NS Special Report - The Journalist as God
Monday 26th January 2004

A seasoned foreign correspondent, John Kampfner thought himself inured to conflict. Then he went to Rwanda and had to decide whether babies should live

Journalist as God was not part of the job description. Ten years ago, I, like others who covered Rwanda, was put in that position. For four weeks in July 1994, I chronicled suffering, evil and goodness, the extremes of the human experience. I am not sure if it served any useful purpose, but to the extent that I could do any good, I tried accurately to convey the genocide taking place before us. I was not kitted out to determine life and death. I had not expected emaciated mothers to expend their last drop of energy thrusting their babies into my arms.

What do you do? Do you, as I did more than once, take the baby to the front of the queue of refugees, desperate for food, water and medical help, waiting outside the aid tent? That baby is probably saved by your actions. Another baby further down the line has to wait an extra minute and dies as a result of those same actions. I never found out what happened to those particular babies. Perhaps I should have done. Perhaps it didn't matter. This was, after all, an arithmetical deceit.

For years I tried to avoid thinking about Rwanda. Journalist as softie is not something you want to advertise, but that trip affected me badly. Recently I chanced upon a dusty purple book containing my cuttings. Those were the days before computers, and I had to write by hand and send my despatches by French military fax. Rereading my cuttings, and with the comfort blanket of a decade, I am struck by a number of things. How fruitless is the task of putting holocaust into the mind of the Home Counties commuter. How complacent the international community was about a massacre and a humanitarian crisis that had long been predicted. Whatever the faults of Iraq, of an excess of US-UK zeal to intervene, Rwanda epitomised the crime of non-intervention.

To recap the events: the death of Rwanda's president, Juvenal Habyarimana, in a suspicious plane crash in April 1994 led to the slaughter of up to a million people. These were mostly Tutsis, the minority tribe in Rwanda, who were seen as too powerful during colonial times. There had been massacres before, but this one was unprecedented in its speed, scope and organisation. Within hours, the Hutu Interahamwe militias went on the rampage. In three months, more than half the Tutsi population had been eliminated. At the same time, the small but well-trained Tutsi rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which had been exiled in Uganda, invaded Rwanda. Much of what was left of the population fled into refugee camps across the border.

UN peacekeepers followed their first instinct and evacuated foreign nationals and withdrew most of their forces. In June, the French, who had backed and armed the Hutus for years, sent in forces to restore a semblance of order. It was at that point that the influx of that other horde - western journalists - began.

My journey began at the French army base in the Central African Republic. After flying across the bush in our Ilyushin 76, we landed at Goma, the town on the Zairean-Rwandan border where the French had established their headquarters for Operation Turquoise. The following day, I went with the French troops by barge into Rwanda to the town of Kibuye, which they had made one of their forward posts. They chose the football stadium as their base because it was comparatively easy to defend. But when their vehicles disturbed the turf, they realised something was wrong. They returned to make an official report. People were reluctant to talk but, eventually, they told us what had happened. On 17 April, 7,000 Tutsis were killed in one day.

This is what I wrote, quoting eyewitnesses: "The militia locked the Tutsis in the stadium stand and fired rocket-propelled grenades at them from a nearby hill. Those who survived the bombardment were finished off with machetes. Local people were then told to dig a pit on the side of the stand, throw the corpses in and cover them with soil."

A mile away, in the church of St Jean, another 3,000 took refuge. "Now there are none left. Only the stench of rotting flesh and the odd bone protruding from the ground testifies to their existence," I wrote. "The altar had been replaced, but all around it were blood- stains the Hutus could not conceal. The corrugated iron roof was still speckled with bullet holes. A young seminarist, the only Hutu I found who showed a hint of remorse, explained what had happened. The Tutsi men stood guard outside the church that day, he said. When the Hutu militia arrived, the men begged that they be used as sacrifices. The militiamen opened fire on them. While the women and children screamed in the small chapels, they lobbed grenades through the windows." The bones, I observed, had been "gnawed by dogs and were covered with flies".


