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7

Road to a Genocide BILL BERKELEY

Ethnic bigotry io Rwanda was born of history, amplified by an elab-orate system of myths built up around that history, and broadly accepted by Huru and Tutsi alike. It has often been remarked that Hurus and Tutsis-i-the latter make up just under 15 percent of Rwanda's pop- ulation-meet none of the conditions normally associated with tribes. For cenruries they have spoken the same language, lived on the same hillsides, and iotermarried to such an extent that the physical character- istics stereo typically attributed to each-tall, thio, and lighter skinned for the Tutsi; short, stocky, and darker skioned for the Huru-are often blurred. Specialists on the region commonly protest that the distinc- tions between the two groups are artificial. But sixty years of colonial rule followed by thirty-five years of Hum dornioation (1959-1994) pro- duced real distinctions: deep-seated stereotypes and even deeper reser- voirs of envy, fear, and mistrust that were ripe for exploitation. The fact that leaders manipulated ethnic divisions for their own cynical ends does not change the fact that the divisions were there to be manipu- lated, in the hearts and miods of those below. Yes,Rwanda was a land of followers, but they were followers prepared to hate and fear.

Rwanda was a textbook example of the destructive legacies of "indi- rect rule." Before colonialism, it was a highly organized feudal kiog- dom. Tutsi chiefs were overlords, but ethnic distinctions were fluid and social mobility commonplace. First the Germans and then the Belgians iorroduced a system of rule from a distance, whereby the Tutsi chiefs

103

104 THE NEW KILLING FIELDS

controlled the Hutu majority and extracted its labor on behalf of the colonial power. Across the continent, indirect rule in the colonial era was a means by which minority groups and traditional chiefs were invested with power and privilege, educated, trained, and subcontracted to do the dirty work on behalf of the white man. Resentments grew accordingly, nowhere more so than in Rwanda and neighboring Burundi.

In Rwanda, the malignant consequences of indirect rule were mag- nified by an explicit racial ideology known as the "Hamitic Hypothesis." European racial theorists concocted the "scientific" notion that "white Africans" from the northeast had brought civilization to the rest of the primitive continent. The Tutsis of Rwanda were held up as just such a superior race: intellectually gifted, morally uplifted, born to rule. The Hutus, by contrast, were dumb beasts of burden, ill-suited to be any- thing more than soil-tilling subjects. Educational privileges for the Tutsis reinforced these stereotypes. A system of population registra- tion-including ethnically based identity cards-cemented them.

Tutsis, not surprisingly, embraced these myths as justification for their privileged position. Generations of European and Rwandan Tutsi intellectuals elaborated on a pseudo-anthropology of Tutsi superiority and Hutu incompetence. Elitism evolved into racism, and a myth of his- toric Tutsi domination-and cunning-came to be broadly accepted by Hutus and Tutsis alike. Sixty years of humiliating subjugation gave rise among the Hutus to what the French scholar Gerard Prunier, author of an outstanding history of the genocide, The Rwanda Crisis, has called "an aggressively resentful inferiority complex," upon which their lead- ers were keen to build.

In the Hutu-led "social revolution" of 1959-1962, which drove out the Belgians and their Tutsi surrogates, upward of ten thousand Tutsis were murdered, and as many as three hundred thousand were driven into exile in neighboring countries. Thousands more were murdered and exiled in subsequent waves of repression. For the next three decades, Hutu politicians, no more democratic than their Tutsi prede- cessors, justified their rule by building on and reinforcing Hutu fears of Tutsi perfidy.

Road to a Genocide 105

The slide toward genocide began in October 1990, after the Rwan- dan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel insurgency led by Tutsi exiles, invaded Rwanda from Uganda. Their aim was to pressure the Hutu government of President Juvenal Habyarimana to allow Rwanda's exiled Tutsis to return. Three years of fighting ended in stalemate, and President Hab- yarimana was forced to enter into a power-sharing agreement with the Tutsi rebels. But extremists within Habyarirnana's embattled regime had already begun formulating a plan to subvert the agreement and destroy the rebels by exterminating their base of support-the internal Tutsi population.

