Rwanda 20 years later: Death and the making of a nation

President Paul Kagame lays a foundation stone for the construction of a multipurpose hall for the genocide survivors in Kiberinka Cell, Nyamirambo Sector-Nyarugenge District at the Global Umuganda in March 29, 2014. Photo/Cyril Ndegeya 

By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO

In Summary

• Rwanda teaches us is that a nation is not just what history and the action of men and women make it. Part of it is made up of our imagination.

 

In February 1994, I interviewed later-to-be President Paul Kagame in his bush headquarters. He spoke about many things, including “some” killings of Tutsi, that was being carried by the extremists Interahamwe in the northern part of Rwanda like Ruhengeri.

Kagame was the military chief of the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA), a return-to-the-motherland rebel movement that launched its military campaign from Uganda in October 1990.

He was younger then, of course, wiry, unflappable and as cock-sure of himself as he remains today. He did not mention the word “genocide”.

He had reason to be self assured. Within days of launching its campaign, the RPA, though it comprised some of the best officers who were then serving in the Uganda army, was handed a humiliating defeat by president Juvenal Habyarimana’s army.

They had been weakened by in-fighting in which their charismatic leader Maj-Gen Fred Rwigyema was killed. With that they became easy pickings for the Rwanda army.

Kagame, who was then studying at a military academy in the US as an officer of the Uganda army, was rushed to the Rwanda hills to pick up the pieces. He gathered the RPA rubble and took it to the top of the Muhabura Mountains where, though weakened, it would take a lot to dislodge.

In the mountains they perished from disease, many froze to death, starved, but those who survived grew very tough. When they came down the slopes, they were a force Habyarimana’s army couldn’t stop.

By the start of 1994, the RPA had prevailed but most of the country remained outside its reach. These were the ripe conditions for a negotiated power deal. The RPA had won the war, but didn’t have the prize. The Habyarimana forces had the prize, but had lost the war.

Elements of the RPA moved into Kigali, after a power-sharing agreement was sealed with the Rwanda government in Arusha. But, fortunately for it as it turned out, its political leadership hadn’t yet relocated.

Thus it was that on the evening of April 6, 1994, a plane carrying then president Habyarimana and Burundi’s president Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down as it landed in Kigali. As if on cue, the extremists took up machetes, axes and clubs, and in the next 100 days killed nearly one million people — a world record.

Missed the signs

The controversy as to who shot down Habyarimana’s plane will rage on for years, as will the one who actually killed whom. But going back to that February 1994 interview with Kagame, I’m struck by how positive he was in the circumstances. How a genocide seemed the least of his fears. It was not just him. Even we journalists who covered the war for four years missed the signs.

I will always remember a few weeks after the RPA was beaten back, we were in Mirama Hills, at the Uganda-Rwanda border. The remnants of the RPA had gathered there.

On the Uganda side about one kilometre in, the Uganda National Resistance Army had amassed, ready to repulse what they feared might be a punitive incursion by the Rwanda army.

There was really no new “angle” to the story. Then we were told that there was a refugee camp about 45km away. After getting hopelessly lost in the bushes for hours, we found it. There were hundreds of Rwanda refugees. We listened to their horror stories and took photographs. We noted that very few of them had bullet wounds. The majority of the injured, though, had machete ­ and axe wounds.