April 7, 2009

Before embarking on a week-long adventure to neighboring Uganda, my housemate Mary and I remained in Rwanda for the beginning of the first week of break in order to attend the fifteenth anniversary of start of the genocide. April of every year is a difficult time for most Rwandans and the day of the memorial, Tuesday April 7th, was especially solemn. Thousands attended the ceremony led by President Paul Kagame, which began at nine in the morning and lasted well into the afternoon. Each year, the official ceremony is held at a different location of historical significance; this year it took place on a hillside in Nyanza, a village on the outskirts of Kigali. In ’94, a UNAMIR contingent was stationed at this site, specifically ETO – Ecole Technologique Officielle, a Salesian secondary school. The role of UNAMIR (UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda) was to see that the Arusha Accords signed in August 1993 by the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the Rwandan Government in place at the time were effectively implemented. Needless to say, the Accords were treated as a farce by the presiding Rwandan government and less than an afterthought by the Interahamwe militia, the government sponsored group that planned and carried out the killings of 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus in the one hundred days following April 7, 1994. When the killings began in Kigali that week, ETO was presumed a place of protection for those fleeing the attacks, due to its UN presence. Unfortunately UNAMIR withdrew its troops from ETO on April 11th, leaving thousands of Rwandans at the mercy of the Interahamwe. Most were killed within the day. Shortly after withdrawing from ETO, UNAMIR reduced its overall strength from 2,548 to 270 troops. As a notable memorial site, ETO was the setting of the 2005 British film Shooting Dogs, which portrays how UN soldiers stationed in Rwanda during the genocide would shoot at dogs scavenging the dead bodies lining the streets of Rwanda’s capital, since their mission prohibited them from shooting at the actual killers.

The memorial that I attended was conducted primarily in Kinyarwanda, with some parts in English and French. While I didn’t understand most of what was said, I did get a sense of the horror and devastation that so many of the speakers and members of the audience experienced. Some of the people giving testimonies openly broke down in front of thousands of their compatriots. As this was anticipated, there were people in the crowds designated to assist those that went into fits of sobbing and in some cases hysteria. In his English remarks, President Kagame decried the lack of support from the UN and other groups that could have intervened and lessened the severity of the event as it was happening. He also spoke of the necessity of fighting revisionist propaganda, which claims that the killings didn’t actually happen on the scale that they did and that what occurred wasn’t a true genocide, but rather isolated incidents of killings. Although the ceremony was upsetting and uncomfortable at times, I would have felt like I hadn’t given proper respect to the gravity of the event, had I not attended. Mary and I stayed in Kigali that afternoon and evening in order to catch a 7AM bus to Uganda the next day, and as our appetites churned from hours without food, we quickly reached an impasse when we realized (to our own folly) that almost everything in town was closed that day in commemoration of the genocide. Ironically, I had my first meal of the day early that evening at the Mille Collines Hotel, which was open and serving food.

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
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