Granta 125: After the War (4 page)

‘Words like, “Let’s finish the job.”’

‘Do people want to say those words? Do you?’

He stared into the distance and said nothing.

‘People here are ignorant,’ he said after a long pause. ‘If we had known there was no Hutu and no Tutsi we wouldn’t have done the genocide. But those feelings are still here.’

The villagers elected monitors who were required to report to the authorities if anyone said anything that could be designated ‘genocide ideology’. Viator described how they would listen in on people’s conversations, take notes and call local officials if they heard anything suspect.

‘We’re really scared of those spies,’ he said.

He thought the survivors in Nyakisu were doing fine – they had free health care, their children got free education, and some had been given houses. It was people like him who were really suffering.

‘We, the people who were arrested, they hate us so much,’ he said. ‘Even the Hutus who didn’t participate hate us. They just wish we would go back to prison.’

I
s nineteen years a long time? Rose was a young woman of twenty-three at the time of the genocide. Epiphane, Ninja’s mother, was twenty-seven. Viator had been thirty-five. Nearly half a lifetime had passed since those days, but maybe it’s still too soon to let people say everything they keep in their hearts, to let out their pent-up hatred and fear. The sneaking and spying, the ban on ‘genocide ideology’ at least keeps a lid on it, apart from the occasional murder of a sad, raped woman. Or maybe that’s the problem, all the things unsaid, the barely contained anger and guilt that smoulder beneath the surface.

‘Anyway, Rwandans are like that,’ said another man I met in Nyakisu who had recently been released from prison. We were talking in a small room where no one could hear. He strenuously denied that he had killed anyone, all the while jiggling his hands, picking up my tape recorder and putting it down again, tapping his feet in a kind of St Vitus’s dance.

‘Rwandans are circumspect, they whisper behind their hands,’ he said. ‘We hide things.’

In Kigali I had a drink with my diaspora Tutsi friend.

‘Rwanda is a nation running away from its history,’ he told me. ‘We say: “The ploughman never looks back.”’

While the government controls language in an attempt to rework the nation’s sense of self, he was hungrily seeking out books by foreign anthropologists and historians who have analysed the power structures of the past and explained how the division between Hutu and Tutsi came about. After studying genetics he had concluded that the distinctions between races and tribes were tiny. To him the answer was to acknowledge identities and then dismiss them as unimportant.

‘Let’s demystify the whole Hutu–Tutsi thing with scientific facts and open discussion,’ he said. ‘As long as it’s spoken behind in tones then it is incubating hate. Let people know that Hutu and Tutsi all share 99.97 per cent of DNA as humans, and these are artificial terms.’

Transparency is antithetical to Rwandan culture as I understood it. Political power depends on circles of influence that have nothing to do with ministries or departments or official titles.

‘The problem is that we have informal and illicit power structures,’ said my friend (I’m withholding his name for a reason – talking about such things can get you into trouble in Rwanda). ‘That’s how you hear that so-and-so is powerful but has no official position. There’s no real party system or career path.’

In the past, the legitimacy of the king was established by his power over the rain, so he needed reliable rainmakers. President Kagame’s dwindling circle continues to make the rain – it’s a system of patronage, but the life of the average Rwandan has undoubtedly improved, and the government is efficient. The World Bank pumps out statistics to prove success and I have the evidence of my eyes: roads, clinics, schools. There is much talk of changing the constitution so President Kagame can run for office again in 2017. I suggested to a few people that in a society where the majority slaughtered the minority, democracy is difficult, but was assured that Hutus would vote for Kagame. He has delivered a better life. He has brought the rain. And he has ensured there is no credible opposition.

