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Published: November 24th 2006
THE RWANDA GENOCIDE
"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincable, but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always.
Mahatma Gandhi
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I experienced some of the most horrific truths known to man today. I attended the International Tribunal for the Rwanda Genocide in Arusha over the past two days. Belguim Luietenant-Colonal Claise was testifying to the facts as he experienced them in Kigali, Rwanda in January of 1994 - a time when the country was on the brink of the genocide. Yes, 1994. These grotesque acts of evil seemed to happen while the world looked the other way and those that were not looking away intentionally were too busy with their daily lives to notice. It astounded me that we were talking about only 12 years ago, only two years before my son was born - not 1944 or 1954, but 1994.
We entered the courtroom at a precarious time. The tribunal was at a point of dissecting the events of the hours and days that led up to the assasination of the President of Rwanda and the death of ten Belgium soldiers - this being a key event that allowed the death squads to be called into action. As we came in and sat down the Corporal was just being called to the stand. We watched as he was sworn in and began to recall the scene in Kigali, Rwanda just prior to January 1994......................
It was his first mission in Africa and he had only 12 hours notice before getting on a plane and starting his reconnisance mission in Kigali. Belguim held a large responsibility in watching over the political tension rising in Rwanda. There was a growing tension and divide in the factions that held power with each wanting complete control. For many years the seperate factions (mainly boiling down to Hutu against Tutsi) had rivaled and as the tension mounted, the international community was called in. In Arusha, UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda), was trying to put together what would have become known as the Arusha Peace Accord. A plan to assign a government to calm the tension of the rivaling parties - a sort of "power sharing" government. President Habyarimana was in power and the extremist factions were becoming more and more impatient with his co-operation with UNAMIR. As the international community grew impatient with the governments lack of good-will, they threatened to cut off all help including the World Food Program. Eventually President Habyarimana had no choice and was obligated to give in and sign the Arusha Peace Accord. This to the extreme dismay of the extremist factions.
On January 8th, 1994 an Interahamwe informant (this being the extremist group responsible for a vast majority of the mass killings of the Tutsi tribe) by the name of Jean-Pierre Tourette-Sinsay contacted Colonel Claise with urgent information relating to the knowledge that the geonocide was about to happen. This was no ordinary informant, he was the leader of the Interahamwe with 1700 men under his control in 40 different cells around Kigali and Rwanda. The reason he decided to meet with Colonel Claise: the Interahamwe were planning a genocide and he thought they were going too far. They had plans to cleanse 1,000,000 Tutsis from Rwanda and Tourette-Sinsay could not bring himself to be a part of it. He did not want to contribute to genocide.
They had in the courtroom a lengthy document, now referred to as the "genocide fax", that recalled the conversations between this informant and Colonel Claise. They went through this document piece by piece. The informant described to Colonel Claise that the there had been a demonstration infront of the Hotel where the interim government was holding a high profile meeting with it's delegates attending. The Belgium troops were assigned to watch over and protect the delegates of the new government and were placed in strategic positions around the Hotel grounds. The Interahamwe were an extremist militia group that usually wore unforms, however, on this day they were instructed to wear street clothing, something that would make them indistinguishable. The Interahamwe had hid around 70 automatic weapons in the drainage pipes around the city in preparation of an all out clash. The plan was to cause a disturbance and fire on the Belgium troops in an attempt to make the Belgium troops fire back. It was their goal to kill as many troops as possible thus leading to the withdrawl of Belgium from UNAMIR which would cripple both UNAMIR and the Arusha Peace Accord. With Belgium gone and UNAMIR crippled, the Interahamwe and the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Force) would be free and clear to cleanse Rwanda of it's Tutsi population without any resistance and regain complete control of Rwanda ie: ethnic cleansing and genocide for the purpose of power.