As we waited for the barge to pick us up, I wrote my story at the quayside, drinking a can of German beer given to me by a Hutu. He denied that any killings had taken place. We took an emaciated seven-year-old girl, who had been given shelter for months by a Hutu woman, to an orphanage in Goma. We felt better for that. That sounds faintly ridiculous, but we did. A few days later, I went to see her. The girl had been reunited with her sister. The director of the orphanage said: "If the devil exists, we have seen him in action. I can't understand what brings someone to cut open a pregnant woman's belly or chase children into the hills, slash them in the face and leave them to die."

We uncovered other sites, but within a week a second calamity had struck. As the RPF advanced on Gisenyi, the last town eluding them, more than a million people converged on the border. One member of the fleeing Hutu government told me: "We are a people without a country. They have a country, but no people."

Goma was only a few miles away. The hapless UN and the other aid agencies there had been taken completely by surprise. Little had been done to prepare for the influx. Many people had walked 100 miles from the Rwandan capital, Kigali. On 14 July, I wrote: "From dawn, as rebel forces took the Rwandan government's final stronghold, the bedraggled hordes swarmed into Goma. Zairean soldiers fired semi-automatic weapons over their heads and tried to snatch their machetes and clubs, but the crowds were unstoppable. It was one of the largest flows of refugees on a single day that Africa has ever seen. Some carried hens and dragged goats and cattle. Some wheeled bicycles. Some were crammed into buses and lorries. Children wandered aimlessly, searching for their parents and tugging at the hands of the nearest adult."

Cholera and dysentery consumed the area. I wrote of the stench of rotting corpses, babies' bodies wrapped in straw blankets and placed on the side of the road. As the numbers increased, the French dug mass graves. Soon they tipped the bodies in.

Four refugee camps were opened north of Goma airport. The closest, Munigi, was overwhelmed within hours. Situated on black volcanic rock, it was impossible to dig for water or to build latrines. The site became covered with faeces. Victims and perpetrators fled together and it became impossible for the agencies to distinguish between them. The Interahamwe strolled around the camps with sub-machine guns and machetes, divesting people of their last possessions. Radio Mille Collines, the station that had incited the slaughter, began broadcasting from inside Zaire, inciting Hutus to "fill the half-empty graves" with Tutsis.

I was driving with the French military outside a clinic. We saw a man in brown rags wriggling on the ground. Refugees were stoning and kicking him. Parts of his head were missing, cut away by blunt knives. We approached the mob: they stopped, but only momentarily. The French shrugged their shoulders and got back in their vehicle. I did so, too. So inured had I become to violence that only later did I have second thoughts about my actions.

Every day, I faxed over what I saw. One day: "Neither the French military with their tipper trucks, nor the aid agencies with their masked volunteers, can bury the people as quickly as they are dying. At first, the bodies were stacked in neat rows, bundled up in straw matting at the dusty roadside. But now they are simply being left to fester where they died. Some have already been run over and squashed by vehicles, like rabbits on an English country lane." Another day: "It is sometimes hard not to believe that there might be some form of divine vengeance meted out here. Yet the children, like a two-year-old girl in a pretty blue dress I saw dying, are being punished in their innocence. Wherever I walked, someone believed that somehow I could do something to save them."

I had covered wars before, but it was the silent passage from life to death that most unnerved me. It was the sight of a baby drinking from the breast of her mother minutes after the mother had died. It was the women, their eyes having already passed into another world, offering me their babies.

After a while, I gave up trying to help. I wanted out. I had been there longer than most. I got out via a relief flight to Zimbabwe.

For a few years, the Interahamwe militias continued to terrorise the camps, leading the Rwandan army to invade. Many Hutus, perhaps some of those I met, have been sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal. But I stopped thinking and writing about Rwanda. On the day I returned to London, I was invited to Glyndebourne. Over their champagne and smoked salmon, I couldn't help smelling corpses. I haven't been back - either to Glyndebourne or to Goma.



This article first appeared in the New Statesman and may not be reproduced without permission.