An Irish journalist who was a correspondent for a British newspaper, The Independent, and made trips to Rwanda at the height of the Genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, is reaching out to Raymond Mbaraga, a Genocide survivor who dared speak to him despite the dangers he was exposing himself to do so at the time. David Orr regrets that at the time, his desire to get a story outweighed the possibility that he was putting him in harm’s way.
Below we produce the letter in its entirety.
Dear Raymond,
It’s been a while since we were last in touch. Coming up for 27 years by my reckoning. I hope you’re well. I have to say, you have been on my mind recently so I thought I’d write to you. The idea came to me as I lay awake in the middle of the night. I’d been clearing out an attic and had come across a box of old notebooks and articles I’d written during my time as a newspaper foreign correspondent covering the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Skimming through them, I had come across your name and accounts of our meetings back in 1994.
To be honest, this was not the first time I thought of you over the years. Every so often, I would hear something about the genocide on the radio or see a documentary and my thoughts would turn back to those terrible days of murder and mayhem. I would remember our chance meeting in the internment camp where you were held while the killings were at their height, and our improbable second encounter a few weeks later.
An RPA soldier stands guard at a church in Rukara, eastern Rwanda.
Then life would take over and you would slip from my memory, you know how it goes.
This time round, though, I was determined not to let the opportunity pass. I will contact a paper in Rwanda, I thought as I lay awake, and write an open letter to Raymond. Perhaps he will see it. So, I emailed someone I knew in Kigali and he gave me the name of the editor and here we are.
Of course, I looked you up on Facebook but couldn’t find any Raymond Mbaraga. Maybe I wrote your name down incorrectly when I was interviewing you in that terrible death camp. Maybe – and this would have been sensible given the circumstances – you’d given me a false name.
But you would have had no reason to do so the second time we met, for by then the danger, or at least the most imminent danger, had passed. Anyway, I’m hoping that Raymond, the teacher whom I met all those years ago, is still alive and well, and will read these words.
Injured children at a Red Cross hospital in Byumba, north of Kigali, in 1994.
The first thing I’d like to say is how sorry I am. Sorry that I took you for granted, you who risked his life to tell me what was going on during that nightmare of a time. Of course, I tried to protect you by not naming you in my first report. I had led you away from the prying eyes of the camp guards to somewhere that seemed safe and we’d talked.
But, reading back over those articles for The (London) Independent, it occurs to me that getting a story was probably the biggest imperative in my reporter’s agenda at the time. Had I given it more serious thought, I would have realised what a huge risk you were taking in talking to me. And, sure enough as you told me later when we met again, you had been betrayed by other inmates desperate to curry favour with your persecutors.
It was only good luck and ingenuity on your part that saved you from death when the Interahamwe guards came looking for you.
But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. For the sake of other readers, I should explain what was going on at that time and how I came to meet you. It was mid- May 1994 and along with a group of other journalists, I had just arrived in Kabgayi on the outskirts of Gitarama (current Muhanga District) where the genocidal government was holed up.
Army checkpoints, bolstered by Interahamwe militiamen armed with machetes and clubs lined the streets. Gunfire and mortar rounds could be heard in a distance as the then rebels of Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF-Inkotanyi) advanced. The killings had been going on for more than a month. Bodies littered the countryside and flowed down the rivers.
To set the scene I will quote from the report I filed for the newspaper. I have the cutting in front of me now. You might find the title - ‘Inside Rwanda’s Death Camp Hell’ – a bit ghoulish but it was not far from the truth.
Empty machine gun shells frame a family photo, outskirts of Kigali
"In a barbed-wire enclosure on the outskirts of Gitarama more than 1,000 Tutsi languish in the worst conditions I have seen. Every day, I was repeatedly told, groups of men are taken from the camp and clubbed to death by government soldiers.” (I note that I wrote "1,000 Tutsi”, not "Tutsis” which would have been more correct but, in those early days, most of us foreign reporters were still learning about Rwanda. I remember one prominent magazine referring to Tutus and Hutsis. I, however, had visited Rwanda before the genocide and so, in theory at least, knew a bit more than some of my press colleagues).
And then I quote you. "First of all, they started taking out the older men but now they are selecting the younger ones as well,” a young man in a baseball cap told me. "We are very afraid but we know that if we tried to leave the camp the Interahamwe would get us.”
The Interahamwe, I explain for the benefit of readers, are "gangs of machete-wielding young men from the government’s youth wing. Their ranks are now swollen by those whose only interest is to join in the hunt.”
