Do Not Disturb

NRA commanders saw themselves as representatives of a people’s liberation army, not mere grunts, a fact that may explain the extraordinary number of memoirs that today crowd the shelves of Kampala’s bookshops. Self-conscious philosopher-warriors, their authors quote Sun Tzu’s Art of War with confidence and can distinguish their von Clausewitz from their General Giap.5

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This was one of the simple pragmatic decisions that led to the NRA victory. It bred an egalitarian atmosphere and a spirit of self-sacrifice.”6

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In reality, decision-making rested with a clique of Banyankole and Banyarwanda fighters who either were related to Museveni, had grown up with him, or had been part of the original group that accompanied him to Mozambique and Tanzania. Salim Saleh was part of that trusted inner core, and so was Fred Rwigyema

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But if his own account—and those of many of his lieutenants—are to be believed, Museveni’s main lesson was: never alienate the population on whose support you depend. “The population was the water and a guerrilla is a mere fish… so he should never antagonise the water,” as Pecos Kutesa put it, borrowing from Mao.7

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Kagame’s disruptive phase was behind him now: the military had given him structure and focus, while his friendship with Fred ensured he was treated seriously by his new comrades. Every school playground, sports team, or work crew boasts a dominant alpha male around whom hovers a tremulous shadow, egret to his buffalo. Kagame and Fred fitted into that familiar pattern of male bonding

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movements, NRA High Command relied on monitoring the army’s uncoded radio messages, a vital source of information. Kagame, it turned out, had the right kind of mindset when it came to dreaming up Machiavellian schemes to outwit the enemy.

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The plan he dreamt up to eliminate a sub-county chief in Kalungi who had been tracking down youngsters likely to join the NRA was one example. Kagame persuaded his fellow fighters to draft a letter thanking the sub-county chief for his help, saying that without him the rebels’ efforts would not have been successful, and saying they hoped such cooperation would continue. The young men put on school uniforms—shorts and shirts—got on bikes, and dropped the letter near an army road block. A few days later they heard that the sub-county chief had been arrested and executed

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It was very clever,” one of them told me. “We had never thought of that—how you can use the enemy to destroy itself.”9

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Kagame’s job—monitoring his fellow fighters—would not have been to everyone’s liking. But it perfectly suited his watchful personality. A puritanical teetotaler, he never seemed to let his guard down, keeping himself at arm’s length from the men, who came to feel he was constantly totting up their failings in some personal Book of Judgment.

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Guerrilla fighters swiftly get to know who can run the fastest, carry the heaviest equipment, march without complaining. Kagame possessed none of these attributes: his wiliness was what won him respect. But that admiration was laced with trepidation.

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He was a strict disciplinarian,” is the mantra NRA fighters nowadays use to describe the young Kagame, and when you ask them to expand—something they will only do off the record—it’s clear this is the gentlest of euphemisms. “There was a perception that he was the enforcer, the punisher,” says General Kayumba. “It was common knowledge.”

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When a disobedient guerrilla came up for court-martial, it was often Kagame’s job to make the case for the prosecution, revealing what he had discovered during the course of investigations to a disciplinary committee. Kagame requested the death sentence with such alacrity that he acquired a nickname that dogs him to this day: “Pilato,” they called him, in tribute to Pontius Pilate, the man who ordered Jesus’s crucifixion while washing his hands of moral responsibility.

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Did Kagame personally administer the death penalty?”

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And the young men—and some women—who joined the movement had already witnessed enough brutality, administered by Amin and Obote’s troops, to understand the need for discipline. It’s a mindset civilians struggle to grasp, the Historical admits, and which it can take decades to shed. “In the military you don’t question orders, you have that drummed into you. ‘Order ni moja,’ people would say: ‘There’s only one order.’ We were young, we didn’t question it at the time. I only questioned it later.”

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weapons, so along with six companions he crossed the front line, boarded a boat, chugged in darkness across Lake Victoria to the Kenyan port of Kisumu, then drove to Nairobi. Having signed a deal there with the head of a Baganda militia, he set off for Libya, where he persuaded General Muammar Gaddafi to make good on a promised arms airdrop.

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Over the following months, the NRA targeted river crossings and bridges allowing access in and out of the Luwero Triangle, using antipersonnel and anti-vehicle mines provided by the Libyans to carve out an operational zone with the town of Semuto as its de facto capital. Inside that zone, the movement set up Resistance Councils staffed by peasants, precursors of the local councils on which Museveni would eventually base Uganda’s national administration. A state-within-a-state was being created, and “cadres” were appointed to teach the masses the meaning of their ideological struggle.

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It was at this point that Obote set his sights on the Banyarwanda community, which was supplying Museveni with so many of his fighters. The ethnic cleansing program he set in motion eliminated any distinction between Ugandan Banyarwanda and refugees. Whether they had crossed over in the 1920s, 1960s, or their presence predated colonial map-drawing, anyone speaking Kinyarwanda was suddenly designated “foreign,” other.

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It began with a series of inflammatory speeches gleefully reported by the government-owned Uganda Times. The Banyarwanda had illegally voted in the elections, Obote claimed: they flirted with terrorists, they had been responsible for most of the atrocities committed by Amin’s State Research Bureau, and now they were supporting “bandits.”

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In September 1982, egged on by Rwakasisi and Patrick Rubaihayo, the agriculture minister and local MP, Mbarara’s district council ruled that all members of the Banyarwanda community were to be moved to the existing refugee camps. Like a flu bug, the virus of ethnic hatred had successfully jumped across Rwanda’s border and found a new host

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Patrick’s brother Ernest recalls that their father was one of the local Banyarwanda who protested. At a public meeting in Mbarara, John Kanimba upbraided Rwakasisi. “Our father said, ‘We have never been refugees. I was born here, my grandparents came here a long time ago.’” The minister was unabashed. “Those who came early from Rwanda should go early,” he told the meeting. Houses of the Banyarwanda started going up in flames.

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The systematic killings, rapes, and pillaging, targeting both citizens and refugees in western Uganda, began a month later. While the UPC’s youth wing, paramilitary special forces, and the police were usually in charge of operations, neighbors and former friends gleefully joined the fun. “A conservative estimate is that 45,000 head of cattle and 16,000 homes were destroyed,” reported Cathy Watson.14 Nearly 80,000 Banyarwanda either fled into the camps, crossed the border into Rwanda, or sat trapped at the border after Rwanda closed its frontiers

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There can be few experiences more traumatizing than becoming, overnight, an alien in your own land. The primal fear of the hate-fueled mob coming to get you, burning torches in hand, runs through our human DNA.