On my last day in Butare, Rose took me to see another of her projects. The governor had asked her to lead his programme of reconciliation and unity, and she had gone at the task with her customary enthusiasm. We drove to Akabakobwa, a forested hill twenty minutes’ drive from town. The rain had cleared, and the smell of freshly turned earth was in the air. As we walked through the trees I could hear the sounds of hacking, chopping and slashing. We emerged from the forest into an open field to see some four hundred people using axes, hoes and machetes – the implements of genocide – to clear tree stumps. Women, some with babies tied on their backs, dug around the base while men, dripping with sweat, attacked the roots. I watched the shadow of a machete moving across the red earth as a young man in a white T-shirt and rolled-up jeans set about his task.

Back in 1994, on 22 April, local officials told Tutsis to gather at Akabakobwa promising they would be taken to safety, probably in another country. Hundreds gathered, maybe thousands. Who knows when the Tutsis realized that this was not deliverance but a trap? None lived to tell the tale. Cold and wet, carrying their few belongings, they must have huddled together, confused and terrified, children wailing, no one knowing what would happen. The
interahamwe
hid in the banana groves and maize fields, until they had surrounded their prey. Then they fired at the hill. Once they were satisfied that the Tutsis were dead or fatally injured they closed in to finish off their victims with grenades and clubs. They left the bodies to rot. Two years later a local official planted eucalyptus trees on the site, the forest designed to hide and not to commemorate the dead.

It is a tradition in Rwanda that people should do community work, known as
umuganda
, one day a month. They labour together to clear ditches, tidy the village or plant flowers on traffic roundabouts. During the genocide,
umuganda
included killing – local officials told Hutus it was their civic duty to murder their Tutsi neighbours. Rose’s community labour project was to disinter the bodies of those who had died at Akabakobwa, so they could be reburied with dignity.
A memorial, concrete pillars rising from the ground and rust-red struts in place for the pitched roof, was under construction at the top of the hill. In Rwanda there is no tomb for the unknown soldier, but dozens for unknown civilians.

Rose had been on a course organized by a German aid agency that had got her thinking about the relationship between survivors and killers. The first thing she had to do was overcome her own inability to talk to Hutus. Prayer had helped – she was a devout Christian – and then the thought that pain and anxiety were not the preserve of victims.

‘It’s not only survivors who have trauma but also perpetrators,’ she said. ‘One tried to commit suicide three times because he didn’t want to live with the people to whom he did bad things. We were taught how to take care of them.’

Over a period of months, she had persuaded perpetrators to pay compensation to their victims for property destroyed or stolen. Gradually, she said, some degree of trust had been established. This project was the result. I was watching killers and survivors working together.

I stood on the crest of the hill looking out over the rice fields planted in the valley below, and the slopes beyond covered with banana, maize and millet. Everything was green and lush from the rains, as it must have been nineteen years earlier. Five small boys with firewood on their heads stood watching the adults working; a few women were sitting on the ground in the shade of some saplings to breastfeed their babies. The landscape that had held such terror had become benign, even bucolic. In those days, banana groves were cover for the killers, millet patches places where
interahamwe
would take Tutsi women to rape them. Now they were just fields of crops, flourishing in good rains.

I thought back to 1994 and how I had paced about my house in Kigali listening to the rocket fire and the rain. How little I had understood; how much has been revealed in the subsequent two decades. Most of the leaders of the genocide have been arrested and
tried at the ICTR. Academics, journalists and human-rights workers have written thousands of reports and books. Films have been made, documentaries broadcast, and a genocide museum built in Kigali. There are projects to identify each and every victim.

But in the hills of rural Rwanda, the unrepentant and the unforgiven are living alongside the unhealed. They abide by rules – spoken and unspoken – governing what is sayable and what is taboo. You could take
umuganda
at Akabakobwa – the rows of killers and survivors sweating alongside each other – as evidence of hope, proof that Rwandans can now establish a shared memory.

Or you could see it as something else entirely, a ritual of reconciliation masking far deeper feelings of anger and pain, proof that Rwandans – Hutu and Tutsi, perpetrator and victim – might live together for decades to come without betraying to each other what they feel inside.

