The Best American Crime Writing (50 page)

All six of the accused are housed in the same cell, which looks to be about six feet across and twelve feet deep. When they hear our approach, they get up from their hammocks, which are slung across the middle of the room, and make some effort to clean up a bit. Ricardo, the shooter, puts on a shirt, and Rubens pushes some
clothes into a corner. They all come to the cell door and look at me curiously. The friar says, “You’re the first white reporter they’ve met.” The guard tells us we have an hour to talk, then leads us to a concrete bench outside the cell block and waits at the gate.

In the pictures published all over the world two days after the murder, the pirates looked like a bunch of guys pulled in from a barbecue, wearing soccer shorts and sandals. In person, they look even less intimidating. Only Isael looks like someone you’d be scared of, with a big scar across his belly and a muscular body with a very low center of gravity. The gunshot wounds to the hand and forearm don’t hurt, either. Reney, on the other hand, has delicate features and soft, velvety black eyes. He doesn’t look so different from Ralph Macchio, circa
The Karate Kid
.

“We are being treated worse than anyone else here,” Ricardo says. “We have been tortured. Show them, José.” José stands up and pulls down his shorts. His ass is covered in big black-and-yellow bruises, which, he says, were administered with an iron bar wrapped in a towel. Isael puts his arm forward and says he hasn’t been allowed to see a doctor in a week. The wound on his forearm, about eight inches long and closed crudely with some black thread, looks unnaturally wet. He unwraps the bandage on his hand and shows where the two fingers closest to his pinkie were shot off at the knuckle.

José, who’s called Grande Blanco (roughly, “Big Whitey”) and has remarkable jug ears and a prominent jaw, says, “It’s not like the media is saying that we are used to doing this job. This is the first time we killed someone—” and then Ricardo cuts him off. The police say Ricardo was the mastermind, and he seems to control the group. He rarely allows any of the others to speak.

One thing I wanted to ask when I came to see them in prison was, given that they didn’t set out to murder a man, how they felt when they realized they had. This was, after all, possibly
the
crucial moment in their lives. The group looks to Ricardo for an answer: “We did not know what happened. We never went down below
deck to see him. We knew only that his shooting had stopped and so we left the boat.” I don’t point out that this can’t be true, since they stole Blake’s rifle.

I ask them if there is anything they want to ask me. Ricardo says, “What is the main religion in Peter Blake’s country?” I say I think they are mainly Protestant, and ask why he wants to know. “I’m Catholic,” he says, “so I would like to know. It’s important.”

Jose says, “I have a question. What did you think of us before? And how do you think of us now? We aren’t what they say we are, right? We are not pirates, river rats.” I tell him I hadn’t known much about them other than that they’d killed Peter Blake while trying to rob him. “Well, I don’t think it’s right, what they’re saying about us. You know, I’ve never been convicted of any crimes before.” The criminals now find themselves infamous, cast in a role larger than they had before. Ricardo seems to see the appeal of it. Jose, though, is scared shitless that he’s lost his former identity as simple local screwup, a feeling that thirty years in prison will probably relieve him of. Jose says, “I swear, I never could imagine that the story would end this way.”

If things had gone according to script, it would have been the Southern Ocean that killed Peter Blake. The Southern Ocean is roughly eight million square miles spreading out from Antarctica. It was the most dangerous and crucial leg of his five Whitbreads and two Jules Vernes, and Blake liked to call it the loneliest place on earth. He said often, “If you get into trouble down there, well, no use crying to Mum.” And trouble was inevitably what you’d find in the Southern Ocean. It was a wind-and-weather factory of unrivaled proportions, and Blake called the swells there “liquid Himalayas.” “The real danger,” he said, “is the bow digging in and the boat flipping end over end.” He built little hatches on the hull of ENZA
New Zealand
so he could climb out if this happened, not
that there’d be much he could have done, sitting on an upside-down boat in the middle of the loneliest place on earth. Blake’s friends and colleagues paint the relationship between him and the Southern Ocean like the relationship between, say, Rocky and Apollo Creed—the chummy, mortal respect reserved for worthy adversaries. It’s not that Peter Blake did not realize that he was, like everyone else, a pawn of fate; it’s just that when fate showed up on his boat, dressed in a motorcycle helmet and a grimy T-shirt, he failed to recognize it.