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Hearts hardened quickly in Nakivale: survival required it. “Sometimes you’d go to queue in the morning and return in the evening without any food,” recalls Jane. “Sometimes people were so weak, they’d faint, and be pushed out of the queue. If you loved someone, you would not send them to the camps

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Old friends could do little to help. If the worst of the violence swept through Uganda’s west, Banyarwanda in the capital did not escape, either, their social status providing no protection. Eliphaz Rwivanga, the Pepsi manager who had generously taken Patrick under his wing in Kampala, lost his job and was chased back to Rwanda, where he died.

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General Kayumba’s family was being brought similarly low. Born in Rukingiri, seventy miles west of Mbarara, he had enjoyed a thoroughly middle-class Ugandan upbringing. His father had served in the King’s African Rifles, the regiment trained up by British colonial authorities, later joining the Ugandan civil service, acquiring a herd of cattle and becoming a health inspector

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To many fellow recruits, these were just NRA fighters like any others. But those who got a little closer remarked on the single-minded ferocity with which the Banyarwanda guerrillas fought, their almost suicidal readiness to take risks. “If you were facing an enemy that was hard to overrun you’d form a crack unit. That meant choosing exactly the right selection of arms and the very best fighters,” my Historical source explains. “And they would often be Banyarwanda.” The first to volunteer for operations, the Banyarwanda would be the last to give up in the face of lacerating enemy fire

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For the “fifty-niner” refugees, that prowess could perhaps be traced to fireside tales they had heard of proud intore, the Mwami’s warriors, going into battle, and the assurances Tutsi elders had given them that they were destined to return to the beautiful country their forefathers had ruled for 800 years

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But with the Ugandan Banyarwanda, the explanation was simpler. Many had thought themselves an integral part of a society that, it now turned out, no longer wanted them. As motivations go, the knowledge that you have nothing to lose probably trumps loyalty to your friends, or even belief in a higher purpose. “They didn’t have much to go back to,” recalls my Historical contact. “So they would be very daring.”

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May 1983 saw a mass exodus of civilians. “It was a pathetic sight,” wrote Pecos Kutesa. “Old women and men, toddlers and babies strapped to their mothers’ backs, with each person carrying the few valuables that the enemy had not looted.” Government forces shelled the bedraggled columns of villagers all the way. In the hemmed-in Luwero Triangle, famine began to set in. Out in government-held territory, civilians were “screened” by the army—a death sentence for many—and penned into internment camps, the aim being to drain the NRA of its civilian support.

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Just as the NRA was forced onto the back foot, its luck changed. Major General Oyite-Ojok, always a hands-on commander, had been making active use of an aging fleet of helicopters, which clattered above the trees to pinpoint rebel bases. In the evening of December 2, 1983, shortly after takeoff, the helicopter in which he was traveling exploded, killing all aboard. As a battle for succession immediately began—a contest that took predictably ethnic form—the army canceled its ground offensive.

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The absence of clarity in part reflects the fact that Uganda in the mid-1980s had become a very frightening place for human rights organizations and journalists to operate. In the day, officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)—not usually easy to rattle—would drive into Luwero to visit the thirty-six internment camps set up by the government. But at night, when so much of the killing took place, these potential witnesses were careful to be back in Kampala, itself a grim city wracked by sporadic gunfire and prowled by the dreaded “computermen.”

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Obote countered by claiming that yes, villagers were being slaughtered, but not by his men. The perpetrators were NRA “bandits” who had either donned government forces’ uniforms or were wearing them already, since so many rebels were army deserters. Their brutality was part of a cynical “false flag” operation, he claimed. The worse these rebels-disguised-as-soldiers behaved, the more likely it became that terrified villagers would rally to the NRA’s side.

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One Western human rights worker who spent six months slipping in and out of the Luwero Triangle—who still prefers to remain anonymous—fumes at that self-deception. He became convinced that a razed-earth policy was at work. One particular evening, when he bumped into an army unit mustering on the outskirts of a village, sticks in his mind. “I don’t know who he thought I was, but the commander saluted when he saw me. I asked what he was up to and he replied, ‘We’re going into that village to kill every man, woman, and child. No dog will be left alive.’ And that was what the unit proceeded to do.”17

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In August 1984, the complicit silence was finally shattered. In congressional hearings in Washington and interviews with US newspapers, Elliott Abrams, the US assistant secretary of state for human rights, claimed that 100,000 to 200,000 civilians had died in the previous three years in the Luwero Triangle, either shot, starved in the camps, or tortured in illegal detention centers.18

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The British government, leaping to Obote’s defense, countered with an estimate of 15,000 dead, which Obote would later blame on ill-disciplined troops, accidental deaths in “cross-fire,” and “bandits” posing as soldiers

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But days later, Britain’s Observer splashed journalist William Pike’s account of his trip into the bush across its front page, an article that forever changed the way the international community viewed the Obote regime. He had seen firsthand the bodies dumped in shallow trenches inside abandoned ICRC camps, sprawled across the front rooms of looted houses, or simply left to rot in the open.20

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When I ask them what testimonies lingered, there is a short pause. “There was one incident in a village in which two boys were ordered to bite each other’s ears off,” Dr. Giller recollects. “They were friends, you see. And I also remember a mother describing how a soldier raped her daughter in front of her, pushing the girl’s legs above her head so violently, both legs were broken. Those are the kind of stories you remember.”2

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How can any human being commit such horrors? Revenge is one explanation. The Acholi and Langi had themselves been brutally purged from Amin’s army in 1971, summoned to barracks and shot in the thousands by supposed comrades-in-arms. As Rwanda’s own experience would prove, victims turned killers are capable of extraordinary viciousness.

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But most analysts point to the schism between Uganda’s southern “Bantu”-speakers and northern “Nilotics,” a historical rift entrenched by British policies of divide-and-rule. To empathize with a peasant grandmother begging for mercy, you must first accept she is a member of the same species. For Obote’s soldiers, Luwero’s inhabitants were “other,” and killing them—after playing various cruelly amusing games—came easily.

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Yet allegations of NRA atrocities linger, and the reason is their source. They are repeated—off the record, of course—not just by former members of Obote’s government with an interest in rehabilitating stained reputations, but also by some of the men who once fought on Museveni’s winning side

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One former NRA fighter I interviewed acknowledged being present at more than one “false flag” attack. “There were situations I witnessed where members of the public were killed just to give the impression that the government army was responsible,” he said. “I saw that. We wanted the villagers not to be government supporters. But these were uncommon incidents, only used in dire circumstances

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The motive for extreme cruelty, in this scenario, is different. Coldheartedness is excused by the deterministic Marxist theory, which dictates that the worse conditions become for the proletariat, the better it is for the revolution, so sacrifices must be made. But it requires a certain kind of mentality to be able to coolly turn such implacable theory into practice

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There’s another allegation that stubbornly surfaces in discussions of the Bush War, and this one involves the kafuni, a short-handled hoe used to dig holes and loosen soil. Part of any Ugandan farmer’s standard tool kit, it became associated during the Bush War with something grimly specific: a method of execution used by the NRA to dispatch suspected informants.

