Its been nearly three weeks since my visit to Rwanda. I’m constantly being asked what the country was like by my Ugandan friends—I reply with a simple statement—beautiful country—very clean and well organized (very much unlike Uganda!), friendly people—but with a heartbreaking, unthinkable history. I’ve tried to sit and write about the experience—the sights and the sounds of Kigali, Butare, Gisenyi, and the various other places we ventured to during our brief holiday. But as I sat and starred at my empty journal page, no words would come. My mind was as blank as the page…and so I just sat—silent and still—waiting patiently for something to inspire the synapses to begin firing so beautifully crafted thoughts miraculously make their way to my journal page. (Note to the reader—especially those that know me well!—yes, it’s true! I’ve grown remarkably patient throughout my time here and quite accustomed to silence to this wasn’t as challenging of an exercise as it might have been, oh say, one year ago).
Needless to say, nothing really came. My mind was an empty room.
My heart, however, was quite the contrary—overflowingly full. Emotions overwhelmed me: a profound sadness and a disturbing sense of anger. My heart was afflicted by the sights and smells and imagined sounds of the Murambi-Gikongoro technical school as the room after room of decaying bodies seemed unending. My blood boiled with deep disappointment and shame at how the international community sat by and did nothing. Kofi Anaan, of the UN, said it pretty well so I’ll just quote him– “what happened in Rwanda leaves us with a sense of bitter regret. After genocide- more I could and should have done…the international community is guilty of sins of omission”. And what may be even more horrifying is the active role the Church played in organizing such atrocities. I think that Anne Lamott is right—“you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do”.
With this peculiar deficiency of words, I shall resort to borrowing another’s—someone much more articulate and well versed in the complex history of genocide in the land of a thousand hills. Below is a series of quotes from the book “We’d Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed with our Families” by Phillip Gourevitch (whole book is highly recommended!) which will hopefully do more justice than my mere musing to capture a glimpse (or two) of the people who are now striving to call themselves Rwandans.
Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech—performed largely by machete—it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least 800,000 people were killed in just a hundred days. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On December 11, 1946, the General Assembly of the United Nations declared genocide a crime under international Law. On December 9, 1948, the General Assembly went further, adopting Resolution 260A (III), the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which obliged “Contracting Parties” to “undertake to prevent and to punish…acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Just as a state’s police swear to prevent and to punish murder, so the signers of the Genocide Convention swore to police a brave new world order. The rhetoric of moral utopia is a peculiar response to genocide. But those were heady days, just after the trials at Nuremberg, when the full scale of the Nazi extermination of Jews all over Europe had been recognized as a fact of which nobody could any longer claim ignorance. T he authors and signers of the genocide Convention knew perfectly well that they had not fought World War II to stop the Holocaust but rather—and often, as in the case of the United States, reluctantly—to contain fascist aggression. What made those victorious powers, which dominated the UN then even more than they do now; imagine they would act differently in the future?
Rwanda is landlocked and dirt-poor, a bit larger than Vermont and a bit less populous than Chicago, a place so dwarfed by neighboring Congo, Uganda, and Tanzania that for the sake of legibility its name has to be printed on most maps outside the lines of its frontiers. As far as the political, military, and economic interests of the world’s powers go, it might as well be Mars. In fact, Mars is probably of greater strategic concern. But Rwanda, unlike Mars, is populated by human beings, and when Rwanda had a genocide, the world’s powers left Rwanda to it.
Rwanda had presented the world with the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler’s war against the Jews, and the world sent blankets, beans, and bandages to camps controlled by the killers, apparently hoping that everybody would behave nicely in the future.
The West’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.
First the genocide, and now this, I thought: Hutus kill Tutsis, then Tutsis kill Hutus—if that’s really all there is to it, then no wonder we can’t be bother with it all. Was it really so mindless and simple?
The piled up dead of political violence are a generic staple of our information diet these days, and according to the generic report all massacres are created equal: the dead are innocent, the killers monstrous, the surrounding politics insane or nonexistent. Except for the names and the landscape, it reads like the same story from anywhere in the world: a tribe in power slaughters a disempowered tribe, another cycle in those ancient hatreds, the more things change the more they stay the same. As in accounts of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, we are told that experts knew the fault line was there, the pressure was building , and we are urged to be excited—by fear, distress, compassion, outrage, even simple morbid fascination—and perhaps to send a handout for the survivors. The generic massacre story speaks of “endemic” or “epidemic” violence and of places where people kill “each other,” and the ubiquity of the blight seems to cancel out any appeal to think about the single instance. These stories flash up from the void and, just as abruptly, return there. The anonymous dead and their anonymous killers become their own context. The horror becomes absurd.
Stalin: “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”.
Inside a church at Nyarubuye, tiny skulls of children were scattered here and there. Inside the nave, empty and grand, where a dark powder of dry blood marked one’s footprints, a single, representative corpse was left of the floor before the altar. He appeared to be crawling toward the confession booth. His feet had been chopped off, and his hands had been chopped off. This was a favorite torture for Tutsis during the genocide; the idea was to cut the tall people “down to size,” and crowds would gather to taunt, laugh and cheer as the victim writhed to death. The bones emerged from the dead man’s cuffs like twigs, and he still had a square tuft of hair peeling from his skull, and a perfectly formed, weather shrunken and weather-greened ear.
I cannot count the times, since I first began visiting Rwanda three years ago, that I’ve been asked, “is there any hope for that place?” In response, I like to quote the hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina. When he told me that the genocide had left him “disappointed,” Paul added, “with my countrymen—Rwandas—you never know what they will become tomorrow.” Although he didn’t mean it that way, this struck me as one of the most optimistic things a Rwandan could say after the genocide, not unlike General Kagame’s claim that people “can be made bad, and they can be taught to be good.”
But hope is a force more easily to name and declare one’s allegiance to than to enact. So I’ll leave you to decide if there is hope for Rwanda with one more story. On April 20, 1997—almost a year ago as I write—Rwanda television showed footage of a man who confessed to having been among a party of genocidaires who had killed seventeen schoolgirls and a sixty-two-year-old Belgian nun at a boarding school in Gisenyi two nights earlier. It was the second such attack on a school in a month; the first time, sixteen students were killed and twenty injured in Kibuye.
The prisoner on the television explained that the massacre was part of a Hutu Power “liberation” campaign. His band of a hundred fifty militants was composed largely of ex-FAR and interahamwe. During their attach on the school in Gisenyi, as in the earlier attack on the school in Kibuye, the students, teenage girls who had been roused from their sleep, were ordered to separate themselves—Hutus from Tutsis. But the students had refused. At both schools, the girls said they were simply Rwandans, so they were beaten and shot indiscriminately.
Rwandans have no need—no room in their corpse-crowded imaginations- for more martyrs. None of us does. But mightn’t we all take some courage from the example of those brave Hutu girls who could have chosen to live, but chose instead to call themselves Rwandans?
**Italics represent texts directly quoted from “We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda” written by Philip Gourevitch
