Many of the Hutu youths who obeyed the siren call of the militias were disenfranchised, spending their days and nights standing around street corners and in open-air drinking spots, doing nothing but discussing the inequalities in their society, their need for a fair chance to study, to find decent work, to have a good time of course and to get married and have children. Such cries of social injustice were normal—completely to be expected in a poverty-stricken nation state that was dependent on foreign aid for food due to the overpopulation. But these were also ideal recruits whom adult manipulators could whip into a state of frenzy every night and then leave alone the next day to muse on the no-win situation they found themselves in. These youths had been cut free from traditional family structures because they could not be housed or fed from the family plot, and so they gravitated to market squares and urban areas where they became the ripest of candidates for recruitment into any ruthless organization that wanted to lure them to the dark side—but also for any NGO or national government body that could gainfully employ and train them. They stood on the cutting edge between a life of destruction and crime and a life of reasonable fulfillment and honest but difficult work by which they could support families of their own.
What choice did many young Hutus make? No NGO or legitimate organization had a reach, an allure, to equal the growing campaign of disinformation provided on the street corners by provocateurs, over the airwaves by an extremist radio station and at large rallies held before and after soccer games in stadiums on Sundays. The Hutu extremists were interested in these youths, wanted to train them, were happy to give them beer, to arm them, even to provide them with a rough and ready uniform so they could truly identify with something. And so Hutu youths swarmed to the militias. Their new cause, their aim in life, became to seek out and destroy this other troublesome ethnic group, the Tutsis, people who were deemed by the extremists to not be people at all, even though Hutus and Tutsis were so intertwined in the villages and cities of Rwanda, in the church congregations and marketplaces, that no one could really tell them apart. But the extremists bent on preventing the peace process had embarked on a campaign to dehumanize the Tutsis, to turn them into vermin, into cockroaches that needed to be exterminated for the good of all. The campaign spread twisted facts of history against the Tutsis, claiming that they had subjugated past generations of Hutus, and were on the verge of stealing their futures through a peace agreement that, the extremists said, simply weakened the majority Hutus, and whose enactment would signal the annihilation of the Hutus by the RPF.
At a time when my mission was trying to aid in the implementation of the Arusha Peace Agreement, the major and most vocal anti-Tutsi party in the Rwandan political landscape was inciting riots, training a youth wing called the Interahamwe and turning it into a militia. I knew this was happening, and alerted the chain of command at the UN and the international community, and was ordered not to conduct any offensive action against them, their arms distribution or their training areas. I was only given authority to submit formal observations and information to President Habyarimana, the minister of defence, the RGF chief of staff, and political party officials, and also to pass such information to selected international representatives in residence in Rwanda.
So the training and arms distribution continued and when the president’s plane was shot down at 2032 hours on April 6, 1994, they were ready. These same previously disenfranchised youths, intoxicated by overwhelming power over their fellow civilians, were let loose with orders to exterminate the Tutsi insects. They were sustained by the hysteria spewing from the hate radio station (which became known as “genocide radio”), by quantities of alcohol and drugs, by the material gain of what they could plunder from their victims. But most of all they were sustained by the constant support and encouragement of their elders to find ever more effective ways to rape, mutilate and slaughter as many Tutsis as possible every day, of all ages, including the unborn.
Soon checkpoints were set up along every road, trail and track throughout the government-controlled areas, manned by a rabble of street kids—children and youth armed with machetes and other agricultural instruments, overseen by older youths and a few adults. Some wore parts of police or military uniforms and all were deadly serious about the business they were engaged in: culling Tutsis from the long lines of people hoping to escape the city and gain the relative safety of the hills, and not only killing them but ensuring that they died with the maximum possible suffering and humiliation.
Mere days before, Kigali was a rather comfortable, westernized city, home to a population of 350,000 souls; now it was chaos at every corner. Endless so-called self-defence barriers against the feared rebel infiltration were established by the militia and political youth every 100 to 150 metres along the roads and pathways through the thousand hills and valleys. Swarms of fanatical and drug-influenced young people and kids, mostly boys, decided who would be pulled out of the line and hacked to death or drowned in nearby latrines and sewers. Those who survived one roadblock would have to go through the same traumatic ritual at the next one until they reached the forests and borders. The city emptied to less than thirty thousand souls, but since most of the country’s roads converged on Kigali from all directions, hundreds of thousands of displaced persons from other parts of the country ran the gauntlet of its main arteries.
And as long processions of Rwandans passed through the culling checkpoints of the city, constant fighting between the two opposing forces flared from one hill to another, shells landing in the valleys and the city slums. The indiscriminate use of mortars and artillery kept everyone on edge. There seemed to be no pattern to the targets they were after. The RPF rebels did not yet want to engage in set-piece open combat due to their inferior number of troops, so they employed the tactic of harassing fire throughout the city that, at times, caused injuries and casualties among my forces and among the thirty thousand Hutu moderates and Tutsi refugees we were harbouring in the city’s main stadium, as well as at the two major hospitals where thousands of wounded waited for whatever treatment the few doctors could provide.