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A hole would be dug and the suspect made to kneel before it, elbows strapped together behind his back in a technique known as kandoya. A sharp blow to the back of the head with the kafuni, if correctly administered, killed instantaneously, and the body would tumble into the ready grave. Kafuni not only had the advantage of being silent, but it saved on ammunition, a key consideration for a group that had to steal every bullet. “That’s how you kill pigs,” my Historical contact explained. “It’s a Communist method, very harsh. With kafuni, those deaths were not made public, and the bodies were never seen again

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When I asked Winnie Byanyima, a former NRA guerrilla who went on to lead Oxfam and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), about the use of kafuni, she just grimaced: “You know, war is ugly.”22 Kizza Besigye, Museveni’s doctor in the bush and Winnie’s husband, was a little more forthcoming, specifying that kafuni had only been used in the movement’s early stages. “It has to be understood within the context of the time. The NRA was in total concealment. They could not cook, or light any fires, they had to maintain total silence during the day, and managing people also had to be done in total silence

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The problem is that the term “suspected informant” covers a multitude of sins. It can apply to a village sneak who relays information about NRA patrols to a UNLA army base for ready cash, food, or protection. But it could also apply to villagers who had the misfortune to bump into a guerrilla unit, for example, just as it was preparing an ambush or stealthily advancing on a government position.

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And he adds, “Those are the kind of operations Kagame was associated with.” For Kagame’s reputation as a “rigid disciplinarian,” his “Pilato” nickname, was not solely rooted in the role he played collecting evidence against court-martialed NRA fighters. It extended to what any human rights organization would regard as extrajudicial execution.

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Still clearly deeply troubled by his past, this former fighter raises two questions to which he would like answers: What happened to NRA recruits who became too ill to fight, and checked into sick bay, and what happened to those who decided, on principle, that the rebel’s life was not for them? In theory, he recalls, the latter were escorted to the front line and waved on their way. “But after liberation, we did not see those men again,” he says. In both cases, he suspects kafuni was used to eliminate a conundrum no guerrilla movement is equipped to handle. “Once you were in, you were in, you could not go back.”

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One of the NRA’s first acts after rolling into Kampala was to set up a Truth Commission, chaired by a venerable Supreme Court judge, to establish a historical record of human rights abuses in Uganda. Justice Arthur Oder toured the country holding public meetings at which traumatized witnesses gave evidence, with the New Vision newspaper running graphic daily accounts of the sessions on its back page

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In theory, the inquiry should have settled the question of who did what to whom in the Luwero Triangle. But Museveni’s pragmatic need to reconcile with Amin and Obote’s supporters swiftly leached away support for the process. By year two, the inquiry was running out of money. When the final report was published, eight years after the commission’s creation, only a thousand copies were printed, and they were not widely distributed. “I never met a Ugandan who had read Justice Oder’s report, and most were unaware that it even existed,” an American author later wrote.23

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You saw Kagame’s true character coming out, even then,” says Leah Karegeya. “I used to wonder what was bugging him. He would order these Ugandan businessmen arrested just because they had made money, calling them ‘thieves,’ and when a beautiful woman walked by, he’d call her ‘a whore.’ ‘What’s his problem?’ I’d ask myself. ‘Why call them that?’ But Fred would persuade him it wasn’t the right way. And Fred was so charismatic everyone listened.”

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Dr. Peter Bayingana, who had abandoned a medical practice in Nairobi to join the NRA, had been appointed director of the Ugandan army’s medical services. Lieutenant Kayumba Nyamwasa—as he was then—became assistant district administrator in the northern town of Gulu. The chief of military police, Kaka Kanyemera, was another Munyarwanda, as were several army brigade commanders, including Major Chris Bunyenyezi, commander of the 306th Brigade, head of the NRA’s training service. Frank Rusagara, who became a key RPF intellectual, was in charge of the Ministry of Defence budget

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As for Patrick, after a short stint with the army in Lira, northern Uganda, he’d been recalled to Kampala to fill an assistant director’s job at military intelligence, focusing on counterintelligence. He was now a lieutenant. “We used to hate soldiers when we were young,” marvels Leah, “and he had promised me not to become one.” That meant regular meetings with intelligence officials at the Western embassies, whose governments had transferred their support from Obote to Museveni with the smoothness of long experience. It also meant schmoozing with members of the ANC, such as Jacob Zuma, whose offices were located in Muyenga

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Pursed-mouth censoriousness does not make for the most convivial of atmospheres, so Kagame was not always the most popular of drinking buddies at the get-togethers up on the hill. “Don’t bring him tonight,” members of the group would sometimes urge Patrick. “We don’t need that stress. He spoils the atmosphere.”

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But Kagame was Patrick’s direct boss now, so that wasn’t always possible. And the former was often at a loose end. The “Pilato” nickname had stuck, and Kagame’s Ugandan colleagues tended to avoid him. “No one would speak to him in the barracks,” remembers an intelligence official. “The soldiers talked about ‘the long arm of Pilato.’”2

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Compared to many of his contemporaries, Patrick had seen little active combat, but it was already enough, as far as he was concerned. “He’d changed,” remembers a cousin. “For some reason, he never wanted to appear a military man. He didn’t use military escorts, he would drive himself around town in a white Datsun pickup, and he wore T-shirts and jeans, not a uniform. Yet he was a Big Man—a director of counterintelligence!”3

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Uganda’s entire administrative system was being restructured, using Resistance Councils as building blocks. Uganda’s war-shattered economy needed a massive electroshock, and Museveni turned for help to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Paris Club of donors, while urging Uganda’s Asians to return and claim their weed-infested plantations and bankrupt businesses. The erstwhile socialist had quickly been forced to recognize the merits of capitalism

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In ministries and departments, no one counted the hours as they attempted to get the machinery of state cranking back into action. The new appointees worked hard, but they played hard, too. Most of the former guerrillas were receiving regular salaries for the first time in their lives, and a government scheme made them eligible for generous bank loans. All the things that had been placed on hold during the puritanical Bush War years were suddenly possible: buying houses, acquiring land, dating, proposing marriage, and starting families. They were young men in a hurry

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But the Banyarwanda boys’ commitment to Uganda was not what it had been. “Our struggle was not their struggle,” remembers Kizza Besigye. The rolling military campaigns had begun to feel like someone else’s fight. What had been left unsaid among them during the bush years now needed to be explored, and that was why they began meeting in secret at Patrick’s home, looking across Kampala as the sun went down and the lights of the city came on

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Ambitious dreams were bubbling up in the group. But they would only take concrete form if someone took the lead and provided the community with a focus, voice, and destination. The man in question, as it happens, was not Paul Kagame.