A key component of the plan was a virulent propaganda cam- paign-crafted by prominent Hutu intellectuals such as Ferdinand Nahi- mana (now in custody at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania)-that tapped into and inflamed old Hutu fears and resentments. The plan worked. On April 6, 1994, Habyari- mana's plane was shot down-most likely by his own hard-line "allies." Habyarimana's assassination was immediately blamed on the Tutsis. This was the pretext for the massacres to begin.

No one really knows what proportion of Rwanda's Hutus participated in the genocide. By some accounts as many people killed as were killed. The broad participation of tens of thousands of ordinary Hutus undoubtedly was a function of Rwanda's by-now notorious culture of obedience. I encountered a chilling illustration of this phenomenon in 1998, four years after the genocide, when I visited one of the provincial prisons. At that time some 130,000 accused genocidaires were held in such places across the country. In the eastern province of Kibungo, the main prison is a squat brick edifice built to house 1,000 detainees. On the day of my visit there were 3,196 inmates, virtually all of them genocide sus- pects, including 112 women and 132 minors. There were also twenty-five infants, growing up in confmement with their imprisoned mothers.

Conditions were typical of prisons across Rwanda, which is to say, unspeakable. An overpowering stench of weeks-old sweat, f.tlth, and urine hit me as I pushed my way into the prison's densely packed dor- mitories. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I became aware of hundreds

106 THE NEW KILLING FIELDS

of eyes peering out of the blackness from within inches of my face. There were no lights or toilet facilities. Prisoners used chamber pots to relieve themselves. The sleeping quarters were pitch dark except for the light from slim window slats. Ventilation was nil. There were no beds or mattresses. The prisoners slept shoulder to shoulder on flattened card- board boxes arrayed on shelves akin to a chicken coop. Their clothes and other belongings hung like stalactites from the ceiling. The prison yard was packed to overflowing, covered with a coat of soot from smoke billowing out of the cooking tent at one end of the courtyard, where inmates stirred massive vats of beans and rice. Streams of fresh sewage dribbled around me. Lice, malaria, ringworm, typhoid, and dysentery were rampant.

In 1995, as many as nine prisoners per day were dying in Rwanda's prisons. Conditions were said to have improved by the time I arrived, but disease, dehydration, and suffocation remained common. It was hard not to think that-guilty or not-these people were enduring a fate worse than death.

My guide through Kibungo prison was the elected leader of the pris- oners, a thirty-eight-year-old former businessman named Joas Kabu- rame, himself accused of genocide. He told me he was framed by a former lover who was jealous of his marriage to another woman. It could be true, I thought. Who knows? No trial was imminent, Kaburame said. The Rwandan government was estimating that at the current rate it would take four hundred years to try all those accused of participation or complicity in the genocide. I asked Kaburame what seemed to me an obvious question: Was there ever any violence in this awful place?

"There are no fights," he replied matter-of-factly; without a trace of irony. "It's forbidden to fight. They must obey the rules."

Here was the culture of obedience at the heart of Rwanda's dark- ness: three thousand accused mass murderers packed in horrendous conditions like snakes in a bottle-and no violence. They were forbid- den to fight, and so they didn't. Perhaps this culture goes some way toward explaining the velocity of a mass slaughter that was orchestrated from on high but implemented by tens of thousands of ordinary civil- ians at the grass roots. Rwanda is a nation of followers, people who "must obey the rules," and do.

