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And a couple of years back, I was interviewing women who were dying
from AIDS in Rwanda, who had been raped during the genocide. One of
them said she had come from Butare. She said she had been in that crowd
outside the prefect's office. And I asked her if she remembered a
television crew coming, and she said she did remember white men coming
with a camera. Was it us? I can't be sure of that, but she said she
remembered white men coming with a camera. And she said, "I thought you
might have been with the militia," whatever that meant, "because you
didn't help us."
Now, human failure? I failed in that particular instance as a human
being because I was scared out of my wits. I had a fear of a kind that
I just cannot describe to you. I just can't describe the level of fear
that you find in a place where the moral order has been completely
overturned, where to do evil is the right thing, where to do good is
the wrong thing. And we were just scared and petrified. And I put my
old instinct for survival first, and any thoughts I had of being brave
or heroic were gone.
You can rationalize that to the end of your days and say, of course,
you had to keep yourself alive, and you couldn't do something which
would have put your own safety in jeopardy. But I will always feel that
I failed.
Where does Rwanda sit in your personal life?
Rwanda was the defining experience of my adult life. There is no
question about that. I had covered wars before I went to Rwanda. I had
been in Angola. I'd lived in Northern Ireland. And I covered the
township violence in North Africa where thousands of people died. But
nothing prepared me for what I saw in Rwanda.
And we came relatively late. It was the very end of May, the
beginning of June. Most of the killing had been done. There was still
pockets of Tutsis being hunted down in different areas. But to drive
through those road blocks, and see the looks on people's faces. I will
never forget driving from Butare to the Burundi border with the Tutsi
orphans whose parents had been wiped out. They tried to get these kids
out a couple of weeks before, and some had been dragged off and killed.
These were kids! You know, five, six, seven years of age. And you are
driving through these road blocks and, if only for the presence of
international aid workers and the fact that they had been able to do a
deal with the local prefect, those kids would have been taken off and
hacked to death in front of us. I never ever forget the looks on their
faces. They were petrified because they didn't know, they had no
guarantees. Rwanda was a country without guarantees.
You had never been there before?
I'd never been to Rwanda before. All I had heard about it was a
couple of colleagues of mine had gone off the previous year to do
something on the gorillas in the mountains. That's most of what the
international media knew. I was living in Jo'Burg (Johannesburg) where
all the Africa correspondents were. We knew nothing about the country.
We were fixated by two things: Somalia and the U. S. intervention
there, and South Africa's transition to democracy.
I remember being in the office in Jo'Burg when the news bulletin
came on about the two presidents being shot down, and hearing about the
killing taking place as a result of this. And I reacted in the same way
everybody else did in the media. It's one of those things that happens
in that part of the world. I just didn't get it, because I knew
nothing. I was ignorant.
And maybe most of us, a great many of us, at least, looked at
Central Africa as [being] beyond our ken. We didn't quite get it. We
didn't get what was. We didn't get the politics and the history of the
place because we were just fixated with other things. And South Africa
represented for us one of those rare good news stories out of Africa.
It had wonderful, colorful characters like Nelson Mandela. Rwanda --
where was that? It was nowhere in on our minds.
So why did you decide to go?
I would say Rwanda found me. I didn't choose to go to Rwanda. I was
called because somebody else had pulled out of the trip, and they sent
me a couple of news cuttings. I read what I could. I'd seen television
images by this stage, obviously, of bodies floating down rivers. I knew
it was grim. I wasn't yet using the word "genocide" myself. I wasn't
thinking of this in terms of a holocaust and that kind of state
sponsored slaughter. But once I got there, I very, very quickly saw
what was going on.
And I will never forget on the way in, in Nairobi, being confronted
with the image of colleagues of mine whom I knew from the townships of
South Africa, and looking at their eyes. They had just come out of
Rwanda. And they were shattered. And I said, "What is this?" And one of
them pulled me aside and he said, "It's spiritual damage, it's
spiritual damage."
I didn't quite get it. I thought he was either drunk or in some kind
of wild existentialist phase. I didn't get what he meant. But I sure do
now. I really do.
If this was mid-May, you still weren't--
By mid- to late-May, most people were still not using the word
"genocide." They were still not seeing this for what it was. But that's
not to say they didn't know hundreds of thousands of people were being
wiped out. The minority had been targeted for extermination.
