Genocide diary: A journalist's account of the horror 30 years ago

The call came in early afternoon in Cape Town, on a Wednesday in the second week of July, 1994. It was early morning in Washington.

“Chris, how long will it take you to get to Goma (eastern Democratic Republic of Congo)?” was the terse query from USA Today International Desk editor.

“Goma, Zaire? I don’t know, could be a few days, maybe more – you know that the place is literally in the middle of the African tropical jungle, right?” I replied, uncertain of my American colleagues’ grasp on Africa’s vastness, and the on-the-ground realities in the heart of the continent.

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Google wasn’t the thing then and travelling between African cities wasn’t a matter of choice. It was luck, mostly.

Some 48 hours later, I was among four foreign correspondents sitting around a table, working angles to get from Nairobi, where we were momentarily stranded, to Goma.

We would most likely be aboard one the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) charter flights. The aircraft had, had some days before, begun to make emergency runs to Goma, on the eastern border of what is was then Zaire, and Rwanda.

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Hutus ‘uprising’

For weeks, since early April 1994, the Hutus ‘uprising’ had been nothing short of a horror-story of murder, mayhem, mass rape and, in its later phases, the ‘forced relocation’ of somewhere between one and two million people.

Paul Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) had swept in from their bases in Uganda and were rapidly taking Rwanda under full control. Masses of Hutus uprooted and ran with what they could carry westward towards then Zaire, their only ‘escape route’ from the RPF.

The result was that from a few days before that call from Washington, when the first trickles of Rwandan refugees had begun to swell into a torrent of humanity seeking hope in a foreign land, Goma had been inundated by an ever-increasing flow of desperate people, some already carrying deadly disease with them.

The squad of journalists looking to get somehow from Nairobi to Goma knew much of the history, and the recent slaughter of the Tutsis.

Yet, despite having covered the anti-apartheid ‘township rebellion’ in South Africa during the 1980s, where massacres were prevalent, and experienced other conflicts and war in Africa, I was not ready for what was to come. The genocide, as it turned out later, was a story that had also attracted big names such as CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and Pulitzer Prize-winning Time photographer James Natchwey at the time. They all wanted to tell the world the story. I will not speak for them though.

Our squad flew into Goma on an UNHCR Il 76 long-haul relief flight, crewed by Russian-speaking Ukrainians. We landed as the sun set on Goma on a Friday in mid-July, 1994.

Desperate humanity

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Various relief agencies, some of them also fresh on the ground, collected what provisions had been brought in before heading back to Goma, a two-street town then in the depths of the African jungle about 5 kilometers from its airstrip.

The next day, I caught a ride with some Canadian and Australian relief workers along the only road running north out of Goma and which, by then, had already seen the better part of a million people arrive in just a matter of days.

The 28km journey through a sea of displaced, desperate humanity was appalling in more ways than are easily conveyed.

From the outset, there were refugee corpses distributed for pick-up, placed presumably by family members along the roadside, with UN teams using trucks and pickups to load bodies for disposal in one of the few large burial sites to be found in this wildly volcanic part of Africa.

There, under watchful eyes of French Foreign Legionnaires, loaded vehicles deposited their deathly cargo and immediately set out for more.

With corpses strewn literally on the other side of a simple wire fence, mainly American TV colleagues took the obvious images and reported the ‘obvious story’: another tragic African ‘famine’ was underway, they said.

But it was not so. Yes, people were desperately hungry, but this was primarily a water story.

Or rather, a story about a critically short vital need which was contaminated, very quickly, by cholera. And there were hundreds, thousands of dead lying everywhere they had died.

5,000 die in a day

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Before heading northwards to the most distant of the recently-established refugee camps, these mainly being points along the road, either self-chosen by the fleeing masses, or set up by relief agencies, as in the Katale camp case. I had spoken to a former colleague working for the UNHCR.

This agency thought about 5,000 were dying a day but had no good idea as their focus was on keeping the arriving throngs of needy alive, if possible.

To get to Katale camp, one had to pass the ‘Cholera Camp’, run by the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) located about 11km northward on the eastern side of the road from Goma, where a literal pile of dead bodies was accumulating as exhausted medics tended to long lines the sick who often lay on the ground.

