On May 12, the burgomaster of Rusatira commented that “the enemy has been seriously beaten.”1 He meant that most local Tutsi had been slain and this assessment was accurate. But for the actual RPF, the situation was the opposite: it had begun its ultimate advance that would finally engulf the capital and defeat the genocidal authorities. The RPF success showed the hollowness of the claim that killing Tutsi would guarantee the safety of Hutu and made murderous fools or liars of the authorities who had promised it would.

Even had RPF progress been less dramatic, the decision by the interim government to push the genocide ever deeper into the community undermined its authority. People found it hard to believe that women, children, and the elderly and infirm posed the same threat as armed soldiers. Many of the women targeted after mid-May were wives or mothers of Hutu and many of the clergy, teachers, and medical personnel were highly esteemed by their Hutu neighbors. Hutu solidarity, at most a short-lived myth, crumbled as protectors of these newly specified targets clashed with others whose own personal or political interests were served by continuing the genocide.

The killing campaign created new opportunities for getting rich as Tutsi property became available for appropriation and it generated new possibilities for acquiring power as political alliances shifted. In struggles over these resources as in revivals of old conflicts, contenders used the same accusations against each other as they had used against Tutsi. The frequency and ease with which these charges were made discredited them and called into question their original use against Tutsi.

With the prospect that the interim government was headed for defeat and with the realization that anyone could be charged as an “accomplice,” popular participation diminished. The activists carrying out the killing campaign at the end were, as at the start, a small number whose hatred and fear of Tutsi were intertwined with what they saw as their own opportunities for success.

These embittered killers sometimes turned on the communities and the authorities who had given them license to kill. The authorities found that the legitimacy which they had used at the start to cover the genocide had been consumed during the course of the killing campaign and that they no longer had the authority to control the assassins whom they had armed.

As the Hutu of Butare fell into conflict on personal, political or regional grounds, they used the discourse of genocide against their opponents. In such struggles, having zealously implemented the genocide was no guarantee of safety and anyone, regardless of attitude toward Tutsi, could be accused of being icyitso.

Personal and Political Conflict

In quarrels between ordinary people, such as one that took place in mid-May in Butare town, one of the contenders could arrange for a soldier to kill the other, using the easy excuse that the intended victim was icyitso. In Rusatira, the burgomaster complained about certain residents of the commune who sought to use the troubled times to bring back the bad habits of vengeance and who confused personal enemies with the enemy of the country, the Inkotanyi.2 In Vumbi, Runyinya commune, twenty-four Hutu were reportedly killed because they were accused of being Tutsi.3 In Cyarwa-Cyimana sector of Ngoma commune, participants at a security committee meeting complained that “tall persons” were being attacked “even though they are Hutu.”4 The burgomaster of Ruhashya deplored unjustified attacks by Hutu against Hutu in his commune. He reported,

[The assailants] even attacked the man named Dominique Bigwiro, pillaged his goods, destroyed his house and in the confusion, he lost his life, on the unconfirmed pretext that he had hidden refugees in his house and in his banana plantation. His mother’s house was also pillaged when she had nothing to do with the accusations against her son. Another person named Jean-Baptiste Rutegesha had his house pillaged in an abusive and vindictive way by these people for the sole reason that he was not able to find the money to pay off those who accused him of sheltering ibyitso and who went so far as to stick an ethnic label on him that was not even his own.5

With the enormous instability introduced by the genocide, political actors at all levels jostled for power for themselves and their parties. At the prefectural level, MRND stalwarts Nyiramasuhuko and Kalimanzira struggled against the growth of MDR-Power represented by men like Semwaga. This struggle intensified towards the end of the genocide when Shalom, as head of the MRND Interahamwe, prepared attacks against the sector Gatobotobo of Mbazi, where Semwaga and Prefect Nsabimana were protecting Tutsi. The MRND group called RTLM to their assistance and the radio station broadcast information about the continued presence of Tutsi in that sector. Semwaga also previously fought challenges from a CDR leader, the former burgomaster of Mbazi, Kabuga, who been one of the most zealous organizers of the genocide in that commune. According to local observers, Semwaga apparently was behind the abduction and murder of Kabuga and his associates like Masumbuko. Soldiers, including Sergeant Gatwaza, reportedly arrived one day in May to carry them off along with Emmanuel Sakindi, a councilor who was said to be Tutsi. The supposed Tutsi and the apparent killers of Tutsi were reportedly all killed by the same people at the same time, but for different reasons. Whether or not Sibomana, the burgomaster of Mbazi, participated in instigating the murder, as is sometimes charged, he benefited from the elimination of Kabuga, who had challenged his authority.6

At the national and prefectural level, Kalimanzira and Nyiramasuhuko lined up against PSD leaders like agriculture minister Straton Nsabumukunzi and Prefect Nsabimana. At the local level they opposed at least one PSD burgomaster, Vincent Rukelibuga of Rusatira, even though he had vigorously supported the genocide. Like politicians in Mbazi, Rukelibuga was troubled by a local CDR leader. In early May, Rukelibuga complained that supporters, “who had helped us to contain these troubles”—meaning who had helped kill Tutsi—had disappeared and could not be found anywhere. The disappearance of his supporters presaged his own removal in late June, his record of killing Tutsi apparently not enough to protect him from partisan enmity.7

In the commune of Kigembe, partisan conflict surfaced at the end of April when Bonaventure Nkundabakura, the head of MDR-Power, was accused of havingarranged the murder of the head of the other MDR faction. Nkundabakura then allied with his previous rival, the CDR leader Bernard Mutabaruka, to combat the PSD burgomaster, Symphorien Karekezi. In the struggle, which continued until the end of June, the MDR/CDR group accused the burgomaster of being Inkotanyi and subsequently charged that he was trying to avenge Tutsi relatives apparently killed by Nkundabakura. The burgomaster asked the prosecutor in Butare to order Nkundabakura to stop making such charges “because you know what that means these days.”8 More than once, supporters of the two sides resorted to violence and, at different times, both called in National Police to strengthen their positions.9

Dominique Ntawukuriryayo, sub-prefect of Gisagara, and Bernadette Mukarurangwa, deputy to the national assembly, seem to have shared a commitment to the killing campaign, but otherwise clashed. Mukarurangwa spread the word that Ntawukuriryayo was planning to flee and that he was hiding Tutsi; she used this as a pretext for ordering a local crowd to put up a barrier to stop him. The crowd forced him to return to his house, which they then searched, as they did that of the burgomaster of Ndora. Finding nothing at either place, they turned back on the instigator and demanded payment from her since they had not been able to pillage elsewhere.10

In divisions at the level of sector and cell, opponents used the same kinds of accusations against each other. The councilor of Nkubi, Augustin Kanyawabahizi, identified as a protector by some survivors, arrested five persons for their role in “conflicts which broke out and cost the lives of some persons and destroyed much property” around April 26.11 The victims apparently had been Tutsi. Fifty-six residents of the sector petitioned the prosecutor for the release of the detaineesbecause “these persons are above reproach” in the community.12 When they got no satisfaction and another person of the same group was arrested, 114 residents petitioned for their release, saying that they had violated no law and that their continued detention caused insecurity in the sector.13 Receiving no support from the prosecutor, they sought other ways to discredit the councilor.14 Kanyawabahizi, reportedly a protector of at least some Tutsi, reacted to the increasing pressure by appealing to Interahamwe president Kajuga. He asked him to provide the “materiel necessary for these difficult moments”—that is, firearms that would increase Kanyawabahizi’s authority—and to send a representative to support him at a community meeting scheduled for two days later.15 This strategy apparently failed and the residents of Nkubi wrote to the prefect on June 9 declaring that Kanyawabahizi was, in fact, a Tutsi who had changed his ethnic group in the 1960s and that “he had put in prison the people most opposed to the enemy.” They asked for his removal and for the release of the detained persons.16

Regional Conflict

Behind the facade of unity against a common enemy, regional rivalries continued. Northerners doubted the loyalty of people from the south while southerners feared that the northerners would end by excluding them from power. On April 27, some 600 secondary school students from the Groupe Scolaire Byumba, most of them northerners, were installed in the buildings of the Butare veterinary school. Although supposedly restricted to the campus, small groups of them participated in attacks on Tutsi and pillaging in town. During the first days of May, the northern students killed two southerners—apparently Hutu—who were housed with them, one a student, one an adult. Later that month, the director of theveterinary school, himself a southerner, foresaw a war to the finish between people from the south—Butare—and those from further north, including people from Gitarama, now won over to Hutu Power. Semwaga, the MDR-Power leader, was from Gitarama and felt so threatened by the people of Butare that he requested a military guard.17