I went to Brazil just before Christmas last year to report a story on the death of Peter Blake for
Men’s Journal,
where I was working at the time. Yd like to say I was drawn to the story because of some overarching theme it brought up for me. But the truth is that a story appeared in
The New York Times
one morning about a world-famous sailor who’d been killed by pirates on the Amazon. It was a kind of no-brainer
Men’s Journal story,
plus I had not written a piece in a while and I was afraid I was going to be fired. I am usually afraid I’m going to be fired. So I flew to Macapá, Brazil, a town I had never heard of before, found a translator who spoke maybe fifth-grade English, and drove around Equatorial Brazil in a rented Fiat, almost always in danger of being robbed by drunk people with machetes
.

There was, nonetheless, plenty of adventure and discovery in the reporting of this story. The thrill of finding yourself in a town you’ve never heard of before, suddenly integrated into its community of policemen and lawyers and criminals, cannot be overstated. The editor of
Men’s Journal
largely wanted me to write about the life of Peter Blake. He was, after all, a
Men’s Journal
kind of guy—intrepid adventurer, naturalist, celebrity. But to me, his life was just another example of bored rich people creating challenges for themselves where none naturally exist (if Blake wanted to circumnavigate the globe, British Airways would have done it more quickly and cheaply, and
with more free pretzels). I was more interested in the families of the killers, in the neighborhoods where they lived, in the concrete stadium built over the equator for dancing competitions, and in the masses of children flying kites at dusk. It’s always reassuring to go to some distant outpost and discover just how enormous and varied and confusing the world is
.

One night, in my hotel room, I became convinced that bandits with pistols were going to climb through my window, steal my stash of American currency and Clif Bars, and leave me bleeding on the floor. And suddenly just how obscene Peter Blake’s death was seemed very real. Blake had simply been a curious man passing through a town that meant almost nothing to him, not so different from me. It was a humanizing moment. That it took my feeling threatened is, I know, kind of pathetic, but I blame fame; it can take away a person’s person-ness and make him seem more like a brand. The more I drove around Macapá in my rented Fiat learning about the night Blake was murdered, about the people involved, the more I became fascinated with the confluence of lives, with the perfect-storm-like escalation of events, the loss of control, the spontaneous combustion that resulted in a tragedy that no one involved had wanted
.

When I met Peter Blake’s killers in jail, they were bewildered at having been part of something so large and violent. When I spoke to the men in the crew, they were likewise bewildered. It was the sort of event for which denial is the only sensible reaction. Since I’ve returned from Brazil, the “pirates” (more like petty thieves) have begun prison sentences many of them may not outlive; Peter Blake’s widow just put up the family yacht for auction, since it’s too big a boat for her to handle on her own and she could use the money; Blake’s business partners are trying to make a go of Blakexpeditions as a Cousteau-ian nonprofit In the movies, killers are calculating and the murders they commit are shot through with meaning and psycho-philosophical dilemma. In Macapá, though, as in most places, lives take violent, abrupt turns for almost no reason at all
.

S
laughter, and then worse, came to Butare, a sleepy, sun-bleached Rwandan town, in the spring of 1994. Hutu death squads armed with machetes and nail-studded clubs had deployed throughout the countryside, killing, looting, and burning. Roadblocks had been set up to cull fleeing Tutsis. By the third week of April, as the Rwanda genocide was reaching its peak intensity, tens of thousands of corpses were rotting in the streets of Kigali, the country’s capital. Butare, a stronghold of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus that had resisted the government’s orders for genocide, was the next target. Its residents could hear gunfire from the hills in the west; at night they watched the firelight of torched nearby villages. Armed Hutus soon gathered on the edges of town, but Butare’s panicked citizens defended its borders.

