Granta 125: After the War Read Online Free

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    The Hotel Ibis was being renovated, repainted in its distinctive mustard colour, two new floors rising from behind a temporary fence of iron sheeting, so I checked into the Hotel Credo, about half a mile down the road – it was shabbier but felt more neutral, less haunted. That night the downpour was so ferocious I was aware of it in my sleep. In the morning a small, bedraggled brown bird sheltered on my balcony to dry its wings. Mist rose from the hillsides across the valley, mingling with smoke from hundreds of kitchens where breakfast was being cooked on charcoal stoves.
    Butare has a special place in the story of the Rwandan genocide. Six officials were tried together and convicted of conspiring to wipe out the Tutsis in the town and surrounding area. The case was one of the key trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania. The most notorious of the six accused was the then Minister of Family and Women’s Development, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko.
    Some months after the genocide, I had chased her down to a refugee camp across the border in what was then called Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she was looking after orphans for the Catholic charity Caritas. A short, plump woman, wearing a sky-blue dress like the Virgin Mary in a medieval painting, she agreed to speak but not to show her face. The cameraman filmed her back. I interviewed her in French as she spoke no English. She was, she said, an exemplary wife, mother and government minister. She knew nothing and had done nothing. I remember a sentence she spat out in anger when I confronted her with evidence I had heard from survivors and witnesses. ‘
Je ne peux pas tuer même un poulet!
’ (‘I can’t even kill a chicken!’) As the atmosphere grew tense, her acolytes closed in around us, eyes burning, weapons surely somewhere close.
    ‘Time to go,’ said the cameraman. We drove as fast as we could to the border, leaving the smouldering anger of the camp behind.
    Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was convicted on seven charges, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Many of her surviving victims, including some who had testified against her, still live in Butare. Among them is Rose Birizihiza. A woman of medium height with delicate features, she came to my hotel wearing neither the traditional Rwandan long cotton-print wrap skirt nor Western clothes, but loose pink trousers and a tunic, like a Pakistani salwar kameez. She had a strong presence, a sense of self that was rare in survivors. I had taken a suite so I could talk to her somewhere private, where she would feel safe, but the Hotel Credo turned out to be a bad choice as it was a mere twenty yards from the house where a local official had kept Rose for three months as a sex slave during the genocide, and even nearer the place along the main road where she had watched people being hauled out of their vehicles and slaughtered.
    ‘I remember seeing people being killed in the rain at Nyiramasuhuko’s roadblock. There was a hole right behind this building where they would throw the bodies,’ said Rose. ‘She gave the men the idea of raping Tutsi women. She had a house in town where her boys could take them. Sometimes they stripped them there at the roadblock.’
    The ICTR had concluded: ‘Sexual violence was a step in the process of destruction of the Tutsi group – destruction of the spirit, of the will to live, and of life itself.’ It had not worked with Rose. Not only had she escaped death, but her spirit and will to live were remarkably intact. It was hard to stop the words that tumbled out of her, even to get her to pause for translation. Some inner force compelled her to keep talking.
    ‘Before, I used to cry when I told my story and sometimes I couldn’t finish,’ she said. ‘I had many things inside me. I could take a piece of paper and write everything. Many people encouraged me to talk because they saw how talking helped