Ntarama church: Revisiting one of Karera's killings

NTARAMA CHURCH in Rwanda’s Bugesera District, the worst of François Karera’s massacre sites, is a testament to the senseless cruelty of human beings to others they view as different. It stands in testimony of how people can ruthlessly turn against their neighbours with whom they, hitherto, had no quarrel and with whom they have lived side by side for decades. Florida Kabasinga The remains of the Tutsi of Bugesera who naively thought their lives would be spared if they sought refuge in the house of God will forever be a reminder of the darkest chapter of my country’s history. No one could have predicted that one million lives would be lost in only one hundred days in the fastest killing spree using crude traditional weapons. On a mild day in September 2014, I drove from Kigali to Ntarama Church, a mere 20 minutes journey, to revisit one of the massacre sites for which François Karera, the aging former Prefect of Kigali Rural or greater Kigali, was charged and convicted to life in prison. As part of the team prosecuting him at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), I attended every day of his trial. Karera was prosecuted and convicted for crimes he committed in different parts of Rwanda, among them Ntarama Church. The hundreds of Tutsi men, women and children whose remains are either buried in mass graves around the Church or remain on display inside the Church as a stark reminder of what occurred there, were massacred in cold blood on 15 April 1994. And the only reason they were killed was because they were perceived to be different from their killers. Seven years after he was convicted to life and sent to serve his sentence in Benin, as I walked among the ruins of the Church, I could still hear the voices of the witnesses in my head. The helplessness in their voices still lives with me every day. The unmistaken anguish in their voices at the horrific realization they were bound to die when they saw their Prefect leading a group of soldiers, Interahamwe militia and local leaders armed with guns, grenades, machetes, pangas, clubs and spears. I can still see the pain etched on the old man’s face who lost, in his estimate, one hundred twenty members of his extended family that fateful day. Walking through the memorial site leaves me with goose bumps and an eerie sense of deep sadness for the senselessly cruel and helpless way in which the victims died. As a young international Prosecutor, albeit of Rwandan origin, I visited Ntarama Church on many occasions. Still, I am shocked at the scale of ruin. Looking at the remains of the innocent victims of Karera’s crimes, I am appalled that no mercy was shown, even to the children. The image that remains with every visitor to this Tutsi genocide memorial is the woman with braided hair cradling her child. What kind of person commits such despicable crimes and is utterly remorseless? The Church where Hutu and Tutsi worshipped together lies in ruins, with bullet holes and damage from grenades used to breach the building inside which hundreds of frightened Tutsi were cowering. The skulls and other human remains stacked on stalls and the decaying clothing visible to all visitors represent lives brutally cut short. The empty and bloodied pews are a reminder of the horrors that took place in this Church that fateful day twenty years ago. Karera’s despicable acts would make sense if he had Dracula-like teeth and horns on his head, an image that would somehow account for his crimes. Upon seeing him in person, one should at least be confronted by a man with an evident nasty character trait that alerts you of his capacity for mass murder. However, there is no such luck with this man responsible for the death in cold blood of thousands of victims. His victims span several Prefectures: Kigali Ville, Rushashi and Kigali Rural. In person, François Karera is a jolly man, very friendly and unbelievably polite. Watching this murderous former Prefect of Kigali Rural from the Prosecution Bench in 2005, I could not reconcile the man with a constant smile on his face in Trial Chamber I of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda with the ruthless murderer witnesses had recounted to me. Skulls of Genocide victims at Ntarama. (File) Could this man, who was very friendly with everyone in the courtroom and who made sure he shook my hand and spoke to me in our mother tongue be capable of the crimes with which he was charged? He was accused of genocide, extermination and murder as crimes against humanity. His acts included ordering the murder of his Tutsi neighbours, ordering the destruction of their homes and leading attacks on notorious massacre sites like Ntarama Church in Bugesera. It is difficult to reconcile this aging man, who looks like any normal graying family man in a business suit, to the acts of a man whose hatred of Tutsi, his fellow Rwandans, was and most likely is still vile. As a young Prosecutor at the ICTR and having seen first hand the results of the genocide, I was shocked at the depravity of the crimes the masterminds at the ICTR Detention Center were accused of. Among the most shocking acts were the statements made by these most educated, and wealthiest political leaders of my country. Karera’s