The Work of War

I left New York having decided to spend the next few years researching the genocide in Rwanda and visited for the first time in the summer of 2003. This tiny country feels as isolated from the wider world as it looks on a map. The Virunga Mountains, rising more than three thousand metres above sea level, run east to west along the north­western border. The volcanic peaks lie roughly perpendicular to the western arm of the Rift Valley ­a great gash in the earth that travels from Syria all the way to Mozambique. To the south­east of Lake Kivu, which covers most of the border with Congo, the altitude rises almost as high as the Virungas. The bulk of Rwandans live in a central plateau dotted with hills that gradually flattens in the east as the inhospitable swamps of the Akagera National Park reach the border with Tanzania.

Kigali, the capital city, lies at the heart of Rwanda. Long before today’s many multi­storey office buildings were built, Saint Famille Cathedral, standing atop a hill, dominated the city. Its façade is of red­brick interspersed with white columns. The cathedral was built to be forbidding in the same style of Kigali Central Prison, which is also almost a century old and is located at the bottom of a hill. I spent many hours at the prison interviewing men and women who had confessed to participating in the genocide.

One was a woman in her mid thirties called Mwamini who had confessed to aiding and abetting the killing of Tutsis in Kigali. She came commended by the prison warden for her efforts to encourage fellow prisoners to admit the crimes they had committed during the genocide. Her hope was that confessing and being seen to cooperate would win her an early freedom. Our long conversations centred on her ex­lover Gerard whom she described as if he were a demon walking the earth. He had been the leader of a small militia in Kigali, she told me, referring to his killing sprees during the daytime as ‘work’. He would come home in the evenings and expected her to run him a bath so that he could clean off the bits of matter and blood that stuck to him after a hard day.

‘Gerard believed that strength alone could earn you the world,’ she said. He had been obsessed with karate and claimed to have once represented Rwanda in a continental championship. Another prisoner recalled how Gerard once lay his gun on the ground and proceeded to hand­chop and karate kick a man to death. I felt I had a chance at last to sit across the killing force whose gruesome effects I had seen on television all those years ago.

I asked to meet Gerard.

If it had been impossible to visualise action from my previous prisoners, if they remained as far from the genocide as they had when I was watching television, here was someone of another order.

Gerard impressed. Tall and swollen with muscle, he moved with a precision that made me, on the other side of the table, feel awkward and nervous. He sat with his hands resting casually on his knees. The pink prison uniform was draped over a body kept in peak condition by rigorous exercise. He wore the uniform elegantly, the trousers ironed, perfect crease showing. I asked questions, but had to restrain myself from blurting out some sort of confession of how drawn I was to him. Nervous, I trained my eyes downward to his hands. They showed no sign of the swollen knuckles I knew to be common to a karate expert. His face was perfect, symmetrical with the smooth skin drawn tight, no shaving bumps or scars – a far cry from the other inmates I had interviewed who showed the wear of living in a crowded, grimy and disease­ridden prison. Gerard had been imprisoned for ten years, and yet he looked as if he had just walked in from the war, looked as if he had won the war.