Now, there was certainly a journalistic failure, a failure of states
of powerful people to use the proper words. But did we know that people
were being wiped out because of their ethnicity in huge numbers, in
unprecedented numbers? Yeah, we did.
You linked up with the RPF? What did you do? How did you find them, and what did you see?
By the time we got to the border with Rwanda through Uganda, we had
made contact with the RPF in Brussels. And they had, by that stage,
become relatively organized about linking up and giving people safe
passage down through the country. It was the most organized guerilla
army I had ever come across. And I'd been with the rebels in Eritrea,
and they have a name for being very strict and highly organized. But
the RPF were certainly in a class of art in terms of organization.
We met a very helpful and friendly young lieutenant, a guy called
Frank Ndore who guided us down through the country. … And the most
striking thing about driving in through Rwanda at that stage was the
emptiness. I was used to an Africa of crowded villages, of people
working in the fields -- a vibrant, living Africa. And this place, it
was like somebody had got a Hoover [vacuum cleaner] and placed it over
the country and just sucked all of the life, Hoovered the life up out
of the place. There was nothing. Just emptiness.
And one vivid image out of all of that, as we drive down towards
Kigali, crowds of white butterflies coming across the road. That was
the only sign of life. And, of course, the more you drove in, the smell
of death coming from all over the place -- from houses, from fields,
from ditches, that rotting awful smell of death.
You describe in your book scenes of bodies in water. Do you remember that?
The rivers at that stage were still carriageways of death. There
were still bodies that had been thrown in weeks earlier and had gotten
caught in reeds. The village population was dead, and most of the Hutus
had fled. Who was going to pull these bodies out? They were left lying
there, rotting in the water, bloated by the sun. It was a hideous,
hideous sight, but you got used to it. You get used to seeing things
like that.
And the other very striking thing was after witnessing the aftermath
of one massacre in particular, we would find ourselves driving along
the road, and there might be, in the distance, a pile of rags or a bit
of wood, but your mind had become attuned to the site of bodies. So you
automatically swerve to avoid everything you saw on the road because
you thought it might be a body. The place was just a giant open-air
cemetery.
And this is at a point where they had tried to clear away a lot of the bodies, but still you couldn't. It was just too much.
As you were driving in on this trip, when did
you start sensing that this wasn't just another little war that you had
been through? How did that realization begin to dawn on you?
I think the scariest thing about Rwanda in those very first days
when we looked in was that emptiness. This was different, this was
really different; a country that had no living people apart from
soldiers. It was just full of dead people. It was not like any civil
war I'd ever encountered. It was just that emptiness.
And the survivors who then started to come out, like ghosts. You
would meet these people, kids. I remember we went to an orphanage about
the second day, and seeing little kids with machete wounds. I remember
one little girl that had been stabbed running away from home. They had
killed her parents. A tiny little kid. And she was just gone. Her mind
was gone. And I looked at this stuff, and you knew this was different.
And then you heard about a massacre in Nyarubuye. You went there. What was the road like going there? You were in a car?
We drove to Nyarubuye with Frank Ndore who was an RPF lieutenant,
and one what they call a Kaadogo, a child soldier. They were our
escorts. And I remember driving down through an area that had been
liberated a few weeks before by the RPF, and the striking thing was you
would come across cattle wandering across the roads and, then, dogs.
And we were warned to be very careful of the dogs because by this
stage the dogs had gotten very used to eating human flesh. They had
lost their fear of human beings, so we were told, you know, whatever
you do, avoid these animals. And I know the RPF were shooting dogs by
this stage.
And we drove on a week. We took off from the main road that leads
you to the border with Tanzania, and we went up this kind of bush
mountain tract, very very overgrown by this stage because people had
fled. There was no one to tend the fields. The people that would have
done it were dead or they had fled. And for the images I have are of
banana leaves coming off of the car, and the sun starting to set, and I
knew we had very little time because this was right on the border. You
know, the RPF people were afraid of an Interahamwe coming across at
night, so we had to get in and out of there rather quickly.
Where did you think you were going? Who did you think awaited you there?
I thought that we would go and we would see a massacre, but I didn't know what a massacre meant.
