Justice on the Grass

Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes and a Nation's Quest for Redemption

Dina Temple-Raston

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780743279710
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 21st Century History
• Index: History

The 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which more than 800, 000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were massacred in just 100 days, was an unparalleled modern-day slaughter. How does a nation pick up the pieces after the killing has stopped? In a gripping narrative that examines the power of the press and sheds light on how the media turned tens of thousands of ordinary Rwandans into murderers, award-winning author and journalist Dina Temple-Raston traces the rise and fall of three media executives -- Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, and Hassan Ngeze. From crime to trial to verdict, Temple-Raston explores the many avenues of justice Rwanda pursued in the decade after the killing. Focusing on the media trial at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, she then drops down to the level of the hills, where ordinary Rwandans seek justice and retribution, and examines whether politics in the East African nation has set the stage for renewed violence. In the months leading up to the killing, two local media outlets, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) and the tabloid newspaper Kangura, warned that a bloody confrontation was brewing. No one would be spared, they said. Observers said later that fearmongering from RTLM and Kangura played a key role in igniting the genocide, so much so that the three men behind the media outlets became the first journalists since Nuremberg to be tried in an international court for crimes against humanity. Drawing on extensive interviews with key players, Dina Temple-Raston brings to life a cast of remarkable characters: the egotistical newspaper editor Hassan Ngeze; hate radio cofounders, the intellectual Ferdinand Nahimana and the defiant legal scholar Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza; an American-led prosecution team wary of a guilty verdict that might bring a broadly written judgment muzzling the press the world over; the bombastic American defense attorney John Floyd; heroic Damien Nzabakira, who risked his life to drive forty orphans to safety only to spend eight years in prison accused of their murder; and Bonaventure Ubalijoro, a Rwandan diplomat and politician who believed in miracles. An extraordinary feat of reporting and narrative, Justice on the Grass reveals a Rwanda few have seen. A searing and compassionate book, Justice on the Grass illustrates how, more than a decade later, a country and its people are still struggling to heal, to forgive, and to make sense of something that defies credibility and humanity.

1

Beginnings

The wreckage of President Habyarimana’s plane was still smoldering when Damien Nzabakira put the last of the children at the orphanage in Kigali to bed. Damien was a strong, solid man who could shush one child while rocking another to sleep. He could inspire trust with a gesture or the tone of his voice. As a result, the children tended to take their cues from him. They loved him enough to decide that if he was not worried, they should not be either. So even though they had all heard the explosion, even though they jumped at the sound of gunfire, they collectively decided to put their faith in Damien and let him, as a grown-up, do their worrying for them. Damien, for his part, tried to minimize what they could hear or see. He read them books. He spoke quietly. He tried to make his calm infectious.

Damien was a compact man with shiny eyes and a cleanly shaven dome of a head. He laughed easily, had a smile that lit up a room, and obviously loved to be around his charges. Damien began his career in teaching because he was determined to pass on the advantages he had had—an education at elite Catholic elementary and high schools, and a year at the seminary—to those who might otherwise have no future in a country like Rwanda. Damien was sensitive to how alien the world must look to these orphaned children. They lived in a constant state of flux, with none of the familiar objects or routines of home to calm them. Their lives were an unending series of new circumstances and new people. Damien knew that his presence provided a modicum of stability. And on that April evening he sensed, without being fully aware of the details, that he was all that stood between the children and chaos. He was equally sure that God had put him there at that moment to protect them all.

As the children slept, Damien stood vigil. He cocked his head to listen to the gunfire and tried to map from the sounds how close the violence was to the orphanage. The crack of each gun’s report was magnified by the darkness. Damien found himself starting involuntarily with each shot. He walked into one of the orphanage’s small classrooms, his shoes chirping over the linoleum, and fished a small radio out of a lower drawer in his desk. He clicked it on. There was a warbling and then a hum and then the sound of RTLM.

He moved toward the window without switching on a light. Outside he could see young men sitting in circles, lit up by bon-fires. They passed around large bottles of beer. Some fired their pistols toward the heavens. He watched as the muzzle flashes lit them in brief silhouette.