Road to a Genocide 107

Anarchy and Tyranny In July 1994 the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) fmally routed the Hutu regime and ended the genocide that in a hundred days had taken some eight hundred thousand lives; two million Hutus fled the country; includ- ing many of the genocidaires and their leaders. In a familiar pattern, the latter re-armed, using UN refugee camps as a base, and they have been fighting ever since to return to power and finish what they started. The result is the present intractable situation. A minority-led regime is com- pelled by circumstances beyond its control to govern indefmitely as a mil- itary dictatorship, in which even the best intentioned leaders are trapped by a kind of Macbethian logic, compelled to shed blood merely to sur- vive. Many advocates for justice in Rwanda, including supporters of the International Tribunal, believe that justice will lead to "healing" and "rec- onciliation" between Hutus and Tutsis. That is an unrealistic goal. There are too many other factors in play; like the ongoing civil war, that are hardening mistrust. The history is accumulating, and so is the bigotry.

Bigotry alone does not explain mass slaughter. Racial stereotypes, envy; resentment, scapegoating, fear-all helped to make Rwanda's genocide possible, not inevitable. In combination, they serve to explain why people followed, but they are not explanation enough. The bigotry was there to be manipulated and exploited by cynical and desperate leaders. The real question is, what sort of environment spawns such leaders in the first place and then rewards their tactics?

Rwanda is a textbook case of ethnic conflict produced by tyranny; a rime 'exam Ie oTtIlelliiKSoetWeen--'--rann'--ancl"ana"ii:n---anabetweenP ""._.",,.,,__ J? " -.----..-- - ~ ,,,_..X _... y

ethnicity and organized crime. There is a widespreao"belier-llr the p'Ost-=-CoidW~;~-;;-th;~;th;ic conflict is a byproduct of "failed states." Rwanda represented the opposite: a state that was all too successful in mobiliZiflghs pe~pf~·;I~·rigidiyii;;~;;~hk;iii~~~·fr~m·tl1et~pciown, from theneaaorst;t~";;;d h1s"rullilg"diqueof co-conspirators down to the last village mayor. And it was this success that in 1994 made possible the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in barely three months, mostly with clubs and machetes.

Rwanda was a model of order. The country was divided into 12 prefectures led by prefets, 154 communes led by bourgmestres, 1,600 sec-

108 THE NEW KILLING FIELDS

tors led by conseilleurs, and tens of thousands of cellules-a top-down network of control rooted in the precolonial kingdom, codified by the colonizers, and preserved after independence. Once Hutus vanquished the Tutsi elite in the early 1960s, their leaders took over the pre-exist- ing social structure and used it to exercise total control over the popu- lace. This rigid hierarchy was not to be confused with the rule of law. The rule of the gun was paramount; enforcement was consistently arbitrary.

The psychologist Ervin Staub, in his valuable book The Roots of Evil-The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, examined mass slaughters in this century, from the Turkish genocide of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust and Pol Pot's Cambodia. Staub found "certain characteristics of a culture and the structure of a society" -such as obe- dience and hierarchy-that enhance the potential for group violence. Rwanda is another case where culture and social structure worked together. But the social structure was more complex than is generally understood. We need to look more closely at Rwanda's slide into geno- cidal conflict.

In the years leading up to the genocide, Tutsis had been massacred across Rwanda with increasing frequency-and impunity. Four hundred were slaughtered in Kibilira in 1990, five hundred in Bigogwe in 1991, three hundred in Bugesera in 1992. No one was ever held accountable. The rest of the world paid no heed.

Many suppose that tyranny and anarchy are at opposite ends of a linear spectrum. But often they are side by side on what might better be described as a circle: the one is a product of the other, and vice versa. Anarchy is a vacuum that brings out the worst in socialized and accul- turated men and women and selects the worst among them. The pur- suit of power is a life-and-death struggle. Those who excel in this struggle distinguish themselves through nothing more exotic than boundless cunning and ruthlessness. The most successful of all become tyrants, and the anarchy in which they thrive is called tyranny.

Even the most rigidly institutionalized tyrannies-Rwanda was one, South Africa during apartheid another-rely above all on the radical absence of lawful accountability for the criminal abuse of power. These tyrannies harness the forces of anarchy to their own ends; the tyrants

Road to a Genocide 109

turn lawlessness and terror, murder and rape, arson and theft into instruments of rule. For them, anarchy is a way of governing.

