In Memoriam

Kigali

“When they said ‘never again’ after the Holocaust, was it meant for some people and not for others?” -Apollon Kabanizi

I recently visited the Kigali Memorial Centre and Genocide Museum, which serves as the burial site for over 250,000 of the 800,000 people killed in the Rwandan genocide of April-July 1994. This reverent museum has been in operation for about five years now and is surrounded by gardens and fountains that provide a humble backdrop to the cruel stories told within its walls. The museum itself is divided into three main exhibits. The first is a history of Rwanda leading up to the 1994 genocide and detailing the event itself through its aftermath using artifacts, photographs, video, written testimonies and other primary sources (i.e. newspapers demonstrating party philosophy) to illustrate what happened. The second exhibit is a reflection on the phenomenon of genocide in light of other genocides that have occurred in the past century, including those in South-West Africa, Armenia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia and Bosnia. The third and final exhibit is tribute to the hundreds of thousands of Rwandan children killed during the genocide.

A few rooms were especially powerful in the main exhibit. In one of them, the skulls and bones of dozens of people were laid in display cases, while a seemingly endless litany of names was read plainly in the background. Another room, much larger than the last, featured hundreds of photographs of the dead. These pictures were submitted by family members who sometimes attached a letter to the person in the photo. The second exhibit opens with a quotation from the director of Aegis Trust, a UK based NGO dedicated to the elimination of genocide. It reads as follows: “If you must remember, remember this…the Nazis did not kill six million Jews…nor did the Interahamwe kill a million Tutsis. They killed one and then another, then another. Genocide is not a single act of murder. It is millions of acts of murder.” The exhibit reminds its viewers that genocide is never a spontaneous act but rather planned acts of violence intentionally targeted at destroying a population, usually carried out by the government in charge and its collaborators.

For me, the most upsetting exhibit was the children’s memorial, which consists of several connected rooms with enlarged, individual photos of children of all ages. Under each picture is a bit of information about the child. Two examples are listed below:

Nadia Chanelle
Age 8
Favorite sport: jogging with her father
Favorite sweets: chocolate
Favorite drink: milk
Favorite song: My Native Land Which God Chose for Me
Enjoyed: TV and music
Cause of Death: Hacked by machete

Aurore Kirezi
Age 2
Favorite drink: cow’s milk
Favorite game: Hide and seek with her big brother
Behavior: very talkative
Cause of Death: Burnt alive at Gikondo Chapel

The exhibit closed with a particularly poignant anecdote, demonstrative of a kind of mercilessness that is still difficult for me to fathom:

“A militiaman came up to kill me. I was astonished because I thought he was a friend. He used to come to our house every day. He farmed my father’s fields and he received a salary. My mother gave him food. We used to play with him and he was like a brother to us, even though we were not from the same family. I asked him why he wanted to kill me when I had done nothing to hurt him. I begged him to take pity on me. He said nothing but just hit me over the head with a machete. He had bits of wood in his hand which he stuck in my face. When he thought I was dead, he left.” –Uwayisenga, Age 7

Visiting the museum in Kigali left me uneasy in so many ways. One of the hardest things about the visit was realizing that even though over 250,000 are buried on the premises, only a handful of men, women and children can actually have their stories told.


Nyamata

“If you knew me and you really knew yourself you would not have killed me.” –Felicien Ntagengwa

Nyamata is the village 30km south of Kigali in which I live. It is also the site of a well-known genocide memorial, a Catholic church where about 10,000 people were killed by the Interahamwe. It is no accident that the Maranyundo School was set up in this part of Rwanda: decades prior to the genocide, Nyamata was the site of large concentration camp for Tutsis. It was one of the first regions to be targeted by the Interahamwe in April 1994 since so many Tutsis lived there. For that reason, Nyamata and the Bugesera District has had a particularly hard time rebuilding itself from the massive destruction, and schools and families in the region are very poor. When the women who founded Maranyundo consulted with the Rwandan Ministry of Education about where their school was most needed, Nyamata was a clear choice.

