The Work of War

On the morning of April 16, 1994, Anastase Kinamubanzi was ordered to drive his employer’s bulldozer into the sacristy wall of Nyange church. The order came from Father Athanase Seromba, the parish priest. Inside the simple redbrick building were over two thousand civilians who had mistakenly thought that a church, in this nation of devout Christianity, would shelter them from a week­old genocidal campaign. Outside, blocking any escape, were policemen and members of a militia armed with guns and grenades alongside a large crowd who now surrounded the parish buildings singing patriotic songs, blowing whistles, gripping machetes, gardening hoes and wooden clubs studded with nails. Local government officials directed and encouraged the unruly, murderous energy of the crowd.

Anastase resisted the order. A decade later, a prosecution witness in Father Seromba’s trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda remembered the exchange this man who made a living building roads for an Italian construction company had with the priest.

‘Really, Father, do you accept that I should destroy this church?’

Father Seromba nodded.

He asked again and again the priest nodded.

Anastase persisted, ‘Father, do you accept that I should destroy this church?’

This time the priest gave a longer reply, ‘Unless you, yourselves, are inyenzi (cockroaches), destroy it. All we want is to get rid of the inyenzi. As for the rest of it, we Hutus are many. If we get rid of the inyenzi, we will build another church. We will build a new church.’

There was work to be done: destroying the church was a step towards building its replacement. Anastase’s heavy machine, like a medieval­era battering ram, would end the siege at Nyange so the waiting crowd could undertake the sacred act of building a Hutu nation untainted by a Tutsi pest.

The refugees had been under attack for two days. Bullets had been fired and grenades tossed, while men who only a brief while ago had been their neighbours directed arrows and stones into the church. Inside, many cowered and prayed for a miracle, but others fought. They mounted a desperate, despairing defence, throwing back stones and using any loose piece of wood to bludgeon back the charging phalanxes. When there was a lull in the attacks, usually in the evenings, the refugees roasted and ate bananas they collected from a parish grove that would later be turned into a mass grave into which the earth­mover would dump their bodies. The bulldozer brought the impasse to an end. The walls of the church were breached and the roof collapsed. Those who survived the crush ran out into the open only to be cut down. Attackers invaded the church to finish off any survivors. They hacked and bludgeoned men, women and children on the altar and in the small recesses of the church.

Father Seromba would later mount a vigorous defence that he had not issued any order to kill. He was found guilty and is now serving a fifteen­year prison term. Anastase, on the other hand, confessed to having followed the priest’s commands and received a life sentence. From Germany to Cambodia and now Rwanda, mass murderers in the dock have attempted a variation of a single defence: ‘I was following orders.’ Doing my job, obeying my superiors, it was impossible to say no. The Nazis at Nuremberg said, ‘Befehl ist Befehl’ ­orders are orders. They too had used machines similar to Anastase’s to push thousands of murdered people into mass graves. In one of the Kolyma Tales, Varlam Shalamov writes of a tractor driver, Grinka Lebedev, whose face shows pride at fulfilling the orders from the camp administration to clear an old mass grave of its frozen bodies. Watched by his fellow Gulag inmates, who envy his driving while they walk and crawl in exhaustion to their work detail, he ‘carefully carried out his job, scooping the corpses toward the grave with the gleaming bulldozer knife­shield, pushing them into the pit and returning to grab up more’.

We can easily visualise the Nyange bulldozer at a Kolyma or at Treblinka. Its heavy steel part of that vast Nazi network of trains, barbed wire, barracks, gas chambers and lethal chemicals turned into death camps. Yet such heavy machinery was only a bit player in Rwanda. For every person the bulldozer ran over or who fell under a parish wall as it was being flattened, simple work tools wielded by ordinary men and women murdered thousands. It was the steel of the machete, used as energetically and rhythmically as it is daily on thousands of Rwandan farms and homesteads that took centre stage in the grim task of genocide.