The Best American Crime Writing (53 page)

The young man Theresa hid was not difficult to find. His name is Dutera Agide, 36, a jobless handyman in Ndora. He told me that he is Pauline’s second cousin, and that he is a Tutsi. He said he had
spent one week hiding in Theresa’s house, listening to the slaughter going on outside. Then he said something even more surprising. At one point, he said, he was hidden in Pauline’s house. “I saw Pauline twice a week during the genocide,” Dutera told me. “One day she came home, and she said: ‘The war is not ending. I’m starting to get afraid. I don’t know what will happen.’ Then she came back again with her husband, loaded things from the house into a car, and left. She looked scared.”

After my conversation with Dutera, I went back to Theresa’s home one more time. Her exuberance had all but gone. She seemed to have settled into the truth, or a form of it. “People killed people because of fear to be also killed by the perpetrators of the genocide,” she said. “My daughter, who was also a minister in the government, could have participated in the killing not because she wanted to kill but because of fear.” Theresa then used the Kinyarwanda expression
Mpemuke ndamuke:
“to be dishonest in order to escape death.”

I spoke again with Pauline’s sister, Vineranda. “In 1959, when the Tutsi regime changed, our family changed with the situation,” Vineranda explained. “Because she was a Tutsi, Pauline was afraid that maybe the government would find out. And she was among many men in the government. And she had money and a position. She didn’t want to lose that.”

Robert Jay Lifton was intrigued by the revelation that Pauline was of Tutsi descent. “Part of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s fierceness had to do with eliminating the Tutsi in her,” he hypothesized. “She was undergoing an individual struggle to destroy that defiled element in herself.”

Pauline’s husband, Maurice Ntahobari, denied irritably that there were Tutsi roots in either his or Pauline’s family. After being asked repeatedly about Pauline’s and Shalom’s actions during the genocide, he sighed and said: “Try to understand, try to be in my shoes. This is about my wife and my son.”

When I spoke again with Pauline’s attorney, Nicole Bergevin, in July, and told her what Pauline’s mother had told me about Pauline being of Tutsi descent, Bergevin said she knew. (In an odd reversal, she later denied that Pauline was Tutsi.) Bergevin’s demeanor had changed since we had last spoken. This time around, she sounded defeated. Though she still insisted that Pauline knew nothing of the mass raping or murdering, she said, “I’m sure she’s going to be found guilty.” Then she paused and said with resignation, “When you do murder trials, you realize that we are all susceptible, and you wouldn’t even dream that you would ever commit this act.” There was a short silence. “But you come to understand that everyone is. It could happen to me, it could happen to my daughter. It could happen to you.”

The crimes Pauline Nyiramasuhuko are accused of are monstrous. Her capacity for pity and compassion, and her professional duty to shield the powerless, deserted her, or collapsed under the irresistible urge for power. But in seeking a reasonable explanation for Pauline’s barbarity, I remembered something that Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch told me.

“This behavior lies just under the surface of any of us,” Des Forges said. “The simplified accounts of genocide allow distance between us and the perpetrators of genocide. They are so evil we couldn’t ever see ourselves doing the same thing. But if you consider the terrible pressure under which people were operating, then you automatically reassert their humanity—and that becomes alarming. You are forced to look at these situations and say, ‘What would I have done?’ Sometimes the answer is not encouraging.”

Pauline did possess humanity, but it was in short supply, and she reserved it for her only son, Shalom, whom she had helped turn into a rapist and a killer. In one of her last moments as an engineer of the genocide, however, she returned to her role as woman and mother.

It was in July 1994, right when the Hutu army was collapsing.

Butare had descended into mayhem, and Pauline’s side had lost. One of Pauline’s neighbors, Lela, spotted the minister in the streets. “I saw Pauline and Shalom at a roadblock,” she said. “Pauline was wearing military fatigues, and she was still trying to separate Tutsis and Hutus, but the confusion was massive. There were people running everywhere. The Rwandan Patriotic Front was coming.” A short time later, Lela saw Pauline again. This time she was standing alone outside her home, looking worried.

“I was shocked,” Lela said. “She was wearing camouflage. She was standing upright in her uniform like a soldier, trying to see what was happening up and down the road. She just looked furious. She was looking everywhere for Shalom. He was her pet. She loved Shalom so much.”

