rwanda’s First Lady Madame Habyarimana, and a charter member of the Akazu, whose militia, the Interahamwe, were charged with being the death squads that would cleanse Rwanda of its entire Tutsi population.

“I am brewing the Apocalypse,” Bagasoro had bragged in January to some high-ranking army associates.

Cowardly of ways

By dawn, as the sun rose over Rwanda, army killers had surrounded the home of moderate Hutu Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and shot her entire family.

She fled over a wall but was shortly slaughtered in the back garden of a European neighbour’s house.

At this time, Rwanda had no legitimate leadership, and the wolves were on the loose.

The 10 Belgian UNAMIR soldiers assigned to guard the Prime Minister were outnumbered, disarmed, taken prisoner, driven to Camp Kigali barracks, tortured, murdered and mutilated to send a message that the genocide would not be stopped by foreign forces.

The UN, in the most cowardly of ways, got the message. Foreign embassies rushed to shut embassies and evacuate their nationals. Radio RTLM gloated: “You cockroaches must know you are made of flesh! We will kill you all.”

That first week of the Rwanda genocide, drunken militias fortified by whiskey and assorted drugs plundered from pharmacies and various apothecaries were bussed from site to site, to massacre Tutsis on sight.

A councilwoman in Kigali offered the killers 50 Rwandese francs for any severed Tutsi heads they brought her, a practice that became so often by the end of that first week in April. It was called ‘selling cabbages’.

Josh Hammer, the Newsweek correspondent who spent 24 hours in Kigali on April 13 1994, exactly 20 years ago, reported seeing, one night in Kigali, a Red Cross ambulance stopped at an Interahamwe roadblock and several wounded Tutsis who had survived a massacre yanked out. Then the slashing and screaming began. When it ended, several minutes later, a gang of young men, literally soaked in blood, their clubs and machetes dripping it, raced past him down the street singing in jubilation.

By the end of that first week, then, the genocide was in full flow, neighbours killing neighbours, Hutus going to work with machetes to hack down Tutsi colleagues, doctors murdering wounded survivors of the massacres in hospitals, and even Hutu extremist school teachers slaughtering their young pupils in cold blood, for the mere crime of being Tutsi.

Genocidaire financier

What is not a crime is killing Tutsis and their ‘traitor’ Hutu sympathisers! The de facto law of the land at this time was that every Hutu citizen was responsible for joining in what was now called ‘the Work.’

If a person to be killed was let go or survived death by one party, it was the responsibility of the next party who came into contact with them to murder him or her.

That is why Kenya’s long harbouring of genocidaire financier Felicien Kabuga and others of his ilk, let alone our turning of our back to our little neighbour in its one hundred days of horror, is something Kenya should well apologise a thousand, or even a million, times for. Incidentally, Kenya has always denied that Kabuga ever lived here.