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He was young, he was beautiful: even at the front, unwashed and unshaven, Fred somehow always managed to look impeccably groomed, parade-ground-ready. Contemporaries recall that no man looked better in uniform. A slim, smooth-skinned, self-deprecating Hector, he was admired by men for his almost suicidal courage in combat and adored by women for his compassion

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Faces soften when his name comes up. In the bush, when supplies were scarce, back when the NRA guerrillas were all cheekbones and jutting angles, Fred would refuse to eat until his men were fed, and he slept next to them on the ground. When they were wounded, he went to their hospital bedsides, and if fighters broke the rules and harder-hearted colleagues—friends like Kagame—called for their disciplining, he’d plead unashamedly for a second chance.

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I’ve met a former child soldier who adopted Fred’s name in the hope of acquiring some of his valor, a journalist who baptized a first son after him. News that the legendary Fred was on his way could itself tilt a battle in the government’s favor, with rebels scattering when they saw ropes being thrown from a helicopter clattering overhead. “They knew it was Fred coming, so they just ran,” a former RPF fighter recalled. “And his feet hadn’t even touched the ground.

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The Luganda language has a term: muyaaye. It can be used in a pejorative sense—“a layabout, a bum”—but in a political context, the emphasis is on accessibility, the absence of pretension: “a regular guy,” “one of us,” “a mensch.” “Fred was a muyaaye,” a Kampala journalist told me. “And so is Salim Saleh. But Kagame most definitely isn’t, and never could be.”

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Fred’s impact on crowds has remained with Charles Onyango-Obbo, former editor of Uganda’s Monitor newspaper. “People talk about charisma. I don’t know if it’s real, but Fred had that quality. He was a great soccer supporter”—Villa, Uganda’s preeminent club, was Fred’s team—“and I remember there was a match being played at Kampala’s main stadium. He walked in, not in uniform, just wearing slacks and a green polo shirt.6

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As is the way with celebrities, everyone who lived through those years and mixed in NRM circles has their own Fred story. Reporting on the campaign against the Holy Spirit Movement for the BBC, journalist Cathy Watson described how 400 soldiers who had mustered in a playground, hepped up for a planned operation, were shushed by Fred, who had noticed that children inside the classrooms were sitting their primary school certificate exam

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“This is a potential turning point in their lives,” said the young commander who had never completed his own education, putting a finger to his lips. “It was a magical moment, somehow,” Cathy told the Focus on Africa program, “all of these armed men sitting obediently in total silence for hours.”

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Noble Marara, who went on to join the RPF, remembers standing as a boy by the bedside of his older soldier brother, who had been terribly wounded during the Alice Lakwena attack. “Fred was touring the hospital with his bodyguards, wearing a Thomas Sankara T-shirt. He came up to my brother and said, ‘Franco, are you going to die?’” His brother tried to rally for his commander’s sake, pooh-poohing his injuries. “I can’t die for no reason,” he said.

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Fred looked in his face and he could see my brother was going. ‘We will meet in Kigali,’ he said. Then he went to visit the other patients, most of who[m] were Banyarwanda, and when he returned, Franco had died. So Fred flew us all back to the village in his helicopter to bury Franco, and the soldiers spent a week shooting in the air to mark my brother’s passing.” Such gestures were remembered.

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But my favorite anecdote comes from one of Patrick’s relatives. Fred dropped in at her sister’s house one evening, when she was still at the age when a child passes unnoticed in adult company. “He always arrived in a casual way, not making a fuss, wanting everyone to be happy.” A Western rock-and-roll hit came on the radio and Fred walked to where her sister’s baby lay gurgling in its cot, picked up the child, and started dancing to the music, serenading the baby. Her face lights up at the memory. “Ah, Fred, he was always so full of life.”7

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“Fred is the reason I joined the RPF,” Robert Higiro, one of the men hired to kill Patrick, once told me. “If I’m talking to you now, it’s because of Fred. And you know, I never even met the guy.”

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He belongs to a group of inspirational Africans—Patrice Lumumba, Steve Biko, and Thomas Sankara also feature there—who will be forever bathed in a James Dean glow of What Might Have Been. Some believe he should by rights be the president of Rwanda today. Others dismiss that notion as fanciful, pointing out that he was a military man with no political experience, so who can say what kind of leader he would have made? “Fred would not have run a country,” says John Nagenda, Museveni’s former official spokesman. “He simply wouldn’t have. He was just too gentle

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Why?” I asked, surprised by this sudden vehemence from someone whose views were usually so quicksilver.

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But it’s possible for an adored national icon to privately see themselves as an outsider. Kagame’s sense of rejection by Ugandan society set in at adolescence; with Fred, always more inclined to grant his fellow man the benefit of the doubt, the process seems to have taken longer.

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During a parliamentary debate that followed, Museveni allowed members to conclude that Banyarwanda would henceforth be barred from owning land or holding government office. “For the Banyarwanda refugees,” comments historian Mahmood Mamdani, “the die had been cast.” The “fifty-niner” refugees and Ugandan Banyarwanda formed a far from homogeneous community, but the forces of history were pushing them closer together.10

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By this stage, the Tutsi diaspora stretched from Quebec to New York, Nairobi to Bujumbura, Lomé to Dakar, Brussels to Paris. Its members worked tirelessly, via social clubs and cultural associations, to keep community identity alive.

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RANU stalwarts like Peter Bayingana abandoned civilian life to join their fellow Banyarwanda in the bush. Knowing how to handle a gun, how to give and take orders, was clearly going to be useful if they were ever to return to their land of origin. “Capacity building,” they called it. “We increasingly saw the need to master military science if we were ever to overthrow the Rwanda dictatorship,” Bayingana later told journalists

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When the NRA split into two in 1985 and Fred led his contingent toward the Rwenzori Mountains, the course he plotted conveniently took the NRA fighters past many of the old refugee camps in western Uganda—familiar personal territory—allowing him to recruit yet more Banyarwanda as he passed

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Many Ugandan and Rwandan civilians blithely assume that during the years in the Luwero Triangle, a covert deal was hatched between the Banyarwanda “boys” and their Ugandan comrades, amounting to, “We’ll fight for you now, if you help us later.” Gahima slaps down the notion. “There was no deal. I would not have discussed this with anyone as it would have been treasonable

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It’s a tribute to the Tutsi knack for secrecy that even men the Banyarwanda fought, slept, and ate alongside often had little grasp of their comrades’ identity or thinking. Accustomed to operating below the radar, shielding behind adopted names, and often “passing” as Banyankole, the Banyarwanda were careful not to speak Kinyarwanda around other fighters. As far as fellow fighters were concerned, they shared the values and agendas of any other NRA guerrilla.

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Personal security was not the only explanation for such discretion. Museveni’s “boys” knew that the entire dynamic on which Rwanda’s postindependence politics operated jarred with the NRA’s ideological vision, heavily influenced by Julius Nyerere. “Hutu” and “Tutsi” were seen as colonial concepts, and pining for an ancient homeland meant giving in to reactionary instincts when the liberation of the entire African continent should be the true revolutionary’s aim.

