Rwanda – Operation Amaryllis: Farewell, see you in another life

This is another article from a translated version of a series of chronicles written by David Gakunzi, a French citizen on France’s role in the Genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi in Rwanda, published in La Regle du Jeu Rwanda. It’s the 12th of April 1994. Another day. Yet another day of despair: how many lives lost, cut up today? Just a week ago, hatred had been fomented, taught, organised, structured, orchestrated, guided, armed, and was raging like the wind ready to do mob justice. --READ ALSO: Rwanda: Our Downfall-- The staggering manhunt was on! Every street, every crossroad, crossing, roadblocks have been set up. Barriers and militia, death, strike a pose in front of piles of corpses, Primus, Mutzig and Guinness in hand; militia on the lookout, eyes wide open, watching, supervising, scrutinizing ID cards and faces. Flush out; flush out those Tutsis, all Tutsis; not even one must live. On the rotary presses of history, it’s April 12 in the year nineteen ninety-four. And hatred, maneuvered by a State, hatred turned into corpses, hatred and its triggered mechanisms, droning of songs and the stench of chaos, smoking, reeking through the ground and wafting up the horizon. And at the UN Council, they feign shock, what with everyone pretending to be all surprised! The truth! It was no secret! All the consular offices were well in the know. Information was coming out thick and fast, all saying the same thing: to the ends of the land of a thousand hills, evil was fast getting the better of good; a more dire doomsday scenario, there never was, the sand drenched in blood. We all knew it. Who can stick out their neck and say that they didn’t know that the militias were readying for war? Or can they say, indeed, dare say, that they didn’t know that lists had been drawn up already? Or that in the next few days, in the streets, up the hills such untold crime would be wrought? Who will say that they did not see coming, did not see streaming in the breath of the time, this hatred in the gendarmes, the presidential guard and the militias, as they strode hand in hand, their foreboding military step, a harbinger of life without eternal rest, life without a casket? All those who should have known knew it. All of them. They all knew that this fomented hatred, spread and sometimes served as daily entertainment, would, at the opportune time, devour everything in its path. The extermination. The drums did roll, announcing this extermination; the archives are there to show it. Just see this diplomatic telegram dated 12th January 1994 and signed Mr. Bunuel: “This morning, the special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General convened the Heads of Mission of Belgium, the United States and France, in the presence of General Dallaire, to inform them of news from a senior official of the MRND responsible for training the Interahamwe militia, according to which a civil war was about to break out as follows: Some elements of the Interahamwe would be engaged in provocations against the RPF battalion stationed at the parliament (CND) to generate response. At the same time, the UNAMIR Belgian military would also be attacked for the same purpose. The Rwandan victims whom these reactions could not but provoke, would be used as a pretext to eliminate the Tutsis in the capital. According to UNAMIR’s informant, 1,700 Interahamwe had received military training and weapons to boot, with the connivance of the FAR Chief of Defence Staff. The precise location of the Tutsi population in Kigali should make it easy to eliminate 1,000 of them within first hour of the violence erupting”. Who could honestly cross their hearts and say, that nope, they did not know? Hatred, armed, deep hatred, the dance of death, mouth openly spewing out, in a deathly guffaw, that the Tutsi must be destroyed. Unmasked faces, the hatred mocked, excommunicated, threatened, chuckled, organized, swelled, jabbering gleefully all day long, unbridled; brashly, with venomous eyes, they loaded their rifles; sharpened machetes in the full glare of the public. Oh we knew it, all too well, what was brewing and the diplomatic to-ings and fro-ings, the ever so cautious language, a treachery to mankind; pathetic pronouncements, as if no one could see: the genocide would not be genocide. Crooked correctness, as we slumbered, our cheeks snuggled into rivers of hopeless resolutions and recommendations. Talking for the sake of it, not walking the talk, amnesia gripping us as we buckled under the atrocities; the killers marauding in the hills and cities, wings furled in ruthless determination, intense in purpose; and what had to happen, could only happen. Because never, never before had humanity been so ripped from the earth by genocide, with everyone just looking on. 12th April 1994; it is the 12th of April 1994; hate runs amok, kills, kills, kills, all week long, frenzy, the fury, stoked by the calls to murder from RTLM, the Radio Machete: “Come, my friends, let us celebrate the extermination of the Tutsis.” God will reward the just”. On prime time television the world over, the same images of the horrific scenes: bodies upon bodies floating on the Nyabarongo, mutilated bodies thrown by the street side. The machete, bludgeon-wielding murdering throng … The air, breathless, stinking of death. Genocide. Extermination. And the humanity, our unstable humanity, there goes our sleep for another thousand years. 