Northerners resident in Butare had been frightened by the outpouring of anger against them following the February assassination of Gatabazi. Some were so afraid in the first days of April that they took steps to leave for the north or at least to send their children back to their home region. The head of SORWAL, Alphonse Higaniro, went to Gisenyi in early April and returned to Butare only briefly to get the factory operating again in early May. The northerner, Captain Nizeyimana, and his ally Lieutenant Hategekimana were transferred from their posts at the ESO and the Ngoma camp in early May. This change may have increased the insecurity felt by northerners. On May 19, the head of SORWAL was so concerned about the safety of his personnel and property that he asked the military commander to increase the number of soldiers protecting the facility. Professor Ntezimana, the university professor who was often seen as representing the interests of northerners, left Butare on May 20 convinced the town was no longer safe. Certainly the northerners feared the RPF advance, but they also faced risks within Butare itself. On May 24, SORWAL was attacked by local armed intruders who arrived in a vehicle, exchanged fire with the SORWAL guards and then left. Two days later, the technical director, Martin Dusabe, wrote to the commander once more to urgently request additional soldiers to guard the factory.18 SORWAL employee Pierre Nsabimana, who had taken over a house from a dead or departed Tutsi in the sector of Tumba, returned the property to the commune in early June because he was afraid to live in that neighborhood.19

Within the south itself, there were local conflicts that pitted the people of some Gikongoro communes against those of Butare, or of one Butare commune against another, or of one sector or cell against another. These conflicts ordinarily centered on pillage or control of land, but often were expressed in terms of eliminating the “enemy.” People from Maraba commune and from Gikongoro, particularly from Kinyamakara commune, made sorties into Rusatira and Ruhashya “at times and dates which they decided themselves,”20 “killing innocent people and pillaging houses,”21 all under the pretext of eliminating Tutsi. For his efforts to prevent this kind of “disorder and anarchy” in his commune, the burgomaster of Ruhashya was labeled icyitso. He rejected this accusation and assured the prefect that he and the people of his commune were quite capable of “harassing the enemy and their ibyitso” on their own and that they would prefer that those troublemakers who came claiming to help would just stay home.22 The people of Cyarwa-Cyimana recognized, too, the “serious conflicts” that resulted when people of one commune or one sector pillaged in another. They decided that any “liberation” (kubohoza) operations in other sectors were prohibited, except by prior arrangement between the authorities of the sectors.23

In some communities, people understood the consequences of adding firearms to the already existing tensions. In Cyarwa-Cyimana, for example, the people of the sector pointed out the problems that could result if people were chosen to learn how to shoot on the basis of party affiliation.24

Property and Women

As a nation of farmers in a country short on land, Rwandans had been concerned about control over property for many years. Anti-Tutsi propagandists exploited the issue even before the genocide began by suggesting that the RPF intended to overthrow the 1959 social revolution and repossess the lands that Hutu had acquired after killing Tutsi or driving them out of their communities in the 1960s. The fears thus raised motivated some people to participate in the attacks on Tutsi, as did the hope of acquiring more property in the new round of violence. Authorities knew that once Tutsi were again forced from their homes and murdered, local people would immediately begin competing for their property and other goods and so they did.

On April 16, just a day after the first major massacre had begun in the prefecture, the prefectural security council dealt with the disposition of Tutsi possessions, decreeing that they should be sold at public auction. Several weeks later, the commune of Ngoma removed four truckloads of clothing from the Butare market, goods belonging to “disappeared businessmen,” presumably to be sold to the highest bidder. The profits from this sale may have formed part of the some four million Rwandan francs (about U.S.$2,300) obtained through the sale of Tutsi property and then contributed to the “civilian self-defense” fund, as mentioned above.25 These measures dealt with valuable goods but not with land, which was customarily not sold but subject to redistribution by the burgomaster if the property was deemed vacant. On April 25, the council established a commission to oversee an inventory of land, houses, and automobiles that had been “abandoned by their owners.”26

At its May 6 meeting, the prefectural security council decided to renew instructions on property from 1963-64, when most Tutsi land and belongings had been forcibly appropriated. Although not further explained in the minutes of this meeting, the policy seems in practice to have been the same as that being implemented elsewhere in the country. Local authorities would appropriate the most valuable goods for eventual sale, but would concede other goods to looters; they would redistribute land; and they would leave standing crops to the disposition of the people of the cell or sector.27 In Huye commune, and perhaps elsewhere, thepeople decided to use the crops to prepare beer to reward those who had done umuganda, that is, searches for Tutsi.28

Recognizing the possibility that property disputes could result in serious conflicts in the community, the burgomaster of Ngoma insisted that councilors produce prompt and careful inventories of available houses and land. He warned them, “The way in which you complete this work will show us how well you understand the commitment we expect from you.”29 The inventories, due by June 5 and submitted by or soon after that date, included also lists of the dozens of market stalls that had been held by Tutsi and that now were available for redistribution.

The decision to begin distributing property led to several dozen requests to the burgomaster and to the prefect for the grant of houses under the authority of each. One communal employee was directed to ensure that such requests be treated in the order received. Both in town and out on the hills, some did not wait for the formalities but simply moved into empty homes and began cultivating fields that had belonged to Tutsi.30

The inventories of vacant property for five of the eight sectors of Ngoma commune suggest that the genocide varied in severity from one to the other. Survivors have confirmed this analysis, stressing primarily the importance of local leadership in determining the intensity and thoroughness of the attacks. From official data gathered in mid-June, it appears that the greatest proportion of Tutsi suffered in Cyarwa-Sumo and Sahera, where approximately 85 percent and 79 percent of Tutsi landholders were dead or driven away. In Cyarwa-Cyimana and Nkubi, some 62 percent and 58 percent of Tutsi proprietors were said to havevanished. In Ngoma sector, by far the lowest percentage of Tutsi, some 40 percent, were reported dead or fled.31

The mid-June inventories for some sectors also included names of persons who had already appropriated or been granted fields or parts of the fields of the departed. So great was the competition for land and the number of contenders to be rewarded that holdings were ordinarily granted to at least two and more often four or five recipients. In the cell Akamuzerwa of Cyarwa-Cyimana sector, the land of Laurenti Masabo was granted to nineteen landholders. In this cell and in the neighboring cell of Agakenyeli, a number of men each received two or three new parcels. The size or number of parcels acquired almost certainly reflected the political weight of the recipients and may also have been related to the zeal shown in slaughtering Tutsi or in driving them from their homes.32

At first, local authorities including Burgomaster Kanyabashi ordered the destruction of Tutsi homes, apparently as part of the effort to expose Tutsi to death or to drive them away. After the first massive slaughter had finished, however, authorities in Ngoma and perhaps elsewhere countermanded this directive and insisted that usable structures be left intact, either to serve as housing or for some public function, such as a school or an office for the cell. By June 10, national authorities had ordered a return to the earlier policy, at least for any houses that could not be promptly repaired and inhabited. They knew that foreign investigators would be arriving to examine charges of genocide and they wanted damaged houses destroyed “completely and immediately” before they arrived (see below).33

Despite official efforts to avoid controversy by early action, questions about property figured importantly on the agenda of most popular meetings in May andJune. In late June, the burgomaster of Ngoma had to admit that “certain councilors hadn’t handled the operation well.” To clear up some misunderstandings, he asked a councilor to prepare a list of all who had received houses from the commune and to have the list countersigned by the local security committee.34

Authorities often discussed disputes over women at the same time as they considered problems of property. This was not just because issues of marriage and inheritance were often related but also because men were thought to have an interest in their wives or female relatives comparable to their interest in property. Thus Hutu men were generally recognized to have a right to protect their wives, even if they were Tutsi. Hutu men also intervened to defend their sisters, even if they were married to Tutsi husbands.