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We were pan-Africanists,” growls Salim Saleh. “The number one priority as an NRA cadre was to get that ‘tribe’ thing out of your head.”14

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The community’s careful self-policing continued after Museveni liberated Kampala. But with a grateful president in charge and Banyarwanda holding key posts in the new administration, there was more room to stretch. Hungry for advice on how to turn the varied aspirations of the diaspora into a dynamic mass movement and effective political force, RANU turned to Tito Rutaremara, a Communist philosopher based in Paris

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Rutaremara moved to Kampala to set up a task force. The result was a secret “school for cadres,” which flew Tutsis from across the world to Uganda to receive an education in political philosophy and the history of Rwanda. RANU was effectively mimicking the consciousness-raising techniques Museveni had adopted when he had dispatched fighters to train in Mozambique and Tanzania

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We would bring in university kids, train them, and send them out to mobilise,” Rutaremara told a US biographer. “We told them, ‘We have to liberate our country, but we have no means. The means is ourselves.’”15 Freshly indoctrinated cadres set off to mobilize refugee communities in Uganda, Zaire, Tanzania, Burundi, and Kenya. They even reached into Rwanda, establishing cells that hurriedly spread the word before President Habyarimana’s intelligence services arrived to make arrests.

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It was a time of heady, bubbling excitement. Utopianism is the man-trap of diasporas. Cut off from the gritty reality of daily contact, exiles’ understanding of the society they left behind becomes blurry. Prunier was struck by the dewy-eyed romanticism of the discussions staged by Tutsi cadres he met in Kampala during this period. “They were like the White Russian community in Paris after the Bolshevik revolution, dreaming of their homeland, trapped in a fantasy world. The Rwanda they pined for wasn’t a country which actually existed.”

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For any resistance movement, funding is a key weak point. So mobilization involved persuading the diaspora to contribute generously enough to deliver self-sufficiency: 10 percent of salary for those in formal employment, with comparatively well-off Tutsis in Western Europe expected to provide more than their cash-strapped African brothers. Fred approached Tribert Rujugiro, a Rwandan who had fled to Burundi and established what would become Africa’s biggest tobacco company, who agreed to back the organization

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Many members were conscious of another RANU weakness. If the movement was ever to acquire a sizable following, its message needed to reach far beyond a Tutsi minority that counted for only 14 percent of Rwanda’s population. The hundreds of thousands of Hutus who had crossed into Uganda, DRC, Tanzania, Burundi, and Kenya over the decades, taking up work in the plantations and copper mines, along with the royal court’s many Hutu retainers, needed to be persuaded that Habyarimana’s regime deserved opposing because it was corrupt, predatory, and nepotistic: issues that had nothing to do with ethnicity

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If it was to prove its good faith, and signal it represented more than one narrow interest group, RANU needed to showcase Hutus in high-profile positions. Fred and his comrades put out feelers to Alexis Kanyarengwe. A former Rwandan army colonel who had played a key role in the coup that had toppled President Grégoire Kayibanda, Kanyarengwe had fallen out with Habyarimana and was living in Tanzania.

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A slow courtship of Hutu activists and politicians in Rwanda who had been marginalized by Habyarimana’s clique began. The policy ruffled feathers among those whose loathing of Rwanda’s Hutus had been hard baked into them in the refugee camps, but seemed self-evident to former NRA cadres. “Let those guys have the government ministries and parliament, let them have the surface appearance of power,” Fred would reassure his Tutsi comrades. “As long as we have the army, then we can defend our people

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In December 1987, in a sign of its gathering confidence, RANU moved its annual congress from Nairobi to Kampala. During that semi-clandestine meeting, which Kagame missed as he was attending a training course in Cuba, the movement rebaptized itself the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Joining, for civilians, involved ibanga, an oath intended to drive home the seriousness of their commitment. It was not deemed necessary for serving members of the military

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The congress adopted an eight-point manifesto. Suspiciously similar to the NRM’s, it still differed in small yet significant ways. Whereas the NRM had placed democracy at the top of its list of priorities, this one put national reconciliation—code for “repairing relations between Hutus and Tutsis”—first

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For many exiles, the document felt like a revelation, saying all the right things. “Its talk of ethnic reconciliation, equality, of fighting against prejudice, of respect for the law, of the need to set up institutions, the fight against corruption… it was inspirational,” recalls a Tutsi who was studying in Belgium.16

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Fred Rwigyema and Paul Kagame, the two men with whom the RPF would become most closely associated, were only formally invited to join in 1988. The reason, Gahima explains, was the simmering rivalry between two young and charismatic potential leaders. Not Kagame and Fred—there was no question at that point of Kagame assuming prominent status—but Peter Bayingana and Fred. “Peter and Fred did not get along, and that’s why Fred wasn’t asked to join until then. There was an unresolved leadership question there

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The tension between the two young men was partly premised on intellectual snobbery. Bayingana had gone to college and qualified as a doctor, whereas Fred had left school at just fourteen. “Peter did not regard Fred, because of his lack of education, as an appropriate leader,” says Gahima.

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If Peter patronizingly looked down on Fred, he actively disliked his sidekick. “Bayingana despised Kagame’s violence and his divisive methods,” says General Kayumba. “He hated his killing.” The feeling was entirely reciprocal, and so was the suspicion many Fred loyalists nursed toward Peter

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This Peter you are talking about, he was a practicing doctor in Nairobi. He could have stayed there. Instead he came to the bush, bringing lots of medical supplies, to join the NRA. He is someone I am very, very proud of. As for his education, it’s great that he is an educated man. This movement needs winners.” The move was typical of Fred: embracing, humane, de-escalating. It was also smart. By endorsing Peter so unreservedly—Peter was regarded from then on as his de facto deputy—Fred had underlined who really was boss

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The RPF, in any case, did not have the time for a drawn-out leadership contest. Pumped up and ready for action, Tutsi youngsters were so desperate to do something that they could barely be controlled. “They were becoming unruly, a problem,” recalls one of Patrick’s Ugandan former colleagues.18

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Astonishingly, the secret still held—just about—in part because the RPF’s leadership decided it wasn’t necessary for these latest recruits to have a precise grasp of what exactly was being planned. Their existence, Fred and his comrades agreed, was enough, an investment to be tapped when the time was right. “In that situation you don’t need to tell every young person you recruited, ‘You know, we need you for the Struggle,’” says Gahima. “All you need is to have this resource, which you have got at someone else’s expense, when and where you need it.”

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“Museveni knew Fred would go back, it was inevitable, but I don’t think he knew the timing. [Fred] Rwigyema was listening to Museveni. My reading is that they must have discussed it and Museveni must have advised Rwigyema to hold on a bit.

