Dying to Live : A Rwandan Family's Five-Year Flight Across the Congo

Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga, Casey Roberts

Description

Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga was a history teacher in Kigali when he was forced to flee to the neighbouring Congo (Zaïre) with his wife and three children. Thus began a harrowing five-year voyage of 9781926824789 low ressurvival during which they travelled thousands of kilometers on foot from one refugee camp to another. Lacking food and water, they were often robbed, sometimes raped but were constantly pursued and bombed by shadowy Rwandan-backed armed soldiers with sophisticated weapons and aerial surveillance information. He and his family were among the more than three hundred thousand refugees who, for the most part, did not survive to tell their story.
Dying To Live is an ode to the human capacity to survive against all odds. Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga brilliantly and touchingly tells a story that has been silenced for too long. It will help restore the humanity and the right to mourn to hundreds of thousands of Rwandans dispersed throughout the world.

Sujets

• Refugees
• Histoire
• Ruanda
• África
• Kagame
• Central Africa
• Rwanda
• History
• Africa
• Paul Kagame
• Congo

Informations

• Publié par: Baraka Books
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781926824833
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga
DYING TO LIVE

A Rwandan Family’s Five-Year Flight Across the Congo

Preface by Phil Taylor


Translated by Casey Roberts
Originally published as Voyage à travers la mort, Le témoignage d’un exilé Hutu du Rwanda © 2012 by Le Groupe Ville-Marie Littérature Publié avec l’autorisation du Groupe Ville-Marie Littérature, Montréal, Québec Translation Copyright © Baraka Books 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN 978-1-926824-78-9 pbk; 978-1-926824-83-3 epub; 978-1-926824-84-0 pdf; 978-1-926824-85-7 mobi/kindle Cover photos: Mathieu Breton UNCHR/R. Chalasani; back cover: Jacques Godon Cover by Folio infographie Book design by Folio infographie Translated by Casey Roberts Legal Deposit, 2nd quarter 2013 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec Library and Archives Canada Published by Baraka Books of Montreal 6977, rue Lacroix, Montréal, Québec H4E 2V4 Telephone: [phone] [e-mail] www.barakabooks.com Printed and bound in Quebec Baraka Books acknowledges the generous support of its publishing program from the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles du Québec (SODEC) and the Canada Council for the Arts. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing for our translation activities and through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities. Trade Distribution and Returns Canada and the United States Independent Publishers Group 1-800-888-4741 (IPG1); [e-mail]
Preface
In a time of war, God help the non-combatants!
On April 6, 1994 a peace agreement in Rwanda, called the Arusha Accords, was slowly being finalized with elections in the offing, a multi-party interim government in place and a UN peacekeeping presence monitoring the process. History teacher Pierre-Claver Ndacyaysenga and his family could look to the future with some hope.
But on April 7 the President of Rwanda was dead, the victim of a well-planned assassination which was the prelude to renewed warfare and widespread massacres of civilians.
The teacher and his desperate family would soon be on the move as refugees. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which had been in an offensive mode when President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, as remarked by UN General Romeo Dallaire, began a drive to seize power. Various journalists claimed the RPF goal was to end the killing of Tutsis, an important ethnic minority in Rwanda. But, again as pointed out by Dallaire, the direction of the RPF columns indicated a different intention. The Arusha Accords were shunted aside, political power was the prize sought by the army that had originally attacked Rwanda from Uganda on October 1, 1990.
The invasion of Rwanda in 1990 had created hundreds of thousands of internal refugees by 1994. Refugees were a major and tragic feature of the Rwanda power struggle, almost an element of RPF military strategy as they drove civilians in front of them, never allowing them to congregate behind their own lines. Administering to fleeing non- combatants became a headache for their opponents. Housing, and food would have to be provided and care taken that there were no RPF infiltrators among the thousands moving away from the front.
In July 1994 a new government was declared in Kigali, with the strongman, Paul Kagame, clearly in charge. The United States provided immediate recognition. There were more than a million Rwandan refugees in camps in Eastern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), among them Pierre-Claver Ndacyaysenga and his family. With the former government defeated Kagame was now determined to bring back the refugees to be under his state’s control, by force if necessary. The refugees had every reason to fear for their lives, as testified to by many Hutus and Tutsis who served in Kagame’s regime and later fled Rwanda. Seth Sendashonga, the RPF’s former Minister of the Interior, urged the United Nations to investigate crimes against humanity committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front and was assassinated in Nairobi for speaking out.
The greatest ordeal for the Ndacyaysenga family began when the new Rwandan army directly attacked the UN administered camps with terrible loss of life. The only hope of escaping entrapment by a ruthless army was to begin a long perilous walk into the jungles of Zaire. As misfortune would have it the Rwandan leadership struck an alliance with Laurent Kabila and entered Zaire in October 1996 aiming to capture Eastern Zaire and if possible the whole of the country. At the time Kagame denied his forces were leading the invasion, but eventually the obvious was acknowledged. The United States and Britain were seemingly quite pleased with this extraordinary aggression. The U.S. ambassador visited “liberated” areas of Zaire.
The 300,000 Rwandans who made the decision to escape the clutches of Kagame’s forces endured terrible hardship, walking ragged and hungry, losing contact with loved ones in the great mass of frightened humanity hurrying along strange roads, only knowing to head west. They were on their own. Prominent humanitarian groups observed their movements and were of little use. Most of their advice was bad or dangerous.
Vengeance-driven armies have always abused refugees. The worst in this story occurred at a place called Tingi-Tingi, Zaire, painfully described by Mr. Ndacyaysenga. Long ago the 7th U.S. Cavalry massacred Lakota people in South Dakota and an American poet wrote, “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.” We could apply the same sentiment to Tingi-Tingi.
Mr. Ndacyaysenga is a living articulate witness to a major human event that is rarely discussed or even acknowledged. The book provides informative and moving and gritty details that beg the question: Why has the present leadership of Rwanda been allowed to get away with such brazen conduct for so long?
Phil Taylor April 28, 2013
Acronyms