Inflamed ethnic passions are not the cause of this Hobbesian war of all against all, but its consequence. In a lawless world, ethnicity is a badge of legitimacy and protection, even of justice. It is the bond by which people high and low adhere to a vigilante code. They may appear to be acting on mindless impulse; in fact, they are making rational cal- culations of their own self-interest or, more accurately, of their own sur- vival. The depth of their pre-existing prejudices may explain the potency of the symbols that their leaders choose to exploit, but it is the logic of their lawless environment that transforms those prejudices into terror.

Ethnic conflict in postcolonial Africa is also a form of organized crime. The "culture" driving Africa's conflicts is akin to that of the Sicil- ian Mafia or of the Crips and Bloods in Los Angeles, with the same imperatives of blood and family that bind all such gangs together. Africa's warring factions are best understood not as tribes but as racket- eering enterprises, their leaders calculating strategy after the time-hon- ored logic of Don Vito Corleone.

It is the stakes in Africa that are different-multiplied exponentially in circumstances where the state itself is a gang and the law doesn't exist. It is as if men like Corleone seized control not just of "turf" on the margins of society, but of the state itself and all its organs: police and army, secret police, the courts, the central bank, the civil service, the press, television, and radio.

It is by now well established that Rwanda's catastrophe was "more than a simple tribal meltdown," as Time magazine put it. All too often, however, the calculated quality of Rwanda's genocide is cited to distin- guish it from other, presumably more spontaneous African slaughters. In fact there is no such thing as a "simple tribal meltdown," not any- where. There were elements in Rwanda that distinguished it from other African calamities, but calculation was not among them. All of Africa's present-day conflicts are orchestrated from on high. They are all prod- ucts of calculated evil.

Rwanda'; Hutu elite, which excelled in this lawless culture, estab- lished a clear example of the state as a racketeering enterprise. Juvenal

110 THE NEW KILLING FIELDS

Habyarimana had governed Rwanda for twenty-three years after the model of his mentor, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire. Amply funded and armed by the French, who funneled huge quantities of weapons to Rwanda even during the killings of 1994, Habyarimana ran lucrative rackets in everything from development aid to marijuana smuggling. He and his in-laws operated the country's sole black-market foreign exchange bureau in tandem with the central bank. Habyarimana was also implicated in the poaching of mountain gorillas, selling the valu- able skulls and feet of baby primates. Habyarimana's brother-in-law was the principal suspect in the murder of the American anthropologist Dian Fossey.

This was the criminal culture in which the Rwandan genocide was~---._---------------. --_ ..- ...._--_ ..... hatched. Like gangsters and despots through me ages, ~~!?'y;l.r.imana aPP'arentli~as destroyed by the monster he created, and then the mon- ster ;eii.1"ofiro eve-r-greateidestrucnon-. ---"". -~'-_._-"---'-""

Fear Above All The genocide of 1994 had its predecessors. Rwanda's border with Burundi is not much further from downtown Kigali than Coney Island is by subway from mid-town Manhattan. In 1965, between five thousand and ten thousand Burundian Hutus were killed by a Tutsi-dominated army. That slaughter turned out to be a premonitory sign of the awe- some carnage of 1972, when upward of a hundred thousand Burundian Hutus-some say two hundred thousand-were killed. In 1988, Burundi's army killed twenty thousand Hutus, and another three thou- sand in 1991. As many as fifty thousand Burundians-Hutus and Tut- sis-were butchered after a failed Tutsi-Ied coup in 1993, and another hundred and fifty thousand have died in Burundi's continuing bloodshed since then. Some eight hundred thousand Tutsis and dissident Hutus were killed in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Tutsis killing Hutus, Hutus killing Tutsis-the common denomina- tor in all this slaughter is the total absence of legal accountability for a singlel?~E.P-~ttatoLAL9J}y:_§~ag~vcrmoreilian wee decag~;' the- -"~..__ .._---._----_ .._--_ .._-~ ..-•.... absence of individual accountability for a single general, tyrant, militia leader, organgster,-an-d-mdrnocommoru:Sn'igFe-ed::upou"seCoflllstori-

Road to a Genocide 111

.~al facts, Tutsis and Hutus alike have blamed the other for the killing thath~~taken such a toll of both. Each has been prepared to believe the worst about the other's intentions in times of chaos, making Tutsis and Hutus alike vulnerable to the machinations of the propagandists and eager to seek the protection that those wearing the badge of ethnicity claimed to afford.

