by Mike Farrell

Ntarma

introduction

1/21

1/22

1/23

1/24

1/25

1/26

1/27

1/28

1/29

1/30

1/31

2/1

coda

what now?

human rights

Agnes (my mom), my sister Kathy, her husband Pat Rogers and Shelley take me to LAX for the evening flight to London. The trip has kind of sneaked up on all of us, so there doesn't seem to have been the worrying that associated itself with leaving for Somalia/Bosnia in '92. Getting more blasé about all this globe-trotting?

Kathy, Pat, Agnes and Shel are wonderful. Warm and attentive. We scare up a meal at what passes for a restaurant at the International Terminal and talk about all sorts of things, but not much about Rwanda. When the time comes, we wander over to the gate and stand around a bit, delaying the good-byes. As we're standing there, Daryl Nickens, one of my traveling companions, comes by and I introduce him around before he boards.

And then it's time. Kisses, a few tears and hearty hugs all around and I make my way aboard carrying with me all the love and support one could ever hope to enjoy.

Once aboard, the Club Class aisle seat looks as good as can be expected. It'll be home for the next nine or ten hours. Daryl is situated a few rows back and seems to be comfortable by himself. I don't see any of the others, so settle in and get out the reading material.

It's a small group this time. I had met the four from the Writer's Guild for the first and only time a week earlier at a lunch at Chasen's arranged either by the UNHCR or the Writer's Guild, or both. Richard Walden, who had finally gotten his medicine shipped over by the U.S. government and had himself been over there only a few weeks earlier, was present to offer a few sage words of advice (he told me, for example, to "forget about being a vegetarian" for the time I was going to be there. He also suggested, lending a certain inferential credence to things I've read about chaos and lawlessness in the country now, that we should bring travel bags "with locks."). Jonathan Estrin stopped by for a while, too, to wish us well, but had to leave early because of WGA contract negotiations.

My colleagues in this adventure were to be Daryl Nickens, David Koepp, Caroline Thompson and Bobby Smith, Jr. None of them had done anything like this before and no one had a lot to say at the lunch. They listened, mostly, asked a few questions and, I assume, shared some version of the "How in the name of God did I get myself involved in this?" second thoughts. Shots, medication, side-effects, how-much-money-should-we-carry? kinds of issues were in the forefront. What-would-we-see and how-would-we-react was just beneath the surface.

Daryl, a thick-set, barrel-chested man in his mid-forties, is an officer of the Writer's Guild and has written a number of television series episodes and telefilms. He's now working in features. An African-American, though it's not an assumption one would automatically make, he's never been to Africa. Actually, other than Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, he's never been out of the U.S.

Caroline Thompson is in her late 30's but looks about 22. Evidently very successful, having written "Edward Scissorhands," "The Secret Garden" and the new "Black Beauty," she's going to be meeting us in London where she'll be doing some pre-release publicity on the new film. She has done some traveling, including at least one trip to Kenya.

David Koepp is a tall, thin, pleasant looking young man who looks to be straight out of the mid-West. I'm not surprised to learn later that he's from Wisconsin. At thirty-one, he's had a phenomenal string of successes, probably the most noteworthy being "Jurassic Park." He also wrote "Carlito's Way," a film I liked a lot. He has traveled around Latin America, he says, and is married to an Argentine.

Bobby Smith, Jr., is a quiet, intense young African-American whose most recent film, "Jason's Lyric," won considerable praise. A Texan, twenty-six years old, he graduated from Vassar (where my daughter is now a senior) in 1990 and seems to have hit his stride in the business right away. He hasn't done much traveling, at least not to the under-developed world, and has not been to Africa.

I seem to be the old man of the bunch and the only one who's experienced refugee camps and the like.

The flight is smooth, quiet. Time to read a bit and think about what's ahead.

Rwanda is a small country just below the equator on the cusp between Central and East Africa. It is bounded on the north by Uganda, on the south by Burundi, with Tanzania to the east and Zaire to the west. Much of its border with Zaire is formed by Lake Kivu, one of the string of Great Lakes of Africa that runs north from Mozambique and appears to hook around east into Lake Victoria. Its pre-war population of approximately 9,000,000 (making it one of the most densely populated countries in the world) was made up primarily of two tribal groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi, with a small number of a third group known as the Twa. The Hutu were the largest group, making up about 85% of the population, with the Tutsi about 14% and the Twa 1%.

The history of the country is somewhat complicated and remains the subject of some debate, in part due to the desire of its colonizers to institute a system by which they could maintain control, but much is now coming clear.