What Damien didn’t know was that a genocide had been launched and all Tutsi, typically the tall, slender minority and anyone who appeared to support them, were targets. Over the course of a week, the murders had become a kind of sport for the Interahamwe militiamen, like hunting. Rooting out the hiding Tutsi had become a battle of wits—Hutu extremists versus their prey. At first, the Tutsi ran to the predictable places: the churches and government compounds. That made them easy to kill. It was more difficult, however, to ferret out the craftier Tutsi. They hid in the vestibule closets of churches. They found refuge behind false ceilings. They clung to rafters. They lay on the ground, unmoving, hoping their pursuers would think them already dead. Those who twitched, or fell from the ceilings, or moved from their hiding places at the wrong time, paid for their mistakes with their lives.

The Tutsi did not beg to be spared. Instead they asked for a merciful end. They offered money to be shot instead of hacked to death. Killing Tutsi had become the law, a duty. It was not disorder, it was order—they were all Inkotanyi, accomplices of the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front army, the radio said.

“There will be no more Inkotanyi; there will be none in this country anymore,” RTLM told its listeners. “When you see how many of them die, you would think that they come back to life. They themselves believe that they come back to life, but they deceive themselves, they are disappearing. They disappear gradually as bombs continue to fall on them and as they are killed like rats.”

Damien watched from the orphanage window as people began moving to the outskirts of the capital, carrying their belongings on their heads. There were bodies in the street, swimming in sticky pools of blood. There were so many people pouring out of the city, Kigali was becoming deserted—like a remote hill village instead of a capital. For days now, Damien’s full-time occupation was to calm the children. But after so many concussive explosions and so many cracks of gunfire, even Damien was losing his grip. The children began to shriek with every grenade blast. They exchanged worried glances when shots were fired. Damien cursed himself for not having taken the group out of Kigali before the fighting started. They would have been in the countryside, safe, if only he had acted sooner. Radio Mille Collines journalists had been beating the war drums for months, ramping up concern that something evil was coming. It had named names. It singled out traitors, enemies, and plotters—their names rolling out of the radio speakers in an endless stream.

“Jeanne is a sixth-form teacher at Mamba in Muyaga commune,” one broadcast had said. “Jeanne is not doing good things in this school. Indeed, it has been noted that she’s the cause of the bad atmosphere in the classes she teaches. She urges her students to hate the Hutus. These children spend the entire day at that, and it corrupts their minds. We hereby warn this woman named Jeanne; and indeed, the people of Muyaga, who are well known for their courage, should warn her. She is a security threat for the commune.”

The station made clear who could be trusted and who could not. It lauded the vigilant who had found Tutsi hiding in the fields. It wooed the Hutu who were torn about the tastiness of the hunt. Damien listened as young militiamen breathlessly told the listening audience about the impending extermination of the Tutsi. One day slipped into the next as Damien held his radio to his ear and listened as RTLM reported every twist and turn of the unfolding war. And it would have continued that way had it not occurred to him one morning that RTLM offered something more than a blow-by-blow of a massacre. It provided the careful listener with clues. The Interahamwe calls gave Damien a good sense of who was where. He mapped out in his mind which roadblock patrols seemed especially vigilant or deadly. Those who called often to report their progress were to be avoided. Those who phoned in occasionally to say their posts were quiet offered hope of a less explosive confrontation.

Six days after the crash, Damien left one of the nuns in charge of the children and began to walk up the hill toward the Red Cross headquarters where he had once worked. The Red Cross volunteers were sure to help, he thought, as he picked his way through banana groves. He avoided the main roads, moving through the dirt alleyways between the houses. He tried not to look inside the houses, with their doorways open like dark mouths. The walk took about half an hour, and the Belgian volunteers, frightened themselves, were happy to see a familiar face. Damien gave them a wave as he came up the dirt drive and hugged them when he arrived at the door. He needed their help, he said. And he began to lay out his plan.

Less than an hour later, Damien was behind the wheel of a school bus, Red Cross flags snapping from the bumpers, driving back to the orphanage. We will leave all this, he decided, in the morning.

History in Rwanda has always been malleable, growing out of story lines of one’s own choosing. If one was Hutu, then heroes were Hutu. If one was Tutsi, the opposite was true. In that storytelling, that exaggeration and embellishment, came the seeds of conflict.

When the colonialists came, to “civilize the savages,” the differences between the Hutu and the Tutsi were formalized. It was the colonizers who took two people who had more in common than not and taught them to loathe each other. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the nearby Congo offered rubber and slaves to Belgium’s King Leopold. Rwanda, on the far side of the Ruwenzoris, or Mountains of the Moon, offered only proximity. From 1895 to 1916, Rwanda was a German colony. In 1916, in the midst of the First World War, Germany pulled out of the East African territories and Belgium took on the responsibility for Rwanda and neighboring Burundi. Belgian paternal rule lasted forty-five years.