shocking and bizarre thoughts on all Tutsi were very evident in an interview he gave to Jane Perlez of the New York Times right after he fled Rwanda in 1994. Speaking to a non Rwandan, his deeply held beliefs on fellow Rwandans is utterly disturbing but makes sense in light of his acts of killing neighbours and men, women and children who had sought refuge in a Church. To him, the massacre of Tutsi was justified because “The Tutsi are originally bad…they are murderers…in war you don’t consider the consequences, you consider the causes. If the reasons are just, the massacres are justified.” He recounted to journalist Jane Perlez, in the Article titled “Under the Bougainvillea, A Litany of Past Wrongs” published on August 15, 1994, a conversation he had with a representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in which he said to him “O.K, you say the Tutsi are good. But that’s like telling me, “You are white”, when I am black”. To him, all Tutsi are born bad and deserved to die. This idea is a true reflection of how illogical hatred based on an identification of which the target has no say. I cannot help but recall the words of another ICTR convict, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, an Adventist Pastor to whom Tutsi Pastors, colleagues with whom he had worked for decades, wrote a letter imploring him to intervene and save their lives and the lives of their families as they had learnt they would be killed the following day. His response? “God has given you up” to be killed or words to that effect. In a word, it was time for all Tutsi in Rwanda to be killed and even God could not help them. Both men were opinion leaders in Rwandan society and would no doubt have qualified for the title of “Inyangamugayo”, a term used in reference to persons of high ethics and morals. There is a saying in Kinyarwanda that literally translated means “God spends the day elsewhere but always returns home to Rwanda where he spends the night”. For a country that, in 1994, was more than 90% Christian, the fact that no respect was given to spilling blood in Churches is still baffling. In cross-examination, Karera denied ever giving Jane Perlez an interview. However, the Article had his photo. He claimed to court that he had no idea how the journalist got his photo. He claimed he had never harboured any ill feelings towards Tutsi and in support, claimed he was from a small group of people called Abambogo who were the Tutsi King’s drummers and were considered Tutsi. How could he then kill his fellow Tutsi? Prosecution investigations on the matter revealed the Abambogo were a clan that belonged to the Hutu ethnic group and in fact, in view of the evidence against him of his actions in 1994, belonging to this group of drummers had no bearing on the case. In addition, he claimed to have saved a Tutsi boy and fled with him into exile. However, no trace of this child was ever made. Like nearly all suspects on trial at the ICTR, François Karera’s claim of saving Tutsi was repeated like a mantra in almost every case as a ready defence against participation in Tutsi killings. The argument was always laughably thin; “if I saved this Tutsi person, how could I kill the ones you say I killed?” As if to mock the dead, it was repeatedly suggested that the accused “could not even kill a chicken” when hungry, how could they then spill the blood of fellow humans? However, like all societies in the world, Rwandan society is a complex subject. Over the years, Tutsi and Hutu, as expected with societies that live side by side and have no geographical separation, intermarried and mingled. Majority of the suspects at ICTR were married to Tutsi wives or had Tutsi mistresses. What is shocking is that while they saved some Tutsi, likely the ones who lived in their homes or their relatives, they invariably killed many more. For a man who ordered his Tutsi neighbours killed, it is not surprising that his regret was that not all Tutsi in Rwanda were killed. Arguing against characterizing the events in April to July 1994 in Rwanda as genocide, he is quoted as having said; “We cannot use the word genocide, because there are numerous surviving.” In other words, how can anyone possibly think what we did was genocide when we did not kill all Tutsi in Rwanda? As he found out when he was sentenced to life for genocide and related crimes, a genocidaire does not have to kill all his intended victims to be convicted. The evidence against François Karera was horrific. Witnesses recounted how he stood at his door in Kigali City’s Kivugiza neighbourhood and ordered the notorious Interahamwe to destroy “the rubbish” in his neighbourhood, a derogatory reference to his Tutsi neighbors’ houses. After taking his family to safety to Ruhengeri Prefecture, he continued giving orders to communal policemen stationed at his house in Nyamirambo by telephone. He further travelled back to lead attacks and conduct meetings with the local population and Interahamwe milita. Of all his acts during this period, the most bizarre was his act of ordering one of his Tutsi neighbours to swear on the flag of Rwanda that he would never talk to his fellow Tutsi and he would henceforth denounce his Tutsi ethnicity in order to spare his life. Witnesses recounted how this Tutsi