The church is located along a dusty dirt road several hundred meters from the main thoroughfare of our village. I had passed by it many times on Sundays on the way to mass, which is held in a nearby building since the structure is maintained as a memorial only. Like many buildings in Rwanda, the church is simply constructed of brown brick and a tin roof. Perhaps it was this sense of familiarity with my surroundings that made the experience of entering the church for the first time so startling: although I always knew it was there, until that sunny Tuesday morning I never actually considered what was inside. What immediately struck me was the stillness. The pews of the church are arranged in rows facing the altar, and lining each pew, all sides of the church and the altar are mounds of tattered clothing. I took my time walking the aisles of the church and processing what I saw. At first, everything seemed to be of a dark, muted brown hue, but as I neared closer to different items I could make out striped and polka dot patterns, floral fabrics with faded tints of red, blue and yellow; a woman’s blouse, a man’s hat, a little girl’s jumper. Although the massacres committed here took place almost fifteen years ago, there was a faint smell of urine and death stagnant in the air, reminding me that this place has still not fully rid itself of its transgressions. There were other indicators of destruction within: behind the altar, the tabernacle had been hacked into so that the symbolic fish and wine were hard to distinguish. Images of apostles and saints on church walls were mutilated, and even the Virgin Mary statue had been struck and crumbled in places. As I took another look around the space, I noticed beams of light ironically flowing through bullet holes that peppered the tin roof, with the faint chirping of birds interrupting the silence inherent to this memorial.

Although there was no guide to walk me through my visit, prior to going I had learned from my housemates what happened there. As in many areas of Rwanda during the genocide, thousands of people fled to local churches when they heard news of the impending attacks. People believed that churches would be safe havens and clergy usually encouraged people to congregate there for protection. In some cases, as in the case of L’Eglise Sainte Famille in Kigali, the pastor was affiliated with the Interahamwe militia and used his role as a church leader to cause the death of as many Tutsis as possible in one go, falsely leading his parishioners to believe they would be secure there. The Interahamwe militia was in fact ruthless in its raids and didn’t have any problem with attacking churches, schools and orphanages just the same. The church in Nyamata witnessed a major attack on April 10, 1994. Those seeking refuge padlocked the door shut, but the militia was successful in breaking down the door and entering with their machetes, rifles and hand grenades. An estimated 10,000 people were killed that day, including the entire family of one of our four resident nuns. There were also survivors of the massacre: one of the men that I work with at the Bugesera district office was ten years old at the time, and remembers hiding still under dead bodies for hours until the militia moved on.

After several minutes inside the church, I went outside and around the back, passing two large tombstones with names of parishioners who were killed in earlier massacres of Tutsis in 1990 and 1992. Behind the church are underground vaults filled with the remains of victims of the 1994 slaughter. I wasn’t sure whether or not to descend into the vaults, as I was already on edge from going into the church and I was all alone. But I took a deep breath and climbed down.

In my family I was always taught that death is a part of life; my parents didn’t shy away from bringing us to funerals of relatives or answering questions about casualties we learned about at school or in the news. I usually find cemeteries very peaceful, and always felt a little sad but more reflective when confronted with the relics of saints or scholars (Pope John Paul II, Victor Hugo) at churches across Europe. But descending into these dimly lit crypts that contained thousands of skulls and bones stacked in rows, I really felt scared. Physically, I was so close to the remains of so many people who had been violated and brutally murdered for no good reason: it was both eerie and devastating to be there among corpses and consider how horrible it must have been to die that way. Within the vaults, there were also a few covered tombs clad in the purple and white ribbon symbolic of the genocide, some bearing flowers, crosses or other personal mementos. But too many victims had no burial at all.

When I visited Kibuye (Lake Kivu) again this weekend and attended mass at the genocide memorial church there, shown below, I thought about the similarities between these two places. Both were vibrant parishes prior to the genocide, both suffered unimaginable horrors during the three months of attacks in 1994, both reported casualties in the tens of thousands. And now, fifteen years later, both parishes have re-built themselves. In the case of the Nyamata parish, it is true that the location at which mass is held has moved, in order to permanently honor the dead at the original church. But the will to survive, persevere and re-build is something that I find extraordinary about Rwandan society.



