When Hutu leaders began massacring Tutsi rebels in 1994, Alan Zarembo '92 left his job at a Washington state newspaper, "saved up for a month, sold my station wagon and bought a one-way ticket to Uganda and a laptop."
Now Zarembo, who wrote a story that appears in April's Harpers Magazine, has returned to Dartmouth to tell students about the genocide in Rwanda.
Zarembo's article in Harper's is a culmination of his research and articles on the "dilemmas of trying to prosecute a genocide," he said in an interview yesterday.
He will address these issues in a speech tonight in 2 Rockefeller Hall and in a Friday afternoon panel discussion in Cutter-Shabazz Hall, which will discuss possibilities for peace in Rwanda and Zaire.
Zarembo said he has kept in touch with government professor Nelson Kasfir and has planned to speak at the College for a while, hoping to see "what students were thinking about these problems and if they were thinking about them."
Zarembo's interest in the problems of Rwanda has its roots in his career at the College.
"The reason I came to Dartmouth is the tremendous opportunity for foreign study," Zarembo said. "I picked the most exotic place. Africa intrigued me because it is such a dynamic place."
While pursuing a government major modified with environmental studies, Zarembo went on the Kenya Foreign Study Program with Kasfir in the winter of 1991.
It was during this FSP that Zarembo became "really motivated as a student for the first time." Zarembo had always wanted to write and, with the help of Kasfir, obtained a reporting internship at the Ugandan national newspaper in the spring of 1991. Zarembo had previously served on the staff of The Dartmouth.
His work in Uganda led him to uncover government corruption and to report on the Tutsi rebels invading Rwanda from their exile in Uganda. Zarembo came back to Dartmouth for his senior year and used this knowledge to write his honors thesis on Uganda's involvement in the invasion.
"I explained that Uganda sponsored the invasion as a convenient way to get Rwandans out of the country," he said. "By this time, there were several hundred thousand [Rwandan] refugees [in Uganda]."
In 1994, the Hutu leaders of Rwanda began the massacres of the same Tutsi rebels Zarembo had reported on as a journalist in Uganda. It was then that Zarembo flew to Uganda and traveled by bus to Rwanda alongside Tutsi refugees returning home after the massacres.
In his travels, Zarembo saw firsthand the effects of the massacres and years of rebellion, at one point watching a family "scrub the blood off a wall" and move into an abandoned house.
As soon as he graduated from Dartmouth, Zarembo "had in the back of my mind that I would go back to Africa," but he initially chose to live in the small logging town of Longview, Wash., his girlfriend's hometown.
"Each phase of my life I go somewhere else," explained Zarembo, who lived in his girlfriend's parents' backyard before getting a job with the town's newspaper.
The rural, conservative mill town was "another foreign country" for Zarembo, who experienced "resentment" for some of his stories dealing with nepotism in local government and corruption in the railroad companies.
"I shook things up as much as I could," Zarembo said. He said he felt the effects of his exposes because of the town's small population.
"You are really accountable in that you see the people in your stories and your readers in the grocery store," he said. "It builds integrity as a reporter and teaches you how to treat people fairly."
Zarembo's most important story during his two years in Washington was an investigative report concerning the head-on collision of two freight trains on November 11, 1993.
"I found out the railroads had ripped out safety systems that had been around since the 1920s to save on maintenance costs," Zarembo said. He said he also discovered evidence which had been tampered with, but after he asked a railroad employee about the cover-up, the man chased him off of his property with a gun.
That July, after 800,000 people had died in the Rwanda massacres, Zarembo felt the need to return to his past area of study. He gave his month's notice to the Washington paper, then left to study the Rwandan problems in greater depth.
Sponsored by newspapers in London, Toronto and five American cities, Zarembo worked as a freelance foreign corespondent in 10 African countries, focusing on Rwanda, Eastern Zaire and Kenya.
"There are 92,000 people in prison charged with the genocide," Zarembo said. "None of the world's judicial systems are set up to handle that."
Although Zarembo is sure he will return to Africa at some point, he says he wants to branch out to other parts of the world. After three years of freelancing, he has accepted a job with International Newsweek, where he will report on both foreign affairs and matters in New York which are of interest to foreign readers.
After spending a month in Europe, Zarembo has been back in the United States for two months and is currently adjusting to life in his new home of Manhattan.