I
n November, I had my first military encounter in Jaffna. Not what you think. Not a skirmish. The war here, in Sri Lanka, was over. But you could say it was an encounter with the war within: guilt, which I am beginning to see riddles everything. I was asked to take Father Perera and his friend, Patrick, from England – a younger, balding acolyte – to a military base for a meeting with a big major. Maybe the officer had turned to Christ, in the wilderness, and was looking for the necessary sacrament, or else it was part of the reconciliation effort the bishop was going on about on the radio. At any rate, my mission was to find the camp and deliver the pastors in time for an army dinner. That was fine. I have no problem with our armed forces. They are all heroes now. We have nothing to fear.

A small town about twenty miles from Jaffna was our turn-off. At the crossroads by the municipal market, where prawns and pumpkins are bartered and old ammunition shells bought for scrap, a monument commemorated a Sinhala king’s victory over a Tamil prince in the second century
BC
. It did not seem to point to much of a reconciliation route to me but I took the turn, as I had been told, and tried to pick up some speed. My plan was to do most of the drive before nightfall, so that there would be some light to guide me, but my passengers had been too slow getting out of the Hibiscus. I could hear them on the veranda discussing redemption versus education instead of brushing what remaining hair they had on their heads and putting on their evening cassocks, but what could I do?

As we got out of the town, the dark enveloped us. I have heard that in some parts of the world the light of humanity has made a black night impossible – darkness has been dispelled by what
Time
magazine calls light pollution. We could do with some of that pollution here. Especially if humanity is what causes it. My headlights illuminated nothing. The stars scattered across the sky thinned out. Fortunately the road was straight. A whitish crumble fell off the edges but I couldn’t tell whether it turned into marshland or salt pans further out.

‘Father Perera, did they say how far before the next turn?’ The numbers of the milometer tumbled in the glow of the dashboard.

‘I was told about half an hour’s drive.’

‘But at what speed, Father? The army has to march, no? Or they go by tanks. Not Toyotas.’

The acolyte, Mr Patrick said, ‘I have Google Maps on my phone.’ Our interior lit up as he switched on his cell.

I slowed down, more out of instinct than practicality. There was no real alternative to carrying on as we were. I heard him tap the screen. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he swore in the bluish glare. ‘No signal, sir?’

‘The map showed nothing. Just a blank space like a bloody desert and now it’s gone off.’

‘War zone, sir. Army business, no?’

We carried on mapless in no man’s empty sand. After about another fifteen minutes, my headlights picked out a jeep stuck by a bumpy white culvert. I made out one soldier leaning against the back, smoking, while another irrigated the desert. I stopped and rolled down the window.

‘Is the Samanala Camp on this road?’ I asked in Sinhala.

The smoker came over and peered into the van. ‘Why do you want to know?’

I said I was bringing a priest for an important meeting with a big major. ‘He is waiting for us,’ I said.

The soldier puffed on his cigarette. I thought Father Perera might offer him some guidance on protocol, and that he might take it out of his mouth for a moment, but there was only the tinkle of piss in the dark. Then the soldier barked something at his companion. The other
soldier did up his flaps and pulled out his phone. He had a signal, but then of course he would. How else could an army function? We waited for the talk to subside outside. Then the first one smacked the windscreen and said, ‘OK, uncle. Can go.’

The phone boy waved a tainted hand as if he were tossing a grenade. ‘Go until you come to a fork in the road. Take the left. One K down you’ll come to the camp.’

‘How do we recognize it?’

‘You will know. There is nothing else.’

A
bout ten minutes later, we passed a fence made of barbed wire and brown twigs. Then another soldier stepped out onto the road with a flashlight. He pointed it at a gate. I turned the wheel. It was good to be guided. I felt deep down I must be a believer like Father Perera. I drove slowly. Long low buildings disappeared in black. I felt we should be on camels, or at least donkeys. Something more biblical than my van.

‘Father, where now?’

