The graves are not yet full

This weekend I finished reading a book by Bill Berkeley, titled, "The Graves are Not Yet Full," named after an announcement played on Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines in Rwanda in 1994.

You have missed some of the enemies.
You must go back there and finish them off.
The graves are not yet full!

The book addresses cases of genocide and war in six African countries - Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda and Rwanda - and examines these conflicts not as the results of age-old tribal hatreds, but as calculated means used by tyrannical leaders to exploit ethnic divisions for their own benefit. Before Berkeley analyzes these issues in detail, though, he begins with a prologue about Rwanda.

Prologue: A Farmer
by: Bill Berkeley

"I killed because I was forced to," said that man in the dirty white shirt, his face knotted with anxiety, eyes averted. "I either had to do it or I would die myself. Many were killed for refusing to kill."

His name was François-Xavier Sibomana, forty-seven years old and balding. he had thin wrists and knobby, callused fingers. He was talking about the murder of his brother-in-law, Isaac Kimonyo.

"I did not kill him single-handedly," he explained. "We would converge on a person. We killed a number of people, but jointly." In his own village they killed nine people, he said. He used a machete; others used clubs. "I knew some of them personally. They were neighbors."

But his own brother-in-law?

"He did not deserve to die. He was an old man."

François rubbed his hands on his worn gray cotton trousers, crudely repaired with black stitches at the crotch. He brushed the ground with his blue canvas sneakers, with no laces, no socks. "We killed him in his house," he continued. "He was dragged from the bedroom and killed in the sitting room. Emmanuel struck him first. He was the leader of the militia. I could not do it myself. For me, I stood by and watched. There was nothing I could do."

Nothing he could do?

"I made no effort to stop the killers because we were led by the leader of the militia," François insisted. "So nobody would dare to ask to spare the man."

François Sibomana had spent most of his life cultivating sorghum and sweet potatoes on the steep mountain slopes of Kibungo Prefecture in eastern Rwanda. He said he had never killed before. He had a wife and eight children, though he didn't know where they were. He was now in captivity - an admitted member of the Interhamwe militia, "those who attack together," the Hutu death squads that had stabbed, clubbed and hacked to death up to a half million Rwandans, mostly ethnic Tutsis, in the weeks just prior to our meeting.

"Everybody had to join," François told me. "It was the thing to do."

We were sitting in a vacant lot in a rubble-strewn, rebel-held town called Kabuga, on the outskirts of Kigali, the Rwandan capital. It was June 1994. Rwanda's genocide was still unfolding in the south. Hundreds of dazed survivors of the massacres, some of them wrapped in gauze that barely concealed their hideous machete wounds, loitered amid the wreckage of their lives in the looted and gutted ruins nearby.

From a crackling transistor radio behind me I could hear Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (A Thousand Hills Free Radio-Television), the state-allied broadcasting arm. "Defend your rights and rise up!" a voice on the radio was singing. There were drums and guitars in the background. A popular crooner named Simon Bikindi was beseeching his fellow Hutus - the bene sebahinzi, the sons of cultivators - to carry on the slaughter without delay. "Defend your rights and rise up against those who want to oppress you!" The drumming and strumming had an oddly intimate effect. Bikindi was singing in riddles, addressing mbira abumva, "those who can understand." His voice was soft, gently cadenced, almost lyrical. He was warning his listeners of the malign intentions of the bene sebatunzi, the sons of pastoralists - the Tutsis. "The Tutsi are ferocious beasts, the most vicious hyenas, more cunning than the rhino," he cooed. "The Tusi inyenzi" - cockroaches - "are bloodthirsty murderers. They dissect their victims, extracting vital organs, the heart, liver and stomach."

In the days leading up to my meeting with François, I had visited a plain brick church by a dirt road south of Kigali that was filled waist-high with about two hundred putrid, maggot-riddled, freshly slaughtered corpses. Later I met a wide-eyed eleven-year-old girl named Umulisa, dressed in a threadbare blue and red sweater, with smudged cheeks and a luminous smile. Umulisa had laughed at me hysterically, irrepressibly, rather than tell me in her own words about the day two weeks earlier when she fled from her home as the militia arrived, then returned an hour later and discovered her mother and father, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles in a heap of severed heads and arms and legs on the floor of her living room.

The previous evening, in an abandoned store less than a block from the lot in which François and I were talking, I had met a middle-aged gentleman named Isadore, who had survived with his wife and children but lost twenty immediate relatives. Isadore had stared at me with tired, quizzical eyes. "I was very much surprised," he said. "Looking at my neighbors, I thought they were friends. I was very much surprised that they were among the people who came to try to kill us."

As I sat now with François in that vacant lot in Kabuga, the old familiar questions were running through my mind, from another part of the world, a half century earlier: How was such a horror possible? How could ordinary men like this one - a farmer, middle-aged, the father of eight - participate in a monstrous crime? What malignant blend of bigotry and fear, coercion or cowardice, history, politics, poverty and ignorance, envy, opportunism, unquestioning obedience, peer pressure perhaps - what brought out the shark in this man?

I looked into François' eyes. He seemed bewildered by my questions. All he said was this: "The message from the top was passed down to the local village chiefs, the conseillers. The conseillers had lists of Tutsis who should be killed. They simply organized their constituents."

He kicked a pebble and stared into the middle distance.

"The leaders of the party and the leaders of the militia rounded up all the men in the village. We were told that we had a mission. We were given a list of people to kill. If we met someone on the list, they would be killed."