Dying to Live Read online

  Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga

  DYING TO LIVE

  A Rwandan Family’s Five-Year Flight Across the Congo

  Preface by Phil Taylor

  Translated by Casey Roberts

  Originally published as Voyage à travers la mort, Le témoignage d’un exilé Hutu du Rwanda

  © 2012 by Le Groupe Ville-Marie Littérature

  Publié avec l’autorisation du Groupe Ville-Marie Littérature, Montréal, Québec

  Translation Copyright © Baraka Books 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-926824-78-9 pbk; 978-1-926824-83-3 epub; 978-1-926824-84-0 pdf; 978-1-926824-85-7 mobi/kindle

  Cover photos: Mathieu Breton UNCHR/R. Chalasani; back cover: Jacques Godon

  Cover by Folio infographie

  Book design by Folio infographie

  Translated by Casey Roberts

  Legal Deposit, 2nd quarter 2013

  Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec

  Library and Archives Canada

  Published by Baraka Books of Montreal

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  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing for our translation activities and through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

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  Preface

  In a time of war,

  God help the non-combatants!

  On April 6, 1994 a peace agreement in Rwanda, called the Arusha Accords, was slowly being finalized with elections in the offing, a multi-party interim government in place and a UN peacekeeping presence monitoring the process. History teacher Pierre-Claver Ndacyaysenga and his family could look to the future with some hope.

  But on April 7 the President of Rwanda was dead, the victim of a well-planned assassination which was the prelude to renewed warfare and widespread massacres of civilians.

  The teacher and his desperate family would soon be on the move as refugees. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which had been in an offensive mode when President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, as remarked by UN General Romeo Dallaire, began a drive to seize power. Various journalists claimed the RPF goal was to end the killing of Tutsis, an important ethnic minority in Rwanda. But, again as pointed out by Dallaire, the direction of the RPF columns indicated a different intention. The Arusha Accords were shunted aside, political power was the prize sought by the army that had originally attacked Rwanda from Uganda on October 1, 1990.

  The invasion of Rwanda in 1990 had created hundreds of thousands of internal refugees by 1994. Refugees were a major and tragic feature of the Rwanda power struggle, almost an element of RPF military strategy as they drove civilians in front of them, never allowing them to congregate behind their own lines. Administering to fleeing non-

  combatants became a headache for their opponents. Housing, and food would have to be provided and care taken that there were no RPF infiltrators among the thousands moving away from the front.

  In July 1994 a new government was declared in Kigali, with the strongman, Paul Kagame, clearly in charge. The United States provided immediate recognition. There were more than a million Rwandan refugees in camps in Eastern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), among them Pierre-Claver Ndacyaysenga and his family. With the former government defeated Kagame was now determined to bring back the refugees to be under his state’s control, by force if necessary. The refugees had every reason to fear for their lives, as testified to by many Hutus and Tutsis who served in Kagame’s regime and later fled Rwanda. Seth Sendashonga, the RPF’s former Minister of the Interior, urged the United Nations to investigate crimes against humanity committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front and was assassinated in Nairobi for speaking out.

  The greatest ordeal for the Ndacyaysenga family began when the new Rwandan army directly attacked the UN administered camps with terrible loss of life. The only hope of escaping entrapment by a ruthless army was to begin a long perilous walk into the jungles of Zaire. As misfortune would have it the Rwandan leadership struck an alliance with Laurent Kabila and entered Zaire in October 1996 aiming to capture Eastern Zaire and if possible the whole of the country. At the time Kagame denied his forces were leading the invasion, but eventually the obvious was acknowledged. The United States and Britain were seemingly quite pleased with this extraordinary aggression. The U.S. ambassador visited “liberated” areas of Zaire.

  The 300,000 Rwandans who made the decision to escape the clutches of Kagame’s forces endured terrible hardship, walking ragged and hungry, losing contact with loved ones in the great mass of frightened humanity hurrying along strange roads, only knowing to head west. They were on their own. Prominent humanitarian groups observed their movements and were of little use. Most of their advice was bad or dangerous.

  Vengeance-driven armies have always abused refugees. The worst in this story occurred at a place called Tingi-Tingi, Zaire, painfully described by Mr. Ndacyaysenga. Long ago the 7th U.S. Cavalry massacred Lakota people in South Dakota and an American poet wrote, “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.” We could apply the same sentiment to Tingi-Tingi.

  Mr. Ndacyaysenga is a living articulate witness to a major human event that is rarely discussed or even acknowledged. The book provides informative and moving—and gritty—details that beg the question: Why has the present leadership of Rwanda been allowed to get away with such brazen conduct for so long?

  Phil Taylor

  April 28, 2013

  Acronyms

  Efforts have been made to avoid overuse of acronyms. However, the following acronyms do appear occasionally.