‘Keep going. There will be a sign.’

A man of faith has much to be thankful for in a world as dark as ours.

Small red border plants flared in neat lines. Clumps of starry flowers blinked. This was a military village with civic pride. An oasis of luxury, rather than a lean fighting unit out of
Spartacus
or
The Guns of Navarone
. The road curved. We came to a lighted building with three magisterial mango trees guarding it. The building had its own inner fence made of dried palmyra fans, more decorative and intricate than anything else around. There was yet another soldier waiting for us. He was the sign. He came forward and opened the side door for my passengers. Father Perera got down first. The soldier clicked his heels. He didn’t say anything. Mr Patrick looked ghostly in the lamplight. Father Perera turned to me. ‘Vasantha, you must join us.’ He sounded like Jesus must have done among the Pharisees, and I began to wonder whether this was how conversion worked. Tonight,
I thought, I could be an officer and an apostle. It felt good. I suppose that’s the thing about it.

I asked the soldier whether I could park the van around the side. He shrugged. In the military I thought one had to be more decisive and heroic, but perhaps that was further up the chain of command and only in times of real conflict. Peace has made us all dozy, I guess. Even the crickets were muffled.

The room was enormous and had electricity. You could do a wedding party in there, no problem. Red cloths had been laid with crisp folds at the corners. We were ushered to the bar, nicely fitted out with cushioned rattan furniture. The TV in the corner was droning Rupavahini news.

Father Perera took the chair in the centre of the row lined up against the wall; Mr Patrick sat next to him. I went for the smallest corner seat. Outside my van, I never quite know my place. Only that it is very easy to make a fool of oneself in unknown territory.

No one said a word. On TV, Chinese VIPs were shaking hands. Why do people shake hands? Why do the Chinese do it? Did Chairman Mao ever do it? Do any of them wash their hands properly? From what I have seen in comfort stops up and down the country, it is a big surprise who does and who does not wash their hands. Not all foreigners do. Pontius Pilate did, but the Unilever man from Birkenhead the other day definitely didn’t, despite the discount he must get on all soap products. Ordinary soldiers in a desert obviously can’t. Or if they are in the middle of a battle or something. That’s why hygiene-wise it is always better to keep one’s hands to oneself. But perhaps in China they are commanded to wash their hands regularly. Cleanliness is next to godliness, my father used to say. As a Party wallah, he would have known.

A few minutes later, a small man in white livery limped in carrying a tray with glasses of orange juice and beer and something colourless and sparkling. Father Perera picked a juice, Mr Patrick a beer. I asked what the other drink was and the man serving cringed as if he thought I might scold him. His skin was flaky. ‘Lemonade,’ he whispered.

But one needs to know. I have responsibilities. I can’t be drinking army gin and tonic and driving back blind as a baboon, whatever the state of the nation.

‘So.’ Father Perera raised his glass. ‘This is very impressive, isn’t it?’

‘I expected a camp to look more temporary,’ Mr Patrick replied. ‘Not so solidly built. This is all very settled.’

‘Concrete beneath the palmyra.’ Father Perera reached behind his seat and slyly prodded the pale brown leafy wall.

Mr Patrick took out his phone and scrolled through something on the screen. ‘A clear shot is all we need,’ he muttered. He seemed a long way from ordination.

Then a door opened and a powerfully built man slipped in. His face was proud and full, his smile glittery. ‘Good evening, gentlemen. Welcome.’

We all rose to our feet. ‘Good evening, Major.’ Father Perera’s voice shifted up as though he were acting a part.

‘Sit down, please, sit down. You have a drink? Good.’ The major strode over to the solitary presiding chair under the TV. ‘Please sit. Dinner will be served at eight. Is that all right?’

‘Very kind of you, Major.’ Father Perera sank down first. I followed, falling in line. Mr Patrick stared at our host and fumbled with his chair.