Enraged by Butare’s revolt, Rwanda’s interim government dispatched Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the national minister of family and women’s affairs, from Kigali on a mission. Before becoming one of the most powerful women in Rwanda’s government, Pauline—as everyone, enemy and ally alike, called her—had grown up on a small farming commune just outside Butare. She was a local success story, known to some as Butare’s favorite daughter. Her return would have a persuasive resonance there.

Soon after Pauline’s arrival in town, cars mounted with loudspeakers crisscrossed Butare’s back roads, announcing that the Red Cross had arrived at a nearby stadium to provide food and guarantee
sanctuary. By April 25, thousands of desperate Tutsis had gathered at the stadium.

It was a trap. Instead of receiving food and shelter, the refugees were surrounded by men wearing bandoleers and headdresses made of spiky banana leaves. These men were Interahamwe, thuggish Hutu marauders whose name means “those who attack together.” According to an eyewitness I spoke with this summer in Butare, supervising from the sidelines was Pauline, then 48, a portly woman of medium height in a colorful African wrap and spectacles.

Before becoming Rwanda’s chief official for women’s affairs, Pauline was a social worker, roaming the countryside, offering lectures on female empowerment and instruction on child care and AIDS prevention. Her days as minister were similarly devoted to improving the lives of women and children. But at the stadium, a 30-year-old farmer named Foster Mivumbi told me, Pauline assumed a different responsibility. Mivumbi, who has confessed to taking part in the slaughter, told me that Pauline goaded the Interahamwe, commanding, “Before you kill the women, you need to rape them.”

Tutsi women were then selected from the stadium crowd and dragged away to a forested area to be raped, Mivumbi recalled. Back at the stadium, he told me, Pauline waved her arms and then observed in silence as Interahamwe rained machine-gun fire and hand grenades down upon the remaining refugees. The Hutus finished off survivors with machetes. It took about an hour, ending at noon. Pauline stayed on, Mivumbi told me, until a bulldozer began piling bodies for burial in a nearby pit. (When questioned about this incident, Pauline’s lawyers denied that she took part in atrocities in Butare.)

Shortly afterward, according to another witness, Pauline arrived at a compound where a group of Interahamwe was guarding 70 Tutsi women and girls. One Interahamwe, a young man named Emmanuel Nsabimana, told me through a translator that Pauline
ordered him and others to burn the women. Nsabimana recalled that one Interahamwe complained that they lacked sufficient gasoline. “Pauline said, ‘Don’t worry, I have jerry cans of gasoline in my car,’” Nsabimana recalled. “She said, ‘Go take that gasoline and kill them.’ I went to the car and took the jerry cans. Then Pauline said, ‘Why don’t you rape them before you kill them?’ But we had been killing all day, and we were tired. We just put the gasoline in bottles and scattered it among the women, then started burning.”

Around the same time, some Interahamwe arrived at the local hospital, where a unit of Doctors Without Borders was in residence. Rose, a young Tutsi woman who had sought refuge at the hospital, watched in terror as soldiers stormed the complex. (Rose, who is now under military protection, requested that her last name not be printed.) “They said that Pauline had given them permission to go after the Tutsi girls, who were too proud of themselves,” Rose told me. “She was the minister, so they said they were free to do it.” Pauline had led the soldiers to see rape as a reward.

Chief among the Interahamwe at the hospital was Pauline’s only son, a 24-year-old student named Arsène Shalom Ntahobali. Shalom, as he was known, was over six feet tall, slightly overweight and clean-shaven. He wore a tracksuit and sneakers; grenades dangled from his waist. Rose said that Shalom, who repeatedly announced that he had “permission” from his mother to rape Tutsis, found her cowering in the maternity ward. He yanked her to her feet and raped her against the wall. Before leaving Rose to chase after some students who had been hiding nearby, he promised that he’d return to kill her. But before Shalom could do so, she fled the hospital and ran home to her family.

