p surviving the slaughter women in africa and the diaspora Series Editors stanlie james aili mari tripp Surviving the Slaughter The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire marie béatrice umutesi Foreword by catharine newbury Translated by julia emerson the university of wisconsin press The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059 www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/ 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Originally published in France as Fuir ou Mourir au Zaïre, copyright © 2000 L’Harmattan Translation copyright © 2004 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved 3542 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Umutesi, Marie Béatrice, 1959– [Fuir ou Mourir au Zaïre. English] Surviving the slaughter : the ordeal of a Rwandan refugee in Zaire / Marie Béatrice Umutesi; foreword by Catharine Newbury; translated by Julia Emerson. p. cm.—(Women in Africa and the diaspora) “Originally published in France as Fuir ou mourir au Zaïre”—T.p. verso. ISBN 0-299-20490-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 0-299-20494-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Rwanda—History—Civil War, 1994.—Refugees. 2. Umutesi, Marie Béatrice, 1959– 3. Rwanda—History—Civil War, 1994—Personal narratives. 4. Genocide—Rwanda. 5. Rwanda—Ethnic relations. 6. Refugees—Congo (Democratic Republic). 7. Rwandans—Congo (Democratic Republic). I. Title. II. Series. DT450.435.U513 2004 305.9´06914´09675109049—dc22 2004012634 p Dedicated to the memory of zuzu p Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark For the straightforward pathway had been lost —Dante Alighieri Contents Foreword xi Author’s Acknowledgments xvii Translator’s Acknowledgments xix Maps xx–xxii Prologue 3 1 I Discover My Ethnic Identity 6 2 Increasing Violence 17 3 Descent into Hell 45 4 Survival in the Camps at Kivu 71 5 A Difficult Choice 89 6 Pursued Westward 103 7 Hunted by the Rebels and the RPF 122 8 The Death Camp at Tingi-Tingi 138 9 Hunger on the Road 164 10 My Life for Ten Dollars 196 11 The End of the Ordeal 233 Acronyms 249 Personal Chronology 251 Chronology of Political Events in Rwanda 255 ix Foreword In the mid-1990s, the tragedies of Central Africa haunted the world. Many works have been published about the Rwanda genocide of 1994, depicting the horror of these atrocious events and exploring why they occurred. We have also seen much soul-searching about the failures of the international community during the genocide. In these studies, however, certain voices were missing. As Béatrice Umutesi shows in this remarkable book, the crisis was not merely a single event—it was a multiplication of catastrophes. Though Umutesi is not an ordinary per- son, her account helps us understand what “ordinary” individuals lived through—fleeing the genocide in Rwanda, living in crowded refugee camps of eastern Zaire, and then trying to survive during the war of Laurent Kabila and the AFDL rebels in 1996 and 1997. By describing and trying to interpret what happened during this painful period, the author aspires to rescue from oblivion the memory of the many who did not survive. Some may be tempted to characterize this testimony as emanating from someone who was implicated in the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi, because the author is Hutu. But as this book makes abundantly clear, many people—irrespective of ethnic category—were caught up in the maelstrom; not all Hutu were génocidaires. Other observers will see in this a victim’s story, representa- tive of hundreds of thousands of others, as Umutesi fled in a forced march across Zaire’s rainforest in the middle of the rainy season. How- ever, such external labels miss the point: this is above all a human account—the story of a person caught up, like so many others, in the whirlwind of the fierce conflicts of her time. It is seldom that we have access to these stories. In this testimony we do; it is an extraordinarily moving account, both by the almost unbelievable force of will it repre- sents and by the simple, unpretentious eloquence by which it is made. Born in 1959, the author is from the generation of Rwandans that grew up after colonial rule, which formally ended in 1962. With a xi xii p Foreword university degree in sociology, Umutesi became part of Rwanda’s educated elite. But she maintained connections with her roots—and especially with women—through her activities promoting the develop- ment of rural cooperatives. In the first part of the book she chronicles the dynamics of Tutsi/Hutu relations in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; the escalation of regional tensions among Hutu under Juvénal Habyari- mana’s regime, when ethnic polarization diminished for a time until the late 1980s; the growing alienation of young