In Rwanda, you learn that terror has a kind of geometry. You approach death in increasing increments of fear. You can follow your fear to the scene of a massacre almost instinctively: In the abandoned Jesuit seminary in Kigali, for instance, the room where the priests were killed, Room 28, is just the one you would guess - off by itself, down a dark, downward-sloping corridor that goes on and on, past an eerie plaster madonna in an overgrown field, past every other door. The cinderblock walls of Room 28 are pitted as if by a jackhammer, the barred windows are smashed, a framed picture of a Rwandan child is smiling down from the wall, and across the floor are strewn dozens of bloody plastic sandwich bags, used for God knows what - for gags maybe, or for worse.
Not so long after the massacre, the press corps moved into the rooms of the dead priests. We put little signs on our doors, and the Rwandan Patriotic Front assigned us protection: a somber group of armed teenagers posted at the gates of the late Jesuits' compound. One day we learned that one of the Jesuits had survived. He was on vacation in Germany in April, when the Hutu soldiers raided the seminary in Kigali and killed seventeen of his colleagues. He became for us something akin to the blank which they say is always put into one of the guns of a firing squad: we were all able to believe we were sleeping in the room of the holiday priest.
The media seminary is clearing out now, the permutations of the Rwanda story seemingly exhausted. We have written about the orphanage, the hospital, the radio station, the gloomy prisons, the returning families. We have been to Room 28, and to the churches where the bodies still lie. We've waited for word of war-crimes trials. The seasoned disaster correspondents - whose appearance heralds the worst, whose disappearance signals the sudden loss of interest that is the prerogative of the editorial classes - have all been leaving. In Africa, at first, it seemed that the invasion of Haiti was to be scheduled around the suffering in Rwanda. In August, Bill Clinton's Caribbean buildup was bumped from the front pages by the millions of Rwandan refugees crossing into Zaire. Now, in the wake of a "friendly invasion" of Haiti, and new troubles in the Middle east, Rwanda has abruptly disappeared from the news altogether. But nothing, really, has been resolved.
By the end of the summer, most of the media attention was focused Bon Goma, Zaire. Kigali by then was quiet. In the seminary at night we read the books the priests had left behind - mine had a whole shelf of Nietzsche, in German, and a French essay on celibacy. Sometimes we drank scotch from glasses that we cut from empty mineralwater bottles, and the wire-service photographers boasted about how many cars they had looted during the killing. Across the border in Goma there were real hotels and running water and even disco lights in the hotel lounge. They weren't much comfort. The lava dust in the air turned your spit black and the death all around you meant you never felt as clean as you did in Kigali, where you had no showers but at least you could breathe. Compared to Goma, Kigali itself is a sort of holiday.
Goma and Kigali are the two poles of Rwanda coverage. In Goma there are two million refugees and 30,000 war criminals and thousands dead of cholera. And, as if that weren't enough, in August the local volcano erupted. Journalists went around with the words "divine retribution" on their lips. Kigali inspired no such thoughts. As soon as you crossed the border into Rwanda you could sense the difference; the smoke cleared, you could see the terraced mountains, the contour farming, the food literally falling from the trees. Bananas bounced off your windshield and avocados bumped under your tires. And there was absolutely no one in sight.
In Goma the aid agencies still complain about "donor fatigue," and the lack of supplies and shelter. In Kigali, however, many of the relief workers have a different perspective. They speculate (perhaps unfairly) that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees is making a bid to become the largest U.N. agency by building permanent refugee camps instead of organizing a large-scale repatriation program. The critics of the UNHCR have a point: the road from Goma to Kigali is an eight-day trek over two mountain passes, and it was only in late August that the United Nations made a few trucks available to help the returning families. Aid agencies in Africa are more practiced in herding people into vast feeding camps. Indeed, the UNHCR is building another vast refugee camp a Yew kilometers from the Rwanda border.
Rwanda, however, seems to call for a more decentralized approach: Besides transportation, the returnees need food and water and medical attention en route (now there are only a handful of such "pit stops") as well as seeds and tools for their farms when they return home. But such a relief operation has its complications. First, the United Nations made a decision, early on, not to provide transportation for the first leg of the return journey: to weed out those infected with cholera. Second, more importantly, the refugees themselves are terrified of returning.
The Zairian soldiers are stealing the relief food and selling it in the streets. The rump Rwandan army - still uniformed, still paid by the extremist government-in-exile - is terrorizing the refugees, stealing the relief food and selling it to the Zairian soldiers. Rwanda, on the other hand, looks suspiciously like paradise after a few weeks in Goma. From the border you can actually see white beaches. Why not return? Most often the refugees say they can't go back because the Tutsis will kill them. The new Rwandan government, which objects even to the term "Tutsi-dominated" ("pluralistic" is preferred) is very sensitive to this charge. Government officials and officers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (the two categories are not the same) anxiously explain that the Hutu elders in Goma "are using the population as a shield" - since they took part in the genocide against the Tutsis and are afraid of returning, they spread rumors in the camps to prevent anyone else from going back.
The need for a speedy truth-telling in Rwanda could not be more urgent. Without it, the refugees will not return from Zaire, and the country, still gripped by doubt and fear, could start to deteriorate into more violence. But as the United Nations' tribunals gain momentum, it is also an appropriate time to raise the question of accountability. The West is likely to opt for quick reconciliation rather than prolonged investigation, which may not be the will of the Rwandan war criminals - they are not only in Zaire, where the former Rwandan army is encamped, and in Tanzania, where Hutu extremists took over the administration of the Benako camp and drove out French doctors - they are at large in the West.
Bibliography
1. BBC, Summary of World Broadcasts, "Thai Military Commander says Khieu Samphan Still Alive," CamNews, camdisc@cambodia.org (24 November 1998).