During this battle for the capital, the presence of young men—teenagers and boys—was ubiquitous; they were at every checkpoint I saw in the city, and throughout most of the countryside during all of the war. And for the hundred days until the RPF was able to assert control over the capital, and then for years after in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, the work of these youths and boys carried on—killing and maiming anyone remotely suspected of being a Tutsi, and even those among their own people who were less than enthusiastic about the cause of Hutu Power.
High school kids, junior high too, boys and some girls. They wore the blood that spattered all over them with pride. They hacked, mutilated, all the while smiling at the faces of fear and horror they created. Adults looked on and encouraged them, even proposing new methods of using the grossest of weapons, the machete, on pregnant women and little children to see the effects of different strokes and twists.
They were the same ages as my kids back home. They were children in body but they had lost their child’s soul to an adult world that had distorted their minds to the point of destroying their consciences, their compassion, their capacity for empathy. Their eyes did not see the human beings they were destroying with such zeal and gusto. They saw insects, evil and parasitical ones, that had to be crushed for their own protection.
And as these thousands upon thousands of young boys and teens were being turned by adults into monstrous killing and mutilating machines, a civil war raged: the standard-bearers of the rebel army were also youths.
There was a country to win over and a government to establish and power to gain and money to be had. There had to be a winner on the battlefield, even though the real human tragedy was being meted out behind the government lines, mostly by the youth of the Interahamwe.
Beyond the checkpoints, the government forces directly employed a number of these young militiamen to reconnoitre the
places they knew best, the villages and districts where they’d grown up. They made excellent messengers, as they could move through the roadblocks much faster than RGF soldiers, who were prey to internal divisions between the moderate Hutu officers, even some surviving Tutsis, and the hardline proponents of Hutu Power. In the capital, for example, the Interahamwe also provided rear-area security and ran wild in parts of the city that the army controlled, and as such continued the extermination of innocent survivors, both moderate Hutus and Tutsis, at every opportunity, all in the name of security.
Facing them across the ill-defined no man’s land were the RPF forces, constantly probing at night, harassing with snipers and indirect fire during the day, thrusting often at first light into specific sectors of town to continue to close the noose around those government forces still inside.
In numerous trips through the lines to negotiate ceasefires, the release and transfer of people from our swelling numbers in protected sites, and to permit the very slow arrival of some humanitarian supplies, I encountered among the RPF the same type of young boy soldiers as I’d met before the war. They were fighting and dying in the thick of the battle for the city. They were also in the rear areas to the east that had already been conquered by the rebel army. They were in the security forces mopping up isolated pockets of government resistance. And they were controlling the flow of what little population was left behind in the territory they had won.
I saw them being tended to in their field medical stations, their young bodies ripped apart by fragments of artillery shells. They would die far from home, from family, from the warmth of a last hug or kiss from their parents. Alone and often conscious that they were about to die, some would cry, not in pain but in sorrow, in loneliness, in despair. Their last conscious thoughts most likely were of loss and abandonment as their wounds silently stole the life force from their young bodies that had barely started to live. They fought like soldiers, like warriors for a cause they and their families believed in, but in their torn and bloodied soldiers’ uniforms, they died like children.
Throughout the hundred days of war and slaughter that was the Rwandan genocide, and for the month that followed the end of hostilities, during which I remained in command of the UN mission (marginally reinforced by eleven Canadian officers deployed with only a few days’ notice from other missions in Africa or from their home bases in Canada), child soldiers continued to play a significant role. Having won the war, the RPF rebels were consolidating their grip on the whole of the country except for the Humanitarian Protection Zone, which had been established by a Franco-African coalition intervention force called Opération Turquoise and into which approximately two million frightened Hutus had fled.
During the campaign, the rebel forces had put a call out for reinforcements and many youths from the Tutsi expatriate community around the world, as well as some from neighbouring countries such as Uganda, joined late in the fight. These youths were green in the ways of a disciplined military force. They did not demonstrate the same restraint and diligence that the young veterans generally maintained. These new members of the rebel force were also kids, young teenagers who had hastily volunteered for the cause and were outfitted in a slightly different uniform and seemingly equipped with a chip on their shoulder that was not often held in check. They were cocky, gun-happy and arrogant, throwing their weight around and causing enormous amounts of friction and near-catastrophic encounters with the newly arrived UN forces—who, in turn, were both mandated and quite prepared to use force against these punks in uniform. The sooner the RPF got rid of these new recruits and brought back the iron discipline of the original young veterans still in service, the sooner the transition to nation building could commence. But throughout this tense post-conflict period, it was young boys who held the local power. Yes, they were often supervised by adults, but more often they were overseen by more senior boys.
And what of the young militiamen, the Interahamwe, during this same post-conflict period? Had they resigned themselves to the defeat their military masters were being subjected to, the total humiliation of their army by the rebels? Did some outside body or organization come to dissuade and disarm them, to try to rehabilitate them back to a semblance of societal normality?
