The other story of Rwanda

I know this post is late. I should have written it way back when Roman and I first returned from Rwanda. I wanted to tell the stories of the Gorillas but did not know where to start to tell about the genocide. After our gorilla tracking, we checked into what is now the Kigali Serena Hotel. It used to be the Hotel Diplomates..this is where the RGF had their headquarters...essentially where the government machinery that orchestrated the genocide were holed up for months prior to and during the genocide. General Bagasora was the kingpin. Just down the road was the Milles Collines, where Paul Rusesabagina, who had been the hotel manager at the Diplomates, was seconded by the hotel management company to go to the Milles Collines and keep things running. What he ended up doing was saving the lives of hundreds of Tutsis and moderate Hutus seeking safety. He risked his life and the life of his family to save others. The story is told in the book and movie called The,Hotel Rwanda. Roman and I sat around the pool bar at the Milles Collines and had a late night snack on our Saturday night in Kigali. It was surreal to reflect on the events that went on there. It was also a reminder that life goes on.

Paul Kagame is Rwanda's current president and who was the general of the Rwandan Patriotic Front that took over Kigali to push out the genocide perpetrators (essentially the army of the government of the time). He has worked very hard to restore peace by focusing on reconcilliation and restorative justice. He could not have asked thousands of Tutsis to return home to Rwanda after fleeing during the genocide and live next to their neighbors who killed their family members without helping them to cope with the horrors that ocurred, and, to help them make sense of why the genoide happened and to ever so slowly work towards forgiving those who killed. Much of the peace has also come because many of the survivors have played a hand in the process of justice by sitting in local village courts (called the grass courts) to watch the perpetrators be brought to justice. Thousands (more than 100,000) Hutus were jailed after the genocide and now many of them are being released. They reintegrate back into the communities they had come from but continue to do community work for their period of parole...you see them on the streets...sweeping, digging ditches etc. Their uniforms are pink.

Many of these Hutu villagers who were swiftly jailed on their return to Rwanda were simple people living a pastoral life but whose minds were poisoned and brainwashed by the government media, largely through radio annoucements and music that was designed to build a hatred so powerful that once provided with machetes, these men (and some women) of the Interahamwe were able to go out and kill their neighbors, friends, wives and even their own children. You see, many Hutus were happily married to Tutsis in Rwanda and both tribes had prior colonization lived in relatove peace. It was the foreigners who colonized them-Germans and then the Belgians who saw the ability to pit one tribe against the other in order to gain power. The Tutsi's have committed genocidal crimes in the past too..just not on the scale that the Hutu led government were able to in 1994.

The thing that I didn't fully understand until I read more books on the subject (Roman and I have been reading everything we can get our hands on since we visited the Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal in Arusha Tanzania in 2007) is that the genocidaires (the planners and the perpetrators) all fled by the millions to the Congo..just over the border at Gisenyi to Goma. They were able to hide out in Goma's UN sanctioned refugee camps in the Congo and were protected by the UN. While in the camps they developed new Interahamwe cells and terrorized Tutsis in the camps who had already escaped the genocide once. Many Tutsis still died in these camps at the hands of the Interahamwe. These criminals were fed and clothed for more than a year by the United Nations while Tutsis in Rwanda starved and tried to rebuild their lives with literally no focus on what had happened to them.

The world seemed to get it all wrong...even after the genocide had happened (and was still happening, the world focused on the growing humanitarian crises (cholera and a volcanoe eruption) in Goma-this focus on the refugees and not what had happened and was still happening in Rwanda was largely due to pressure from the United States who not only failed to act during the genocide but blocked UN efforts to launch a big enough force to stop the genocidaires from committing atrocities...after the genocide, the United States government (out of guilt perhaps) decided to then put 300 million dollars into the UN camps in Goma....if they had funded just one quarter of that amount to fund the UNAMIR force in Rwanda that was head by Romeo Dallaire, it is believed by many experts that the genocide could have been stopped.

I am not sure what to tell you about what we saw and did on this leg of our trip....it is difficult. We went to the Genocide memorial in Kigali first. It is funded by a humanitarian organization called AEGIS that focuses on keeping the stories of human genocide alive inour world so that we can learn from what has happened and stop future generations from suffering similar fates. The Kigali memorial tells the story of how the genocide occurred. There are testimonials and films. It is very moving. The museum also tells the story of other genocides. Some we know much about such as the Jewish Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis (when the world said Never again.... and yet still....). They also tell the story of the Armenian Genocide, Cambodia's killing fields, the Balkans...

There is a very moving exhibit of the brief stories of children who were murdered in Rwanda. I have attached a few pictures. There is a mass grave with 250,000 souls buried there. There is a beautiful garden surrounding the mass grave.

One of the meorials we went to was about 45 minutes from Kigali in a town called Nyamata. The church looks like a regular somewhat modern African Catholic church. The sheer size of the killings that ocurred there are only evident when you enter. The benches of this lovely church are filled with stacks and stacks of clothing and personal items tat were found in the mass graves in the area. The bones of these victims are buried here on site in a mass grave and others are in Kigali. There are 50,000 people buried in Nyamata's mass grave. There is a glass box with a coffin in it in an underground crypt built beneath the church seating area. This coffin contains the remains of a young woman who was savagely murdered along with her baby during the genocide. Her surviving family (who found her after she was murdered)allows her to lay in rest here as a representative of all women who died in Rwanda during the geneocide. They want her to be a reminder of the crimes that were committed against women....I don't need to go into details...you can use your imagination.

Another genocide memorial we visited was in Ntarama. In this little village there was a catholic church where 5,000 Tutsi's and moderate Hutus sought refuge. They thought that that would be sacred ground that no one would touch. They hid there for weeks and then the Interahamwe came and slaughtered them all. There are doorsways that you can see where grenades had been thrown through them and there are bullet holes everywhere. Some victims were burned alive in the building at the back where they were cooking for the massess who were hiding there. All the bodies that were recovered in mass graves in that area have been placed on display within the church as skulls and bones on racks. Most of the skulls bear the nachete wounds visibly on them. Other bodies were placed in coffins that are also located there. They put bodies in coffins that were thrown into latrines. These did not decompose in the same way as others to produce just bones...so they needed proper burial in a coffin. There are shelves of people's belongings...shoes,school books, dolls, pens, rosaries and many Tutsi ID cards that they were forced to carry. It brought tears to my eys as I examined these little items that once represented the day to day lives of ordinary people, who went to that church to try to live and survive.

The woman who gave us the tour was soft spoken (we were the only ones there incidentally). She sits all day at the site as a specially trained historian to tell the Rwandan genocide story correctly. She took us around the back to a room that looked like a Sunday school..little benches and a dirt floor...she said that this was a Sunday school when the church was functional but it became the baby killing room. It would seem that the quickest way for the Interahamwe militia to kill babies was to hold them by the feet and swing their heads against a brick wall. That is exactly what they did here. I did not know it while we were standing next to the wall...she just looked over as she told the story as she had many times before. I eventually looked at the wall I could see that blood, and bone fragments and flesh are still stuck there (I have included a picture of this wall..taken from the doorway of that little building). A gruesome but important reminder to never go down that road again. The savagery is hard to imagine and I promise you, that is the only gruesome story I will tell. There are many more but....words fail me.