Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (8 page)

The refugee camps were set up in July 1994 and stayed in place for over two years. Some would swell to contain more than 400,000 inhabitants, becoming the largest refugee camps in the world and larger than any city in eastern Zaire. Together they housed over a million people. In a perverse way, they provoked a mobilization of international resources that the genocide never had. Within days of the first arrivals, aid workers detected a cholera outbreak; the virulent parasite spread fast in the unhygienic and cramped quarters. Without proper health care, the disease killed the weak refugees within days, emptying their bodies of liquids through violent diarrhea and vomiting until their organs failed. By July 28, 1994, a thousand bodies were being collected a day and dumped unceremoniously into chalk-dusted pits by the dump-truck load.

Foreign television crews who had not been able to reach Rwanda during the genocide now set up camp in Goma; the pictures of hundreds of chalk-dusted bodies tumbling into mass graves suggested a strange moral equivalency to the recent genocide, except that this catastrophe was easier to fix: Instead of a complicated web of violence in which military intervention would have been messy and bloody, here was a crisis that could be addressed by spending money. Over the next two years, donors spent over $2 billion on the refugee crisis in eastern Zaire, more than twice as much as they spent on helping the new Rwandan government.
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The RPF was furious. Vice President Paul Kagame lamented, “Personally, I think this question of refugees is being overplayed at the expense of all our other problems. We no longer talk about orphans, widows, victims [in Rwanda]. We’re only talking about refugees, refugees, refugees.”
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In the camps the living stretched out next to corpses, which nobody had the strength or the means to remove. Medical workers ran from patient to patient, jabbing intravenous liquids in their arms as fast as possible, often failing to find veins. Diarrhea stained people’s clothes and rags; everywhere, the smell of shit and death clogged the air. After one month, 50,000 people had died.

Beatrice arrived in a smaller refugee camp to the south of Goma and was spared some of the worst of the cholera epidemic. She had to face other challenges, however. Her days were made up of long stretches of waiting for the next food distribution, punctuated by meetings of her women’s group and visits to the health clinics. “Feeling useless is the worst,” she later wrote.
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Men would try to make extra money working in local fields or transporting sugarcane and cassava to the market, while women busied themselves washing the few pans and clothes they had taken with them from Rwanda.

On the outskirts of the camps, bustling markets appeared, where looted goods from Rwanda were available along with the usual assortment of Chinese-made toothbrushes, soaps, cheap acrylic clothes, and bootleg tapes of Zairian, Rwandan, and western music. A UN official catalogued the amenities available in five camps around Goma: 2,324 bars, 450 restaurants, 589 different shops, 62 hairdressers, 51 pharmacies, 30 tailors, 25 butchers, 5 blacksmiths and mechanics, 4 photographic studios, 3 cinemas, 2 hotels, and 1 slaughterhouse .
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Market stands advertised bags of generic, often expired or useless drugs, next to jars with traditional medicinal powders, roots, and concoctions. The camps were so well stocked that they became a hub of attraction for locals. Zairians from Bukavu and Goma trekked out to the camps to buy looted cars, stereos, and televisions. Youths from Bukavu went drinking on the weekends in the outdoor bars entrepreneurial refugees set up overlooking the lake, making sure they were home before night to avoid the hoodlums who roamed about looking for easy prey. Men in Bukavu still reminisce about the
mishikaki
, shish kebabs of sizzling goat and beef introduced by the refugees, that were downed with the local Primus beer.

Most refugees, however, like Beatrice, had fled Rwanda with little more than the clothes on their back and could not afford such luxuries. They ate once a day from the rations they received: a handful of U.S.-surplus maize meal, a cup of beans, a few drops of vegetable oil, and a pinch of salt.

Around Beatrice, refugee life gnawed away at the social fabric. A camp newsletter reported an alarming increase in child marriages, a rare phenomenon back home in Rwanda. Youths and older men married girls as young as thirteen and fourteen, sometimes taking them in as their third or fourth wives. Some youths had brought with them pillaged goods and money from Rwanda and were able to afford the dowries of several girls. Often families had broken up, and marriage allowed youths to rebuild their fractured world. In some cases, wives had to share their tiny shack with several other women. These marriages were often short-lived and produced many fatherless children, adding to the hungry and sick in the camps.
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Beatrice, who traveled from camp to camp holding women’s rights workshops, heard story after story of women suffering abuses. Many young girls were forced into prostitution, often selling themselves for the price of a plate of beans or a couple of
mandazi
, fried dough balls. As refugees were not, at least in theory, allowed to farm fields or move about freely outside the camps, boredom and inactivity became huge problems, especially for the thousands of unemployed. Men often resorted to drinking banana beer and homemade liquor. Alcoholism, domestic abuse, and violence were added to the long list of refugees’ woes.