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“Hold on a bit,” because Museveni had been discussing the fate of the Banyarwanda with President Habyarimana since the mid-1980s, well before Kampala fell to the NRA. The bilateral meetings continued after the NRA’s accession to power, as they gave an increasingly worried Habyarimana a precious opportunity to raise the troubling issue of the growing number of Tutsis in Ugandan army ranks. However Museveni might attempt to gloss them over, the extent of the “capacity-building” among the Banyarwanda was certainly not lost on Habyarimana

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He told Museveni, ‘You people are training the Tutsis to come and invade us,’” said a Ugandan official present at these talks. “And we were categorical. ‘No, we admit we have them in our army, because they were refugees, victims, like all the others—most of our combatants came because they were victimized—so they have come, they have trained, we don’t deny it, but we are not organizing them, we are fighting our war, we are not going to fight yours.’

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Habyarimana’s worst fears seemed confirmed when he attended the 1988 ceremony at which formal ranks in the Ugandan army were handed out to the onetime NRA guerrillas. “Habyarimana was invited to the ceremony in Lubiri barracks as a guest of the government,” remembers Besigye. “I’ll never forget how he looked that day. I remember his bewilderment at seeing Fred Rwigyema there being decorated.”

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Standing ramrod straight, Fred made deliberate eye contact with the flustered older man as he accepted his decoration as major general. See what the refugee children of yesteryear have become, read the message in his eyes. We are coming to get you. “Habyarimana,” says Besigye, “looked really, really fearful

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There was a very African element to Museveni’s inability to grasp the seriousness of their concerns. Even in modern African society, “elders” expect levels of obedience and respect from youngsters that seem bizarre to Western eyes. The fifteen- to twenty-year age gap between the NRA’s founding fathers and their Banyarwanda acolytes fostered an attitude of avuncular concern that blurred into condescension. “We used to look at the RPF as young sons, not even brothers,” a retired Ugandan commander told me. “Those boys”—he cites the biggest names in the RPF at the time—“those boys were my escorts.”21

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Museveni was not the only head of state pressing unwelcome changes on Habyarimana. In June 1990, French president François Mitterrand gave what was hailed as a landmark speech at the seaside resort of La Baule indicating that future aid to Francophone countries would be conditional upon democratic reform.

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When asked how such preparations passed him by, Jim Muhwezi, by then director general of the Internal Security Organisation (ISO), waxes defensive: “No one suspected they could do such a thing. We did not regard them as foreigners, they were part and parcel of our movement. So it was not our preoccupation to keep monitoring them. If I have people round to my house, how do you know if it’s a meeting or just socializing?”

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He asked me if I had numbers for people in Mbarara, and I said that I did. ‘Call them and let me know what they are seeing.’ I had the phone numbers of some military commanders in Mbarara, old comrades from the struggle, and some relatives, so I made the calls and phoned him back half an hour later. He was still seething, absolutely livid. Museveni can pretend, but I know when he’s lying, and he was really taken by surprise that night. He kept asking me to repeat things: ‘They did what? Went across with what? Heavy weapons, you say?

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Fred’s timing offered Museveni a fig leaf of deniability, and the Ugandan president made of it what he could. Hoping to partially defuse what was clearly going to be a diplomatic explosion, he sought to alert President Habyarimana, also in New York attending the UN General Assembly. But he had not provided for the quaking obsequiousness that develops around a despot.

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It was a tribute to Fred’s extraordinary pulling power that many of the soldiers who went across that day had no Rwanda connection of any kind. “Many of the boys who went with Fred were Baganda, or Acholi,” recalls Pecos Kutesa. “He was that charismatic.” This was not their fight, but Fred was their invincible commander, and where he led, they would follow.

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A glorious adventure that, this time, boasted some decent gear. “What did you take?” I ask the General. “Everything!” he says with a sudden burst of energy. “We took everything! Everything that Uganda possessed in terms of military equipment, we got a share of that. RPGs, grenades, SMGs, machine guns, trucks, bullets, boots, uniforms, everything we could carry. Remember that it wasn’t an overnight operation, we’d been planning it for years, whatever you could carry, you carried.”

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In Kampala, the invasion’s impact was electrifying. Members of the Banyarwanda community could finally drop the disguise they had assumed, and for many Ugandans, that meant registering their presence for the very first time. When Patrick rang one of his oldest friends to tell him excitedly, “The boys have crossed,” the response was one of sheer bemusement. “Which boys?” asked the friend.

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Fred Rwigyema was dead. The dancing, smiling, golden warrior had been killed on the invasion’s second day. Museveni’s surrogate son, Salim Saleh’s comrade-in-arms, the RPF’s military genius, the Tutsi community’s big-hearted hero and hope for a united Rwanda was gone, at the tender age of just thirty-three.

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The whole of Kampala was mourning,” recalls Sheila Kawamara, a young reporter at the government’s New Vision newspaper, who knew many of the NRM’s and RPF’s top players. “‘Not Fred,’ everyone kept saying. ‘Not him.’”12

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It would take a full month for the whispers to be confirmed in the Ugandan media.13 Before going into print, newspaper editors ordered their journalists to check and double-check the information being relayed by soldiers crossing back into Uganda, many of whom were declaring they no longer saw any reason to keep fighting.

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Did something more than shock lie behind that news blackout? “The story of the RPF is built on secrets,” a Rwandan journalist in Kigali once told me. “And the first big mystery is: ‘How did Fred die?’”

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Kagame regularly arrived in the early hours, his escorts having driven through the night in order to reach Kampala unobserved. He’d look on disapprovingly as Leah and her female relatives fussed over the exhausted men, slicing up pineapples and preparing glasses of milk, cups of hot tea. “You spoil them,” he’d say, before disappearing into Patrick’s bedroom to brief his de facto quartermaster and put through a series of calls to backers abroad.

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how would I say anything?’”

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“You have to understand,” Patrick said. “We are a small and densely populated country. We have a higher population density than any other country in Africa. So we have no space for another war. We just don’t have the strategic geographical depth.”

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As for Sendashonga, the RPF’s fear had been he would team up with the interahamwe, rally the Hutu majority behind him, and launch a fresh invasion, Patrick said. “We could not risk a popular civil war. So we had to cut off its head. The idea was a preemptive strike aimed at leadership decapitation, based on the doctrine that the strike must be preemptive and must be external

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Explaining all of this, Patrick sounded neither impassioned nor celebratory, Wilfred recalls. “He was just calm, reflective, and very matter of fact.

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It’s a jaw-dropping conversation. Not only does it give a taste of the rarefied nature of debate within the RPF’s intellectual elite—it’s hard to imagine Amin or Mobutu discussing an enemy’s elimination in such coolly abstract terms—but it exposes how self-conscious the RPF was about the choice of a geopolitical model whose worldview it knew chimed with the West. If Israel could do it, and get away with it, then surely Rwanda could too.