Fear, not hatred, was the dominant theme of the Hutu propagan- disfsm"Rwand¥~~li~:'raenHessry'=~~~iQf~~~4:!helr"listeners on two state:~.;ne,rra-dio stati~~~b;~h-before and thr9ggn:Q!if:the genocide of 1994:··These···radio-o·foadcasts'fabricat~d·t~ies of harrowing mas-~...., sacres attributed to Tutsi guerrillas and civilians. They warned Hutus that Tutsi-led rebels were bent on re-imposing feudalism, wiping out all the Hutus, and taking all their land. All too many Hutus, looking across that nearby border at what happened in Burundi, believed what they were told, and then did what they were told they had to do in order to survive.

In June 1994, I interviewed six admitted members of the Intera- hamwe militia who had been captured days earlier by the Tutsi-led rebels. We sat on benches in the filthy remains of an abandoned corner store in Kabuga, a rubble-strewn, rebel-held town on the outskirts of Kigali. Genocide was still unfolding in the South. The climactic siege of Kigali was underway. Hundreds of dazed survivors of the massacres, some of them wrapped in gauze bandages that barely concealed their ghastly machete wounds, lingered amid the wreckage of their lives in the looted and gutted ruins nearby.

These militiamen were illiterate peasants-husbands and fathers- with thickly callused hands. Most of them had spent their entire lives cultivating sorghum and sweet potatoes on the steep mountain slopes of Kibungo Prefecture in eastern Rwanda. Defeated, scared, disheveled, wearing grimy secondhand clothes and sneakers or rubber flip-flops, they spoke in dull monotones under the watchful eyes of their Tursi captors. They appeared to be men of the herd; each one said he had never killed before this. Evidently calculating that it was pointless, and might be fatal, to deny their crimes, they spoke with surprising candor about joining up with the "Igitero" -a group of attackers, leaders and led as one.

112 THE NEW KILLING FIELDS

"Mal:!Lpeople contributed to killing one person," one of them told ~B ~_----1.....L-bto d f~· . b" .J ."me. ecause tuey ieareu trre-rrroo OVlCtlm a glluy,consclence,

my translatorexp1aii1ed.];-each person was afraid to kill alone. We would kill in groups. Even that old man hiding in the sorghum plantation- when we discovered him, Leonard, the militia leader, ordered every- body to hit him. Even after he was dead, everybody was supposed to take part in the killing. I used a club."

Another said, "If someone was discovered, we would surround him with sticks and start beating him. Then the rest would come with sticks and machetes and fmish him off."

I asked this man if he felt any remorse. "I felt guilty and I felt I was committing a crime," he replied. "I had never killed before, so I did not feel comfortable to kill, because I knew these people had committed no crime. But I had to save myself I had only to do as I was told."

This was the line: they killed because they were forced to. Many were killed for refusing i'OKiltthey·-said:1jutfurtherquestions yielded a more complicated picture. F~~e driven them to kill, but it was fear not just of their leaders. It was aim-rear of those wh6m theysouglir"fo-exfei·miiiate~- ._-~-_ ..