For Beatrice, as for many others, life was dominated by fear and distrust. She and other women had denounced the RPF’s abuses in newsletters and statements. She thought that her name was on a blacklist in Kigali and that she would be arrested or worse if she tried to return. On several occasions, the RPF staged raids into the camps by Lake Kivu, killing scores of suspected militiamen and refugees. On the other hand, because she tried to organize women into selfhelp groups, the Hutu extremists in the camps also saw Beatrice as a challenge. Soon she was accused of being
pro
-RPF and of having Tutsi features. Thugs attacked several of her friends for their alleged sympathies with the new government across the lake, although the real motive was probably just to steal their meager belongings. In her diary she wrote, “Such is the human being: when he is afraid, he sees enemies everywhere and thinks the only chance to stay alive is to exterminate them.”

The war had created a new class of thugs and delinquents. Gangs roamed the camps, harassing women and stealing to survive. A Rwandan priest who had come to visit his family was bludgeoned to death and left on the edge of the camp; a woman and her five-year-old child were killed by a grenade thrown into their tent.
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The mere suspicion that someone was a spy was enough to rally a mob with sticks, hoes, and machetes. On October 25, 1994, in Kituku camp, refugees caught four men by the water reservoir and accused them of trying to poison the wells; three escaped, but one was stoned to death. Several days later, in a nearby camp, five Tutsi were chased by a mob and killed. One of them made it to a Doctors Without Borders health center, where he was beaten to death in front of the medical staff. According to another aid organization, “fresh bodies [were found] in Mugunga camp every morning in September.”
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A study estimated that a total of 4,000 refugees were killed in the camps, often at the hands of the various militias employed by the former government.
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The camps were pressure cookers. A thousand people lived in the space of a soccer pitch. All intimacy was banished, as several dozen people could easily overhear the lovemaking, quarrels, and gossip of each
blindé
’s occupants. The tents were too small to stand up in and, during the nine-month-long rainy season, were caked with mud inside and out. At night, temperatures sometimes plummeted to 10 degrees Celsius. Beatrice only had one light blanket and a few
kikwembe
that she used for clothes, swaddling children, and lying on. In the morning, she would wake up with condensation dripping on her.

Women had other problems, as well. The aid organizations running the camps didn’t provide sanitary napkins, and women had to use rags or tear up sheets to use instead. As there was little soap, these scraps of cloth became hard and caked with blood. To their humiliation, women had no choice but to try to wash these in the same pots they used for cooking. “The bloodied water snaked in rivulets between the tents and little puddles of blood formed here and there.”
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One of Beatrice’s neighbors was the tiny, malnourished Muhawe, a three-year-old orphan whose mother had died in childbirth on the trek to Zaire. When she first saw him, he was little more than a shriveled body with an oversized head, unable to walk more than a couple of feet before collapsing. The health center had given him nutritional milk, but he couldn’t keep the liquid down, and his grandmother, who was taking care of him, didn’t have money to buy more substantial fare. Beatrice began to buy morsels of beef and potatoes that she would mash into porridge and feed him. Somehow, after her two-hundred-mile trek to Zaire and the hardships of the camps, Muhawe’s suffering was the last straw for Beatrice. Disgusted and outraged by her life, she began writing at night in her
blindé
. “What had Muhawe and the thousands of other Rwandan children dying in the camps done? Was he, too, a
génocidaire
to have deserved this fate?” She began writing her own story, the horrors of the massacre of Tutsi, often crying herself to sleep.

For the humanitarian organizations, the dilemma was excruciating. The former government officials had set up administrative structures in the camps through which aid workers were forced to operate. With 5,000 people dying a day, they had to act, but unless the innocent civilians were separated from the soldiers and ex-government officials, aid groups were left little option other than to work with people guilty of genocide, bolstering and financing them in the process. Aid groups launched one of the largest humanitarian operations the continent had seen, bringing forty-five organizations and over 1,600 relief workers to Goma alone. In late 1994, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spent $1 million each day on operations in the camps. Its effort was effective: Within weeks of deployment, mortality dropped steeply, saving thousands of lives. At the same time, however, it became obvious that the aid was also sustaining the perpetrators of the genocide. As Alain Destexhe, the secretary-general of Doctors Without Borders, put it: “How can physicians continue to assist Rwandan refugees when by doing so they are also supporting killers?”

And they were supporting killers. Camp leaders refused to allow UNHCR to count the refugees for over half a year, inflating their numbers so as to pocket the surplus food, blankets, and clothes for themselves. In Ngara, Tanzania, food for 120,000 “ghost refugees” was being skimmed off the top, while in Bukavu leaders pocketed aid for 50,000 refugees over six months.
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Even after censuses were carried out, leaders stole the food of those most in need, pushing thousands of children into severe malnutrition. “We never had to worry about food,” Rwarakabije told me. “The United Nations supplied us with plenty.” As families starved, desperate mothers abandoned their infants at night at camp orphanages, where they were sure to get fed.

The abject suffering inverted the moral standing of the refugees and even soldiers—they became victims, not killers. Aid workers and local groups, who spent months living with and talking to the refugees, became influenced by the revisionist concept of a double genocide—that the Habyarimana government and the RPF had both killed in equal proportions. Caritas, a Catholic aid group, provided food to FAR military camps in Bulonge and Panzi, protesting that the soldiers “have to eat, they are not all murderers.” Groupe Jeremie, a Congolese human rights group affiliated with the Catholic church, published a collection of works that includes statements and reports by the government-in-exile.
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