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The whole argument, though, begs a question. For Cyrie angrily rejects any notion that Sendashonga was a guerrilla leader in the making, and is furious with Prunier for lending credence to Kigali’s justification. “That was one of the stories they spread around. Kagame told Prudence Bushnell, the US ambassador in Nairobi, Seth was training a network in Tanzania to attack Rwanda, and she relayed that to the other Western ambassadors. It was totally false. The Americans fell for it because they wanted to.”

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He was always cautious about any armed struggle that would plunge Rwanda into another war. I remember him saying, ‘I would only give my okay to a war if I would be given 100 percent assurance that not one single civilian, especially among the Tutsi, would be killed, and this kind of assurance does not exist.’”

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That element of the conversation still baffles Wilfred. “Patrick and General Kayumba were prime architects of that targeted policy, so it’s beyond ironic they should have fallen foul of it themselves and become armed enemies of the state,” he says. “How, knowing Kagame as they did, having helped build this doctrine, did they think he would react when presented with an existential threat?

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Tiny, inward-looking, and overpopulated, Rwanda was in many ways the perfect environment for a highly effective intelligence service, and it already boasted a solid pedigree. During Habyarimana’s single-party rule, a system of community policing had operated at village level, with one official reporting back on each cluster of ten houses (nyumba kumi). Reproduced across the country, this cell system perpetrated the notion that snitching on your fellow citizens was not just forgivable, but admirable. After the genocide, the archives of the Service Central de Renseignements (SCR)—domestic intelligence—revealed Rwanda to have been one of the most intensely monitored societies on earth.

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“The files,” writes British author Linda Melvern, “revealed twenty-four-hour surveillance reports, and records of intercepted telephone calls and listening devices in hotels and embassies.” The archive contained intercepted mail and family photographs, transcribed interrogations, and the updated addresses of Rwandans living abroad.8

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It did not prove a difficult task. The urge to rat on your fellow man goes deep within the human psyche. After World War II, it was revealed that up to a million citizens in Vichy France had denounced their neighbors to the occupying Nazis. “In a sense, it was the only way people could express themselves in a country where there were no demonstrations, no rights, no vote: it was the voice of the people, although often a mean and petty voice,” historian Laurent Joly told a conference on the topic.9

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The more oppressive the regime, then, the more pronounced the tendency. To inform is to enjoy secret power over another, particularly intoxicating for those who have gone ignored all their lives. Investigating East Germany’s Stasi, a surveillance system she found had “metastasized” like a cancer during the Cold War, Australian journalist Anna Funder asked a former recruiter why so many East Germans had ratted on their fellow citizens: “Well, some of them were convinced of the cause,” he said. “But I think it was mainly because informers got the feeling that, doing it, they were somebody. You know—someone was listening to them for a couple of hours a week, taking notes. They felt they had it over other people.”10

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If “Keep us safe” was the RPF’s driving mantra, it was easier said than done. It had taken a generation for the refugee camps in Uganda to produce a rebel group capable of threatening Rwanda’s national security. This time around, it would take only a few years

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The plan possessed the mixture of ruthless brio and strategic chutzpah the world had learned to associate with the RPF, a movement beginning to feel it possessed a military Midas touch. But if the RPF was going to invade Zaire—its second cross-border operation in only six years—without alarming the African Union, the United Nations, and Kigali’s new friends in the West, it needed some kind of camouflage: a frontman who could lend local credibility while doing exactly what he was told. One possible candidate was Laurent Kabila, a Marxist militant from Congo’s Katanga Province quietly going to seed in Tanzania, under the protective aegis of a retired Julius Nyerere. Nyerere and Museveni, the two great puppet masters of the Great Lakes, together arranged for Kabila to be driven to Kigali to allow a cautious Kagame to size him up

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But the man was also genuinely Congolese, “a son of the soil,” and in contrast with most of Zaire’s opposition leaders, had never been co-opted by “the Leopard,” as Mobutu was known. “Kabila might have been old-school, but he had not been bought off. We gave him some credit for that,” Patrick told Stearns, adding, with typical frankness, “We weren’t looking for a rebel leader. We just needed someone to make the whole operation look Congolese.”12

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Accompanied by his son Joseph and daughter Janet, Kabila moved into a house in central Kigali, where Patrick assigned the then junior intelligence officer Dan Munyuza—the man who would later urge Robert Higiro to poison his former boss—as his main handler.

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Three other Congolese hopefuls, with varying levels of experience, mustered there: Andre Kisase Ngandu, aging commander of a rebellion in the Rwenzori Mountains; Deogratias Bugera, a Tutsi architect from North Kivu; and Anselme Masasu. The latter was a serving sergeant in the Rwandan army, but came from South Kivu and was blessed with an instinctive understanding of how to rally Zaire’s shiftless, questing youth.

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By late 1996, the rebels, their Rwandan minders, and their backers in the region were ready. On October 18 the coalition published the Lemera Declaration, unveiling the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL). The fact that a small town in South Kivu and the Kigali district where some of the rebels were based had similar names—”Lemera” and “Remera” respectively—conveniently bolstered the fiction that the deal had been signed in Zaire.

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Some 800,000 Hutus returned, trudging across the border without screening or checks. But it soon become clear that a large group of refugees, a group including the ex-military, interahamwe, and the genocide’s masterminds, had peeled off in the opposite direction, plunging into the equatorial rainforest as they headed for Shabunda in the southwest and Kisangani, the trading city built on the Zaire River

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The Rwandan army ruthlessly hunted them down. The RPF wanted the broad mass of the refugees back, but not these men. “These are not genuine refugees,” Kagame told an interviewer. “They’re simply fugitives, people running away from justice after killing people in Rwanda—after killing!”15 Women, old people, or children who had walked the red jungle roads alongside the fighters were dismissed as so much collateral damage. “Military and civilian were mixed. But everyone had more or less been militarized,” was Jack Nziza’s careless assessment. “There was no demarcation between them

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So effectively had the RPF seized the moral high ground by then, reporters initially struggled to believe reports of atrocities. When a French diplomat in Kinshasa who was almost shaking with rage assured me and a Dutch colleague that Kabila was the “Pol Pot of Africa,” adding, “What is happening in Kisangani will make the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge look like child’s play,” our response was incredulity. We left the embassy shaking our heads at how an intelligent official could be so blinded by his government’s ingrained hostility for the RPF.

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I often think of that wasted briefing as an example of how the storyteller’s need to identify Good Guys and Bad Guys, culprit and victims, makes fools of us all. If any uncertainty still hovers over what the RPF got up to inside Rwanda itself, there’s very little associated with the “excesses”—the preferred RPF euphemism—committed inside eastern Zaire during this episode. This time there were too many witnesses and too many incidents, extended over too many months.

