Killer Songs
By DONALD G. MCNEIL JR.
Karim Ben Khelifa
Bikindi with his interpreter at his extradition hearing in The Hague in
January. He faces six counts of genocide, murder and persecution.
imon Bikindi is Rwanda's most famous musician. He is also one of the
country's most famous accused war criminals. He was arrested last July at a
center for asylum seekers in the Netherlands, and he sits now in a Dutch jail
awaiting extradition to Tanzania, where the tribunal investigating Rwandan
war crimes is convened. The ''statement of facts'' in his six-count
indictment runs to 46 paragraphs, but the charges against him focus on his
music: in essence, Bikindi is accused of inciting genocide with his songs.
Bikindi, 47, grew up in a broken little village called Akanyirabagoyi in
Rwanda's mountainous Gisenyi Province, five miles from the nearest paved
road. He was a child prodigy on the inanga, a sort of guitar, and the
iningiri, a one-string violin with a calabash tone box. From the village
priest, he learned to do the ntore, Rwanda's signature war dance, in which
two fighters with short spears, small shields and white manes hanging to
their knees feint and thrust at each other. At 22 he was hired by the
Ministry of Youth and Sports to act as the ministry's head cheerleader,
organizing massive North Korea-style song-and-dance displays for honored
visitors, including the pope. He became a popular songwriter; a United
Nations official who has followed his career calls him ''Rwanda's Michael
Jackson.'' His style was to infuse old folk songs with new rhythms and ideas.
He wrote powerful rap lyrics that mixed English, French and Kinyarwandan and
set them to traditional tunes. He supplemented his government income by
working at weddings, where he would sing and lead folk dances like the caller
at a hoedown. His first cassette, released in 1990, was of traditional
wedding songs.
At the time, Rwanda was in the midst of a tense but officially tolerant
standoff between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority. Inciting racial
hatred was illegal and a social faux pas. But in 1990, the army of the
Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded Rwanda from Uganda, quickly
capturing some territory in the north. For the next four years the R.P.F.
fought a guerrilla war, punctuated by sporadic massacres of Hutus, and slowly
advanced toward the capital, Kigali.
The invasion radicalized the Akazu, a secret elite Hutu corps within
President Juvenal Habyarimana's inner circle. The Akazu's view quietly but
quickly hardened into an official government doctrine: All domestic Tutsi
were fifth columnists for the Rwandan Patriotic Front. They had to be wiped
out.
It was in that context that the songs of the government's hired cheerleader,
the wedding singer who had celebrated love, Lake Kivu and the beautiful
Virunga volcanoes, began to change.
The two songs mentioned in Bikindi's indictment, songs for which he stands
accused of inciting genocide, are ''Bene Sebahinzi'' (''Sons of the Father of
the Farmers'') and ''Nanga Abahutu'' (''I Hate Hutus''). The latter, written
in 1992, is the most troubling of Bikindi's songs. He never mentions Tutsis
by name but attacks Hutus who break ranks with other Hutus. The delivery is
spoken-word, a driving, almost shouted Gil Scott-Heron style, not quite rap,
and the power of his poetry is obvious even in translation. The song lists
the types of Hutus the singer detests:
I hate these Hutus, these de-Hutuized Hutus, who have renounced their
identity, dear comrades.
I hate these Hutus, these Hutus who march blindly, like imbeciles.
This species of naive Hutus who join a war without knowing its cause.
I hate these Hutus who can be brought to kill and who, I swear to you, kill
Hutus, dear comrades.
And if I hate them, so much the better.
''For a Rwandan, it's easy to see the virulence in the text,'' says Ephrem
Rugiririza, a Hutu journalist. ''Renouncing identity'' implies marrying a
Tutsi, Rugiririza explains, and ''naive Hutus'' is a reference to an army
colonel who defected to the invasion force with his men.
Alison DesForges, the lead specialist on Rwanda for Human Rights Watch, says
that Bikindi's songs are subtle, using poetic language and oblique
references. ''There's a Rwandan proverb,'' she says. ''A message is given to
many, but those who are meant to understand, understand.' There's always a
subtext in Rwanda. You don't have to resort to brutal language. People
understand.''
At the beginning of the orgy of killing that engulfed Rwanda from April to
July 1994, Bikindi wasn't even in the country. He was in Europe, arranging a
tour for his ballet troupe. But his voice dominated the airwaves. Radio
Milles Collines -- the radio station that coordinated the genocide, that gave
death tolls like weather reports and exhorted murder squads to hurry to
villages where ''the work'' wasn't going fast enough -- played Bikindi's
music constantly during the 100 days of killing. In Rwanda, almost no one
reads newspapers or owns a television, and radio is king. According to
eyewitness reports, many of the killers sang Bikindi's songs as they hacked
or beat to death hundreds of thousands of Tutsis with government-issued
machetes and homemade nail-studded clubs.
Although he is also accused of taking part in some killings himself after he
returned to Rwanda toward the end of the 100 days, the prosecution is trying
Mr. Bikindi primarily as a lyricist. Had he only killed, he would not be a
target of the International Criminal Tribunal, according to a United Nations
official familiar with the case. ''He's a big fish because of his musical
compositions,'' the official says.
Back in Akanyirabagoyi, Tharcisse Twasenga, a former neighbor of Bikindi's,
blames the government. ''Bikindi was an artist,'' he says. ''But as an artist
working for the Ministry of Youth and Sports, he had to follow the rules set
by the former government. But that shouldn't be a reason to be imprisoned. An
artist shouldn't be jailed.''
That excuse dovetails neatly with Bikindi's planned defense: he says he never
wrote a song advocating killing anyone, never made a speech advocating it and
never killed anyone. He entertained government rallies, as required. He
couldn't help it if the ruling party, which he served, switched its policy to
genocide, nor could he stop stone-cold killers from singing his songs.
''The songs I wrote in the 1990's were not for the government; they were what
I felt inside myself,'' he told me during an interview in a Dutch jail last
month. ''The peasants were blind. They were killing each other, and the
politicians were giving them 10 francs to go kill someone. When I sang 'Nanga
Abahutu' and the rest, I was saying 'Stop!' I was asking everybody to stop
the chaos, stop the killing.''
His former mistress, Angeline Mukabanana, says he hated no one. She points
out that she is a Tutsi herself and that Bikindi adopted her first son, who
had a Tutsi father, and defended their Tutsi neighbors against Hutu thugs
before the genocide.
She sees him as a romantic opportunist, too eager to please. ''After he wrote
'I Hate Hutus,''' she said, ''I asked him: 'Why did you write that? What if
the R.P.F. wins the war?' He said: 'The government obliges me to write these
songs. If I hear the R.P.F. is coming to Kigali next month, I'll write a song
for them.'''
Donald G. McNeil Jr. is a correspondent in the Paris bureau of The New York
Times.
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