We stopped long enough for the briefest of discussions with one of the doctors: cholera was the killer – and they had no idea how many they had treated, but certainly exceeding many thousands. The chaotic intensity of the work to save as many lives as possible bespoke the severity of what was unfolding: a human-made tragedy of the first magnitude.

Down the road north from Goma the scene was worse than any disaster film could convey – throngs dispersed away from the road into the surrounding jungle, cutting it to the lava-covered ground as they went, in some places stripping the jungle back 200m or more from the road.

Small lean-tos and sticks used to hold up blankets were about as much as the sick and exhausted throngs could manage. People had brought with them some belongings, an odd pot, some clothes perhaps, and sleeping mats made of slatted strips of woven reeds. On these some lay, most ending up wrapped in these same mats alongside the road, when they had breathed their last, to be collected by the harried UNHCR body teams.

But some simply lay where they had died, perhaps having no one living to give them what last rites were possible amid such a rapidly unfolding human catastrophe.

One man had died with his legs jutting into the narrow dirt road now heavily trafficked by people moving north and some aid vehicles attempting to weave through the masses.

Later that same day, en route back to Goma, I saw the same dead man, now lying in two pieces, cut in half by multiple vehicle wheels that had driven over his middle section, no-one having had the time or space to retrieve his body.

Everywhere there was death and the smell of it. Bloated bodies, sometimes mothers with little ones also wrapped in the same deathly parcel of reeds, awaiting their internment in long strip-like mass graves dug by the Legionnaires using heavy machinery, each layer of the dead covered with quick lime, before the next layer of the dead was laid upon them.

Katale camp, no different than the surrounding jungle except for a black river of newly-release lava which marked the location and upon which healthy-looking children happily played, was the site for the farthest refugee relief camp the UNHCR had set up.

Only a few hundred of the first arrivals in Goma, and the strongest, had reached that point.

The tidy tents, and the arrival about 500m away of the first road-train of relief goods, mostly food, from Uganda, belied the reality – down the road but a few kilometres away from the relative ‘normality’ of the camp was coming an inexorable tide of death, an unstoppable tsunami of disease so severe in vulnerable people that a matter of several hours can mark the course of the infection-to-death process that runaway cholera can cause.

The way back to Goma was every bit as depressing and troubling as getting to Katale camp had been.

A food truck’s arrival caused a crash of people trying to get whatever nutrition and drink was on it, during which a young boy aged about the same as my own child, maybe 6, climbed onto the running board of the SUV I was in, his dirt-covered little fingers tightly gripping the slightly opened window, saying to me, with great intensity, his face pressed to the window: “Famie mzungu, famie.”

Before I could give him what energy bars of chocolate I carried in one pocket, he was swept away by a surge in the crowd.

Later, after establishing how many vehicles were being used to collect the dead and how many they could carry with each trip, the calculus was that on that day alone some 10,000 people had died.

I caged another UNHCR flight ride in the cargo straps, got to my Nairobi hotel room around midnight and wrote my piece immediately – it was too fresh and I had to process what I had seen. It was one of the most distressing experiences of my life.

I filed to USA Today, as well as the Daily Nation which carried my piece on the paper’s front page. A day and a half later, I made another foray into the death zone.

Still more people were dying, and still water was not being reported as the main issue, which I estimate cost several tens of thousands African lives. The story of refugees was being misreported as famine.

My second outing involved a lucky encounter with the Under-Secretary of the UNHCR who was overseeing the international humanitarian relief efforts for the roughly 1.25 million people who had crossed the border from Rwanda at Goma by that time.

With another story, this time involving also interviews with the Legionnaires and some others involved in the relief effort, I made the last leg back to Nairobi in the early hours of the next day – and had to pay ‘beer money’ to some fellow who had driven out to the UNHCR-chartered aircraft, another Il 76, parked some vast distance from the airport, just to get off the runway.

Sick with a nasty stomach bug (not cholera), as many others involved in this tragedy also had become, I filed again and was told by an editor in Washington that a full team was coming from the USA to replace me.

They were worried about me and the impact of covering this story, which was kind, but which could not deflect what experiencing human tragedy on a mass scale is really like.

The final irony was that the entire awful business was purely human-made.

Chris Erasmus is a Nation Correspondent based in Cape Town, South Africa