Militia (unknown alignment) on the outskirts of Kigali
And then I describe the scene in that camp where you, Raymond, were being held. "Hundreds of people fill the courtyard of a former seminary; hundreds more huddle together in fetid rooms, cellars and outhouses. The dead lie among the sick and the dying. There is little food and no running water. An elderly woman takes my arm and points pleadingly to her stomach. In the centre of the compound children play in the dirt beside two bodies placed on a stretcher.”
Little did I realise that, by interviewing you, I had left you a marked man. By the time I and the other reporters had reached Gitarama, the guards were already looking for you. Why they had let us into the camp in the first place, I have no idea. Of course, they denied that anything was amiss.
They told us you were being held there for your own protection. But, overcoming your fear, you had revealed the truth to me. Perhaps you thought a report in a well-known newspaper could help turn the tide of events.
Suspected killers held captive by RPF soldiers at a Belgian church in Rukara
But you overestimated the power of the international press. The killings went on. And though aware of what was unfolding in that small land-locked African country of yours, the West did little to stop them.
I have so many memories of your beautiful country, Raymond, so many memories of your terrible country as it became in 1994. Driving through the lush, green hills to visit the mountain gorillas the year before the genocide broke out.
Interviewing President Habyarimana months before the shooting down of his plane and the outbreak of the genocide. Standing above the Kagera River in May 1994, bodies churning in the waters below.
People fleeing the killing near the Ugandan border
Staying at the Méridien Hotel in Kigali – no running water but CNN on TV – as mortar rounds exploded in the hills around us. Hanging out at the UN compound with the ill-fated peacekeepers who failed to keep peace. Meeting Paul Kagame in the bush as he and his forces marched on the capital and ultimate victory.
Re-reading my reports on the genocide, I am struck by the endless litany of horror and misery. I made three reporting trips during May and June 1994, two on the government side during the height of the killings, then one on the side of the RPF rebels. In that time, I must have interviewed hundreds of people, many of them survivors of the slaughter. Most emerge nameless from the lines of newsprint.
From among all those I met, why is that you emerge with such clarity and force? You may well have stayed in the nameless shadows had it not been for the fact that, a few weeks after our first encounter, I ran into you at a displaced persons’ settlement outside Ruhango town, by now in RPF control.
‘’The massacres and rapes continued after you left,’’ you told me. "The Interahamwe came looking for me when they heard I’d spoken about what was happening. It was only God who saved me. I dug a hole in the floor of a hut and my brother covered it with leaves. I stayed buried there for five days, praying I would not be found. Then the RPF arrived and freed us.”
Two of your brothers were butchered by the death-squads, you said. You had spent six weeks in the camp. No one knows how many were killed there. After the arrival of the RPF, those like you who were strong enough had walked to the newly-liberated towns.
When my press colleagues and I returned to the camp, we found some survivors still there, too weak or traumatised to leave. Among the mounds of bodies, I discovered two babies still alive, one of them clinging to its dead mother.
"Can the few who survived these horrors ever really recover?” I asked by way of conclusion. "I do not know, for, though I have spent weeks in this blighted country, I cannot imagine what such suffering must do to the minds and hearts of human beings.
All I can say is that Raymond Mbaraga, when I met him again, had a glimmer of life in his eyes. Now and then as he talked, a smile came to his lips. He even mentioned some of his plans for the future.”
What those plans were, I don’t say. Are you still a teacher, I wonder…Do you still have a glimmer in your eye? I’d love to know what became of you in the years that followed, Raymond. You were a young man when we met.
I like to think you got married and had a family. Perhaps the story of your miraculous escape from the death squads has become part of your family lore. Or maybe you were so distressed by what you’d been through that you prefer not to speak of those terrible days. My memories of the genocide were disturbing enough – in the weeks afterwards, I had nightmares and trouble sleeping. But what are my memories compared to yours and those of all the thousands of your fellow countrymen and women who survived? What can I know and understand of your suffering and loss?
I hope the years have been kind to you and helped you realise some of those plans you mentioned. You won’t have forgotten what you went through but perhaps you’ll have learned to live with the past and to forge for yourself and your loved ones a bright, new life in that lovely country I came to know so well. I went back there several times in the years that followed and whenever I did, I remembered our meetings.
With my best wishes,
David Orr
davidharmanorr@gmail.com
David Orr is an Irish journalist, now living in southwest France. He worked for many years as a foreign correspondent based in Kenya and later in India. The Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda was his first major assignment as a foreign correspondent.
Jack Picone is an Australian photographer who has worked extensively in Africa and other parts of the world. He is now a professor of media and communications at Mahidol University International College in Bangkok.