The plan was not carried out as anticipated on this night. For unknown reasons (to me) the Interahamwe were not able to follow through. However, the UN now held reliable information that a genocide was, indeed, being planned, just as the rumors that had been circulating said. They also knew that it was the Interahamwe's plan to force the withdrawl of the Belgium troops and UNAMIR. Colonel Claise and General Dallaire (a Canadian General) spent the evening translating Tourette-Sinsay's information into English and drew up an urgent fax to send to Kofi Anan in New York at 2am. The information was of such urgency that Kofi Anan called an immediate emergency meeting to go over the details. Colonel Claise and General Dalliare requested permission to disarm the Interahamwe and put a stop to the planned genocide. At this time, the US had just suffered a major defeat in Somalia and to make a long story short, the reply was that it was out of the UN's mandate to be anything other than peace keepers and Colonel Claise and General Dallaire were basically told to ignore it. General Dallaire was beside himself, he felt that this action, or rather inaction, was tantamount to treason. He felt that his own people, the UN, were turning their backs on both the UN contingent and the Rwandan people (the Tutsis). However, an order is an order and there was nothing more they were able to do.
Tensions grew rapidly over the next couple months. The political climate in Rwanda came to a point where Colonel Claise was walking over dead bodies as he walked down the streets of Kigali. Still, no action by the UN. By the end of March 1994 Colonel Claise requested a short leave to go back to Belgium to attend a family matter. Upon returning to Kigali on April 6th, they flew over and circled the Kigali airport only to find all the lights were out and there was no authority to land. Their plane was diverted to Nairobi, Kenya where Colonel Claise ended up at the Nairobi Hilton. Upon checking into his room, Colonel Claise turned on CNN only to find that the reason they could not land in Kigali was because President Habyrimana's plane had been shot down. It was reported that one or two missiles had hit the Presidents plane head on. According to witness accounts, the presidential jet was blown to pieces. There were no survivors.
The next evening, ten Belgium soldiers were killed in another attack in Kigali. They had been sent to protect the Prime Minister at her compound. As she was leaving, the Interahamwe came out of nowhere and shot her dead. They beat the 10 Belgium soldiers to death with an iron club. Two Belgium soldiers initially escaped into a cement hut and within two hours, they were dead too. Colonel Claise, in shock from the death of the 10 Belgium soldiers, requested that Belgium pull all troops from Rwanda. This led to withdrawl of Belgium (as planned by the Interahamwe) and the eventual disintigration of UNAMIR. The international community pulled their troops out of Rwanda just as the Interahamwe planned and the Tutsi population were left alone with the factions (the Interahamwe and the Rwandan Armed Forces) who wanted their ethnicity cleansed from the country to regain complete control. The consequences of the attack were unimaginable.
From April to July, the most heinous acts that mankind could imagine happened in Rwanda. From the evening of the assassination on April 6th (and the international community starting to pull their troops), the Interahamwe militia immediately set up dozens of what they called "roadblocks". They made big piles of stones in the middle of the roads with big piles of bodies on the sides so people could not escape around them. At these roadblocks, militia men that were heavily drunk or on drugs watched as people would approach. Upon approaching one of these "roadblocks", each person had to show their identity card which told their ethnicity. If their ethnicity was Tutsi, they were hacked to pieces on the spot. It was also a sentence of death for those who pretended or genuinely had lost their identity cards. It came to a point where it was a sentence of death even if their identiy card did read "Hutu" (the tribe that supported the interahamwe and RAF) but their skin was too light or they were a bit too tall (which is a Tutsi trait) and came to an even more repulsive point where the killing became addictive and the militiamen would aimlessly slaughter children who were just walking around because they felt children were useless to their cause.
The Hutu people had been so brainwashed by the Interahamwe and RAF into believing that the Tutsi people were contaminated and evil, that there were actually women and children cheering the milita men on as they slaughtered the Tutsi people on the side of the road with their machetes. The Hutu people really believed (as uneducated and suffering as they were) that if the Tutsi people were allowed to live and bare children, that those children would grow up and kill their own children. By repeated and intentional brainwashing leading up to the geonocide, the Hutu people truly believed that slaughtering the Tutsi people was the only way to ensure their own survival. Murder became commonplace. Soon it was not even necessary to encourage the population to kill the Tutsi's. Violence feeds on violence, like a fire. They just killed and killed and killed. This ensured complete power to the Interahamwe and RAF as there would be no Tutsi's left to compete with.
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Everywhere people were killed. First at the roadblocks, then in houses where Tutsi's were known to be living. Then, when the districts had been "cleaned out", they attacked the settlements where the gendarmes (UN) had encouraged the Tutsis to gather, under the pretext of providing protection. At the technical school in Murambi where the gendarmes had gathered all the Tutsi who had survived the initial wave of massacres, the carnage lasted a whole night from the 22nd to 23rd of April. As the UN pulled out, the Tutsis begged them to kill them with their rifles knowing full well that the Hutu and Interahamwe were coming to torture and kill them. The next day at dawn, after the full day of mass slaughtering, the militamen came back to loot the dead bodies and finish off any survivors. Later, after the geonocide, the United Nations investigators uncovered 27,000 bodies in one grave at the technical school.