I had an intellectual understanding of what the word "massacre"
meant from reading books. But books don't smell. Books don't rot. Books
don't lie in stagnant pools. Books don't leach into the earth the way
those bodies did. They can't tell you about it. Nothing can tell you
about it except the experience of going there and seeing it.
We got out of the car, and in front of the church there were some
bodies on the ground. And then we walked down this path through the
church compound, and it was heavily overgrown, heavily overgrown
because there had been rains.
And then you find yourself walking along and you are stepping around
and stepping over bodies. A colleague of mine, you know, almost tripped
over the body of a kid. I know he's haunted by it to this day.
We went down further and we came to this kind of open courtyard area
where the bodies were stacked in against the walls. And I think to
myself now, there were a lot more dead people there, but we just -- you
know, we didn't go beyond that. We didn't go around. We didn't make a
really thorough search. And I think it was just a sense of shock that
we didn't. We filmed what we could.
And it started to get dark and, then, we would enter the church. And
there was no light in the church itself, so we had one little camera
light, and we -- you are walking around in the dark and suddenly the
light points here and you see a kid's body. And you know it's a kid
because he's wearing his khaki school uniform, and he's lying there,
and his head has been bludgeoned away.
And down in another corner, there is a man's body lying there. Up
there, there also are bones, probably where dogs have been because
there is no body left there, it's just bones.
And then it's really dark, it's really dark by this stage, and we
have to go because the escorts are getting uncomfortable, they are
starting to get afraid of the area. And as we are coming out, we hear
noises, noises from one of the roads. I got very, very scared. And one
of the drivers with us, a Ugandan, said, "Don't worry, it's only rats."
Rats. And then we left. And I just remember looking up at the church
itself, and there is this white statue of Christ standing with his arms
open. And as you look down from him, there is the remains of a human
body underneath, and then-- I was raised at a Catholic, and I kind of
drifted away big time from religion, but I prayed so hard. I prayed so
hard because I was scared, but I prayed so hard, too, because I needed
something good to hold onto at that moment. I really did.
And I'm not the only one. There were lots of reporters who have had
that experience -- lots in Rwanda who went to those massacre sites at
the time.
What did you pray?
I said, "Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, give us thy kingdom come." I needed to believe in something.
Do you?
Not any more. The huge thing that Rwanda changed for me was a kind
of fundamental optimism of the humanity. When you see what people were
capable of, the unspeakableness of which they were capable of. The
simple fact that there was so much more evil than there was good. There
was so much more cowardice than there was bravery. After that, no, I'm
not optimistic any more.
When you were there at the church and you were talking to your colleagues, what kind of voice did you use?
I remember that apart from standing in front of the camera and, you
know, talking about what I was seeing, we whispered. If you listen to
those tapes, there is almost no sound.
That's the really striking thing. And not a lot of the time when
journalists go out to the field or anywhere, and they see something
shocking, exciting, we chatter in the background. The cameraman is
having to turn around and say, "Shh."
There is none of that on this. There is this silence. In my
experience, this unique silence, and just whispers, whispers every now
and again.
You described going to government offices,
seeing bodies, I guess, with identity cards. That massacre was the
result of that kind of organization, the state's organization?
The kind of thing you really have to appreciate about Rwanda was the
degree to which the country was organized. This is a country where the
mayors of areas were hand-picked by the president. The man that was
accused of leading the slaughter at Nyarubuye was a man hand-picked by
the president. That was the kind of attention to detail, because they
understood the people at the very top of this -- that if you want
anything to happen in Rwanda, and you want it to happen on a
coordination scale, then you've got to be with the local officials.
They were immensely powerful people, and they had access, because of
the nature of the state, to everybody's ethnic origin. They had to
carry it on identity cards, and these were stored -- lists of these
people, lists of Rwanda's Tutsis, Hutus, were kept in offices run by
the mayor.
So it was a kind of filing index for killing. It was perfect. It was
a perfect system. We saw the identity cards for all of the areas around
Nyarubuye and Nyarubuye itself. And I looked at these identity cards.
There it was -- so and so, Hutu; so and so, Tutsi. And you knew looking
at them that most of the Tutsis on these cards were dead.
And then you heard about some survivors?