Not really. The young militia slipped away either through the Humanitarian Protection Zone into Bukavu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), or with the refugees on the move from Rwanda into the closest possible facsimile of Dante’s Inferno—the town of Goma, also in the DRC, at the foot of an active and ash-spewing volcano. There the human masses fell into the hell of refugee camps set up on black and unforgiving volcanic rock, where thousands would die of dysentery and other hygiene-related diseases. As they crossed the zone, the defeated Hutu soldiers and the Interahamwe on the run wiped out the last pockets of Tutsi civilians on the western border, right under the noses of the French humanitarian protection forces, hundreds of emergency NGO workers and the cameras of media from around the world. This second phase of the massive destruction of human lives gained enormous notoriety but did absolutely nothing to quell the conflict—now spread to the region—and the confinement of millions of black Africans in self-destructive refugee encampments.
At Bisesero, an enclave of a few very small villages on the top of a couple of nondescript hills in Kibuye province, a mass grave now honours a unique group of Tutsis who had defended their families and lands from extremist assaults for years before the genocide, and who successfully resisted the génocidaires for close to a hundred days. With bows and arrows and stones, hiding under the rotting bodies of those who had already fallen, in order to surprise and ambush the militiamen, eating leaves and grass and drinking the morning dew to survive, they fought off wave after wave of Interahamwe and RGF troops until the French soldiers finally arrived. Nearly twelve thousand were still alive when they were persuaded by a French patrol that the genocide was over and they could safely come out of hiding. The French soldiers subsequently withdrew to get more personnel and vehicles to evacuate them as well as bring humanitarian relief supplies, without leaving any security behind. The Interahamwe, monitoring all this, then moved in for the coup de grâce, slaughtering these surviving heroes in their thousands. Scant few scrambled back up the hills and survived to tell this tale of mass slaughter.
Even though these Hutu youth militia members realized that their cause was lost, that the war was essentially over, and that some day they would have to enter into a period of reconciliation and reconstruction, they did not hesitate to use their machetes on the near-skeletal survivors.
By the time the French returned to Bisesero the next day, the militia members were making their way across the lake into the DRC. There, they would continue to slaughter their own brethren in the refugee camps, and at times even returned to kill more in Rwanda. To this day a number of these original militia members still run amok in the northern Kivou area, searching out and killing Tutsis and “collaborators.” They are men now, with new youth recruits, and they have indoctrinated those youths with their disdain for life and humanity, for people different from them. They continue to prey upon the weak and will do so until the day they themselves are rendered hors de combat.
How many times did I bully, threaten, negotiate or simply ram my way under fire through roadblocks put up by these young militias and their supporters and adult leaders? But I could never reconcile my sense of their youth and potential with the hatred, the guile, the blatant evil in the eyes of these teenagers: boys, and yes, even girls. Their faces, so many of them, still appear in a sort of composite form in front of me, even as I write.
We owe it to these youths, as much as to the children we consider more “innocent,” to eradicate the idea that children can be used this way.
3.
Kidom
1
A dragonfly is born in the mud, a clumsy bug. With hundreds of its kind, it struggles toward the bushes, the trees and walls that will take it to the sky. It crawls and then it
rests, and the warmth of the sun dries its shell to a delicate golden brown.
We sat and watched, my sister and I, basking like baby dragonflies in the hot midday sun.
When the moment finally came, a special silence filled our ears and made them ache. All the little necks split open and the dragonflies began to unfold, shimmering red or shocking blue, putting the rose and the sky to shame. Stretching, spreading, growing impossibly big from their tiny, crispy shells.
A slight touch, even a too-strong breeze, could stunt the transformation. Disturb one before it is fully grown and it will fall and be swarmed by predators. This happened once, and we couldn’t watch.
We named the survivors, and cheered them when they finally took flight. To celebrate, Kesi dragged a stick around us in the earth, tracing a circle.
“We are the rulers of the dragonflies! And this,” she said, “is our world. This is Kidom.”
We passed through the circle together, Queen Kesi and I. When she approached her ride—a shimmering dragonfly with golden antennae—I helped her mount, and she leaned forward to whisper directions to her winged steed for our victory ride. But I did not need a mount, only to unfurl my purple wings, so large I could wrap myself in them like robes. And all the insects of the forest and the bush began to gather about us to honour Queen Kesi and me for the safe birth of the dragonflies.
We have had many such adventures. Last week, the honeybees needed us to lead them from hive to flower, and afterwards, when the nectar was gathered, we celebrated with a dance. Not long ago we fought and won a battle against a ruthless aardvark, and saved a hill and thousands of ants.
On that occasion, the ants made us a feast. We slipped down the tiny entrance hole into their nest and through a web of tunnels. Past one, two, three cooking fires, and seven rooms filled with dozens of mothers and their young, wearing hats of new spring leaves.