  AFDLC Alliance des forces démocratiques pour la liberation du Congo

  CIB Congolaise Industrielle des Bois, a company in Congo-Brazzaville

  FAR Forces armées rwandaises (The Rwandan armed forces until the RPF took power in July 1994)

  FAZ Forces armées zaïroises (The Zairean armed forces until the AFDLC took power under Kabila in 1997).

  HCR High Commission for Refugees (see UNHCR)

  NGO Non-governmental organization

  RPA Rwandan Patriotic Army (Created formally after the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a political-military party, took power in July 1994)

  RPF Rwandan Patriotic Front (The political-military party led by Paul Kagame that currently holds power in Rwanda)

  UNHCR United Nations High Commission for Refugees also known as the UN Refugee Agency

  WFP World Food Programme

  Prologue

  On the evening of April 6, 1994, the plane bringing Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira from Tanzania was shot down while preparing to land at the Kigali international airport in Kanombe. Its eight occupants, passengers and crew were killed instantly.

  It was in the aftermath of this attack that Rwanda would descend into a murderous rampage culminating decades of tensions between Hutus and Tutsis.
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br />   It was in the aftermath of this attack that my ordeal would begin, and that of every single Rwandan, bar none.

  CHAPTER 1

  Rwanda Put to Fire

  and the Sword

  In the early morning of April 7, 1994, my family and I were sleeping peacefully in our home in Kigali. We had moved to the capital a couple of months earlier in search of a better life than what we had been able to find in our native region, Cyangugu. I was teaching history at the Lycée de Kigali, having been hired in September 1993 after completing university. My wife Francoise worked as a social worker at the Centre Hospitalier de Kigali, where she had been transferred three months earlier. We shared our life with our three children: Ange-Claude, at eleven, our eldest son, and our daughters Claudine and Emmérence, who were seven and three years old.

  At the break of dawn, the sound of violent explosions occurring throughout the city shook us from our sleep. I turned on the radio and we were astonished to hear that the country’s president had been attacked and killed. The announcer called for calm and advised people to stay inside.

  The explosions intensified throughout the morning; some of them were very near. We were terrified. The children asked me questions, which I unfortunately didn’t have the answers to. All I could do was to try to reassure them. They were unable to eat or drink and were all suddenly seized by bouts of diarrhea!

  Around mid-day, I gathered my courage and left the house to take a look around. On the street, I met a former neighbour and university colleague. He was returning from his shift at Radio Rwanda and passed along his version of what had happened. According to him, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel movement founded by Rwandan Tutsi exiles in Uganda who had taken up arms in 1990, had blown up the president’s plane and launched an all-out attack on Kigali.

  At this point, I couldn’t be sure of anything. All I could tell was that Interahamwe, a Hutu militia linked to the government, had been unleashed. Armed with guns, machetes and clubs, they scoured the city in search of Tutsis and moderate Hutus who they then systematically executed. There were barricades pretty much everywhere and you had to show your identity card to be allowed through. If the card designated its holder as Tutsi (ethnicity being required on the card since its creation by the Belgian colonial administration), that was the end of him.

  Everywhere chaos reigned. People ran in every direction, weighted down with the belongings of victims of the slaughter. The situation was so confused that no one could be sure that they weren’t on somebody’s list.

  After two or three days, the “work,” as the extermination in process had come to be called, was almost complete. The streets were littered with corpses that were beginning to decompose and which no one knew what to do with. They would later be gathered up by the city.

  While all this was going on, the RPF intensified its attacks against the government forces and established control over part of Kigali, in turn killing those Hutus who found themselves behind their lines, in the northern part of the capital. After two weeks of fighting, the Rwandan Patriotic Front had almost surrounded the city, there being only one exit still open to the west: the Nyabugogo pass. This escape route was not without danger, as it was often shelled by the RPF.

  As the days passed, the situation continued to deteriorate and people, especially women and children, used every means at their disposal to get to safety. Hoping to put my family out of harm’s way, I managed to secure them passage on a van going to Cyangugu with the help of an officer of the Rwandan Armed Forces (Forces armées rwandaises or FAR) whom I had known since childhood. They moved back into the same house we had lived in before we moved to the capital. Although I no longer had any work, since all the schools were closed, I decided to stay in Kigali, anxious to defend our home from looters and hoping that things would improve.

  As the weeks passed, the noose gradually tightened around the city, which was under bombardment from all sides. The Rwandan Armed Forces pulled back. Food was scarce. The prevailing insecurity forced people to remain indoors. Telephone service was nonexistent. Under these conditions, I decided to leave as soon as I could. Early in the morning of May 17, I packed some food, a bottle of water and clothes into a small backpack and headed out. The only remaining paved road leading out of town was no longer safe; people on foot were being refused passage through the narrow corridor. Columns of refugees were moving towards Mount Kigali, to the west of the city. The high ridge had to be crossed to reach the bridge over the Nyabarongo and the road to Gitarama. So I started climbing.

