A Nightmare Waits for Democracy’s Dawn : Rwanda: A survivor mourns the slaughter of his fellow progressives--both Hutu and Tutsi--who dreamed of moving the country beyond tribalism.

The small hours of April 7, 1994, now seem a lifetime ago. My bags were packed, and my passport, visa and tickets were in my pocket. In just a few hours, I was due at Kigali’s airport for a dawn departure to America. As a guest of the U.S. government, I was to join a group of visitors from all over the world in a three-week seminar on the role of Congress in the U.S. political system. Rwanda’s political system was slowly opening after three decades of authoritarian rule and nearly a century of colonial oppression before that. Democratic opposition forces were gaining strength. Ideas on how other societies made democratic systems work were timely.

About 3 a.m., explosions rattled my apartment’s windows and started me on a very different journey. Some hours earlier, a plane carrying our president, Juvenal Habyarimana, along with Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira, crashed as it attempted to land at Kigali airport. People said it was shot down. By whom? No one knew. But now shouts and screams were carrying across Kigali’s hills, along with the din of machine-gun and mortar fire.

Kigali is not my home town; I sent a message to my parents at the village post office, telling them to flee. Hoping against hope, I felt tragedy was on its way.

By early the next day, my feeling had been replaced by knowledge--and with it, terror. I knew that I had to get out of my country and beg the world to save it.

Kigali was turning into a slaughterhouse. Now we know that the slaughter became genocide--what else can you call the murder of half an ethnic group? But I tried to keep in mind that the instigators of the massacres were government soldiers and others intent on thwarting democratization. Among their primary targets were the thousands of moderate Hutus supportive of democratic change and ethnic accommodation. One of them was Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, whom I had served as press counselor in 1992-93. She was murdered in the first wave of killings, along with 10 Belgian U.N. peacekeepers trying to protect her.

I have known these democrats, Hutus and Tutsis both, since my student days and through my work as a writer and news editor at Rwanda’s fledgling television station. I have spent long evenings with them discussing, with growing hope, our country’s chances for democracy. They are gone, killed by those who say the only security is in the power of the tribe.

I slipped out of Kigali and started my long trek through the countryside. Often it’s quite hard to tell a Hutu from a Tutsi; we share the same language and culture, and centuries of intermarriage frequently blur distinctive physical characteristics. But militias and mobs bent on slaughter need only look at one’s national identity card for the information they need. Alone among African states, the Rwandan identity card lists ethnicity. Luckily, it does not list political leanings. My identity card reads “Hutu.” With it, walking south through the bush over a thousand hills, I was able after 10 days to reach Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi. There, I tried to call my village, but the lines had been cut.

The U.S. Embassy arranged for me to begin my American visit--”delayed due to unforeseen circumstances”--and urged me to try to explain the nightmare.

Rwanda is a beautiful country of rolling hills and rich farmland. But since 1962, the year of our independence from Belgium, we have suffered from dictatorial governments and ethnic strife. Amid terrible violence, hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, who make up about 15% of the population, fled to neighboring countries as the majority Hutu took control of government and army. Violence again flared in 1972-73.

Our country is crowded, with about 8 million people trying to earn their living from the land. Africa’s artificial colonial boundaries mean that migration in search of more open spaces is nearly impossible, making the competition for scarce resources even greater. Establishing large federations of states that are viable in the scale of their economic and human resources is, I believe, the only true long-term solution to Africa’s ethnic and economic problems. In Rwanda, people are fighting to share a wealth that in fact is not yet there.

The first thing is to stop the bloodshed. The world should strongly pressure the government and rebels to resume peace talks. It will take a long time to get over the ethnic fear and anger that the horror in my country has caused. Reconstruction will be difficult. But the most important problem for us to face is democratization. Only if there is the rule of law--if we have a situation where Citizen A and Citizen B are treated equally, no matter what their ethnicity--will we have peace in Rwanda.