References: Kigali Memorial Center and Genocide Museum, Kigali, Rwanda
Nyamata Memorial Church, Nyamata, Rwanda

Brief Political History of Rwanda, including events pertaining to the 1994 Genocide

Rwanda has a rich history recorded through oral tradition until the time of its colonization and maintained in writing in more recent centuries. It was originally settled by three main tribes: the Hutus, Tutsi and Twa people, which occupied different roles in Rwandan society. From approximately 1000AD, Rwanda was ruled by a line of Tutsi kings in a system comparable to feudalism. Hutus were generally peasant farmers who were subjected to the law of their Tutsi chiefs. Tutsis, who were traditionally cattle-owners, formed the ruling class and held a superior status. The Twa people, a pigmy population of hunter-gatherers, served different roles in the royal courts, such as potters, dancers and singers. Unlike the European system of feudalism, the Hutu-Tutsi divide was less rigid: if a Hutu earned enough cattle through purchase, war or marriage, he could become a Tutsi and marry a Tutsi woman if he so wished. Just the same, if a Tutsi lost a substantial amount of cattle through any of these circumstances, he would be classified as Hutu and may marry as such. This same rule did not generally apply to the minority Twa people, who seldom intermarried or changed their social status. For this reason, the Hutu and Tutsi people of Rwanda and Burundi experienced hundreds of years of intermarriage and social integration, speaking one unified language, until the time that the Germans arrived to colonize Rwanda and Burundi in 1885.

Recognizing the effectiveness of the feudal system of Tutsi chiefs already in place, Germany invested its energy in promoting the leadership of the Tutsis through indirect rule. It is important to note that the Germans and later the Belgians, who acquired Rwanda and Burundi as colonies in 1919 after Germany lost WWI, adhered to the social Darwinist philosophy predominant in Europe at the time. They viewed the ruling Tutsis as characteristically taller, leaner and of lighter skin, descendants of Ethiopia and more “civilized” parts of Northern Africa. In conjunction with their more European physique was the assumption that they were genetically predisposed to a higher level of intelligence, presumably why they had ruled without objection for so many years. The Hutu people, descendants of Bantu tribes that inhabited central Africa, were characterized as shorter, stockier and darker in skin. Given their physique, they were deemed less intelligent on average and therefore merited their second-class citizenship, so to speak. To establish order, the Belgian colonists in the 1930s mandated that each Rwandan be issued an identity card based on their physical appearance, neglecting to consider that the actual lineage of most people had been blurred substantially over hundreds of years of intermarriage and changes in hierarchy. These identity cards were maintained up through the time of the 1994 genocide, and served as a primary way to identify the race that was to be slaughtered.

By the time of Rwanda’s independence, the Catholic Church, in accordance with the Belgian government, had sent hundreds of missionaries to Rwanda to establish schools in a francophone context. The Belgians had also set up infrastructure in the form of hospitals, roads and local administration. More Hutus were educated than ever before, and Hutus became more vocal about taking their rightful place as leaders of a country that was Hutu by majority. When Rwanda achieved independence in 1961, Hutus took power in governance, and in the so-called spirit of democracy, was endorsed by Belgium and the Catholic Church as the rightful ruling party. In light of what appeared to be hundreds of years of oppression from power, the Hutu ruling party took control with a vengeance from the start. Under the leadership of President Gregoire Kayibanda, quotas were implemented in order to restrict Tutsi participation to 9% in schools, jobs, government and various other roles in society. Between 1959 and 1973 over 700,000 Tutsis exiled Rwanda to escape the sporadic “ethnic cleansing” of Tutsis that had been taking place since the rise of the PARMEHUTU (Party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement) faction ruling party and Kayibanda’s 1957 “Hutu Manifesto”.