We heard that there were survivors when we got to the mayor's
offices, offices that had been used by the man accused of leading the
genocide in Nyarubuye. Outside those offices were clusters of people,
and the minute you walked up, you could see they were different.
Because there was a kid sitting there with a huge black gash in his
head where he had been hit by a machete. There are other people sitting
there that are just dazed, they are absolutely dazed.
And we were in speaking to some nurses who were standing outside the
building. They told us about some kids and a woman inside a small
little office. And we walked in, and sitting on the ground were this
woman and I think two children. And one of the children, she looked in
the most terrible state. You could tell her hand was black, it had been
hacked away, and there was a wound on the back of her head as well.
The nurse was trying to dress the wounds, and the child looked
looked like a famine victim. And I just remember her grimacing in pain
as they tried to treat the wounds. And we had no medicine. I remember
all we had was some aspirin and some sweets, and we gave it to them.
And I assumed -- I looked at that kid, and I said she's not going to
make it. There was no way because her hand was rotting. She looked
starved. I just couldn't see her pulling through. And I left assuming
that, believing that, she wouldn't make it.
What was her name?
The kid's name was Valentina. And she had been at the church with
her parents, and her brothers, who had all been wiped out. She had
survived there for something like a month among the bodies, with dogs
roaming outside trying to eat the flesh of the dead. She was haunted.
She was haunted.
On that first journey when I met Valentina, you couldn't talk to
her. There are times when, you know, you go to a war zone and you see
what happened to them -- you couldn't have asked this child.
She was in so much physical pain, her hand hacked away, her head
wound, and she just looked so traumatized that we backed off. We did
the only decent thing you could do. We gave the few sweets we had, we
gave some aspirins, which was all we had, and we backed off. We left
her be. And we assumed she would die.
Does looking at that footage restrain you? She is obviously in pain but she is not screaming.
That's Rwanda. Rwanda is a country that was in pain but wasn't
screaming. Silence. That's what I remember most -- silence. Just an
endless, screaming silence. That was Rwanda.
If you want to understand what genocide means at the human level,
look at Valentina. Who did she offend, who did she hurt? Her crime was
being a Tutsi. Her crime was being a member of the wrong ethnic group.
And for that her entire family was wiped out, and she was mutilated and
traumatized terribly. That's what genocide is. And if you want to
understand our failures as human beings, as governments, look at that
kid. That's who we failed. You know, we failed the innocent, we failed
those who are targeted for no other reason than that they come from the
wrong group.
You asked me what I'm left with? Yes, a sense of human failure, but
also one hell of a determination that if I ever see anything like that
happening again, would I take up a camera and a notebook? No. I might
do something much more fundamental, because you can't depend on the
powerful and the rich to come to the aid of people like Valentina.
Don't believe them, don't trust them, no matter how many times they say
"never again."
Going back to her, you told her story.
One of the ways that I tried to keep faith with Rwanda is by going
back, and going back to Nyarubuye. I don't think you can go back to a
whole country. But when you meet people, you can go back to them, like
Valentina. And she's about the most remarkable person I know. She's
extraordinary. The first time I went back, she was still very, very
traumatized, and it took a lot of talk off-camera, and just getting to
know her before she felt free enough to talk about her experiences, and
I knew it was vital that she did. Because how do you explain to the
world the reality of something like genocide? Not through mass
statistics. People don't get the idea of 800,000 dead. They just don't
get it. It's too big.
But they can understand the testimony of a child like Valentina. And
she spoke in amazingly moving and haunting terms about what had
happened to her, and what had happened to her family. I stayed in
touch, and I've been back maybe three or four times to see her. And
each time she gets stronger. Each time she is more confident.
And she has turned into a really beautiful and engaging and warm
human being. She is quite the most remarkable person I know to come
from living among the bodies at Nyarubuye, to seeing your family wiped
out -- to come from that, and to be able to talk as she does to me now
about going on to be a doctor, about wanting to be a doctor so that she
can heal people. For all that Rwanda has left me haunted with, someone
like her also has given me a gift, a real gift.
And when all the politicians and all the soldiers and all the
journalists and all the rest of us -- all this great international
circus -- when we move on, Valentina and people like her, they offer
what hope if any there is for Rwanda.
