Dying to Live: A Rwandan Family's Five-Year Flight Across the Congo

Programme

Prologue

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

It was in the aftermath of this attack that Rwanda would descend into a murderous rampage culminating decades of tensions between Hutus and Tutsis.

It was in the aftermath of this attack that my ordeal would begin, and that of every single Rwandan, bar none.

CHAPTER 1

Rwanda Put to Fire

and the Sword

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In September, naively considering myself unaffected by the events of the previous months, I decided to return to Kigali, hoping I might resume teaching. Well aware that there were risks, I left my family behind.

I left Cyangugu early in the morning in a World Food Programme (WFP) truck and arrived in Kigali late in the evening, after crossing several checkpoints under RPF control. People were detained at each of them. In all, five of the thirty persons with me in the truck were held at one checkpoint or another. As far as I know, none survived!

Since squatters were occupying my house in Kigali, I had to stay with a friend who had returned before me. He warned me that I should be careful, since many Hutus had been kidnapped.

I had two main objectives in returning to the capital. The first was to see if I could find out what had happened to my brother-in-law (Françoise’s brother), who had lived in Kigali before April 1994 and who had disappeared. His wife and three children, who had been evacuated to Cyangugu, had not heard from him and did not know if he was still alive. In Kigali, I learned that he had been killed in the most atrocious way by the RPF, forced to dig his own grave before being buried alive!

I also wanted to see if it was possible to go back to teaching at the Lycée or to find another job, as I was aware there were a number of NGOs hiring people.

I only stayed for