Though the Twa were probably the first to settle in the area, their relatively small number and their essential lack of involvement in the political/social structure and recent fighting makes them largely irrelevant to this discussion.

Of those who later settled the region, the Hutu were primarily farmers, or cultivators, while the Tutsi were cattle-herders. Though the differences in appearance between the two groups have in significant part disappeared through assimilation and intermarriage, the "classic" Tutsi is tall, thin and has a straight nose, while the "classic" Hutu is short, more broad and has a flatter or wider nose. While there were certainly shifts as the social order was worked out between the groups, it is widely agreed that the Tutsi eventually achieved dominance over the area, in large part because status was ultimately determined by one's possession of capital (how unusual!) and the primary form of capital was cattle (importantly, Hutu who owned cattle were automatically considered Tutsi, which demonstrates how vague, elastic and ultimately political this tribal designation was even then). That being so, the cattle-herding Tutsi rose to dominance.

When the region was colonized, first by the Germans and then more importantly by the Belgians, Tutsi dominance was used as a form of control, with the Belgians exaggerating and exacerbating the differences for their own purposes and establishing what was essentially a caste system with the Tutsi on top (directly under the control of the Belgians). They even went so far as to adopt and spread an ugly idea that had some currency at the time; namely that the Tutsi were racially different from the Negroid Hutu, being of the Hamitic race, a supposedly mongrelized form of the Aryan or Caucasian race. The natural superiority, then, of the white race was granted the Tutsi, whose taller, thinner frames and straighter noses were held as signs of racial superiority.

This racial aspect was even used by the Catholic missionaries who proselytized in the area (the majority of the total population is today [at least nominally] 60-80% Catholic), referring to the Tutsi as a lost tribe of Ethiopian Coptic Christians who had lost their faith in a southern migration and needed to be brought back into the fold.

As ill-defined and meaningless as the "tribal" differences were in actuality (during a census in the '30s, for example, the Belgians had so much trouble determining the difference between the two groups by appearance that they automatically ascribed Tutsi status to anyone who owned more than ten cows) they became ingrained in the minds of the populace through custom, training and lore with terrible consequences in recent times. For decades, at least, the Tutsi were seen as intellectually and socially superior while the Hutu became the underclass, with all the political ramifications that status suggests, and these differences were legally emblazoned on identity cards issued by the Belgians in the middle '30s which labeled the bearer either Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. Trading or forging of cards in order to advance socially became a regular phenomenon and continued through recent times (though for different reasons).

After World War II the Tutsi-dominated nation began agitating for independence, with a forward-looking faction urging the elimination of the tribal designations, which they saw as "alien impositions." But the ingrained belief in their differences, or resentment at years of having been relegated to an inferior status, resulted in rivalry between emerging groups of Hutu. While some saw the inherent logic in a more liberal and integrated society, others simply wanted to reverse the existing polarity.

The Belgians, seeing the writing on the wall, sided with the most powerful Hutu party in a 1959 uprising that resulted in the death of approximately 10,000 Tutsi, the expulsion of many more and the emergence of a Hutu-dominated governing structure that simply reversed the old discriminatory order.

The next three decades saw mounting tension between the groups and a solidifying of Hutu political thought in an increasingly more extreme posture. Tensions continued to ratchet upward as groups of Tutsi exiles formed guerrilla bands, pejoratively dubbed "Inyenzi" (cockroaches) by the Hutu, and mounted attacks from Zaire, Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania aimed at destabilizing the government and allowing a return, by force if necessary, of the exiles. Inside the country, the resultant violence against Tutsi who had chosen to remain was considerable. In 1963, Hutu gangs killed another estimated 10,000 Tutsi and forced the flight of thousands more. The same type of thing occurred again in '67 and '73, along with ever-increasing social pressures on those who chose to stay.

In 1973, a coup d'etat led by Major-General Juvenal Habyarimana brought about the establishment of what became a single-party (MRND) state under his leadership. Though there were no more pogroms against the Tutsi and Habyarimana made a show of trying to establish a more balanced society, what in fact developed during his tenure was a proto-fascist system in which not only Tutsi but Hutu from different regions and with different political views were reviled and made the objects of discrimination.

While Habyarimana secured his power domestically and hardened his position against the return of Tutsi who had fled earlier, the refugees themselves were organizing outside the country, with many of them joining a revolutionary army in Uganda to overthrow the unfriendly regime of Milton Obote in that country. The training many Tutsi received during that period was put to use as they joined the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) which, with Tutsi and some Hutu in its ranks, launched an attack on Rwanda in 1990.