  From the outset, I knew that the journey was going to be long, not only because the road was jam packed with people, but also because there were numerous barricades that had been erected by militiamen armed with machetes, clubs and occasionally automatic rifles, looking for RPF infiltrators. At checkpoint after checkpoint, we were thoroughly searched and asked to show our identity cards. People were systematically abused as they passed through the checkpoints. If you had any money or valuables, you could easily be accused of conspiring with the enemy as a pretext to separate you from your belongings. The most unlucky paid with their lives.

  After twelve hours of walking, during which I only covered ten kilometers, I finally crossed the bridge over the Nyabarongo. At the top of the hill at Ruyenzi, there was a dense crowd of unhappy people who had just become refugees. People were tired, but they somehow managed to keep a smile on their faces! They were no doubt relieved to have escaped the city, which had become a veritable tinderbox.

  At the day’s final checkpoint, exhausted, I prepared to sleep under the stars when I encountered a young taxi driver who I knew. His vehicle had been rented by a family who was also fleeing the capital. He promised to wait for me after the checkpoint. I was searched for more than a half hour, after which I piled into the car, already crowded with passengers and luggage. This gift from out of nowhere seemed like a miracle to me!

  The taxi dropped me off at Ruhango where I spent the night at the home of an old university friend who taught nearby. There I learned that the government, exiled to the town of Gitarama in the center of the country, was paying the capital’s civil servants their salaries for April. I took the risk of turning around and travelling the twenty kilometers back to Gitarama to see if I could get paid. The money would surely be needed! With a little luck, I managed to get my hands on my final paycheck and immediately returned to Ruhango where I once again slept at my friend’s. The next day, I bought a seat on a bus that took me to Cyangugu, my destination.

  Cyangugu, where I come from, is located in the southwest of Rwanda, on the border with Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Burundi. When I arrived back at my old home in mid-May, my family had already been there for a month.

  A glance at the ruins that dotted the area was all that it took to see that the local inhabitants hadn’t been spared their share of horrors. Almost all Tutsis had been slaughtered and their homes destroyed or burned. The few survivors had been resettled by the prefectural authorities at a camp on the heights of Nyarushishi, in the town of Nyakabuye. These were people who had been hidden in the early hours of the tragedy by their Hutu friends and had managed to avoid detection.

  Far from the fighting that raged in the north, center and east of Rwanda, people in Cyangugu seemed to be living in relative peace, even if the RPF advances, which had resulted in an influx of refugees, filled them with fear. As in the rest of the country, the governmental authority seemed to be nonexistent. The soldiers and militias were the only law.

  Now, with no source of income, I had to find a way to support my family. Using some of my savings, I opened a watering hole in a trading center near my home, selling banana wine urwagwa) and locally-produced beer from Bukavu, Zaire.

  In mid-June, displaced Hutus from around the country began arriving in the region by the thousands. Cyangugu was one of only two places from which you could easily enter Zaire, avoiding Lake Kivu, a natural border between Rwanda and its neighbour. The other way was thro
ugh Gisenyi, further north, which the RPF had closed on July 18, two weeks after taking Kigali, leaving Cyangugu as the only remaining exit.

  The refugees, exhausted, crowded along with their cattle onto the only two roads that connect Cyangugu with the rest of the country, one passing through the Nyungwe primary forest from Butare via Gikongoro, the other along the shores of Lake Kivu from Kibuye.

  Fortunately, the pressure we were all feeling was soon mitigated as a result of “Opération Turquoise.” After dithering for weeks, the UN, under Security Council Resolution No. 929, finally agreed to the deployment, between June 22 and August 21, 1994, of a multinational force under French command. Its mission was “to contribute to the security and protection of displaced persons, refugees and civilians at risk in Rwanda,” and to create a “safe humanitarian zone” encompassing the prefecture of Cyangugu and part of those of Kibuye and Gikongoro.

  Occupied by the French military, the area was closed to the RPF, providing temporary protection for both local people and refugees, giving them time to prepare their escape to Zaire. When the RPF took power in mid-July, some Hutus who had originally lived in the central regions (including Kigali) chose to return home voluntarily, encouraged by the declaration of a cease-fire and the formation of a national unity government.

  Opération Turquoise was ended on August 21, 1994, in accordance with its mandate, freeing the RPF to establish control over the country. Despite its short duration, it was responsible for saving the lives of thousands of Hutus whom the RPF was determined to kill, while also providing protection to the few Tutsi survivors, under threat of elimination by the militias.