heads again, it will no longer be necessary to fight them in the bush. We will start by eliminating the internal enemy [my italics]. They will be silenced.”
This farce of a paper had a small circulation but an enormous reach. Copies were sent out to the villages and passed around
gleefully. It seemed a welcome break from the usual tired and boring news out of the capital. Here at last, said many people,
is a paper that really says the ugly truth—that the Tutsis are going to kill us when they invade.
Before it stopped publishing two months before the genocide Kangura editorialized: “We must remark to the cockroaches that if they do not change their attitude and if they persevere in their
arrogance, the majority people will establish a force composed of young Hutu. This force will be charged with breaking the
resistance of the Tutsi children.”
What the newspaper did not say was that just such a force had already been put into place and was busily preparing itself
to murder children throughout Rwanda.
In early November 1993, a shipment of cargo was trucked into Kigali. The wooden crates bore import papers announcing that
they had been received from China at the seaport at Mombasa in Kenya. Inside were 987 cartons of inexpensive machetes. This
was not enough to cause alarm by itself. The machete is a common household tool in Rwanda, used for all manner of jobs—slicing
mangoes, mowing grass, harvesting bananas, cutting paths through heavy brush, butchering animals.
If anybody had been paying attention, however, the shipment might have seemed curious when matched with other facts. The recipient,
for example, was one of the primary financial backers of the hate-mongering radio station RTLM. Those cartons from China,
too, were but a small part of what amounted to a mysterious wave. Between January 1993 and March 1994, a total of half a million
machetes were imported into my country from various overseas suppliers. This was a number wildly out of line with ordinary
demands. Somebody obviously wanted a lot of sharp objects in the hands of ordinary Rwandans. But nobody questioned the sudden
abundance of machetes—at least not publicly.
If those imports were quiet, the formation of the youth militias was obvious. It was hard to miss those roving bands of young
men wearing colorful neckerchiefs, blowing whistles, singing patriotic songs, and screaming insults against the Tutsis, their
sympathizers and members of the opposition. They conducted military drills with fake guns carved from wood because the government
could not afford to give them real rifles. They were known as the Interahamwe, which means either “those who stand together” or “those who attack together, ” depending on who is doing the translating.
Habyarimana’s government formed them into “self-defense militias” that operated as a parallel to the regular Rwandan army
and were used to threaten the president’s politicial enemies. They were also a tool for building popular support for the ruling
regime under the all-embracing cloak of Hutu Power. The ongoing civil war brought a whole new flock of members. Most of the
new recruits came from the squalid refugee camps that formed a ring around Kigali. It is difficult for me to describe just
how terrible the conditions were inside these camps: no decent food, no sanitation, no jobs, no hope. There were several hundred
thousand people crammed into these tumbledown wastelands, most of them chased away from their homes in the countryside by
the advancing RPF army. Kigali itself held about 350, 000 people at the time—a city about the size of Minneapolis, Minnesota—and
the strain on the infrastructure was very great. These refugees saw plenty of reasons to be angry at the rebels—and, by unfair
extension, angry at each individual Tutsi. Plus, the militias were fun, in the same way that the hate radio was fun. They brought a sense of purpose and cohesion
This farce of a paper had a small circulation but an enormous reach. Copies were sent out to the villages and passed around
gleefully. It seemed a welcome break from the usual tired and boring news out of the capital. Here at last, said many people,
is a paper that really says the ugly truth—that the Tutsis are going to kill us when they invade.
Before it stopped publishing two months before the genocide Kangura editorialized: “We must remark to the cockroaches that if they do not change their attitude and if they persevere in their
arrogance, the majority people will establish a force composed of young Hutu. This force will be charged with breaking the
resistance of the Tutsi children.”
What the newspaper did not say was that just such a force had already been put into place and was busily preparing itself
to murder children throughout Rwanda.
In early November 1993, a shipment of cargo was trucked into Kigali. The wooden crates bore import papers announcing that
they had been received from China at the seaport at Mombasa in Kenya. Inside were 987 cartons of inexpensive machetes. This
was not enough to cause alarm by itself. The machete is a common household tool in Rwanda, used for all manner of jobs—slicing
mangoes, mowing grass, harvesting bananas, cutting paths through heavy brush, butchering animals.
If anybody had been paying attention, however, the shipment might have seemed curious when matched with other facts. The recipient,
for example, was one of the primary financial backers of the hate-mongering radio station RTLM. Those cartons from China,
too, were but a small part of what amounted to a mysterious wave. Between January 1993 and March 1994, a total of half a million
machetes were imported into my country from various overseas suppliers. This was a number wildly out of line with ordinary
demands. Somebody obviously wanted a lot of sharp objects in the hands of ordinary Rwandans. But nobody questioned the sudden
abundance of machetes—at least not publicly.
If those imports were quiet, the formation of the youth militias was obvious. It was hard to miss those roving bands of young
men wearing colorful neckerchiefs, blowing whistles, singing patriotic songs, and screaming insults against the Tutsis, their
sympathizers and members of the opposition. They conducted military drills with fake guns carved from wood because the government
could not afford to give them real rifles. They were known as the Interahamwe, which means either “those who stand together” or “those who attack together, ” depending on who is doing the translating.
Habyarimana’s government formed them into “self-defense militias” that operated as a parallel to the regular Rwandan army
and were used to threaten the president’s politicial enemies. They were also a tool for building popular support for the ruling
regime under the all-embracing cloak of Hutu Power. The ongoing civil war brought a whole new flock of members. Most of the
new recruits came from the squalid refugee camps that formed a ring around Kigali. It is difficult for me to describe just
how terrible the conditions were inside these camps: no decent food, no sanitation, no jobs, no hope. There were several hundred
thousand people crammed into these tumbledown wastelands, most of them chased away from their homes in the countryside by
the advancing RPF army. Kigali itself held about 350, 000 people at the time—a city about the size of Minneapolis, Minnesota—and
the strain on the infrastructure was very great. These refugees saw plenty of reasons to be angry at the rebels—and, by unfair
extension, angry at each individual Tutsi. Plus, the militias were fun, in the same way that the hate radio was fun. They brought a sense of purpose and cohesion
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