Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [42]
Finally, someone grabbed my legs from behind, tugging at my jeans. It was another reporter inside the courtyard.
“Get down,” he yelled, and I started to lower myself from the wall. Before I dropped, I looked for the woman. I caught just a glimpse of her. She was being led away by several men in the crowd. I never found out what happened to her. I never saw her again.
FOR THE NEXT two years, I traveled continually for Channel One. Bosnia came next, then Croatia, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Israel, Cambodia, Haiti, Indonesia, South Africa. Wherever there was conflict, I wanted to go.
In May 1994, I headed to Rwanda. The genocide was well under way. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus had already been killed. Many more would die before it was over. The mostly Tutsi army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front was advancing on the capital, Kigali. They were on the verge of victory and had vowed to stop the killings. Hundreds of thousands of Hutus were streaming for the borders. With blood on their hands, they slinked into Tanzania and Zaire, hoping to lose their sin in the crush of the crowd. Their piles of weapons were the first thing you noticed when you crossed into Rwanda. The weapons and the bodies.
Most were naked, swollen grotesquely by gases and water. There were at least a dozen of them, bobbing up and down, at the base of a small waterfall underneath the bridge you had to cross to get into Rwanda from Tanzania. It was hard to count how many; they twisted and turned in the tide, their arms flailed about in the churning water. I noticed the body of a child stuck between two rocks. His arms shook as waves of water washed over him. I watched him for several minutes. I couldn’t look away. I kept wondering if his body would somehow become dislodged, break free. It never did. Not while I was there, at least. Breathing on the bridge was difficult. When I opened my mouth, the spray from the falls filled it with the taste of rotted flesh.
The bodies floated downstream, about one a minute. I actually stood there and timed them. I heard that thousands of bodies floated all the way to Lake Victoria in Uganda, where the UN paid locals a dollar a corpse to fish them out.
The border was controlled by the Rwandan Patriotic Front. When I first approached them, I tried to be diplomatic.
“I’d like to see some of the local areas,” I explained to a soldier in army green fatigues and red Converse hightops.
He looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Don’t you want to see the massacres?” he asked. The rebels knew all about the value of good public relations. “We will help design a program that meets all your needs,” he promised.
His name was Lieutenant Tony. He took us into Rwanda the next day.
I’d rented a car in Tanzania, but I didn’t tell the driver where we were headed because I was afraid he wouldn’t go. I said we were just driving to the border. The joke was on me, though. Since he didn’t think we were going far, he didn’t fill the tank with gas. We had only a few gallons. So every time we passed a rebel vehicle, we had to stop and beg them for a few liters of fuel.
“Please, we have a war to run, you know,” Lieutenant Tony complained whenever we stopped for gas. “We don’t have much petrol left ourselves. We can’t give it away.”
“We’d be happy to buy some,” I said.
“Please, let’s continue,” he responded.
That’s how our conversation went for several hours.
YOU SMELLED THE bodies before you saw them, but the truth is, after