At the same May 6 meeting where the prefectural security council decided to implement the 1963-64 rules concerning property, prefectural authorities decided also to write to burgomasters about the need to stop “rapes with violence, seizing and sequestering wives of other men.”35 Referring presumably to sexual servitude involving Tutsi women with family ties in the Hutu community or Hutu widows of Tutsi husbands, the councilor of Cyarwa sector, Ngoma commune declared that the “unions of couples that are happening these days, without a proper marriage contract” was “a form of kidnapping which could cause much enmity, enmity that could lead far; it was a rape.”36 At a series of meetings with the people in Huye, the burgomaster found that the question of Tutsi wives of Hutu husbands was often raised. Participants in these meetings readily agreed to condemn anyone who attacked these women. With the increased killing of Tutsi women after mid-May, those determined to extend the genocide to all Tutsi women clashed increasingly frequently with Hutu men who wanted to protect their Tutsi wives.37

On the question of Hutu women married to Tutsi husbands, the burgomaster of Huye decreed that they should be allowed to keep their property if their husbands were gone or dead. Participants agreed with this decision also becausethey wished to protect the interests of women related to themselves and other Hutu in the community.38

Individual Protectors

Some Rwandans struggled tenaciously to protect certain individual Tutsi and in so doing clashed with those who aimed to eliminate all the Tutsi of a given area. The head of the rice factory in Mugusa commune, Augustin Nkusi, for example, used the soldiers assigned to protect the factory to assure the safety of his Tutsi relatives and others in the adjacent commune of Rusatira. The burgomaster, Rukelibuga, angrily denounced these soldiers whose presence meant that local people “responsible for security did not dare go on that hill.” He demanded that these soldiers be removed “because they prevent the inhabitants and other people responsible for security from guaranteeing it and from working [gukora].” Once the soldiers were gone, he said, he wanted the local people to “be allowed to do the work that they were unable to do” while the soldiers were present.39

In Matyazo, a pastor of the pentacostal church had four soldiers threaten local people who had raided his house four times, each time apparently finding “unknown persons” hiding there. The pastor charged the search party with stealing and with threatening his Tutsi wife. The local people, intimidated by the soldiers, in turn asked the military commander to give them protection. Otherwise, they said, “we will stop doing patrols so that the pastor can hide all the people he wants without problem.”40 In another case, those troubled by a search charged that the searchers were under the influence of marijuana when they made their raids and they got soldiers at local roadblocks to harass one of the search party each time he passed.41 When a group raided a home in a sector of Ngoma and killed Tutsi found there, the persons who had protected the Tutsi called in National Policemen whothreatened to kill the search party. The aggrieved searchers asked the prefect for his support in their efforts “to prevent the enemy from living among us and installing his ibyitso here.”42

When authorities who had led people to commit violence then undertook to protect certain Tutsi, those who had followed their lead under duress reacted with anger and resentment. In Muyira commune, assailants intending to attack a passing vehicle stopped short when they found Adalbert Muhutu, a member of the national assembly inside. One exclaimed, “It’s you who tell us to kill people and then you help them to flee.”43

Civilian and military authorities also sometimes engaged in disputes over the lives of individuals. The acting burgomaster for Ntyazo commune, for example, explained to the prefect that he was doing his best to obey orders from his superiors, but that he was blocked by Sergeant Elyse Twahirwa who was being paid to protect people known to “be in connivance with the enemy.”44 The burgomaster of Mugusa complained to the military commander about soldiers at the barrier at the Hotel Faucon who had taken Camille Rwamanywa, accused of recruiting for the RPF, from him. He had supposed they intended to deliver him to the appropriate authorities, but the soldiers took a bribe from Rwamanywa and released him.45

Protection by the Community

Throughout the genocide, authorities had tried whenever possible to send Tutsi back to their home communes to be killed. In some cases, however, home communities offered a strong defense of local Tutsi. In Maraba, people protected an elderly woman out of gratitude for her husband’s generosity in sharing his landwith others.46 When a group came from Tumba to kill a Tutsi woman in Cyarwa-Cyimana the neighbors joined to protect her. Her Hutu husband recounted, “They blocked the entrance to the enclosure and would not let the killers in.”47 In Tumba it was recognition for the acts of charity of a religious sister that prompted part of the community to defend others in her family. In the same sector, neighbors sought to protect a teacher, a father of five children, who was known to be a good and pious man. When a Burundian finally killed him, the people turned on him and killed him too, because “he had really carried it all too far.”48

Local authorities sometimes confronted situations where part of the community rallied to protect a person whom the rest of the community wanted to kill. The burgomaster of Ndora, known for his continuing reluctance to kill, dealt with several such cases in May. In one, he directed that a woman be returned to her protectors because the people of the commune were divided over what to do with her. In another, a group accused Theodetta Mukangango, a medical assistant, of being named on a list of ibyitso supposedly found by students at a vocational school where the directress was also accused of supporting the RPF. According to the notes of a community meeting, “As soon as the people heard that, they let it be known that the communal committee would be attacked if anyone dared to touch Theodetta.” As accusers and defenders of Theodetta were disputing the authenticity of the supposed proof, the subprefect arrived to warn that the people must support the government and combat the enemy. Asked about the case of Theodetta, he declared that everyone should search for her and the other women named in this case and that “the authorities would find a solution for her problem.” He castigated the people of Ndora for being divided between sympathizers of the RPF and “others who wanted peace.” He announced that “certain persons whom we took to be our brothers are hiding secrets from us.”49 When Theodetta was located several days later, the burgomaster subjected her to a charade of an interrogation about two trips that she had made the year before to Burundi, allegedly to contact the RPF, and about her supposed meetings with other women in the commune who were saidto have supported the RPF. He then sent her to the prosecutor in Butare, apparently unwilling to decide her case in the face of strong community sentiment both for and against her.50

At the May 23 meeting of the security committee in the sector of Cyarwa-Cyimana, Ngoma commune, some participants complained about the ineffectiveness of their efforts to “punish” certain people in the community:

Then another question was raised concerning the enemies of Rwanda who should be punished and those who should punish them who do not do it because of one or another member of the committee and yet all that is supposed to be planned in secrecy; also decisions made together are changed without there being another meeting to do it.51

Protection on Principle

In some communities, respected leaders opposed the entire killing campaign instead of just trying to protect persons close to themselves. Many such leaders were eliminated relatively early, either by being killed or by being forced to flee, but a few continued their opposition. A PSD member named Innocent Kabayiza, a teacher and dean at the Groupe Scolaire, seems to have been such a person in the Kabutare neighborhood of Butare town. He told a friend, “I detest this filthy business.” Those who supported the genocide first accused him of being Tutsi. When this was not enough to garner wide support for his murder, they arranged to find incriminating “documents” in his home, just as was usually done with Tutsi. Defenders of Kabayiza apparently argued that the recently proclaimed “pacification” prohibited killing him, but his accusers countered by calling the military camp to ask permission to do so. The soldiers told them they should do what they thought right. The accusers beat Kabayiza to death.52

In Mbazi, the doctor Alexander Rucyahana began trying to halt attacks on Tutsi as soon as he returned to his home commune from Kigali in early April. Later, he hid two Tutsi women in his house, one of whom suffered complications while giving birth and had to be transported to the hospital, thus leading to public knowledge that she had been hidden at Rucyahana’s house. From that time on, his house and the homes of his relatives were regularly searched for Tutsi. Several days after the massacre at nearby Rugango church, militia came to taunt Ruchyahana about being a “king” who had arrogated to himself the power to save Tutsi. They told him that a two-year-old Tutsi boy was still among the bodies at the church waiting to be saved. Rucyahana rescued the child, to much public criticism, and delivered him to the intensive care unit at the hospital.