At Kibuye, Tutsi's were made to gather at Gatwaro Stadium also under the guise of protection. An estimated 14,000 people were gathered there on April 16th when the militia soldiers and the Interahamwe entered and locked all entrances. They took up their positions on the terraces and opened fire. A few managed to run out before the stadium was sealed off - none of the others survived.
A CNN team, returning from South Africa stopped off in Kampala (Uganda) and filmed the mouth of Lake Victoria. The water was red: 50,000 bodies, most of them dismembered, were floating on the surface.
The UN estimates that nearly 1,000,000 Tutsi's and Tutsi's supporters were slaughtered.
Nearly 2,500 heavily armed peacekeepers were present in Rwanda when the massacres started. Much has been said about the ten Belgian peacekeepers deaths who were protecting the Prime Minister. These ten deaths meant that Belgium could disengage from UNAMIR unilaterally and pack up its arms and protection without giving the impression that it was totally abandoning to the killers all the Tutsi who had sought protection in UN camps. On April 27, the UN decided to completely end it's mandate of UNAMIR and cleared out all its men and materials, while Rwanda sank into total chaos and genocide.
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We sat in the courtroom for a number of hours as the lawyers went over this lengthy document with the Leuitenant-Colonel. It all seemed so surreal, that this could happen not only in our day and age, but without the rest of the world knowing it. I mean I knew in hindsight that there had been a geonocide in Rwanda - I had seen previews for the movie that came out some years ago, but I never knew at the time it was happening and that baffled me. How could that be?????? How come the entire world didn't cry out and stop this from happening? There was so much evidence that this was going to happen. The leader of the Interahamwe told the UN that this was being planned and that it was going to happen months before it began. There were letters written, pleas of help and what did we (the first world and UN) do.........? We pulled out when the going got tough. We pulled out when ten of our soldiers were killed and in exchange 1,000,000 Tutsi's were tortured and killed. They needed us. They were killed with machetes and bats with nails on the end. Thousands at a time. Little girls. Little boys. Kids just like our own children - innocent and beautiful.
Was it able to happen because it was in Africa? Does this all come under the classification of people that don't really matter? Invisible people that suffer anyways. People that aren't even a number or a statistic? Maybe the statistic they bare now will be the most remembered they ever were. Maybe they matter more now as a statistic of the genocide than they ever would have in life.
To hear Lieutenant-Colonel Claise talk about walking over dead bodies before the geonocide even officially started.......didn't that tell us something? He spoke of being told by the informant John-Pierre Tourette-Sinsay that Presidents Habyarimana's brother, who was another leader of the Interahamwe, was disciplining his top men for not killing enought Tutsi's quickly enough - they had the capacity to kill many more. This was before what they now consider to be the real geonocide even began. People knew!!!!!
How could they as human beings, leave that country and the Tutsi people knowing the Interahamwe and RAF were waiting in the wings to slaughter them all. They knew that the Interahamwe and RAF needed UNAMIR out of the country to pull off the genocide and they left anyways - because 10 of their soldiers were killed.
In World War II, approximately 19,000 soldiers were killed. What would the world be today if we had all let Hitler reign after 10 soldiers were killed? I wonder if the difference is that it was white Europeans being slaughtered then. My soul hopes that that isn't the reason but something tells me it definately has something to do with it.
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I thought it was commendable to lend a voice, however weak, to those who do not have the right to speak. Have I managed to make their voices heard? Not always. Those who live without chains, without constraints, those who have enough to eat every day make such a deafening noise on their own behalf that they do not hear the moans that rise from below. If you ask them for a moment of silence, they reply that they cannot afford it. They do not believe that it is their duty.
Albert Londres
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Adam
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Hello
Hi Guys What an amazing travel blog, the african train ride looked like an amazing experience, hope you have a great safari and enjoy all the stunning wildlife. Our trip is nearly over and once we are in the uk ill find some more time to have a bit more of a read of what youve been up to. Like the haircut Jordan and hows the pool playing going?