Fierce fighting resulted, in which both sides suffered heavy losses. The Rwandan Army (FAR) had at its side French troops (President Mitterrand of France and President Habyarimana were said to be close personal friends whose children went to school together, and France was underwriter for a multi-million dollar purchase of arms for the government) who were able to contain the RPF advance. But the military conflict continued, with the RPF ultimately forcing the government into political compromise, some small steps toward opening up the system, and peace talks.

The Arusha Accords, named for the Tanzanian city where the talks were held, were a significant victory for the RPF and the opposition Hutu parties within Rwanda as well as a signal defeat for the extremist faction of Hutu around President Habyarimana. They provided for the creation of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), a UN peace-keeping force to oversee the implementation of the agreements, which themselves promised peace, democracy and reconciliation. But the requirements of the agreement, such as power-sharing, an end to privilege and a requirement of accountability for past crimes, were anathema to the extremists, who saw that they had everything to lose and nothing to gain.

President Haybarimana was killed on April 6, 1994, when his plane was shot down by rockets fired from, according to many first-hand reports, the grounds of or directly adjacent to Kanombe military base - the headquarters of his own forces - just outside of Kigali. It is the view of a great many that the still-unsolved murders of Habyarimana, the members of his staff, the newly elected President of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, and the French crew, all of whom perished in the explosion and subsequent crash of the plane, were the result of a plot within the ranks of his own extremist supporters who felt that he was betraying them by compromising with the enemy.

Whatever the case, the president's death was the trigger for the unleashing of an horrific tidal wave of violence that caused the deaths of 500,000 to 1,000,000 people within what was essentially a three-month period. This slaughter, which was directed at moderate Hutus as well as Tutsis, was conducted essentially by four groups; that portion of the military that was not involved in the war with the RPF (the truce fell apart immediately), the gendarmerie, or police force, the Presidential Guard and the Interahamwe, a youth group that had been trained as a militia and heavily propagandized by the extremists. Much of the killing was incited by radio broadcasts over Radio Rwanda and particularly over Radio Milles Collines (actually Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines), a source of such garbage as to be almost beyond belief.

During the months of bloodbath that followed the president's death, the RPF prosecuted the war with a vengeance in order to vanquish the killers and save the lives of those they could. Despite the utter abdication of responsibility on the part of the international community, the withdrawal of the international peace-keeping force (UNAMIR) and the last-minute intervention by the French to create a "safe zone" for retreating Hutu, the RPF succeeded in driving the government and its forces from the country (or into the zone temporarily held by the French). As Rwanda's (FAR) forces retreated, they continued to use the radio, this time to drive Hutu non-combatants out of the country with them by nurturing the seeds of fear and spreading panic about anticipated reprisal killings at the hands of the hated Tutsi.

The flood of refugees created by these events swarmed across Rwanda's borders, especially those in the southeast, at Ngara, Tanzania; in the south, toward Burundi; and in the northwest, at Goma, Zaire. The sheer force of numbers nearly overwhelmed the international humanitarian community's capacity to respond, and in Goma the combination of the unprecedented size of the refugee population, the inhospitable, lava-rock soil and the incapacity of the initially under-staffed and under-supplied responding organizations to fully respond led to the cholera epidemic, thousands of deaths and the chaotic conditions we all witnessed on the nightly news through the summer and into the early fall.

In the ensuing months, the situation in the camps has improved from a public health point of view, but the political fall-out is still smoldering. There has been much criticism based on the claim that the camps are essentially run by the former government and military who control the civilian (Hutu) population through terror, intimidation and propaganda while they live off the largesse of the international community at the same time as they are training and rebuilding to take Rwanda back.

Inside the country, the triumphant, largely Tutsi RPF, under the leadership of General Paul Kagame, has renamed itself the RPA (Rwandese Patriotic Army) and governs in tandem with an appointed civilian government which is of mixed tribal background but has a Hutu majority. They claim to want an open, inclusive society and are trying to rebuild a country left in tatters by the war and at the same time establish credibility (not to mention credit) with the international community. There are accusations of reprisal killings of Hutu civilians, but the claim is that these are isolated acts committed by ignorant, emotionally over-wrought and/or less-well-trained soldiers and are neither orchestrated nor condoned by the new government. In fact, it appears that some soldiers have been tried and punished for such actions.

So, that's where we're headed.