man’s life was actually spared and he in turn refused to testify against him. For an educated man who owned homes in Kigali City’s Kivugiza neighbourhood and in his home town of Rushashi, considered an elder in Rwandan culture and a political leader, the acts for which he was charged and convicted, to date, make me wonder about the pre 1994 society in Rwanda. If he too seemingly believed the Tutsi stereotypes or at least espoused them, what about the masses that willingly took up crude traditional weapons and indiscriminately killed their neighbours? In the interview he gave Jane Perlez, he states that the Tutsi are physically weak —“look at their arms and their legs. No Tutsi can build; they are too weak. They just command. The others work.” His statements suggested he believed the myths and slurs levelled at all Tutsi in Rwanda by opportunistic politicians. In his statements, Karera echoes the infamous “10 Hutu Commandments” and the so-called “19 Tutsi commandments” when he asserts that the Tutsi “…have given the white people their daughters,” an act he implies is loathsome and unforgivable. The so-called commandments were made popular by Kangura newspaper whose editor, Hassan Ngeze, was convicted and sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment by the ICTR for direct and public incitement to commit genocide and were meant to mock Tutsi’s supposed superiority over the Hutu population, which in turn was meant to prop up Hutu superiority. The first three Hutu Commandments were dedicated to Tutsi women, which is considered one of the reasons why rape of Tutsi women was so widespread during the genocide. When the judgement in his case was rendered and sentence passed down, Karera showed no emotion. Looking at him, I wondered whether, given a chance to rethink his actions, he would have chosen the path he did. Was his all consuming hatred worth spending the rest of his life behind bars in a foreign country? He seemingly wished his country would never rise from the ashes in which he and his friends left it in July 1994. Jane Perlez wrote that Karera only had derision for the post genocide government in Rwanda because it would not function without the Hutu population. “The country will become a park for wild animals”, he is quoted as saying with some satisfaction. Having left the fire still smoldering in Rwanda, it is not surprising that he and his ilk thought Rwanda was destined to be a failed state. Unfortunately for him and like-minded former elite who thought they had ensured they burnt their country to the ground, Rwanda has risen from the ashes and is currently acclaimed for many different reasons, of which they have not contributed anything. It is to people like Karera that I owe my career as a Prosecutor. As a Rwandan teenager living in exile in 1994, I was keenly aware of the difference between my Ugandan classmates and I. They had no obvious worries and were going about their daily school life. On the other hand, two classmates of Rwandan origin and I were utterly worried about family members in Rwanda. We constantly whispered our worries for loved ones in Rwanda. Before long, one of us learnt her father and brother had been brutally murdered in Kigali. To our Ugandan classmates, it was a sad situation but an utter inconvenience, with bodies floating down their rivers and lakes, preventing them from eating fish. We had no idea how bad the situation was about to get for all Tutsi in Rwanda. The news coming out of Rwanda was dire. There were warnings of a possible human catastrophe. Born in exile, as a child, I heard older family members talking about the killings of Tutsi in 1959, 1962 and 1992. These periodic massacres led them to flee Rwanda for a life in exile. They talked of killings of Tutsi men, looting and burning of Tutsi owned homes. There were stories of Hutu neighbours who warned them to flee and some even assisted them to get to the nearest border crossing from where their journey into exile began. However, 1994 was proving different. Listening to the vile broadcasts of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), there was no doubt all Tutsi, including women and children, would be killed. Our worst fears were realized in one hundred days of mayhem between April and July 1994. And Karera was one of the key perpetrators of this tragedy. Speaking in Kinyarwanda during his trial, a poignant moment in the history of the Tribunal, I had a sense of justice being done in the image of a young Rwandan Prosecutor, whose family hailed from Bugesera before fleeing into exile, prosecuting a man accused of murdering Rwandans. I have a sense of justice with his life sentence and hope this punishment brings some measure of comfort and closure to the survivors. Watching the ruins of Ntarama Church, I know the lives lost and the survivors’ trauma can never be restored. Only time will truly heal the wounds of what happened on that fateful day in Bugesera. And the Memorial stands as a stark reminder for future generations of Rwandans. In a way, I hope it stands as a deterrent to future mass crimes. That is a lesson I hope everyone who walks among the dead at Ntarama Church takes with him.

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Ntarama church: Revisiting one of Karera's killings