EniJiranu~rK;~-uhanda, eighteen years old, wore a mangy, purple corduroy jacket, blue jeans, and plastic high-top sneakers. Sullen and withdrawn, he spoke very quietly, and did not look me in the eye. "I did not want to kill," he told me. "I was just compelled to kill by the leader of the militia." When I asked how many people he had killed, Emmanuel replied, "There were many. Perhaps those who had the lists know better. I can tell you in my village we killed fifteen people. After my village we went to other villages and killed many. To say there were hundreds would be an understatement. The top leaders of the militia, when they marched us to kill, they had a list of the victims. We were shown whom to kill on the list. If you resisted, they would threaten you. They said you must kill or you will be killed."

Yet when I asked Emmanuel why he was forced to kill, his reply sug- gested that he understood the reasons for killing, and that they made sense to him: he believed in what he was doing when he was doing it.

"The government always told us that the RPF was Tutsi, and if it wins the war all the Hutus will be killed," he said. "As of now I don't

Road to a Genocide 113

believe this is true. But at the time, because it was the government say- ing so, using the radio, and because I had not known the RPF before, I believed that the government was telling the truth."

His confederate added, "They were always telling people that if the RPF comes, it will return Rwanda to feudalism, that they would bring oppression."

A third put it this way: "I did not believe the Tutsis were coming to kill us and take our land, but when the government radio continued to broadcast that the RPF is coming to tak~-o~rlana~-i;'~~itlg"to kill the Hutu---'-wh~ttthis-wcrsrepeatedover'and over, I began to feel some kind of fear."

Responsibility No one disputes that Rwanda's Hutu leadership must bear ultimate responsibility for the genocide. But what of the RPF? What measure of responsibility do Rwanda's rebels bear for provoking what, in the con- text of Central Africa, was surely a foreseeable mass slaughter?

General Paul Kagame, leader of the Tutsi-dominated rebel army that invaded Rwanda in 1990 and now the president of Rwanda, is keen to draw parallels between the Tutsis' experience of genocide and that of the Jews. He and his fellow Tutsi generals point to Israel's conduct in the Middle East as a model for their own behavior. Indeed there are legitimate parallels, and they help explain why policy makers in Wash- ington in the years since the genocide have flinched at the thought of passing judgment on those who claim to be acting on behalf of Rwanda's Tutsis.

But the parallels between Central Europe and Central Africa are not exact, and they may obscure more than they illuminate. To begin with, the Jews of Europe were never armed. Nazi propaganda notwithstand- ing, there was no Jewish conspiracy to dominate Europe, nor was there ever. There had been no Jewish tyranny in Germany, as there were Tutsi feudal tyrannies in both Rwanda and neighboring Burundi. And there had been no Jewish-perpetrated genocides in, say,Austria, as there were Tutsi-perpetrated genocides against Hutus no fewer than three times in a generation in Burundi.

114 THE NEW KILLING FIELDS

These differences by no means absolve Hutus who participated in the genocide, but they underscore the recklessness of Tutsi refugees like General Kagame who, in 1990, thought the solution to their exile was an ethnically based armed insurgency against an entrenched and brutal, Hutu-dominated regime in Kigali. No rational person could have looked at the history of repeated mass slaughters in Rwanda and Burundi since 1959 and doubted for a moment that at least one likely outcome of such an invasion would be massive violence against defenseless Tutsi civilians.

Kagame was not himself a defenseless victim. To suggest that he was would be to adopt the same logic that informed the genocide, namely that a Tutsi is a Tutsi is a Tutsi, whether armed or unarmed. Kagame and his RPF confederates were armed. The victims of the genocide were unarmed. Kagame can argue that armed rebellion was his only alternative under the circumstances; he surely did not intend his rebel- lion to provoke a genocide. He points out that Westerners, not least Americans, have often resorted to violence to achieve their ends. Fair enough. But Kagame, no less than the West, must bear a measure of responsibility for the unintended consequences of legitimate ends pur- sued through violent means.

