"A blink of an eye, and a million killed"

You write about how the media paid less and less attention to Africa over time as well. What was that like, especially being in Rwanda and realizing that no one cared when one of the great tragedies of the 20th century was playing out?

Over time it has definitely been the case that international media have covered Africa less and less. The thing that kept it going during the 1980s was that there was an immense interest in South Africa -- the whole apartheid story drew in large numbers of journalists. Basically these resources have been drained because the bottom line is what speaks now. A lot of these companies like Reuters became listed on stock exchanges and they're beholden to their shareholders.

For example, all the time that I was a reporter in Nairobi there was a Newsweek correspondent for Africa based in Nairobi -- he had a big office and a company car. That no longer exists. It seems scandalous that there's an entire continent of 50-something nations that isn't really covered, except out of Johannesburg. I think the same is true for Time magazine. The Washington Post and the New York Times are pretty good about it, though.

So what was that like during Rwanda? It must have been surreal for you.

It was appalling, horrible. There was a small Nairobi press corps and other people coming in from Kampala who knew what was going on. But even those media organizations that should have been the most conscientious about covering Africa -- the supposedly liberal ones -- were the ones that didn't want to know. They didn't want to acknowledge that such a terrible thing could be happening in Africa, most particularly at the time of the South African elections. They wanted to produce out of Africa a positive story: Nelson Mandela's victory. Which I understand. It was a great moment for everybody, April 21, 1994. I describe it on the flight out of Rwanda, on that evacuation plane.

How long were you in Rwanda during the genocide?

I started covering Rwanda in October 1990, on the second day of the invasion by the rebels, and I carried on going there pretty regularly until the outbreak of the genocide, which was in the first week of April 1994. I stayed there for the rest of the year.

At what point were you and everyone you were traveling with aware that this was genocide? At what point does that become clear?

It doesn't. And that's why I say it's like "an ant crawling across the hide of an elephant." Get this: In the first week of the civil war in October 1990, the Hutu extremist government began chopping up Tutsis. I wrote the story on Oct. 15, 1990. It was immediately picked up by human rights groups. I took pictures of the people who were being hacked up. It was ignored by the embassies. The embassies were given all the information, and governments didn't do anything, and throughout the civil war, human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International were all saying, these guys are gearing up for a big one. We knew that something was coming. But "genocide" is a word that you don't use lightly. So we didn't reach a trigger point.

What we did realize in 1994 -- and we're talking about weeks here -- was there was suddenly an open program for [killing in Rwanda], but frankly I don't think anyone thought they could be so efficient about doing it. It took the Germans several years to kill six and a half million Jews ... having to kill people in large numbers is an amazing task. What took everybody by surprise is really -- it happened in three weeks. And it happened by manual labor, it didn't happen with gas chambers. It happened with machetes and rocks and all the other stuff. Within a blink of an eye, nearly a million people had died and we were thinking, "Christ there's another one and a half million people left who they might still kill."

And remember we couldn't physically get places. When we walked from the Ugandan border to Kigali [the capital of Rwanda] in April, we saw things along the way. The mayor of Kigali had boasted that 60,000 people have been killed in the capital, but it's a long way to go from 60,000 to a million, do you know what I mean?

It's impossible to comprehend. And you were traveling through this country by foot, and one imagines that in that short time you must have witnessed mass murder everywhere.

Yeah, I did witness killings. I describe the woman with the child on her back running after another woman with a child on her back.

You actually saw that?

It was happening everywhere. Basically, what was happening was that you'd see it from a distance, from your hotel room, looking down on roadblocks, Or you'd see it as you drove up to a roadblock. How many people did I see actually being killed? Several. I saw lots of people who'd been killed 10 minutes before and who were going to be killed 10 minutes after I left. I saw people saying, "Tonight we will be killed," and they were probably killed. And so on. In most cases, the militias didn't take much trouble to conceal what they were doing.

You must have felt so vulnerable.

Yes. For example, even when we were in a U.N. vehicle, an armored personnel carrier, you'd go through a roadblock and you'd have these guys with nailed clubs drunk out of their mind, asking, "Are you Belgian? We kill Belgians." We'd just say, "No, we're not Belgians." And I describe the walk to Kigali. It was a combat situation -- we were being fired at and all that sort of stuff. I never felt so exposed as in Rwanda. But we were not their target. They had a very specific target -- anyone who was Tutsi.

Right, whereas I feel like you were more of a target in Somalia.

No! In fact, in Somalia if anything happened bad, it was because you happened to be in a Toyota Landcruiser and they wanted the car. Or maybe you were the victim of crossfire. But no, we were never targeted in Somalia, except maybe spontaneously.

Have you been back to Rwanda recently? And how do you feel about it?

I was back in 2000, and the feeling that I had was that the country will take an awful long time to recover from what happened. It's not over yet, because there's still great tension between the communities. The Congo was a consequence of what happened in Rwanda. The killing just spread across the border. Whereas the Tutsis were the main victims at the time of the Rwandan genocide, the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front], the Tutsi army, went into the Congo and killed a lot of Hutu civilians. I describe how there's a road in eastern Congo where there are so many dead people that the tires are crunching on bones and spectacles and so on.

None of it is over. Kigali is quiet but forlorn -- everyone is basically haunted. I remember the time I was there, my taxi driver had enormous scars on his face, which were machete scars. They're a traumatized nation, and the conflict in central Africa continues. But hopefully not indefinitely. These things just take generations to recover from.

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