In the late 1800s, race science was in fashion, and no one was given more credit for making sense of the dark continent than British explorer John Hanning Speke. Speke was best known for finding the source of the Nile in a wild and adventurous competition against the more intellectual and taciturn Captain Richard Burton. Speke, ever the glad-hander willing to slap fellow members of the Royal Geographical Society on the back and stand them a pint at the nearby pubs, was decidedly more popular than Burton. British society embraced his theories as gospel. Rwanda would suffer the consequences of Speke’s popularity more than a century later. His doctrine, known as the Hamitic theory, laid the foundation for the 1994 genocide.

On his travels in Central and East Africa, Speke came to classify Africans into orders. He decided that all culture and civilization in Central Africa by 1863 had been the work of a taller, sharper-featured people who he decided must have come from a Caucasoid tribe in Ethiopia. This “higher order” of African descended from Noah’s son, Ham, who married a Cainite woman, he said. These special Africans had a royal family and a semblance of a government and were, as a result, superior to the native Negroids. The other black Africans, the majority, he casually classified as subhuman. They were the savages who could be taken as slaves without troubling issues of conscience.

“In these countries,” he wrote of East Africa,

the government is in the hands of foreigners, who had invaded and taken possession of them, leaving the agricultural aborigines to till the ground, while the junior members of the usurping clans herded cattle—just as in Abyssinia, or wherever the Abyssinians or Gallas have shown themselves. There a pastoral clan from the Asiatic side took the government of Abyssinia from its people and have ruled over them ever since, changing, by intermarriage with the Africans, the texture of their hair and color to a certain extent, but still maintaining a high stamp of Asiatic feature, of which a marked characteristic is a bridge instead of bridgeless nose.

For posterity, Speke drew his vision of these two Africans in one of his notebooks. On the last page of a sketchbook filled with watercolors of antelope and African birds, there is a quick drawing. On the left-hand side there is a rendering of a small, stocky African. There are dark lines and smudges around the nose as Speke used his chalks to flatten the bridge and flare out the nostrils. Behind that small African man, Speke drew another. Nearly twice the first one’s size, this figure was what any European at the time would have drawn to capture the image of an African king: he looked like a slender, regal European in African garb, with a long nose and thin lips.

Taking their cues from the famous British explorer, white rulers in Rwanda decided that the Tutsi were destined for great things. The Tutsi were given administrative duties and the Hutu were shunted aside. They were given menial tasks. In most instances, the Hutu were obliged to work for Tutsi. They tilled their land or grazed their cattle. Enlisting the Tutsi as de facto rulers allowed the Belgians to develop and exploit an enormous network of tea and coffee plantations without having to install a contingent of Belgians on the ground. The Belgians appreciated the natural orderliness of this so much that they institutionalized the differences between Hutu and Tutsi in a series of administrative measures between 1926 and 1932. They issued identity cards, dividing everyone as either Hutu or Tutsi. No one is altogether sure how the distinction was made. Some stories said that anyone who owned ten cows was automatically designated a Tutsi, so that the system was based more on caste than on ethnicity.

However the ethnicity was assigned, it came to be the basis for determining everything from enrollment in the school system (only Tutsi were worth educating, Hutu were too stupid) to civil service jobs (also reserved for the Tutsi). The very act of recording the ethnic groups not only made them more important but fundamentally changed their character. The Hutu and Tutsi designations were no longer amorphous categories; instead, they became inflexible. Europeans began to refer to them as ethnic differences. The elite, the Tutsi, were the immediate beneficiaries, and they played that superiority to its best advantage. By the same token Hutu, officially excluded from power, began to take on the hallmarks of the oppressed. They banded together against the Tutsi. They groused about the unfairness of it all, and they plotted revenge.

The culmination of all this resentment came in November 1959 when an attack on a Hutu political activist sparked the first modern recorded violence of Hutu against Tutsi. Rumors of the attack sent bands of Hutu into the streets. They organized themselves into groups that were eerily like the Interahamwe militia who would succeed them. Splitting up into groups of ten, the Hutu men hunted Tutsi neighbors. Tutsi were summarily murdered. The episode was called the “wind of destruction.”