Local leaders of the killing campaign decided to kill Rucyahana because of his opposition to the genocide. On May 10, they had their plans in place, even to the extent of having alerted potential customers to kinds of goods they would have for sale once they had finished pillaging his home. The pretext for the attack was that Rucyahana was himself a Tutsi who had changed his ethnic affiliation. Having heard of the plan, Rucyahana went to the authorities to ask that those planning the attack be arrested, but his opponents persuaded the National Police commander, Major Rusigariye, that Rucyahana was likely a Tutsi. The major reportedly threatened to kill Rucyahana himself if this were found to be true. In the meantime, he imprisoned Rucyahana, along with those accused of planning to attack him. A small circle including the prefect, the burgomaster Sibomana, the major, the vice-rector, and probably the militia leader Rekeraho, debated Rucyahana’s fate the next day. Sibomana attested to Rucyahana’s Hutu identity, although he reportedly said he was “almost a Tutsi” because of the efforts he had made to protect them. Another supported Rucyahana’s Hutu identity, reporting that a 1973 inquiry had shown that Rucyahana’s father was in fact Hutu. The major, unconvinced, wanted to have Rucyahana killed, but rather than do so in police custody, he released him along with those intending to kill him. A mobile unit of RTLM was on the spot, ready to publicize the case. Soldiers or National Police came to search for Rucyahana almost immediately, but he was able to flee Mbazi and escape from the country.53

Soldiers and National Police, acting either on orders or as paid protectors, were drawn into some of the personal, political, and regional conflicts among civilianHutu, raising the costs in lives lost and property damaged or stolen. They also committed their own abuses against Hutu as well as Tutsi, adding hostility between civilian and soldier to the other kinds of divisions in the prefecture. In addition to killing for pay, they took part in open pillage and in hidden theft, cooperating with civilian criminals and corrupting the children of the streets to assist in burglaries. They robbed each other of the booty looted from Tutsi. Soldiers, including a large number quartered at the Groupe Scolaire where they were convalescing from war injuries, raped Hutu women and girls in the immediate vicinity. Although some soldiers were arrested for their abuses, the prosecutions were apparently too few to have any effect on the behavior of others. When civilian authorities arrested civilians who had helped soldiers in crimes, the soldiers usually were able to obtain their release.54

Many people in Butare complained about military misconduct and asked why their people in government, including the interim president and prime minister, could not protect them from such abuses. Prefect Nsabimana and others demanded action from Lieutenant Colonel Muvunyi, who responded in early May by establishing more military police patrols to keep order. The abuses continued, however, and the prefect went to Gitarama to raise the matter with the interim prime minister. Kambanda replied that the problem was the same everywhere and that military behavior was the responsibility of the minister of defense, not of the prime minister.55

Sometime in early May, Captain Nizeyimana was transferred to a military training program at Mata, Gikongoro. He was still often seen in Butare because his wife, also a military officer, continued to live there, but he no longer had an official post from which to command ESO soldiers. Lieutenant Hategekimana also was removed as head of Ngoma camp in May and replaced by Major Ntambabazi. Soon after, Captain Jean de Dieu Mugabo took over from Major Rusigariye as theinterim head of the National Police.56 These transfers may have resulted in part from protests about military misconduct.

Towards the end of May, Lieutenant Colonel Muvunyi was put on leave for two weeks, reportedly on the initiative of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and Straton Nsabumukunzi. Nyiramasuhuko, who was often seen in military uniform, and Nsabumukunzi, who reportedly spent a great deal of time drinking with soldiers had good connections with the military. They are said to have labeled Muvunyi an icyitso and to have accused him of “sabotaging the development of political action in Butare.”57 Colonel François Munyengango, a native of Huye, replaced Muvunyi, supposedly because military authorities thought it wise to put a southerner in charge.58

The naming of new officers seems to have brought little change in the behavior of the soldiers. Their responsibility both for the genocide and for other abuses in Butare does not emerge clearly from data available at this time, perhaps because the tenure of each was so brief, perhaps because civilians had taken over much of the military role in hunting Tutsi.

Even civilians apparently zealous about the killing campaign and ordinarily on good terms with soldiers sometimes found the military abusive. On May 31, Dr. Munyemana tried in vain to save the life of a Hutu friend, an agronomist of the Rubona agricultural research station, who was seized by soldiers at the barrier at the Hotel Faucon. The soldiers, who suspected the agronomist was carrying a large sum of cash, took him to the arboretum next to the university and shot him.59

Some ten days later, in early June, Prefect Nsabimana declared an end to the road-blocks on the main roads leading out of Butare town, supposedly to eliminate some of the opportunities for soldiers and militia to kill and pillage. The commanding officer cooperated and the barriers came down, but Kalimanzira allegedly overruled them and, within a week, the barriers were back up again. Atabout this time, there was also a serious conflict between militia and military at barriers at the southern edge of town. This dispute may have been linked to the temporary suspension of the roadblocks. When they were resumed, the barriers of the militia and those of the military were some distance apart.60

As the FAR lost ground to the RPF, its troops became even more focused on personal profit. On May 24, some 600 soldiers engaged in pillage and rape as they fled the RPF at Ntyazo. One witness who saw the FAR flee from a later defeat recalls that they passed laden down with furniture and other loot. In at least two communes, Mugusa and Maraba, local people shot soldiers, in one case fatally, to punish them for abuses.61

As the numbers of Tutsi were reduced, the assailants deputed to kill them directed their violence increasingly against other Hutu. The young men who hung around the barriers, often drunk or under the influence of marijuana, plundered, raped, and even killed Hutu passersby. Sometimes they confiscated identity cards from victims so that they could claim that they were Tutsi. They paraded through the sectors with the firearms meant for use at the barriers, extorting what they wanted from unarmed neighbors.62 On April 27, the interim prime minister and the prefect both called on representatives of the judicial system to help combat violence and disorder, meaning these abuses against Hutu. In this effort to reestablish law and order genocide was not counted as a violation.

Judicial Action

In Butare, the National Police, occupied for some weeks with the genocide, began once more making arrests and investigating crimes in mid-May. Arepresentative of the Ministry of Justice scheduled a meeting on May 25 with the Butare prosecutor, the president of the court of first instance, and other judicial personnel to make sure that the system was beginning to function as ordered.63 Administrative authorities urged fast and firm action by the police and courts. The burgomaster of Runyinya requested the immediate appointment of a judicial police inspector to help restore order in his commune and the burgomaster of Ngoma insisted that the murders of a group of displaced people—presumably Hutu—passing through Matyazo be investigated immediately.64

Most of the crimes investigated in May and June involved some form of theft or pillage, including such minor affairs as a purse-snatching and the theft of the bicycle mud-guards mentioned above. In two cases, the accused were interrogated about having destroyed houses belonging to Hutu.65

Among the judicial records found in Butare prefecture, there was only one case of genocide suspects having been arrested by judicial authorities: the assailants from Nkubi sector mentioned above. Their arrest seems to have stemmed as much from local power struggles as from any concern for justice.

That the objective of judicial activity was to restore greater security for the Hutu was made clear by the interrogation of a suspect in a case involving grenades. In Butare, as in Kibuye and elsewhere, authorities and established members of society were worried by the number of young men who possessed grenades and used them to terrorize others. On May 13, Sgt. C. Corneille Mudacumura questioned François Minani about his alleged use of grenades to steal a bicycle. He began by asking where Minani had obtained the grenades. Minani declared that he had received three of them from soldiers who were posted in Butare and that he still had two in his possession. When asked what he had done with the third, he stated that his friend Kamanzi had thrown it at the Inyenzi at Sovu. The interrogating officer then pursued questions about whether local authorities were aware that Minani had the remaining grenades and what assurances he could give that hewould not misuse them. Sergeant Mudacumura showed no interest whatsoever in the use of the grenade at Sovu that almost certainly cost the lives of one or more Tutsi.66

Attempts at Community Control

Authorities hoped too that the “civilian self-defense” program might help establish control over the ill-disciplined assailants whom they themselves had turned loose on society in the first days of the genocide. But most of those who graduated from the program proved as ready to use violence for personal or partisan ends as those who had no such training. The commanders of “civilian self-defense” devoted their energies largely to recruitment and training and left supervision of those trained to local security committees.