A few days later, Rose recalled, a local official knocked on her door. Rose told me that the official informed her that even though all Tutsis would be exterminated, one Tutsi would be left alive—
one who could deliver a progress report to God. Rose was to be that witness. And her instruction on her new role began that moment. “Hutu soldiers took my mother outside,” Rose told me, “stripped off her clothes and raped her with a machete.” On that first day, twenty family members were slaughtered before her eyes.

Rose told me that until early July, when the genocide ended, she was led by Interahamwe to witness atrocity after atrocity. She said that even though the Interahamwe’s overarching objective was to kill, the men seemed particularly obsessed by what they did to women’s bodies. “I saw them rape two girls with spears, then burn their pubic hair,” she said. “Then they took me to another spot where a lady was giving birth. The baby was halfway out. They speared it.” All the while, Rose repeatedly heard the soldiers say, “We are doing what was ordered by Pauline Nyiramasuhuko.”

I met Rose in Butare this summer. She is 32 now, a pretty woman with high cheekbones and small features. Speaking in an airless hotel room, Rose pitched slightly forward in a red business suit, her gaze direct. She explained that since the genocide she has suffered from stomach ulcers, and occasionally slips into semicon-sciousness, racked with delirium and pain. “People think I’m possessed,” she said. These fits, she said, frighten her children—her two born before 1994 and the four genocide orphans she adopted afterward. As we spoke, it was clear that Rose was telling her horrific story as carefully as possible, to finally fulfill, in a way much different from intended, her role as witness.

Rose said that during the months the genocide was carried out, she saw Pauline Nyiramasuhuko three times. The minister was an unforgettable sight. She’d exchanged her colorful civilian wraps for brand-new military fatigues and boots. She was seen carrying a machine gun over her shoulder. Other survivors told me they heard the minister for women and family affairs spit invectives at Tutsi women, calling them, “cockroaches” and “dirt.” She advised the men to choose the young women for sex and kill off the old. By one
account, women were forced to raise their shirts to separate the mothers from the “virgins.” Sometimes, I was told, Pauline handed soldiers packets of condoms.

Much of the violence took place in the scrubby yard in front of Butare’s local government offices, or prefecture, where at one point hundreds of Tutsis were kept under guard. Witnesses recalled that Pauline showed up at night in a white Toyota pickup truck, often driven by Shalom, and supervised as Interahamwe loaded the truck with women who were driven off and never seen again. Often, when a woman at the prefecture saw Pauline, she appealed to her, as a fellow woman and mother, for mercy. But this, claimed survivors, only enraged Pauline. When one woman wouldn’t stop crying out, a survivor recalled, the minister told the Interahamwe to shut her up. They stabbed the pleading woman and then slit her throat.

There will never be a precise accounting of how many Rwandans were massacred between April and July 1994. Human Rights Watch calculates the number to be at least 500,000, while the United Nations estimates that between 800,000 and one million Rwandans died during that period. Whatever the total, the rate of carnage and the concentration of the killing (Rwanda is roughly the size of New Jersey) give it the distinction of being the most ferocious mass slaughter in recorded history. Three-quarters of the Tutsi population was exterminated. Today, Rwanda’s common greeting, the Kinyarwanda expression
mwaramutse—
which translates as “did you wake?”—is less an expression of “good morning” than it is of relief that one is breathing at all.

Understandably, the world’s attention subsequently focused on the sheer volume of the Rwandan slaughter. But the prosecutors and judges of the International Crime Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, are now coming to recognize the equally alarming and cynical story of what was left behind. Though most women were killed before they could tell their stories, a U.N. report has
concluded that at least 250,000 women were raped during the genocide. Some were penetrated with spears, gun barrels, bottles or the stamens of banana trees. Sexual organs were multilated with machetes, boiling water, and acid; women’s breasts were cut off. According to one study, Butare province alone has more than 30,000 rape survivors. Many more women were killed after they were raped.

These facts are harrowing. More shocking still is that so many of these crimes were supposedly inspired and orchestrated by Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, whose very job was the preservation, education, and empowerment of Rwanda’s women.

