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Published: October 23rd 2008
I don't particularly enjoy writing "heavy" entries, but writing about Rwanda today and ignoring the fallout from the Genocide wouldn't paint for you an accurate picture but an incomplete one.
Sometimes you peruse a museum lightly, glancing fleetingly at some exhibits and perhaps reading a plaque or two here and there, strolling through to see what the hype was all about. Sometimes though, you let yourself become totally engulfed in the pictures, you read every narration, you watch each film in its entirety, and you stare at every murdered face as if you had seen it somewhere in some life before. I guess I'm saying that today, I was the latter. I set aside one or two hours of my morning to see the two small floors of the Kigali Genocide Memorial and finally leave after nearly four hours. I'm not sure if I can or really want to describe what I felt going through the exhibits, but let's just say I was pretty much silent for these four hours on end which is not normal for me.
Basically this is what happened for those of you who need refreshing, as concise as I can manage:
Rwanda was first colonized by Germany in the early 1900's and was inhabited by three tribes peacefully. Post WWI, Rwanda came under control of the Belgians and thus the French influence. In 1932 the first divisions between Tutsi's and Hutu's were made by the Belgians: anybody with ten cows (no, seriously) was deemed a Tutsi, and anybody with less was deemed a Hutu. It doesn't matter if your cows just gave birth or that you only had five cows the next week, and it doesn't matter what tribe you were in before this official division. The Belgians put into place the ID card system that clearly labels you as one or the other. Over the years Tutsi's sort of rose in the class system and were highly favored for jobs, approvals, positions, etc. Come a couple years before Rwanda's independence in something like 1960, a Belgian army official decided to build the army heavily with Hutu, and thus somehow the military power shifted drastically. Two years later at independence shit starts to go down, and Hutu's (85%!)(MISSING) begin to discriminate against the Tutsi's (15%!)(MISSING) out of resentment of past years etc. Killings, abuse, "practice massacres" ensue in the next thirty years, and the country which was once completely at one speaking the same language, telling the same myths, sharing the same families, this country has now been torn apart completely. The French government all the while underwrites Hutu arms deals with Egypt, sends arms and support the training of the Hutu militia in these endeavors. Hutu propaganda infiltrates the entire country and the Hutu 10 commandments permeates Rwanda. If a Hutu marries, does business with, shelters, befriends a Tutsi, he is just as guilty as the Tutsi himself.
The actual full on Genocide comes in 1994. Over a million Tutsi's are killed outright, something like 75%!o(MISSING)f Rwandans are displaced, tons turn into refugees in Zaire, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya. The international community including the US had received warnings and were tipped off of the build up and actual events, but when it hit and for the next 100 days that the genocide took place, didn't do a thing about it. The UN actually pulls headcount from the area, and any troops that were sent in to evacuate foreigners and diplomatic personnel would have been enough to stop the genocide itself. Hutu husbands kill Tutsi wives, Hutu mothers kill their Tutsi children. All the normal ingredients of an appalling genocide are present: rape, guns, machetes, babies being smashed into walls, torture, burning, forced killings, friends betraying friends, family betraying family. Priests betrayed entire congregations and burned their own churches, full of people fleeing to assumed safety. Nobody is spared, from the elderly to the babies, everybody is killed in similarly incomprehendable ways.Post-genocide you still have tons of Hutu's and Tutsi's scared to come back into Rwanda. Tutsi's are repeatedly discouraged from returning for fear that the violence has not ended, and also have nothing to return to. Hutu's fear blame, guilt, and punishment. The country, in short, is in the shitter.
Of course following the genocide the current president is working on promoting a one country, one peoples sort of deal. There are no longer Hutu's and Tutsi's, but all Rwandans. Walking the streets here in Kigali, I get a strangely creepy feeling. The whole place is quiet in a way that you wouldn't expect an African capital to be, the whole place is so sterile. So this is a country recovering from recent genocide... You can see the country is trying hard to repair itself. Kigali was in the thick of it. Bodies during the genocide were piled up in the streets of Kigali, piles and piles, bodies strewn everywhere. The streets now have been cleared of course, but I can't help but imagine where piles may have lay as I ride on a motorbike down to the post office. You see who must have been a Hutu there walking alongside a Tutsi there, but when they laugh, are they really laughing? Have the Tutsi's really forgiven? The genocide really did touch every Rwandan personally, from the capital and out to the rurals. It was described that not all Hutu's were evil: Perhaps 90%!w(MISSING)ere evil, 5%!w(MISSING)ere neutral, and 5%!w(MISSING)ere good.