Burgomasters, councilors, and security committee members sought to use regulations to reestablish control over the unruly. Burgomaster Kanyabashi railed against the misuse of guns and summoned a meeting for all who had been trained to shoot, except for a few who had to be left at the barriers to guard against the Inkotanyi. He planned to review the rules and regulations for the use of arms and for the functioning of barriers and patrols. Believing that clear identification of guards might help make them more responsible, he promised to prepare written authorization forms for those who were supposed to be working on the barriers. He had already put into use similar authorisations for those doing patrols. In Runyinya, too, the burgomaster hoped that the appropriate credentials might improve the orderliness of the patrols and barriers; he announced that the designated head of each group “would receive a written order from the burgomaster to direct the group.”67

Following the lead of the Ngoma burgomaster, the security committee for Cyarwa-Cyimana tried to lay out its own set of rules. Firearms were to be kept by the heads of the cells and signed out by those who needed them. Those who took the weapons were to sign for them in a register and to account for any bullets used. Carrying a gun into a bar was strictly forbidden. The committee decided:

As for the use of firearms, there are people who have learned how to use them but they must also respect the disciplinary rules that go with their use. That is why the security committee should present moral lectures (causeries morales) on the use of firearms. To do this, the security committee decided to have a meeting with those who have learned how to shoot to determine the rules which will govern the use of the weapons. The persons who are to use these arms as well as the cell heads who should keep them should sign these rules.68

Members of the security committee, not themselves trained to shoot, had no means to compel obedience from the young troublemakers. And, complicit as most were in the genocide, they had little grounds for appealing to them through “moral lectures.”

At a meeting at the end of June, the burgomaster and a number of councilors, cell heads, and other local leaders in Ngoma again deplored the bad behavior of those at the barriers, those who attempted to search the houses of others while drunk, and those who threatened others with grenades. Implicitly recognizing that government officials had set loose these assailants, the burgomaster threatened to “withdraw their authority” from those who misused it but made no suggestions how this could be done. He remarked that problems like the proliferation and misuse of grenades happen in times of war and that higher authorities would have to find a way to resolve them. The burgomaster directed his subordinates “to publically admonish the troublemakers; because if they are not admonished, no one will be safe from the disorder which will reign.”69

As defeat neared, some authorities realized that the whole international community would come to know the scale and horror of the genocide. RTLM tried to counter worries that officials, soldiers, and political leaders would face international opprobrium and perhaps even actual trials for the crime of genocide. But many, including Kalimanzira, remained very concerned. In his years at the Ministry of the Interior, he had had frequent contacts with foreign diplomats and aid specialists and understood the consequences of implication in genocide, both for the government and for himself. He was one of those determined to shift the Tutsi grouped at the prefecture to another less visible location. When the visit ofthe Special Rapporteur for Rwanda of the U.N. Human Rights Commission was announced for early June, with other foreign delegations soon to follow, Kalimanzira gave orders to destroy all Tutsi houses that could not be easily repaired and inhabited. Burgomaster Kanyabashi, and presumably other burgomasters, passed on the directive to the people of their communes.70

While some engaged in trying to hide the signs of genocide, others sought to convince foreigners that they bore the Tutsi no ill will. When the Swiss humanitarian organization Terre des Hommes sought to evacuate 700 orphans—many of them Tutsi—in late May, its representative, Alexis Briquet, found officials at the Ministry of Defense quite willing to cooperate in drawing up the necessary agreement and others from the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs ready to sign it.71 According to former Prefect Nsabimana, Kalimanzira allegedly opposed the evacuation, saying that the children would grow up abroad and return to attack Rwanda. If Kalimanzira expressed such an opinion to others in the interim government, his view did not prevail over that of other officials more concerned to improve relations with the international community.72

The Italian consul, Pierantonio Costa, was able to arrange for the evacuation of a Swiss citizen, his Tutsi wife, and their children and to obtain the agreement of prefectural civilian and military authorities that seventeen people, most of them children and young people, who had been living with the Sunier family would be cared for by the Rwandan Red Cross and a religious order. Someone who dealt with the case, presumably a prefectural official, wrote on a list giving the names and ages of the seventeen, “these people are an international problem and should be evacuated!” A subsequent document also remarked that this was “a litigious case” and decided that the persons in question should be allowed to leave by the Burundi border. In late June, a religious congregation, the Sisters of Sainte Marieof Namur, obtained the agreement of the prefect of Butare to the departure of a group of Hutu, Tutsi, and foreign sisters.73

Prefect Nsabimana, anxious to impress foreigners favorably, cooperated with foreign journalists as well as with those trying to evacuate people at risk.74 He later declared that he regarded foreign contacts as a resource for outmanoeuvering Kalimanzira and, he asserted, for impeding the genocide. When the foreign staff of MSF decided to leave after the April massacres at the hospital, Nsabimana berated one of their Rwandan colleagues for not having stopped their departure. The former prefect wrote:

Many, many people from Europe left the country, some through my office. I asked them why they were going. Stay with us, I said, because I felt that if there were foreigners around it would be very hard for them to keep killing. If there were no foreigners it would be easy, I thought, for them to keep killing because there would not be anybody to see it.

He continued:

When I told people not to go, it was because if people are going, leaving you, you have the feeling that you are living in a desert. When you have people around, when you are many, it is possible for people to try to think of ways of protecting themselves.75

If Nsabimana and some other officials saw the advantage in presenting a smiling face to foreigners, others sought to impress them with the strength and popular support of the government. When the Vatican representative Cardinal Roger Etchegaray arrived on June 24—after Nsabimana had been replaced by Nteziryayo—authorities in Butare ordered the local population to turn out for a demonstration meant to impress him. Reportedly organized by Dr. Munyemana, the demonstration was a parody of a military review, with crowds of men paradingbefore the pope’s representative in a “uniform” of banana leaves and woven grass, with their faces covered with chalk or charcoal.76

In Butare, as in Kigali the militia at first interfered with efforts by officials to seem conciliatory to foreign visitors, but eventually yielded to or were overruled by the authorities. Briquet was accosted by a group of militia while he was having a drink with the head of the local Boy Scouts, Réné Sibomana. One of the militia was a university professor who informed the others that Swiss from places like Lausanne or Geneva—as was Briquet—often had links with Belgians. The militia arrested Briquet and confined him to his hotel. They also beat and imprisoned Sibomana. After Briquet talked with Nsabimana, the prefect arranged for Sibomana’s release.77

More seriously, militia attempted to interfere with the evacuation of orphans agreed to by national authorities. The first day that the children were sent to the border, there was no problem. But with a second convoy, the militia blocked the entrance to the Groupe Scolaire where the children were lodged. It took great effort by Colonel Munyengango to get them to move aside. The convoy was stopped at two barriers when it was leaving Butare. At the second one, militia climbed into the trucks and insisted that the children could not leave. At that moment, Nsabimana arrived and persuaded the militia to allow the convoy to proceed.78

Terre des Hommes established a center for orphans and other unaccompanied children in Butare at the Karubanda School. Several hundred more children were then delivered to them, including ten smuggled into the heart of town by a man from Cyarwa under cover of the excitement over the cardinal’s visit.79 A small number of Tutsi adults were also lodged there, some of them helping care for the children. Briquet asked for military protection for the school, but military patrols passed only from time to time. One day, when Briquet was absent, the militia seized a woman at the school and killed her. Briquet arranged to meet with Kajuga, president of the Interahamwe. Kajuga listened politely while Briquet explained theimportance of guaranteeing security to humanitarian operations but promised nothing.80

The evacuation of a family group, a religious congregation, and of more than a thousand children demonstrates that when foreigners offered opportunities to save lives, there were some officials ready to exploit the possibility, whether for sincere humanitarian reasons or simply to enhance their standing with foreigners. The willingness of officials to evacuate the children like the concern for removing the traces of genocide before the arrival of foreign investigators suggests the extent to which authorities involved in the killing campaign remained concerned about the opinion of foreigners and open to pressure from them.

Apparently routine bureaucratic decisions sometimes spelled the difference between life and death for Tutsi. An official who granted permission to leave the commune or the prefecture offered the possibility of escape. In Butare, the prefect and his representatives held particular power because they could grant authorisation to cross the frontier with Burundi. Prefectural officials had been ordered in early April by the general staff to halt the departure of all persons from the country, but they later permitted certain individuals, as well as the groups mentioned above, to leave. A hand-written list records decisions of prefectural authorities concerning thirty-four persons who were apparently seeking authorization to flee the violence of Rwanda. Of six “children” from the Kacyiru orphanage in Kigali, five were to be allowed to leave with the next convoy for the frontier, including two who were twenty-one years old. The sixth, a twenty-year-old, was said not to be an orphan and was to stay to work in the kitchen of the orphanage in Butare. Two children from Nyaruhengeri, a fourteen-year-old accompanied by a three-year-old, were to be given priority on the next convoy. A husband, wife, and mother-in-law who wanted to follow other relatives who had left the country were told that they must stay in Butare, as were the persons associated with the Sunier household. Hutu who were not local residents and who were refused permission to leave the prefecture were sent to a displaced persons camp at Mubumbano, in Gishamvu commune, while Tutsi—designated with an asterisk as well as a T next to their names—were sent to join other Tutsi at the prefecture. One person’s affiliation was in question. Next to his name was “H? T?,” as well as the notation “Mubumbano.”81

Persons who were desperate did try to flee the prefecture and even the country without the necessary papers, but the likelihood of death was increased if they were captured and could not present even the fragile defense of having complied with regulations.