The major’s hands, I noticed, were immaculate. Another officer appeared – younger, taller, slower – whose face was round and beautiful, like a woman’s, and whose petal-like lips were large and sensitive. ‘Captain Vijay, come and sit down.’ The major then looked at me.

‘Vasantha,’ I managed to say. ‘My van.’ I looked at Father Perera for corroboration but he was too busy exchanging glances with Mr Patrick.

‘Good. Welcome, Vasantha. Welcome to the army.’ The major turned back to the other two. ‘So, you are touring and wanted to see our operation.’

Father Perera took a quick sip of juice. ‘Yes, Patrick is in training in the UK, church, you know, not army. But he was keen to see a real camp and our mutual friend, Peeky, yours and mine I mean, said you were the man to arrange it.’

‘Old Peeky? You went to London with that fellow for one of his Christian conventions, I hear.’

‘Actually a conference on conflict resolution in Berne. Switzerland. He is in tourism, no?’

‘Funny bloody business.’ The major laughed. ‘We were in college together, you know. Then he took the high road and I took the low. Look what happened.’

‘You can never tell,’ Father Perera assured him.

‘I know. The ways of God and all that.’ The major put his hands together in a small prayer. ‘You should have come for lunch, Father. We could have shown you everything then. But in the dark, what can you see?’

‘Yes, quite.’ Mr Patrick nodded. His shiny face reddened. He lowered his head as if he had shaved his horns. ‘We were hoping to visit one of the IDP camps.’

‘That, I am afraid, is not my department. This is only a military camp.’ The major cracked his knuckles deliberately, one after another, and made a small fort with his fingers. He was never a man afraid.

No one had mentioned IDP camps while we were in the van. Those pockets in the jungle where hundreds of thousands of Tamil refugees – Internally Displaced Persons – were kept at the end of the war until the government worked out what to do. Or so they say. I had a suspicion that Mr Patrick just wanted to unsettle the major. Perhaps that is how one proselytizes. Internally displace first, then reprieve. The pastor must find a way to go where angels fear to tread, no?

‘We have many parishioners back in England who are very concerned about Sri Lanka,’ Mr Patrick added, a little nervously. ‘I want to tell them what it is really like. We hear such confusing things.’

‘That’s media, no? It is important for you to see us as we are. After the war, we are now pure administrators, one and all.’ The major
smiled charmingly and turned to Father Perera. ‘Tell me, Padre, you must have been to Jaffna before?’

‘I have indeed, but not for a few years.’

‘It is certainly time for you to return then. Your flock must be anxious.’

Father Perera bowed. ‘Some, but we do have brothers who have been in the area all along.’

‘Oh, I know, I know. I wish your brothers had taken your flock out of the war zone and left us a clear field to operate in.’ The major demolished the small structure he had made and rubbed his hands together as though he were oiling the joints of a machine. ‘So, what do you think? You like our little mess?’

I was taken aback for a moment, until I realized what he meant. Father Perera knew straight away. ‘Very nicely appointed.’

‘We’ve been here for more than ten years. One must do one’s best.’

‘That is a long time for a camp,’ Mr Patrick butted in.

‘For us it is home, Patrick. I myself planted the orchard on my first posting.’ He laughed like a man used to laughing alone. ‘Between battles, you know.’

‘The mango trees outside?’ Father Perera asked.

‘Not those. No, those were here. Pukka trees. You know, the Jaffna mango cannot be beaten. And we have the fruit straight from the tree. When it is ripe, it just falls into our hands. You cannot get a decent mango in Colombo these days, you know. They are all forced to ripen. All sorts of cheap market tricks. None of that here. The real thing, you get here. We will have some tonight. You will see.’ He spread out his arms. ‘I love this country.’

‘Sounds like you will not be shifting camp for a while then, after so many years here. You will remain in occupation?’ Mr Patrick’s face showed thin, craven lines of daily strain more easily than smiles. His was not the face of a regular believer; there was much too much zeal in it.