We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families Read Online Free PDF Page A

briefs, the pastor had been spared such unpleasantness.
    Yet, when I returned to New York in September of 1996, a week after my visit to Mugonero, I learned that the FBI was preparing to arrest Elizaphan Ntakirutimana in Laredo. The United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, sitting in Arusha, Tanzania, had issued an indictment against him, charging him with three counts of genocide and three counts of crimes against humanity. The indictment, which made the same charges against Dr. Gerard Ntakirutimana, as well as the mayor, Charles Sikubwabo, and a local businessman, told the same story that survivors had told me: the pastor had “instructed” Tutsis to take refuge at the Adventist complex; Dr. Gerard had helped to extricate “non-Tutsis” from among the refugees; father and son had arrived at the complex on the morning of April 16, 1994, in a convoy of attackers; and “during the months that followed” both men were held to have “searched for and attacked Tutsi survivors and others, killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to them.”
    The indictment was a secret, as were the FBI’s plans for an arrest. Laredo, a hot, flat town, tucked into one of the southernmost bends of the Rio Grande, overlooks Mexico, and the pastor had a record of flight.
     
     
    THE ADDRESS I had for Dr. Eliel Ntakirutimana in Laredo was 313 Potrero Court—a suburban brick ranch house at the end of a drab cul-de-sac. A dog growled when I rang the bell, but nobody answered. I found a pay phone and called the local Adventist church, but I don’t speak Spanish, and the man who answered didn’t speak English. I had a tip that Pastor Ntakirutimana was working at a health-food store, but after making the rounds of a few places with names like Casa Ginseng and Fiesta Natural that seemed to specialize in herbal remedies for constipation and impotence, I went back to Potrero Court. There was still nobody at 313. Down the street I found a man spraying his driveway with a garden hose. I told him I was looking for a family of Rwandans, and indicated the house. He said, “I don’t know about that. I only know the people next door here a little.” I thanked him, and he said, “Where’d you say these people were from?” Rwanda, I said. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Colored people?” I said, “They’re from Africa.” He pointed to 313, and told me, “That’s the house. Fancy cars they drive. They moved out about a month ago.
    Eliel Ntakirutimana’s new phone number was unlisted, but late at night I got hold of an operator who gave me his address, and in the morning I drove there. The house was on Estate Drive, in an expensive-looking new private community, designed, as in Rwanda, with each home set within a walled compound. An electronic gate controlled access to the subdivision, where most of the plots were still empty prairie. The few houses were wild, vaguely Mediterranean fantasias, whose only common attribute was immensity. The Ntakirutimanas’ stood at the end of the road behind another electronic security fence. A barefoot Rwandan maid led me past an open garage that housed a white Corvette convertible and into a vast kitchen area. She phoned Dr. Ntaki—he had chopped down his name as a professional courtesy to American tongues—and I told him I was hoping to meet his father. He asked how I’d found the house. I told him that, too, and he gave me an appointment in the afternoon at a hospital called Mercy.
    While I was still on the phone, the doctor’s wife, Genny, a handsome woman with an easy manner, came home from taking her kids to school. She offered me a cup of coffee—“From Rwanda,” she said proudly. We sat on huge leather couches beside a gigantic television in an alcove of the kitchen, with a view over a patio, a barbecue pavilion, and, on the far shore of a tiled swimming pool, a patch of garden. The distant voices of the Rwandan maid and a Mexican nanny echoed off the marble floors