Every Rwandan in his family has somebody who was a victim or was a perpetrator.
Every Rwandan, everybody I see in the street here in Kigali was affected. Are you comprehending this??? The genocide was just that widespread. It's probably really bad of me to wonder like this, but I can't help it. My mototaxi driver looks about 30, which puts him at 15 around the genocide. Was he hiding, did he see his mother killed in front of him? Or perhaps he was one of the infamous youth militia and he himself had hacked several children up? Did he rat out a neighbor? How did he get that horrible permanent rip in his nostril? And what about the guy who checked me into my cage of a hotel room? What about the guy sitting next to me in the bus? That group of teenage guys always huddled in front of the internet cafe I go to, are they all Genocide orphans? Do they all live with one of the many strangers that houses 10 orphans today because he knows that is what he would have wanted somebody to do for his kid had he been murdered?
What about him, and him, and him? You just don't know here, once you are actually aware of what happened and the modern-day consequences, the questions never stop.
Even harder still is to voice any of my questions about the genocide. Of course one must be sensitive and out of respect, you can't just walk around asking, "So, you a Hutu or a Tutsi? Anybody in your family killed? You kill anybody? Do you have friends on the other side right now?" I wonder and I wonder, I stare at people and I wonder. I walk with people and I wonder. However even I know that my wondering now is less important than the fact that this man may have seen his mother raped, totured, and hacked to death when he was but a child. Or what if this man, brainwashed and in rage, smashed babies against the wall? What the hell would he say, what would he respond to my wondering with?
I also wonder, wonder, wonder about exactly how much has been forgiven? 14 years is not that long. Most of the Rwandans walking the street now lived through those horrible years. Can you really forgive the neighbor that ratted you out, led the group to your house and chopped up your children and your wife? What if you don't even know who you are to forgive? How confused you must be, imagine the internal struggle these people must live with today.
Being here now, it is mindblowing that something like this could have happened only little more than 10 years ago. I mean, you think about it and while these absolute atrocities were unfolding here in Africa, I was a 10 year old playing in the yard with my little brother in safe America. I suppose for me visiting Rwanda brought me to awareness of the genocide in the same way that being in the Middle East brought me to awareness of Israel/Palestine. We don't know these people; sucks for them, but this is a problem that is far, far way and itsn't mine. We see these things in our newspapers but we aren't really reading, and we sure aren't really caring. I'm not much of a bleeding heart, one to run around and preach about all the horrible wars going on in our imperfect world, but the outstanding feature of the Rwandan Genocide is that nobody internationally gave a damn. It's as if we automatically brush it off like "Oh, in Africa? Again? More black people getting raided, raped and killed.... sigh, too bad..." And this isn't thinking that has stopped in recent years. Think Darfur, think what's happening in the Congo?
Don't get me wrong, I'm guilty as well. Why is Israel/Palestine getting so much attention in our world, when in reality the number of people being killed in that conflict is barely a fraction of the number being slaughtered in any of these African conflicts? It is sad to realize that in our world, people only emphasize and care about issues which the rich and influencial care about. Without sounding too bleeding heart, just remember that the people here in Africa are just as much people as you or me. It sounds bad but I know many people really don't believe that. You don't believe it until you meet the people, see the people, befriend and talk to the people. They don't have as much money as we do, they don't dress as well and they may not be as educated. But they laugh at the same jokes, they love their families like we do, they work extremely hard (if not much harder) than we do at staying alive. They have just as much of a right to be alive and to be cared about as anybody else in this world. Just because they are off on a "lawless, problematic, dark" continent doesn't mean that they don't exist.
The second floor of the Memorial houses a very good exhibit putting Rwanda into context with other Genocides of the past. It is not until I see this exhibit that I see how widespread genocide must be in our world as I realize that I personally have perchance traveled to way too many countries of genocide unintentionally! I was in Germany/Poland, Auschwitz - Holocaust. I was in Cambodia - Khmer Rouge. I was in Turkey - Armenian. I was in Bosnia - Balkans. Last month I was in Israel/Palestine... pretty close to a genocide if you ask me. Now I am in Rwanda. That's like a genocide visited on most continents!
It's not often that I am sad, and certainly not often that I am sad when traveling. I guess you have to see it to believe it. I'm not even the most sensitive person, but if you had any human bone in you and saw this firsthand you would undoubtedly feel sadness as well. I am scared to know how many other countries of genocide I have yet to wander into.
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El Eterno Caminante
Greg
WELL SAID!
WOW very powerful blog i gotta say!!! great piece of writing!