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Well before that report’s publication, human rights investigators registered that the tactics used—UN Special Rapporteur Roberto Garretón detailed how radio appeals were used to summon Hutus to meetings in schools and churches, urging those hiding in the forests to emerge for medical care and food17—had a chilling familiarity. The same methods for gathering people in one spot, the better to eliminate them, had been described in the infamous Gersony report. Like a serial killer, the RPF had developed a recognizable modus operandi

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When reports of the massacres in Kisangani came out, I recognized the NGO workers’ descriptions,” said one of the field workers who contributed to Gersony’s research. “The mobilization techniques, the trucking in of highly motivated troops, the mechanics of how civilians were lured to certain places, the promises made: it was all the same.”18

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By Christmas 1996, the AFDL and its Rwandan backers controlled a sixty-mile buffer zone running along Zaire’s border with Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. The génocidaires faced a stark choice: either to use the refugee return as cover for infiltration of their own country, or to trek toward distant Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Zambia, and Angola.

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The First Congo War, as it would be known, now acquired a momentum of its own. As Mobutu’s demoralized army folded like a stack of cards, its retreating soldiers putting more energy into looting than fighting, excitement at the prospect of regime change rippled across the giant country. One by one, Zaire’s towns and cities fell, with Angola—which had always resented Mobutu’s support for the UNITA rebel movement—now joining the fray. Kisangani was captured in March 1997, after that came Mbandaka, then the mining center of Lubumbashi, then the diamond center of Mbuji Mayi

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If one is to believe the account given by General James Kabarebe, the real fighting was all done by the Rwandans, while the AFDL leadership, which had moved to Goma in “liberated” North Kivu, waited to be briefed on progress, then publicly claimed the credit. Kabila never visited the front, nor did he offer advice, which was fine as far as Kabarebe was concerned, as, he said, “I discovered he did not have any experience in military matters.… He only visited captured towns. Whenever we captured a town he would come and talk to the population. By that time of course I would be ahead, heading for another objective.”19

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When Kabila dropped in to receive the misplaced acclamations of a grateful public, Patrick was by his side. “He was the link between Kabila and Kagame, and all the countries in the coalition,” says General Kayumba. He hit it off with the Mzee and struck up a particularly close friendship with Bizima Karaha, a South African–trained doctor and Congolese Tutsi who became one of Kabila’s most trusted advisers.

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“I totally believed what they were doing in the Congo was right,” recalls Hranjski. “I’d swallowed the line that the Congolese were useless, bickering, and that the Rwandans should be given a shot at running the country. They were colonizers, plain and simple, but we were sympathetic. The Congolese raped and looted, with the RPF there were never any reports of raping and looting, so the argument was, ‘Look, these guys are not your typical army, they can put your house in order, why don’t you let them?’ In retrospect, it’s amazing what you can rationalize.”

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The First Congo War was over. The revolutionary leaders of the Great Lakes resembled a set of wooden Russian dolls. Inside Julius Nyerere had nestled Yoweri Museveni, inside Museveni lay Paul Kagame, inside Kagame nestled Laurent Kabila. One of the latter’s first significant acts was to baptize Zaire the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The other was to nominate James Kabarebe, the Rwandan general who had made it all possible, chief of his new army

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Over the next year, while Kabarebe struggled to shore up his position as the head of one of Africa’s least impressive military forces, General Kayumba—first as deputy head of Rwanda’s gendarmerie and then as Rwandan army chief of staff—targeted Hutu fighters left behind when the refugee camps emptied, who were attacking in battalion-sized units in Habyarimana’s old heartland.

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Realizing that the enemy was still adopting the tactics of a regular army, the General made sure his force was the nimbler of the two, using mobile units of 500 men, equipped with armored vehicles, to locate ALIR units, then taking them out with helicopter gunships.20

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“Kayumba was tactically brilliant,” remembers Rick Orth, who as US defense attaché in Kigali witnessed the General in action at close hand. “His great gift was that he understood how insurgents work and that these guys weren’t really guerrillas,” Orth said. “It’s easier to kill insurgents when they’re massed. He would create conditions in which they would mass so he could concentrate his helicopters and troops on them. They would scatter, and then he’d do the same thing again

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The campaign was utterly brutal, though, in terms of civilian casualties. Journalists covering what became known as the Northern Insurgency saw scores of bodies lined up along road verges and were allowed to visit a network of caves at Nyakinama full of rotting corpses—up to 8,000 were said to have been sealed inside, then grenades thrown in. It was the usual problem: Were the dead Hutus really “infiltrators,” as the army claimed, or villagers shot as suspected sympathizers? The often-indiscriminate nature of the killings, coming at a time when young Hutu men in the northwest were constantly mysteriously “disappearing,” left a permanent stain on General Kayumba’s reputation.22

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By April 1998, Rwanda’s security crisis was largely over. Thousands of young Hutus who had been training in Kivu’s camps were back in their own country. Reeducated at solidarity camps, they were meekly incorporated into Rwanda’s new army. Rwanda’s existential fears had been addressed in a manner of the RPF’s choosing.

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The episode is engraved on his memory. Kagame, who was supposed to chair the get-together, arrived in an inexplicably filthy temper. “He got up, addressed the first man: ‘You, Third Battalion Commander, what have you done?’ and then he kicked him,” says Habyarimana. “With the next man it was, ‘You, Brigade Commander, what’s your name?’ and he was kicked, too. He worked his way across the room, kicking and punching each one.”5

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In 2001, Patrick took the plunge. “I’ve done my part and I want to go back to school,” he told Kagame.

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“Back when you and I were covering the genocide, Michela, when the corpses were lying by the sides of the street and neighbor was killing neighbor, if someone had shown us Kigali today, with its high-rise buildings and its safe streets, wouldn’t we have thought that counted as a pretty good outcome, if we’re absolutely honest?”12

Ref. D324-Y

But any researcher under the age of forty has no personal memory of the country before the RPF. History, for them, began in 1994, and the country’s pristine infrastructure and clockwork bureaucratic efficiency are inevitably seen as Kagame’s handiwork, admirable work at that. But those, like me, who ventured into Habyarimana’s Rwanda also marveled at the ribbon-like smoothness of the roads, the sobriety of customs officers, the surreal fact that it was still possible, even as horror engulfed the country, to be fined by an overly punctilious policeman in Kigali for running a red light.

Ref. 9CE3-Z

As Peter Uvin points out in his book Aiding Violence, Habyarimana’s Rwanda was also a “donor darling”—“there was no colline and no public service where one did not find the four-wheel-drive vehicles of foreign experts”—only the bilateral donors in question were Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, and France, rather than today’s United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, and Germany.14

Ref. A3E4-A

You get used to killing. Human life becomes something plain, easy to dispose of. You spend 15–20 minutes on who to kill. On how to kill him: two, three days.

Ref. 6C98-B

never entirely clear, but it centered on the new curtains hanging in the presidential office. Himbara believes his former boss might have been annoyed that the order did not go to a business in which the RPF, which controlled so much of the economy via Crystal Ventures, held a stake.

Ref. 03AE-C