12th April, 1994; it is April 12th, 1994. Operation Amaryllis. Operation Amaryllis under way. On the now dark red soil of the thousand hills, operation Amaryllis: men of the 3rd RPIMa (Parachute Marines Regiment), men of the 35th RAP (Parachute Artillery Regiment), Men of the 35th RAP, men of the 8th RPIMa. Operation Amaryllis Were they there to rescue the victims? Or for the condemned persons to erase crimes of birth? Or they were there for the hunted, the dismembered, or those killed, for having been born? There as a glimmer of hope in the midst of this wind of hatred howling over life, sheer gloom, and this dogged determination to kill, metallic? Then out of the blue, help at last … erm… for the victims? What an absolutely humanitarian move, nobility springing suddenly from the recesses of our silvered wings, to protect the torture victims? Solidarity nearing the horizon? Not on your life. In that gloom and doom, humanity is no where near: the lucky ones are only French nationals and Westerners. What about the victims? The victims stripped of their right to exist, bound for destruction? On our passage, their misfortune far from us: while the dead and the living continue to cry out; our conscience unfazed by their wailing; and then so long, so long, farewell and see you in another life. Operation Amaryllis. April 9, wheels up, as the first flight took to the skies, carrying 43 French nationals, interspersed with 12 members of the … Habyarimana family …. Bloody fog, in the froth of the day, Rwandans saved by the movement of our compassionate arms? Not those lives hunted down, nor the shattered ones, the maimed, nor the lives in ordeal, nor those in shambles, on borrowed time, staggering, finished off at the edges of our way, near our rescue parties. The mission orders, which, having noted, “the arrest and elimination of the opponents and the Tutsis, says that the French detachment will adopt a discreet attitude and neutral behavior towards the various Rwandan factions”. Operation Amaryllis, 12th April, 1994: another aircraft on the tarmac of Kigali airport; another aircraft which lifts up and, flies away and in its bowels, other strange passengers. Some names? Félicien Kabugas family and Mr. Ferdinand Nahimana. Kabuga? Date of birth: 1935. Profession: businessman, President of the Provisional Committee on the National Defence Fund (FDN), President of the initiative committee of the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM). Yes, Kabuga, Félicien Kabuga, President of Radio Machete; Kabuga, who imported 25 tons of machetes in November, 1993; Kabuga, again, who imported 50,000 other machetes in March 1994. Kabuga, Félicien Kabuga, still a wanted man for: genocide, attempted genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and the crimes against humanity (persecution, extermination). What about Nahimana? Ferdinand Nahimana, wanted for a long time, and had been on the loose. Nabbed in Cameroon, in March 1996. Nahimana? This was how the South African judge, Navanethem Pillay, described him before the ICTR: Nahimana was a reputed academic and Professor of History at the National University of Rwanda. He was Director of the Rwandan Office of Information and Founder of the RTLM. He was fully aware of the power of words and used radio, the communication means most capable of reaching the greatest number of people, to spread hate and violence”. Nahimana sentenced to 30 years imprisonment “for inciting directly and publicly to the commission of genocide and for persecution as a crime against humanity through the RTLM broadcasts”. 12th April, 1994; the 12th of April 1994. Operation Amaryllis. Operation Amaryllis; in our hustle and bustle, the atria of our heart, insensitive to cries of the victims, our sagging humanity, taken apart, buried in the darkness; and here we are, saddled, not only with the family of the one who funded the genocide, but also the ideologist of the crime, with going further. An act of such utter horrific monstrosity, which, in the cellars of our history, will pin the blame on us, again and again. No distortion of the facts, nor those unremorseful, shameless and babbling talks – highfalutin propaganda - will ever erase this shameful and nauseating assignment. Questions: Where, on that day, was the conscience of the custodians of our national fate? When did we start to flounder in that quagmire of our history? When did we start to turn toward the wrong side of the light, to lose our human clarity and give up on our very being? A few seasons earlier already? A few years before, with the Operation Noirot? The time has come to unbolt the rusty padlocks of our official memory and unroll the scroll of the parchment of our muddied presence in Rwanda. Even guilty as we are, in the face of history, must we muster courage to the very end, forgetting nothing, bent only on seeking the truth, if our future is to be any different from our past. And really, it’ll be of no use continuing to turn the pages against the truth of the facts. The writer is a French citizen

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Rwanda – Operation Amaryllis: Farewell, see you in another life