We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda by Gourevitch Philip

Author:Gourevitch, Philip [Gourevitch, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, War, Politics, Biography
ISBN: 9780374706487
Amazon: 0374706484
Goodreads: 13721705
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1998-09-30T07:00:00+00:00

THE CAMP AT Kibeho had been one of dozens of camps for “internally displaced persons”—IDPs—established in the Zone Turquoise. When the French withdrew in late August of 1994, the camps held at least four hundred thousand people, and they were placed under the supervision of the refurbished UNAMIR and an assortment of UN and private international humanitarian agencies. The new government had wanted the camps closed immediately. Rwanda, the government claimed, was safe enough for everyone to go home, and significant concentrations of Hutu Power military and militia members among the IDPs made the camps themselves a major threat to the national security. The relief agencies agreed in principle, but insisted that departure from the camps should be entirely voluntary.

The IDPs, however, were not eager to leave the camps, where they were well fed, and provided with good medical care by the relief agencies, and where rumors that the RPF was exterminating Hutus en masse were being circulated by the génocidaires, who maintained a powerful influence over the population. As in the border camps, interahamwe agents didn’t hesitate to threaten and attack those who wished to leave Kibeho, fearing that a mass desertion of the civilian population would leave them isolated and exposed. The génocidaires also made frequent sorties out of the camps to terrorize and steal from the surrounding communities, attacking Tutsi genocide survivors and Hutus whom they suspected might bear witness against them. Kibeho was the epicenter of such activity. According to Mark Frohardt, who worked with the UN’s Rwanda Emergency Office and later served as deputy chief of the UN’s Human Rights mission in Rwanda, UNAMIR “determined that a disproportionately high percentage of the murders that were taking place in Rwanda, in late November and early December of 1994, had occurred within a twenty-kilometer radius of Kibeho.”

That December, UNAMIR and the RPA ran their only joint operation ever, a one-day sweep of Kibeho in which about fifty “hard-core elements”—that is, génocidaires—were arrested and some weapons were confiscated. Shortly afterward, the RPA began closing the smaller camps. The preferred strategy was one of nonviolent coercion: people were evicted from their shanties, then the shanties were torched. The IDPs got the message, and relief agencies, too, went along with the program, helping to move more than a hundred thousand people home. Follow-up studies by international relief workers, and UN human rights monitors, found that at least ninety-five percent of these IDPs resettled peacefully in their homes. At the same time, many génocidaires fled to other camps, especially to Kibeho, while some IDPs who returned to their villages were arrested on accusations of genocide, and some were alleged to have been killed in acts of revenge or banditry.

By early 1995, a quarter of a million IDPs remained in the camps, of which Kibeho was the largest and home to the largest collection of hard-core génocidaires. The UN and relief agencies, fearing the consequences of coercive closings, offered to come up with an alternative course of action. The government waited. Months went by; but the humanitarians could not agree on a coherent closing plan.

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