In a military coup, another prominent Hutu named Juvenal Habyarimana took office as president of Rwanda in 1973 under the auspice of the MRND (Mouvement Revolutionnaire et Nationale pour le Developpement), but the persecution and sporadic killings of the minority Tutsis continued. In the meanwhile, ethnic Tutsis continued to flee Rwanda to neighboring Zaire (now DRC), Uganda and Tanzania and in many cases form communities. In 1986, a group of ethnic Tutsi Rwandan exiles in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), under the leadership of Paul Kagame and Fred Rwigyema. Disheartened by their forced exile and Habyarimana’s failure to maintain a multi-party democracy, this party invaded Rwanda in 1990 but was quickly suppressed by the French, German and Zairean troops summoned to augment the Rwandan army in its defense. Habyarimana used the attack as a justification to increase the Rwandan army from 5,000 to 35,000 troops between 1990 and 1993, and his regime was supported in arms by many nations including the US, France and South Africa. In this same period, Hutu power philosophy increased tenfold with the publication of the Hutu Ten Commandments and other anti-Tutsi propaganda which spread through all official media. Government-sanctioned killings of Tutsis and Tutsi sympathizers occurred with numbers in the thousands, and all the while, the Rwandan Hutu Power militia (Interahamwe) grew in size and lists of names of Tutsis and Hutus who did not support the cause of the Hutu Power militia were compiled. In April 1994, the plane of Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down, signifying the start of the genocide.

Although the source of the presidential assassination has never been determined, it is known that the planning of the Rwandan genocide occurred over many years time. Major foreign governments were aware that Tutsis were being targeted in the early 1990s and prior, but elected to turn a blind eye and in many cases continued supplying the Interahamwe with its arms. In January 1994, UN Secretary –General Kofi Annan received a fax from UN General Romeo Dallaire, stationed in Rwanda, informing him that a huge massacre of Tutsis was planned and that killings had been taking place already. In spite of this message and Dallaire’s urgent recommendation to send in reinforcements of peacekeeping troops, the UN opted not to act on the tip. In the 100 days following the plane crash, Rwanda became a frenzied bloodbath. Tutsis were hunted and killed by the Interahamwe like birds of prey, and along the way, anyone who did not participate in the search and destroy of Tutsis was also subject to slaughter. Over 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the months of terror, with an estimated 500,000 women victimized by rape and countless others subjected to physical and emotional torture. In additional to the physical and mental trauma that plagued survivors of the genocide, many surviving rape victims awaited a long and arduous death sentence after being infected with AIDS or other fatal STDS. There was also the very real possibility that they would have to deliver and raise a child that was conceived in an act of violence. As a result of the genocide, over 300,000 children were orphaned and 85,000 became heads of households. More than 2/3 of the population of Rwanda was displaced within the country, and over 2 million people fled to refugee camps in Burundi, Tanzania, Zaire and Uganda.

For more information on the successful invasion of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the end of the genocide, please refer to the third paragraph of my entry on Lake Kivu (February 20).

Since 1994, Rwanda has made great strides in rebuilding itself as a nation and forging into the 21st century as a unified nation of Rwandans. Identity cards designating ethnicity have been outlawed and it is not even legal to refer to people as Hutu or Tutsi. President Paul Kagame has a vision for the economic development of the country which includes a push to make the landlocked country an African hub for the services industry. Changing the official language of schools, government and business from French to English is one manifestation of this development in which I feel privileged to participate. Although it could take decades or longer for Rwanda to recover from the wounds of its past, the current leadership seems to be doing everything in its power to enable citizens to move forward while honoring the memory of the dead.

References: Dallaire, Romeo. Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005
Kigali Memorial Center and Genocide Museum, Kigali, Rwanda
Powers, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. “Chapter 10: Rwanda: Mostly in Listening Mode.” New York: Harper Perennial, 2002
Additional references as included in my senior thesis, “Modern Genocide and Its Effect on Women: An African Case Study,” completed at GW University ESIA in May 2007.