How odd and in some ways appropriate that the reporting of this profoundly disturbing story about Rwanda began on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and not with me but with my wife. Ten days after September 11, I was on a plane to Islamabad and beyond, and my wife, Kimberlee Acquaro, was on her way to Kigali on a Pew Fellowship for International Journalism. We spoke nightly by satellite phone, relating the horrors before us, the ones before me unfolding and the ones before Kimberlee surviving as living memories. I was exhausted. I had been on one intensive assignment after another for nearly eighteen months, and when I returned from South Asia I almost immediately left on still another story. I was out of gas
.

But Kimberlee, a photographer as well as a writer, insisted we return to Rwanda together, to make an attempt to force an Afghanistan-centered readership to pay attention to a critical, as-yet-untold story that continues to reflect the worst of us. The Rwandan genocide, all things considered, may have been human history’s most awful moment. And the woman at the heart of this particular angle, a woman mandated to care after the lives of women and children, who helped orchestrate
and personally carry out a campaign of unprecedented sexual torture and mass murder, in some ways reflects the demon sleeping in us all
.

I entered the reporting reluctantly. But once in Rwanda, Kimberlee and I realized that this story was emblematic of a form of warfare and human behavior that has not been addressed honestly. One million dead in ten weeks, not in a hail of gunfire and not in rooms of gas, but hacked to pieces and sexually mutilated at the hands of neighbors, friends, priests, and relatives. I became obsessed, and remain so, by the angle that in this one 8,000-word article I could not make the room to fully address: What is the source of bloodlust? Rwanda was an orgiastic frenzy of almost joyful slaughter. What in us—in me and you—permits us to slough off what we know to be true, and to allow us to club to death a best friend or skewer a baby niece?

The first drafts of this story were too upsetting to read. My editor told me that he could hardly get through them. As difficult as the details are to digest, please do know that the most difficult job in the writing of this story was to cull the imagery enough to allow the typical brunch-time reader of
The New York Times Magazine
to turn the page
.

But this story, more than any I have written, became a Pandora’s box. It is about the relationship between the West and Africa, between white and black, between man and woman, and between a reporter and his own conscience. It took me nearly six months to accumulate the will to move on to another story. But the questions that the Minister of Rape raised (there are no answers) echo loudly and every day
.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a newspaper editor/publisher,
ROBERT SAM ANSON
was educated at the University of Notre Dame. He began working for
Time
while still a college student and served as correspondent in the Chicago, Los Angeles, Saigon, and New York bureaus. Taken captive by North Vietnamese/Khmer Rouge forces while on assignment in Cambodia in August 1970, he was released after several weeks.

He served as chief anchorman/executive producer for special events at WNET/13 and was a senior writer for
New Times
magazine, a special correspondent for
Life
, a contributing editor for
Esquire
, and editor in chief of
Los Angeles Magazine
. At present a contributing editor at
Vanity Fair
, he is the author of six books and has written for, among others,
The New York Times, New York
, the
London Sunday Times, U.S. News & World Report
, and the
Los Angeles Times
.

Regarded as an investigative specialist, he covered Bosnia, organized crime, race riots, national politics, the New Left, the civil rights movement, and the sixties. He thinks of himself as the Susan Lucci of the National Magazine Awards.

MARIE BRENNER
is writer at large of
Vanity Fair
and the author of five books, including the best-selling
Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women
(Crown 2001) and
House of Dreams: The Bingham Family of Louisville
(1988).

“The Man Who Knew Too Much,” her investigation of the life of Big Tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, inspired the Michael Mann movie,
The Insider
, starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, which was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. She is the winner of three Front Page Awards and her articles have appeared in
The New Yorker, New York, Vogue
, and
The New York Times Magazine
. Her reporting on the Enron case was used as the basis for questioning during the Senate hearings on the matter.

RENE CHUN
is a New York-based writer who has written for numerous publications
including
The New York Times, Esquire, GQ
, and
New York
. He is currently working on a book about the former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer, which is based on an article of his that appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly
.

GARY COHEN
lives in Washington, D.C., and writes for
The Atlantic Monthly
and
Vanity Fair
magazines.

DEVIN FRIEDMAN
is a senior writer at GQ magazine. He has also been on staff at
Men’s Journal
and
Esquire
. He would appreciate your not making any men’s magazine jokes. He’s written for
Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine
, and
The New Yorker
, among others, and he was nominated for a National Magazine Award and was a finalist for the Livingston Award. He was raised by a criminal defense attorney and used to work for the public defender’s office; it’s not surprising that he often has somewhat more compassion for criminals than normal people do.