Gerard Prunier tells the story of the RPF occupation of a town in Western Rwanda during the early stages of the war. An old Tutsi man remarked to one of the young guerrilla fighters who had come to 'lib- erate" him: "You want power? You will get it. But here we will all die. Is it worth it to you?" Prunier goes on to say;"[I]t is improbable that in late 1990 when Paul Kagame was working day and night to turn the RPF from an alienated band of exiles into an efficient fighting machine, he ever stopped to ask himself what was really going to happen. And in a way it is quite normal. Action carries with it its own logic, and in such situations men who stop to think for too long are likely to end up dead."

In January 2000, I had an opportunity to pose the question about responsibility to Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda, who was Kagame's main ally in 1990 and after. Not least, in 1990 Museveni had backed the Rwandan Patriotic Front's armed invasion of Rwanda from Uganda, led by men who were among Museveni's closest military con- federates.

Road to a Genocide 115

I met Museveni in his suite at the Waldorf Astoria, where he was staying during a visit for what turned out to be fruitless meetings of the UN Security Council to try to end the war in Congo. I asked Museveni about the law of unintended consequences. He had waged an armed rebellion against ldi Amin, and then another against the successor regime of Milton Obote. Now he was backing an armed rebellion against Islamist tyranny in Sudan. He had backed Laurent Kabila's rebel- lion against Mobutu's tyranny in what was then Zaire. Now he was backing rebels fighting against Kabila's tyranny, in a war that, as of this writing, had claimed as many as two and a half million civilian lives. Had it not occurred to Museveni and his friends, I asked, that armed rebellions provoke massive reprisals against defenseless civilians? What was he thinking in 1990? Surely he was mindful that a Tutsi-led armed rebellion in Rwanda was likely to result in the mass murder of Tutsi civilians. That had been the pattern in both Rwanda and Burundi, not to mention Uganda itself.

"We did not conspire with the RPF in 1990," Museveni demurred. "But after they went, we did not want them to come back. We said stay there [in Rwanda]."

Did Museveni accept no responsibility for the bloodshed that fol- lowed? I asked. For that matter, did he accept no responsibility for the bloodshed unleashed in response to his own war against Obote? Does one who engages in violent rebellion-even justified armed rebellion against tyranny-bear no responsibility for the unintended conse- quences of his rebellion? When those consequences are foreseeable, as surely they were in Rwanda and Congo, as well as in Sudan, aren't the rebels responsible for protecting those who bear the brunt of the tyrant's repression?

Museveni was plainly contemptuous of this line of questioning. "There is a thief who grabs a briefcase in the street," he said, eyes

alight, staring me down. "When I try to restrain him, he starts shooting passersby. And then the journalist from New York says, 'Why did you try to restrain him? You are the one who provoked him.' Don't you think that's a bit ... ?" He shook his head incredulously. "The authors of the genocide are to blame. We cannot have this blackmail."

Blackmail?

116 THE NEW KILLING FIELDS

"Amin said on the radio, 'Museveni will be killed. His family will be killed." The president was recalling his first armed rebellion in Uganda, against Idi Amin. "That was blackmail-if you resist dictatorship, your family will be killed. The threats to my family should not doom resist- ance to dictatorship. I do my duty. If you want to kill innocent people, that's your own responsibility."

Museveni concluded with vehemence, "But I will not accept black- mail. Every dictator says, 'If you attack me, I will kill you.' Before 1986, a hundred thousand children were dying of six preventable diseases in Uganda. So people in a bad system are dying every day. That is the basis for deciding to resist a dictatorship. You are mistaken. The people who are killed in reaction to resistance are not as many as by dictatorship itself There is a responsibility of regional actors to attack dictatorship."

Museveni had a point, of course. Even the best intentioned of Africa's leaders-and Paul Kagame is one of them-must choose between painful alternatives. Meek submission to tyranny would be unacceptable and nonviolent resistance almost certainly ineffectual. The latter could only be credible and effective-in the eyes of the tyrant as well as in those of his subjects-if there were many more regional actors prepared to support it, and if those actors were backed by the resources and prestige of outside powers.

That support and backing, however, were entirely missing in the Rwandan case, where both the UN and the Clinton administration declined to intervene even after the massacres began. And the next time?