Efforts have been made to avoid overuse of acronyms. However, the following acronyms do appear occasionally.

AFDLC Alliance des forces démocratiques pour la liberation du Congo CIB Congolaise Industrielle des Bois, a company in Congo-Brazzaville FAR Forces armées rwandaises (The Rwandan armed forces until the RPF took power in July 1994) FAZ Forces armées zaïroises (The Zairean armed forces until the AFDLC took power under Kabila in 1997). HCR High Commission for Refugees (see UNHCR) NGO Non-governmental organization RPA Rwandan Patriotic Army (Created formally after the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a political-military party, took power in July 1994) RPF Rwandan Patriotic Front (The political-military party led by Paul Kagame that currently holds power in Rwanda) UNHCR United Nations High Commission for Refugees also known as the UN Refugee Agency WFP World Food Programme
Prologue

On the evening of April 6, 1994, the plane bringing Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira from Tanzania was shot down while preparing to land at the Kigali international airport in Kanombe. Its eight occupants, passengers and crew were killed instantly.
It was in the aftermath of this attack that Rwanda would descend into a murderous rampage culminating decades of tensions between Hutus and Tutsis.
It was in the aftermath of this attack that my ordeal would begin, and that of every single Rwandan, bar none.
CHAPTER 1
Rwanda Put to Fire and the Sword
In the early morning of April 7, 1994, my family and I were sleeping peacefully in our home in Kigali. We had moved to the capital a couple of months earlier in search of a better life than what we had been able to find in our native region, Cyangugu. I was teaching history at the Lycée de Kigali, having been hired in September 1993 after completing university. My wife Francoise worked as a social worker at the Centre Hospitalier de Kigali, where she had been transferred three months earlier. We shared our life with our three children: Ange-Claude, at eleven, our eldest son, and our daughters Claudine and Emmérence, who were seven and three years old.
At the break of dawn, the sound of violent explosions occurring throughout the city shook us from our sleep. I turned on the radio and we were astonished to hear that the country’s president had been attacked and killed. The announcer called for calm and advised people to stay inside.
The explosions intensified throughout the morning; some of them were very near. We were terrified. The children asked me questions, which I unfortunately didn’t have the answers to. All I could do was to try to reassure them. They were unable to eat or drink and were all suddenly seized by bouts of diarrhea!
Around mid-day, I gathered my courage and left the house to take a look around. On the street, I met a former neighbour and university colleague. He was returning from his shift at Radio Rwanda and passed along his version of what had happened. According to him, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel movement founded by Rwandan Tutsi exiles in Uganda who had taken up arms in 1990, had blown up the president’s plane and launched an all-out attack on Kigali.
At this point, I couldn’t be sure of anything. All I could tell was that Interahamwe, a Hutu militia linked to the government, had been unleashed. Armed with guns, machetes and clubs, they scoured the city in search of Tutsis and moderate Hutus who they then systematically executed. There were barricades pretty much everywhere and you had to show your identity card to be allowed through. If the card designated its holder as Tutsi (ethnicity being required on the card since its creation by the Belgian colonial administration), that was the end of him.
Everywhere chaos reigned. P