In July 1994 Pauline fled Rwanda in a mass exodus of more than one million Hutus fearing retribution by the advancing Tutsi rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front. After finding safety in a refugee camp in Congo, she eventually slipped into Kenya, where she lived as a fugitive for almost three years. On July 18, 1997, however, Pauline was apprehended in Nairobi by Kenyan and international authorities. (Shalom was seized six days later, in a Nairobi grocery store he was running.) After interrogation by investigators, Pauline was transferred with Shalom to Tanzania, where both were delivered to the International Tribunal in Arusha.

At the tribunal, Pauline faces eleven charges, including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. She is the first woman ever to be charged with these crimes in an international court. And she is the first woman ever to be charged with rape as a crime against humanity. (Her son, Shalom, faces ten charges, to which he has pled innocence.)

For the last five years mother and son have spent their days at the U.N. Detention Facility in Arusha in nearby 16-by-19 cells. They have access to a gym and a nurse. Pauline often spends time tending flowers and singing to herself in a common open-air courtyard.

Since June 2001, when their trials began, Pauline and Shalom have spent most of their weekdays in a courtroom inside Arusha’s dilapidated conference center. The U.N. Security Council established the Arusha tribunal in November 1994, eighteen months after establishing a tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague. With all of Rwanda’s judicial and law enforcement personnel dead or in exile, and the country’s physical infrastructure reduced to rubble, the U.N. chose to house the tribunal in this tourist hub near the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. Fifty-three Rwandan
genocidaires
are in custody in Arusha; twenty more have been indicted and are on the lam, most likely in Kenya and Congo.

This summer, I attended sessions of Pauline’s trial. In court, her appearance suggested a schoolteacher. Now 56, she favored plain high-necked dresses that showed off the gleaming gold crucifix she usually wears. According to observers, at the beginning of the trial she shook her head and smirked as charges were read out. But as more and more survivors have come from Butare to testify against her, she has grown subdued. During my visit, Pauline mostly looked blankly around the courtroom past a pair of scholarly bifocals, taking copious notes on a legal pad and avoiding the gaze of witnesses. Sometimes, I was told, she wears wild hairstyles and headdresses and slumps behind a computer screen that sits in front of her, as if she were trying to disguise herself from witnesses asked to identify her. On one such day eleven months ago, she didn’t show up at all, preferring, her attorneys told the court, to worship in chapel; that morning, when asked to identify the defendant, the witness could point only to Pauline’s chair. The courtroom is typically crowded with three judges, twelve defense attorneys and prosecutors, clerks, interpreters, and other staff. Most days there are only a handful of spectators watching all this in a narrow gallery behind bulletproof glass—and frequently there are none at all.

Pauline and Shalom are being tried together with four other Hutu leaders from Butare who are also accused of genocide. Fourteen
witnesses for the prosecution have testified so far, with seventy-three more still to go, most of whom will have something to say against Pauline, who faces life imprisonment. In most cases, she is accused of inciting crimes rather than carrying them out herself. However, according to a document prepared by tribunal investigators in preparation for the trial, one witness, code-named Q.C., saw a Tutsi community leader die “at the hands of Nyiramasuhuko.” (The report does not specify what weapon Pauline used.) Attorneys for each of the six accused will most likely open their defenses in 2004 and will probably call more than a hundred witnesses of their own as the trial creeps along for at least another two years. Justice at the tribunal has moved at a glacial pace, with only eight convictions and one acquittal handed down in seven years.

Pauline has consistently denied the charges against her. In 1995, before she was arrested, she gave an interview to the BBC in a squalid Hutu refugee camp across the Congo border, where she had been leading the camp’s social services; her job duties included the reuniting of separated parents and children. When asked what she did during the war, Pauline replied: “We moved around the region to pacify. We wrote a pacification document saying people shouldn’t kill each other. Saying it’s genocide, that’s not true. It was the Tutsi who massacred the Hutu.” Told that witnesses had accused her of murder, Pauline shot back: “I cannot even kill a chicken. If there is a person who says that a woman—a mother-killed, then I’ll confront that person.”