It was after this killing spree that Rwanda’s Belgian administrators decided to replace about half the local Tutsi authorities with Hutu. Popular elections were held the following year. It came as a surprise to no one that the Hutu, as the majority, won most of the seats. In September 1961, 80 percent of Rwandans voted to end recognition of the Tutsi monarchy entirely. The Belgians allowed Rwandans to claim a republic and retired from the colony completely. Their system of identity cards, however, remained in force. Maintained over sixty years, it eventually became one way Hutu killers identified Tutsi during the genocide. But that would come later. In the meantime, the Hutu consolidated their power in Rwanda by installing a charismatic Hutu leader named Grégoire Kayibanda as president. Thousands of Tutsi fled for their lives. They became stateless refugees in Burundi, Uganda, and Zaire. The revolution of 1959 forever cleaved Rwandan history into a before and an after. The uprising was popularly known as the Hutu Revolution.

From 1959 to 1994, victims and killers were slowly prepared for the coming genocide. Day after day at every level of Rwandan society the seeds of distrust and hatred were sown. Newly empowered, Hutu teachers would make Tutsi children stand up in the classrooms before their schoolmates. “Look at these Tutsi,” the teachers would sneer, as the Tutsi children stood uncomfortably at their desks. “They think they are better than we are.” The Tutsi students would try to protest and then would go silent. They were only children. Certainly, they could not be blamed for the crimes that came before them?

And yet they were blamed. Ethnicity came to trail the Tutsi minority like a tin can tied to the tail of a dog. While outsiders assumed that the Hutu and Tutsi were differing tribes, their differences were more superficial than that. While many Tutsi were tall and fine-featured with delicate hands and fingernails the color of blanched almonds, they did not all look that way. It was a stereotype. Similarly, while many Hutu were ebony black, short, and powerfully muscled, some belied the classification on their identity cards. Many looked Tutsi. Tutsiness or Hutuness was as much a state of mind as it was some closely tracked lineage. There were intermarriages that begot Hutu-looking men whose fathers had been Tutsi but who favored their Hutu mothers. Technically, their identity cards would read “Tutsi” since one was assigned the designation of one’s father. And there were tall, thin Hutu, the offspring of Hutu fathers and Tutsi mothers, who were also caught between the two groups. Residual Belgian perceptions of Tutsi and Hutu found a place in the Rwandan psyche. Tutsi were seen as a handsomer people, a smarter people. Never mind that there was nothing to substantiate either claim. It was enough that people believed it to be true.

Rwandan mornings smell sweet and sour. The tang of fresh fires mixes with the salt of old sweat and the sweetness of fresh-cut grass. The air is thick and cool. The ground is soft and mossy. Fog gathers thick and white in the valleys and envelops hills sculpted by thousands of gardens. The mist softens the hard edges of the coffee plants and plantain trees. It muffles sound. Children in limp, colorful T-shirts balance on makeshift bicycles made of wood, swimming in and out of focus, taking shape out of the whiteness. Teenagers pulling bullock carts suddenly appear at close range. In every direction the view is the same: coffee plants, mud huts, green hills.

Before the genocide, Rwanda was known as the Tibet of Africa, the land of a thousand hills. The name came from the peaks and valleys of the Virunga Mountains, a volcanic chain that forms the continental divide between the Nile and the Congo river basins. The hills give the Rwandan landscape an enchanting quality, more Central America than Africa. For anyone on foot, however, the hills quickly become oppressive. They make one feel closed in, suffocated. Car engines strain going up the inclines and brakes smoke going down. It is difficult to get anywhere in Rwanda without running out of breath. One hill is left behind only to be followed by ten more ahead. The rolling lushness makes an already tiny place seem that much smaller. Hills are a curse in a place where size really matters. Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries in Africa. Its ten thousand square miles hold almost 8 million people, all of whom seem to be clinging to the sides of the hills. Houses lean at angles, small patches of crops struggle to take root.

In one way or another all of Rwanda’s battles seemed to spring from the ground on which its people stood. Geographers joke that Rwanda is so small there is no room for its name on a map. Atlases draw arrows—or allow RWANDA to slip into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the former Zaire) on one side or into Tanzania on the other: a cartographic metaphor for the Rwandan condition. In the waning days of the genocide, ten thousand Rwandans spilled over the Zairean border every hour, as if Rwanda had filled to capacity and was letting the excess run off. The feet of millions of exiles padded into neighboring countries packing the cinder plains near the Virungas to an asphalt hardness.

There had been other exoduses. Hutu would flee on one occasion, Tutsi would flood the borders on another. It was an endless seesaw of political fortunes—when one group was down,...