In the first weeks of the genocide in April and early May 1994, my father ordered us to stay in hiding in our house in the commune of Kigali. Aman is a Hutu, the eldest son of a successful businessman in Rwanda, supporter of the Mouvement Democratique Republicain (MDR) whose moderate members, of which he was one, were systematically murdered by extreme Hutus in the genocide. Aman is talking in Cairo, having fled Kigali in the late summer of 1998, believing himself to be in danger of being kidnapped and sent to fight in the Congo.
My fathers business was importing in bulk, and we had enough food to last us for many weeks. Our family consisted of my father and mother, both supporters of the MDR, my younger brother, and four little sisters. We had been there for a month and eight days when the Interahamwe, organised bands of youths who carried out much of the killing under military leaders, visited our house. Until then, they had been concentrating on killing all Tutsi and high-level opposition Hutu, but by May most of these were dead, and the youths were casting their net more widely. Their targets now were all those middle ranking Hutus suspected of Tutsi sympathies and opposition political views.
The group consisted of six young men, and the one in charge was holding a list. They began ransacking the house and demanding money. I heard one of them say: Today its you.
Aman was in the toilet when the men came: he witnessed much of what happened next through a crack in the door. Amans father told them to take what they wanted, but to let his family live. My mother, my sisters, and a Hutu neighbour of ours who had been hiding with us, were stripped naked. I watched as my two youngest sisters were raped. I couldnt see what happened to my mother, but I think she was raped too. My father and my brother had their arms tied behind them. I could hear sobs, pleas, and the sound of blows. Then they found me where I was hiding. One of the men said: Ive found the real Tutsi were looking for.
Survival, amidst new dangers
Though Aman is Hutu from both sides of his family, he has many of the features more commonly associated with the Tutsis a thin, angular face, high forehead, and slender fingers and hands, and he is unusually tall and thin for a Hutu. During the genocide the killers had been given orders to execute what they called the cockroaches, members of the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army, with particular savagery. Assuming from his appearance that Aman was one of the RPA soldiers, who had been taken in and hidden by sympathetic Hutus, they tied him up and took him round to the front of the house, where the rest of his family were being held. He heard one of the men say Hurry, hurry, we have other houses to do.
The leader then killed my father with his machine-gun. Aman tells the story very precisely, trying to hold himself together in the detail. His parents, he goes on, were given no chance or time to explain the error about Amans identity, and harbouring a Tutsi was enough to warrant instant execution. The others shot my mother, my brother, one of my sisters, and our neighbour. They poured petrol over our house and set it alight with a bullet. Then they took my other sisters away with them. I have never seen or heard from them again. Aman fears that they were taken as sexual slaves for the Interahamwe, which was a common fate for young women captured during the genocide.
Aman himself was now led away for execution by the guillotine method, involving great brutality and pain, for only rarely did the killers waste bullets on Tutsi vermin though some of the victims were allowed to pay the Interahamwe for a bullet execution if they had the money. They led me to the edge of a pit about fifteen meters deep and began stabbing me with their bayonets and beating my spine with the butts of their rifles. I fell into the pit, which was full of dead bodies and wet with blood.
After two days, feeling his way over the bodies, covered in blood and in great pain, Aman recovered sufficiently to climb out of the hole. It was dawn; he was hungry and thirsty. A young girl collecting wood saw him, and came over. She was Tanzanian, taking refuge with her family in the Tanzanian embassy and for the next six months they looked after him. By now the genocide was over, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandese Patriotic Front was in power and over a million Rwandese had fled, most of them to Tanzania and Zaire, either to escape the slaughter or fearing reprisal killings by the RPF. When the day came that his Tanzanian friends left Rwanda, Aman went back to the remains of his home, and dug up some money five thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars his father had buried under a terrace before the killings started. He used it to live, to rent a room, to return to his education.
What Aman realised, however, was that he would never be safe. He owed his survival, as did many of those who extraordinarily lived through the genocide, to a series of lucky events. But he was now doubly in danger. As a Hutu, he was permanently at some risk in the new Rwanda, where Hutus were automatically suspected of participation in the genocide, and over one hundred thousand had been locked up to await trial; and as a survivor, witness to the Hutu massacres, he was a prime target for the Interahamwe raiding from over the border in Tanzania and Zaire, young killers eager to leave alive no survivors to give testimony before the War Crimes Tribunal set up at Arusha.
And there was a new peril. By 1998, disappearances were increasing, particularly of young men who were either killed immediately or kidnapped to be trained to fight in Congo. One night three men in civilian clothes armed with Kalashnikovs came to where he was living. They demanded money and beat him, and said they would be back.
My fathers land had now been confiscated from me, Aman continues. I knew I would never be safe. I had just enough money left to buy a plane ticket for Cairo. In September 1998 Aman arrived in Egypt. He had completed his secondary schooling and done a course in computer studies. But he had finished his fathers hidden cache of money and was penniless. He was also in some pain from the injuries to his back before he was thrown into the pit. In Cairo, he was taken in by a Burundian student, and, in February 1999 he applied to UNHCR in Cairo for refugee status. Almost exactly a year later, he heard that he had been rejected. He appealed, and his appeal, too, was rejected and his file was then officially closed.
Aman has now been outside Rwanda for over three years. For the last year, since his file was closed, he has lived illegally, without passport or papers, knowing that he can at any moment be picked up by the police, put in prison and deported. Since leaving Rwanda, he has learnt that there has been a hardening of attitude in Kigali against defectors, which makes it extremely likely that he would be arrested on his return. Not surprising then, that he feels his fear of persecution, should he go home, to be well founded.
Over the last four years in Egypt, twenty thousand asylum seekers from all over Africa have had their final appeals turned down and like Aman live in an illegal limbo. What happens to them now, no one can say.