Rwandans from the state during the late 1980s and early 1990s; and the political consequences of famine, of rural pauperization, and of the war that started in October 1990 when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) attacked northern Rwanda.1 While some of these themes are familiar, Umutesi provides an often- neglected perspective, that of a woman closely tied to the rural sectors of the country. She shows how these events directly affected members of her family, her professional colleagues (both Hutu and Tutsi), and other people she knew. For example, when describing effects of the war, Umutesi indicates that she became aware of torture and massacres of ci- vilians perpetrated by the RPF in the north because this affected people close to her. In February 1993, when the RPF mounted a major offen- sive to seize a large swath of territory in northern Rwanda, they attacked Gatete and killed several members of the family of Umutesi’s mother. In another incident, at Mwendo in the north, RPF soldiers locked local in- habitants in houses that were then set afire with grenades.2 Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Hutu, fled from the region. 1. The RPF was composed largely of Tutsi refugees and their children who had fled from Rwanda decades earlier during episodes of politically motivated violence against Tutsi—in the 1960s during and after the Rwandan Revolution of 1959–1961 (in which the longstanding Rwandan monarchy, dominated by a Tutsi aristocracy, was overthrown) and in 1973 when Tutsi students and salaried workers in Rwanda became the targets of pogroms. The military wing of the RPF was called the Rwandan Patriotic Army (APR); their attack on Rwanda in 1990 aimed to topple the authoritarian regime of Juvénal Habyarimana and win the right of return for Tutsi refugees. To avoid confusion, both the political movement and its military wing will be referred to here as the RPF. 2. In the 1990s most journalists portrayed the RPF in a generally favorable light— viewing their military as a disciplined, well-behaved, professional force. Umutesi, reporting what she and her friends observed, presents a different perspective: The RPF were engaged in a guerilla war in which they committed atrocities. This is now acknowledged in some analyses of the genocide written by academics and human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch. Foreword p xiii In the wake of the 1993 RPF offensive, Umutesi’s mother and twenty- five of her relatives came to Kigali to take refuge in her house. They were among the fortunate. Umutesi describes the appalling conditions faced by most of the other displaced persons from the north, congregated in makeshift camps rife with hunger, unsanitary conditions, and lack of medical care. Umutesi also portrays the effects at the local level of the abortive attempts to promote multiparty politics in Rwanda in the early 1990s— while the country was at war. And she describes the horror of the geno- cide during April to June of 1994 by referring to the experiences of ordi- nary people, Tutsi as well as Hutu. More than that, she captures the great confusion, helplessness, fear, and wanton violence that marked this period. In the midst of such fear and confusion, she, along with some two million other Rwandans, mostly Hutu, fled in haste and disarray to Zaire in July 1994. The central subject to the book is the condition of the Rwandan ref- ugees in Zaire during the 1990s. In its simple honesty and non- manipulative presentation, her account compels us to acknowledge and remember what many highly placed members of the international com- munity tried to ignore at the time. After the destruction of Rwandan refugee camps in eastern Zaire in October and November 1996 by sol- diers from Rwanda and by the AFDL army associated with Laurent Kabila, approximately five hundred thousand people returned to Rwanda through the North Kivu camps, passing through Goma and Gisenyi, while many thousands of others fled west, into the forests of Zaire’s interior. Umutesi was one of hundreds of thousands of people in the camps in South Kivu, more than 150 kilometers from Goma; they were not able to enter Rwanda directly because RPF soldiers had blocked the border between the cities of Bukavu (in Zaire) and Cyangugu (in Rwanda). Consequently, those refugees were left with two options: to return to Rwanda by walking north on the dirt road along Lake Kivu, where they ran the risk of being attacked by both Interahamwe and sol- diers of the AFDL and the RPF, or to flee to the west. Many chose the latter option. Seized with panic, trekking along in unimaginable condi- tions, those who fled suffered a veritable “martyrdom” on rough and in- hospitable paths in the equatorial forest. In the process, many died of disease, hunger, and exposure.