You went to Kigali. You went to the Red Cross
Hospital. What was that [like] driving, just trying to get to that Red
Cross Hospital? It was a make-shift hospital, a school on the side of
town, There was no way to get there. What did you see?
To be able to get to the Red Cross Hospital from where the
journalists stayed, and which was around UNAMIR, you have to go with
the U.N. There was no other safe way across. So you had to go with the
UNAMIR people, and there was a marvelous French Canadian, Officer
Plante, who was their information guy. And he took us down.
And I remember him saying to us very clearly -- we had a camera with
us -- but his instructions as we approached no-man's land, he just
said, "For God's sake, keep that on the floor. Do not produce that
camera". Because you going across no-man's land, which is dodging
enough because the shelling and shooting is sporadically going on. But
you come into the first road blocks where you have FAR, the Rwandan
Army, and you have a Interahamwe, and these guys did not want to see
cameras produced. They really didn't.
And the faces of the people on those roadblocks -- and a lot of the
guys were drunk, and there were just bloodshot eyes looking at you. The
road blocks in most cases didn't amount to much more than a couple of
beer crates, and a few stones and a bit of wood across the road. But
they were very, very scary. And those UNAMIR guys, you know, like
Plante were an amazing presence of mind and calm. They used their heads
to negotiate their ways through these road blocks.
We got to the Red Cross Hospital, and it was being shelled at the
time. The area was being shelled. I'm not saying the hospital itself
was being deliberately shelled. The area was being shelled by the RPF.
And you could hear explosions and you could hear gunfire in the
background. And you walk in there, and what's striking is the degree --
for all the kind of chaos and the wounded, and the grimness that was
there, it was just this little sense of an island, of a haven right in
the middle of this madness which these people had against all odds
managed to establish.
And when I say odds, right outside their gates, you know, was a
population intent on exterminating any Tutsi, or any moderate Hutu they
found. And as the violence went on, in a population where law and order
had just vanished -- you know, it was war central at this place.
Plus, they are being shelled from the other side. And yet they have
managed to establish in this little patch of sanity, which they tried
to achieve. And I'll never forget someone like Philippe Gaillard
-- I only met him for what, 15, 20 minutes. It was a snapshot meeting
-- but this guy was a serious, serious human-being in a conflict that
had been characterized by international fumbling and cowardice and
abandonment. Here was one guy in particular who was making a difference
through his personal bravery.
Now, when I interviewed him, he struck me as being tired and war
weary. I will never forget asking him about the number of people that
were dead. And he took the figures up to a half a million, and then he
said something like, "I stopped counting after that." He sounded like a
profoundly weary man. But the trick of a really brave person in a
situation like that is not only confronting their own courage, but
confronting the kind of emotional exhaustion which he must have felt at
that time, and keeping going, and they really made a difference.
You asked him-- You said he had "a brain of iron." What was the price to pay for that? Do you remember that?
I do, I do. I asked him that and I asked several other people there.
And the sense I got from Philippe Gaillard and other ICRC
(International Committee for the Red Cross) workers was, there will be
a time to talk about what it was doing to them inside, but they
couldn't afford that kind of reflection at that time because there were
lives to save, there was human life to save.
There was … thousands that we now know they managed to save. It's
extraordinary that they did that. They couldn't afford -- I won't use
the word "luxury" because it isn't a luxury -- they couldn't afford the
time to feel the pain of what they were going through.
That struck me as really -- you know, it's as brave as physical
courage; it's as brave as going out and facing those road blocks, just
keeping going.
You said you have been back several times. Do you really want to go back much more?
I said to my wife, who's looked at the effect of Rwanda on me, and
she said, "You really should pull back from this." And I said that I
don't want to go back any more, but after the anniversary, then that's
it.
But even as I say those words, I don't think I can. Valentina will
still be there. The graves of the people who died in Nyarubuye will
still be there. The memory of my own failure to intervene on behalf of
people who were threatened, the memory of my own fear -- all those
things will be there. They don't go away.
And I suppose, you know, if I say I won't go back-- Poor me. Nothing
happened to me. I didn't see my family wiped out. I didn't see them
buried alive in front of me. All I did was go for a couple of weeks and
come out. But I can't, I can't say goodbye that easily.
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