JOSHUA HAMMER
has been
Newsweek’s
Jerusalem bureau chief since January 2001. Before that, he was the magazine’s bureau chief in Nairobi, Buenos Aires, and Berlin. He is the author of
Chosen by God: A Brothers Journey
, a finalist for the 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the forthcoming A
Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place
.

SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH
has been writing crime stories for
Texas Monthly
for fifteen years. He has been nominated for the National Magazine Award four times and several of his articles have been optioned by film producers. He is now working on a nonfiction book for HarperCollins on the mysterious murders of seven women in Austin, Texas, in the late nineteenth century.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER
, the author of the international bestseller
The Perfect Storm
and
Fire
, has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS-Novartis Prize for his journalism. He lives in New York.

TOM JUNOD
is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award. He is a writer at large for
Esquire
, and lives in Marietta, Georgia.

JESSE KATZ
is a senior writer for
The Los Angeles Magazine
. His work has appeared in
The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine
, and
Texas Monthly
. He received a 2002 gold medal in reporting from the national City and Regional Magazine Association for his investigation into the murder of former Los Angeles police chief Bernard Parks’s granddaughter. As a
Los Angeles Times
reporter from 1985 to 2000, he was a member of the Metro staff that twice won Pulitzer Prizes in the spot news category, for the 1992 LA riots and for the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

JAY KIRK
has written for
Harpers Magazine, The New York Times Magazine
, the
Chicago Reader
,
Nerve.com
, and other publications. This story was nominated for a National Magazine Award.

ROBERT KURSON
is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Harvard Law School. He is a senior editor at
Chicago
magazine, a frequent contributor to
Esquire
, and has written for
Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine
, and other publications.

PETER LANDESMAN
is a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. His nonfiction appears frequently in
The New York Times Magazine
. His first novel,
The Raven
, was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters prize for best first fiction in 1996. He lives in Los Angeles and New York with his wife, photographer and journalist Kimberlee Acquaro.

DOUG MOST
is a senior editor at
Boston Magazine
and a freelance writer whose work has appeared in
Sports Illustrated
and
The New York Times Magazine
. He’s had pieces chosen to appear in
Best American Sports Writing
and the first edition of
Best American Crime Writing
. He’s the author of
Always in Our Hearts: Amy Grossberg, Brian Peterson, and the Baby They Didn’t Want

Award-winning journalist
MAXIMILLIAN POTTER
has been on staff at GQ since 2000, covering sports, business, politics, and crime. He’s written for
Outside, Premiere, Details
, and
Philadelphia Magazine
. He lives with his wife and two sons in Pennsylvania.

PETER RICHMOND
is a staff writer for GQ magazine, a commentator for NPR’s
Morning Edition
, and the author of three books. His fourth, a biography of the late singer Peggy Lee, will be published by Henry Holt in 2005. His work has appeared in
The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine
, and
Rolling Stone
.

JEFF TIETZ
has written for
The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly
, and
Rolling Stone
. He lives in Texas.

PAIGE WILLIAMS
is a native of Tupelo, Mississippi, and has written for
The New York Times Magazine, Men’s Journal, Playboy
, and
Atlanta
, and before that wrote for
The Charlotte Observer
. Now she lives in New York and is a first-year MFA candidate in fiction at Columbia University.

EVAN WRIGHT
is a contributing editor to
Rolling Stone
, where he has been dubbed “ambassador to the underbelly” for his coverage of the West Coast’s peculiar underworld of porn magnates, celebrity drug addicts, anarchist environmentalists, Internet scam artists, punk skateboarder gangs, and unrepentant murderers. He previously worked for Larry Flynt
as the entertainment editor at
Hustler
magazine. He has also contributed to
Time Asia, Men’s Journal, ESPN
magazine, and LA
Weekly
. During the past eighteen months he has reported from the Middle East on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Evan Wright lives in Southern California.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT
is a writer of books, magazine articles, and screenplays, both fiction and nonfiction. His screenplay,
Siege
, coauthored with Menno Meyjes and its director, Edward Zwick, based on Wright’s original story, was called by
Panorama
“the most chillingly prescient terrorism film of them all.” He lives in Austin, Texas.