As the RPF took Kabgayi and moved towards Gitarama, the interim government called the “civilian self-defense” forces to back regular troops that were undertaking their one and only major counteroffensive of the war. The Ministry of the Interior directed the prefect of Butare to send the civilian forces to the northeast of the prefecture to try to halt the RPF advance.82 The counteroffensive, launched June 6, failed, with considerable losses to the “civilian self-defense” forces. Several days later, the interim government fled from Gitarama, heading first west towards Kibuye, then northwest to Gisenyi. On June 13, the RPF took Gitarama.

On June 16, the French announced they would send troops for a “humanitarian intervention” in Rwanda. Immediately heartened by the prospect of French military support, the government saw new hope of protecting Butare and areas to the west from the RPF. The day after the French announcement, they made administrative changes meant to give the Hutu of Butare new confidence to resist the RPF and new energy to complete the genocide. They removed Nsabimana as prefect, a decision he attributes to anger over his efforts to protect Tutsi, including by evacuating the orphans. But the national authorities were not so displeased as to want to sever all connection with Nsabimana: they offered him two other positions soon after his dismissal.83 As his replacement, they named Lieutenant Colonel Nteziryayo of the “civilian self defense” program. They also removed the burgomaster of Ndora, Célestin Rwankubito, who never met Kalimanzira’s expectations of zeal for the genocide. They replaced the burgomaster of Muganza with Elie Ndayambaje, a former burgomaster who had reportedly been more effective in organizing the genocide in the commune of Muganza than had the incumbent. The government named Matthieu Nahimana to the vacant post of burgomaster of Ntyazo, most likely to reward him for his efforts in eliminating Tutsi in that region. He was the local leader who had sent the above-mentionedmessages calling for troops to reinforce local people confronting Tutsi resistance and asking for the delivery of “the three girls of Gapfizi.” The government also removed Vincent Rukelibuga of Rusatira although he had shown zeal for killing Tutsi. Kalimanzira and Nyiramasuhuko had accused him of tolerating robbery of Hutu fleeing through his commune; this may have represented a serious effort to combat attacks by Hutu on Hutu or it may have simply been a pretext for getting rid of a political enemy.84

On the day that Nteziryayo took over as prefect, June 20, he ordered the displaced persons who had been outside the prefectural offices loaded on buses and sent to Rango, a short distance outside of town. Burgomaster Kanyabashi and one of the sub-prefects reportedly supervised the move. Although a first group went voluntarily, those who were left for a second dispatch of buses were more roughly handled and forced to go against their will. Many among them feared that they were being sent somewhere removed from the public eye in order to kill them without causing much stir. Once at Rango, the several hundred people—a mixture of Tutsi and Hutu—were kept in a guarded enclosure, where they were provided with food and water. Some witnesses report that militia watched the compound during the day and at night sneaked in to take out young Tutsi to be killed. The militia also threatened that they would wipe out the entire group, but they were frightened away by the RPF before they could do that.

Soon after Nteziryayo became prefect, and presumably at his order, local authorities directed aggressive searches for the last remaining Tutsi, both in wooded areas around town and in outlying regions. The civilians went through the bushes, beating them, while accompanying soldiers fired in the air to frighten anyone who was hidden there. Some 300 Tutsi were found in the course of a search in Nyaruhengeri and Muganza communes, particularly around Mugombwa. The dirty, tattered, half-starved survivors of earlier massacres were made to sit together outside the building at Kibirizi on the day when the new prefect, resplendent in his uniform, arrived to meet the community leaders inside. During the meeting, two soldiers came in to report to the prefect about having found more Tutsi. The burgomaster reportedly was distressed about the presence of the group outside the door, apparently because he did not want the responsibility of killing the captives. He asked the prefect what was to be done with them. Nteziryayo was annoyed at the question and asked if the people of the commune wanted him to take care of them, implying that they should be willing to do the “work” themselves. No onespoke. Faced with the apparent unwillingness to kill any more, the prefect did not insist. The captives were sent off the next day, presumably headed for Butare. We do not know what happened to them after that.85

Throughout June, officials in Butare, as elsewhere, had growing difficulty getting people to do searches and patrols and to guard the barriers. In the sector of Cyarwa-Cyimana at the start of the month, the security committee resolved “to blame people who showed no enthusiasm for doing patrols and to invite the others to wake them up, by force if necessary.”86 By the end of the month, when the Nyakizu security council found it necessary to pay to attract participants, the Ngoma burgomaster was faced with people demanding payment in food for carrying out patrols.87

Intellectuals at the university who supported the interim government reacted to the growing dissension and sense of defeat by scheduling a new session of political discussion to reaffirm solidarity of purpose. Since the visit of the prime minister in mid-May, the commissions established at that time to propose policy had made little progress. Dr. Eugène Rwamucyo, acting for Le Cercle des Républicains Universitaires de Butare and the Groupe des Défenseurs des Intérêts de la Nation, called for a round table discussion on June 23 to help authorities formulate a national plan for resistance and to understand the “uniformity and consistency necessary in political discourse about this war.”88

The prefect meanwhile went out to the hills to try to inspire renewed support for the government program. According to a June 29 broadcast of RTLM, he went to the commune of Ndora to promise that the people would deliver “a deserved punishment to the RPF supporters.”89

The Final Hunt in Butare

If a sense of the approaching end of the regime moved some to refuse or demand pay for further involvement in the genocide, it appears to have fired otherswith greater urgency and ruthlessness. A man who was caught twice, once in April and again in early July, compared the two assaults.

[The first assailants] wore banana leaves and they carried weapons, machetes and others, but very few of them seemed convinced of what they were doing. They didn’t seem all that dangerous to me. They seemed to be playing a kind of game. The people of July were very different. They made me really afraid. By July 2, they were savage, full of hatred.90

At the end of June, the militia in Butare town decided to eliminate some Tutsi whose presence had been known but tolerated for one reason or another. They killed François Semanzi, the councilor for Butare town, who had been hiding since April. Then Shalom himself directed an attack against the household of a wealthy businessman named Rangira. The family had been among the first targeted in April, when six persons had been taken and killed. After that, the family was not attacked, although they continued to live openly in central Butare. Military men who came, virtually daily, to extort money from the family, had afforded some protection. In addition, one of the women in the family was married to a militia member, which may have made other militia less ready to attack. But on June 27, with the RPF only a few miles away, the militia broke down the kitchen door with a sledgehammer just as the family was preparing for bed. One woman of the house was able to flee, as were two young boys, and a sixteen-year-old hid in the ceiling and was not found. But Shalom and his men captured Rangira, his wife, two grandsons—one aged six, the other aged ten—and a teenaged girl who cared for the children.91 They put them in the back of a pickup truck, which Shalom drove. The girl recalled:

Then they took us to Cyarwa where they kill people. They told us to get out and they lined us up next to a mass grave. In it were other bodies, covered with sorghum leaves. They pulled the leaves aside when they were going to add other bodies. One of the Interahamwe asked the old man for his jacket. He was busy taking it from him and the others went to pick up the leaves.92 I saw my chance and I took off. I just ran, not knowing where to go. I saw a ditch andjumped down inside it. The Interahamwe came looking for me with flashlights, but they didn’t find me. They went back to the grave. I heard shots and then the truck drove away.93

The next morning, the girl made her way to the home of a family related to her godmother. On the way, she pretended to be gathering firewood to allay any suspicions from passersby. At that house, she was told that the councilor had forbidden people to give shelter to Tutsi on pain of death, but she was allowed to spend one night anyway. The next morning, the family directed her to the camp at Rango, where the group from the prefecture had recently been installed. As she approached the enclosure, she was set upon by Interahamwe who were lurking nearby. They put her in a sack and beat her, saying that she was a messenger of the Inkotanyi. They took her down to the road where Burgomaster Kanyabashi happened to be driving by. He stopped and they explained that they had caught this girl trying to sneak into the Rango camp and that she was probably a spy for the Inkotanyi. Kanyabashi asked the girl, who had clearly been badly beaten, who she was and what had happened. She explained how she had been taken, along with others of Rangira’s family. Kanyabashi asked if Rangira, whom he had known well, was dead. She replied that he had been killed a couple of days before. The girl later reported:

Kanyabashi then told them to take me back to Rango. He said, “I’ll think about it and I’ll come back this afternoon at 2 p.m.” He never came back. After two or three days, I knew that many people had fled, including Kanyabashi, because of the arrival of the Inkotanyi.94

As the RPF neared Butare town, both the local authorities and the population fled south and west out of the prefecture. The roads were so clogged with the southward-moving flow that it was impossible to go north. By June 28, the sub-prefect of Nyabisindu and the burgomaster of Nyabisindu were in Gikongoro and the burgomasters of Muyira and Ntyazo had taken refuge in Butare town. That day, Kalimanzira reported that the RPF had moved into the commune of Mugusa and had taken the rice factory at Gikonko, which had been defended by FAR troops. In a desperate bid for help, Kalimanzira wired the ministries of interior and defenseto get the French who had arrived in Cyangugu to come “protect these innocent people threatened by the Inkotanyi.”95

By Wednesday, June 29, the RPF were close enough for the sounds of battle to be easily heard in town. Two days later, on July 1, a small French reconnaissance team entered Butare and the next day evacuated a number of persons by plane and helicopter. Knowing that substantial numbers of French troops were at Gikongoro, some thirty kilometers away, Hutu Power politicians and the FAR clung to the hope that they would come to their rescue. Prefect Nteziryayo told a journalist, “The French must come here to convince the RPF not to advance, pushing civilians in front of them.”96 In preparation for this much-desired arrival, flyers hailing Mitterrand and French soldiers lay ready for distribution in the prefecture. They repeated the quotation, “It is in hard times that you know your true friends,” that Kangura had published along with Mitterrand’s photo and the Ten Commandments of the Bahutu in 1990. (See chapter three.)

On Friday and Saturday, the town emptied. One journalist described the scene on Saturday:

The hills echoed with explosions. Trenches were manned by wide-eyed soldiers with bows and arrows, spears, and assault rifles. Tens of thousands of people—some on foot, balancing their weapons on their heads, some herding frightened livestock, others on bicycles so overloaded with personal possessions that they could barely ride them—filled the verges of the roads leading out of the city.97

Some left under duress. One university professor who saw no need to flee was warned by militia that he would be killed if he stayed. He boarded the last vehicle in a convoy of university staff heading west. The group was stopped at a barrier beyond Gikongoro while militia and soldiers examined their documents. The barrier guards had a list of persons to seize if they came through, including the professor, who was known to have protected a number of Tutsi children in his house. He was warned by someone who heard guards asking about him near thebarrier. He retreated with the children and flagged down a passing French vehicle. The French could not understand why the professor, a Hutu, refused to go to the camp that housed tens of thousands of other Hutu, many militia among them, but they finally agreed to escort him and the children to Nyarushishi, where some ten thousand Tutsi were under their protection.98

A Tutsi woman, protected for ten weeks by her Hutu husband, fled with him and their children from their neighborhood of Cyarwa. At a barrier, the militia harassed her and tried to force her husband to take a gun to help defend the town. The family managed to get free and fled once more, this time down back roads towards Rango. As evening fell, the family clustered together with several other Tutsi wives and Hutu husbands. Nearby was a woman and Tutsi child, apparently eager for the protection of their company. The men stood guard all night. When the morning light broke, the woman had gone, leaving the child behind. Soldiers came by soon after and told them to move on to the west because the RPF would soon arrive. Fearing the militia still at the barricades and patrolling the area, they stayed on the outskirts of Butare, hiding and moving from one hilltop to another for three or four days, until they were surrounded by an RPF patrol that told them how to get behind their lines. The witness relates:

We applauded the RPF, but it was just to fool them. In reality, we did not trust them, even though many in our group were Tutsi. We had heard terrible things about what happened in the zones they controlled. After they passed, most of the group decided to go on towards Gikongoro, but I went back to Butare instead.99

On July 3, about one hundred French troops executed a rapid mission to Butare to “evacuate a number of people who needed help and who were in danger from both the militia and the RPF,” as Col. Didier Thibaut, commander of the mission, put it.100 They rescued some one hundred clergy and religious sisters, including Abbé Mungwarareba who ended his long weeks of hiding in various locations (see chapter thirteen) on July 3. Having heard that the French were at the bishopric, the sisters who had been sheltering him called them to come and get him. He was smuggled out of town with his head under a blanket. With the arrival of the French,Abbé Jerome Masinzo, a priest at Ngoma church, who had spent his life since April 30 in the ceiling next to the kitchen chimney and later in a cupboard in the church, was able to emerge also and to join the convoy out of town.

Outside Butare town other sisters and clergy tried to flee on their own. A priest from Kansi church set out to escort a Tutsi nun and three handicapped children across the Burundi border. At a barrier, militia and soldiers stopped their vehicle and insisted that everyone get out. They stripped the nun and put her and the children down in a ditch to kill them and made the others kneel and watch at the roadside. As they began sharpening a stick to use as a spear, the priest rushed forward to give the nun and children absolution. The assailants tried to stop him. In the struggle, they discovered his wallet with several hundred dollars in it. They took the money and told the priest to get back in his vehicle and to take the Tutsi with him. Others were less fortunate. Eight sisters from Sovu and two priests were caught on the road trying to head west a day or two later. They were killed.101

The French also evacuated some 600 orphans and unaccompanied children who had been gathered at the Karubanda school. Two of the group saved a teenager, recently graduated from secondary school, who had survived weeks of terror, loneliness, and privation. In late April, the girl, whom we will call Marthe, and her family had watched the spreading smoke and fire on hills facing their comfortable home in Buye and had heard the whistles of the assailants and the cries of their victims. On April 21, as the killing was beginning in town, Marthe and most of the family fled to a Muslim friend who owned an automobile repair business. Two of her sisters stayed at home, with a friend and the watchman for the property. On the morning of April 22, a woman with her arms badly cut by machetes and her baby dead on her back arrived to tell them to flee immediately. One of the girls wanted to pack a bag before leaving. The other, whom we will call Bernadette, tried to convince her that people in flight do not take baggage. While her sister was gathering some clothes, Bernadette heard the sound of a vehicle and peeked out from behind the curtain. She saw militia jumping the fence of the enclosure and soldiers in the truck outside. Shouting for her sister, Bernadette fled through the back fence and hid in a vacant house. There she heard the assailants beating the watchman, demanding to know where the family had gone. He refused to say. They found the girl and her friend in the house and tried to get information from them. The girl told them they had come too late for the others and that they would have to be satisfied with just her. The assailants pillaged the house and took the three away to be killed.

Bernadette rejoined the rest of her family and they stayed together for four days, hiding in a field, sheltered by banana plants. Their hiding place could be reached only through a hole in the back wall of the auto repair shop, itself hidden by a piece of scrap metal. The field was bordered on three sides by buildings and on the fourth by a fence. It was near enough the prison for the family to hear the prisoners, who had been burying the dead, exchanging shouts about who among the notable people of town had been most recently killed. On Tuesday, April 26, they heard a vehicle pass with a loudspeaker making the announcement, “The market is open. No one will kill you. Peace has been established.”

Rather than emerge from hiding, the family decided to divide and to seek shelter at several places. Their protector escorted Marthe, dressed as a Muslim woman, to an empty house where Europeans had lived and arranged with the watchman there to look after her. But when the local patrol group came to search the house, they beat the watchman and he revealed both that Marthe was hiding there and who had brought her. The patrol broke down the door, but by that time, Marthe had hidden behind a wardrobe and they did not find her. They went to question her protector and he denied having hidden anyone in that house. They returned, with soldiers this time, and searched again without success. Fearing that she would be found on the next attempt, Marthe fled that night to the home of her protector. He took her in once more and sent her to the field behind his house. There she passed her days in a hole. The household workers came every evening at about 7:30 p.m. and gave her some food. Then she would stretch and run around in the field. She explained:

It was the only moment that I was really free. I didn’t want to go to sleep because I wanted to enjoy those moments and sometimes I didn’t go back in the hole until 5 a.m., without having slept at all. The workers were out and around town during the day and they told me that they heard everything about the girl who was hidden but whom no one had yet been able to find.102

The protector and his family had fled in early June and the household workers left on June 29 when the sounds of battle were heard in town. After three days without food, Marthe left the field. Having heard from the workers that the French might be coming, she went to the headquarters of a Franco-Rwandan exchange project, hoping she might find them there. But there was no one. She returned to the field. Believing her family to be dead and believing that she herself was going to die anyway, she decided that she might as well go and get herself killed. At 6a.m. on Sunday July 3, she went to the barrier next to the gas station, at the start of the road to Gikongoro. She recalled:

The first sergeant who was in charge of the barrier asked me, “Where are you coming from and where are you going?” I answered that I knew where I came from but that I didn’t know where I was going. He said, “I’ll kill her and that will show the Inkotanyi what we will do to them.” He pushed me into a hole after he had hit me and told the other soldiers at the barrier that no one should touch me. He said, “I’ll take care of her myself.”103

She stayed in the large hole near the barrier until about 11a.m., when another soldier came by and greeted her. She was too exhausted to do more than make a gesture of acknowledgement. This angered the soldier, who said, “You see how they are! I’m going to kill her.” But as he took aim, one of the militia, who knew Marthe, intervened. A man named Clement, he was the son of Isaac Munyagesheke, an important distributor of beer and long-time MRND leader, who was also important in the “civilian self-defense” program. Clement told the soldier, “Why are you killing this girl instead of going to find the Inkotanyi and fighting them? You shouldn’t kill this girl. There’s no point in that.” He pushed the soldier away and gave him 5,000 Rwandan francs (about U.S.$25) to leave.104

From the hole, Marthe could see and hear the many children playing in the yard at the Karubanda school, but thought that she would never be able to get there. Mortars were falling, including one that exploded in the nearby prison yard. Then French soldiers arrived. Marthe remembered:

A jeep stopped not far from the hole where I was. I heard the French telling the Interahamwe, “In twenty minutes, you be out of town.” I cried out because I could not stand up to get out of the hole. Then one of the French got me out.105

Marthe was put in one of the eight buses organized by the French to evacuate the children from Karubanda. As they drove south out of town, they passed the barrierin front of Nyiramasuhuko’s house. The minister was there, at the barrier, in military uniform, with her son Shalom. At a second barrier further south, the French escort had to threaten the militia with their guns to be allowed to pass. The convoy was also protected overhead by a helicopter that followed it down to the border with Burundi. At the border, while Marthe was waiting to register her identity, she was looking at the children, some of them very small, a few months old, and some of them with their arms or legs badly cut or even missing altogether. Suddenly she saw her sister Bernadette step out of one of the vehicles. “We cried and we almost made a scene. It was unbelievable finding each other that way.”106

As Colonel Thibaut had declared, the French had come also to evacuate those “who were in danger from...the RPF,” including the former prefect Nsabimana. As they would do later with military and civilian authorities who fled into Zaire, they provided him safe passage to Burundi. The first night, Nsabimana stayed with the other evacuees in Bujumbura and showed great interest in hearing how they had survived. He was sought by Burundian soldiers but eluded them early the next morning when a car came from the Rwandan embassy in Bujumbura to collect him.107

As the French escorted their charges out of town to the south and west, the RPF arrived from the north. A few Tutsi emerged from hiding to applaud their arrival. One man had survived an unsuccessful effort to flee across the border to Burundi, had hidden for weeks in the bush, had been imprisoned and escaped when he was being transported to be killed, had again hidden in the woods, and had sneaked into Butare town at the end of June to lie hidden along the top of a wall, sheltered by a low-hanging avocado tree. He saw the RPF move in and came down from his perch to welcome them. Another emerged from a tiny, make-shift shelter of bricks where he had spent weeks of solitude and misery. Two parents and their two children who had passed their first weeks in an unused well and the last month and a half in a ceiling also came out to applaud their rescuers.

In the first days of the genocide in Butare, a Hutu of some standing but no official position tried to intervene when a militia gang was about to attack some Tutsi. They pushed him aside, asking why they should listen to him since he wasneither prefect, nor burgomaster, nor councilor. By late June, even those who held such posts could no longer count on being obeyed or even respected. The prefect was insulted at a barrier by a university professor because he had protected the widow of an opponent of the genocide. The burgomaster of Ngoma received peremptory demands from other university professors who insisted he facilitate their requests for arms and military collaboration in doing their patrols. A councilor in Nyaruhengeri felt obliged to obey the rude order of a teenager armed with a grenade, explaining to a foreign observer that it was safer to obey “the authorities.” Another councilor from Cyarwa-Cyimana remarked:

Indeed there are people who say that authority no longer exists, for example, those who dared to tell the councilor, face to face, that they would make mincemeat of him with their machetes, when he is only preventing them from destroying his crops that are still growing—not even ripened yet—in the fields.108

In late May and June, other people contested the authority of their councilors with less violence but equal vehemence, demanding that they resign.

The erosion of authority was not the cause but rather the result of the genocide: by implementing the killing campaign, the administrators sacrificed their legitimacy and undermined their own authority. The “anarchy” and “chaos” which they deplored may have been real by the end of June but it did not exist in April and cannot be used to excuse the genocidal violence.

By the time of the removal of Prefect Habyalimana, he and his subordinates still presented a substantial obstacle to slaughter in many communes, although they had been overcome by extremists in the western and southwestern parts of the prefecture. After his removal and the recruitment of administrators as passive or active collaborators, the committed leaders of the campaign were able to annihilate the majority of the Tutsi in the prefecture in just ten days. The dramatic transformation of the situation in Butare demonstrates how important the administration was in first hindering and then in facilitating the genocide.

From written records and from the accounts of witnesses, it is clear that some administrators zealously executed their part in the genocide. But most seem to have collaborated reluctantly, from fear of losing their posts or their lives. While the first set took public leadership of the killing campaign, the second group stepped silently aside for activists from outside the administrative hierarchy: politicalleaders, intellectuals, or just local strong men suddenly become important through their ruthlessness and possession of firearms.

Regardless of personal conviction, the administrators undertook the bureaucratic implementation of the killing campaign. This did not entail taking up grenades or machetes and leading attacks, although a few lower level officials did so. Instead they participated by carrying on their usual functions of passing information down the chain of command, exhorting the population to action and organizing them for that purpose, and implementing the regulations connected with the campaign. They saw that recruits were selected and trained for “civilian self defense.” They assigned communal police to “work” at massacre sites and on patrols. They recorded the distribution of firearms to subordinates and accounted for the numbers of bullets used. They logged in the miles driven by communal vehicles and the sums paid for the transport of the goods confiscated from Tutsi market vendors. They supervised the registration of nonresidents staying in the commune. They decided on the issuance of identity papers for persons who claimed to have lost theirs and they authorized—or did not authorize—permits to leave the commune or prefecture. By the regular and supposedly respectable exercise of their public functions, they condemned Tutsi to death for the mere fact of being Tutsi. Silent before the daily horror, they sought to hide behind the bureaucratic routine that divided the genocide into a series of discrete tasks, each ordinary in itself. But in the end, the semblance of administration as usual failed to disguise the ultimate objective of extermination.

In Butare, as elsewhere in Rwanda, people at all levels of responsibility saved some Tutsi even while carrying out the genocide. In some cases, the favored were relatives, friends, or at least acquaintances: like the women saved by Interim President Sindikubwabo, the priest ransomed by the burgomaster of Ngoma, the few who obtained false identity papers from the burgomasters of Huye and Shyanda, and the persons who hid under the beds of various councilors and communal employees.109 In some rare cases, officials even assisted sizable numbers of persons to whom they were not personally linked, as the prefect did in helping to evacuate the orphans.

But some 105,000 Tutsi alive in Butare prefecture in early April 1994 had been slain by early July, in addition to tens of thousands of others who had fledthere from other prefectures.110 Military, civilian and political authorities must first take responsibility for slaughtering these vast numbers of Tutsi before they claim credit for saving a few fortunate individuals from the genocide they themselves perpetrated.