Thursday, April 9, 2009

15th Anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide

Tuesday marked the 15th anniversary of the beginning of the Rwandan Genocide.

As a commemoration, I am posting a piece of writing I did last year for a university writing competition. The theme was It mattered then, and it still matters now..... May we never forget this tragedy and the lessons we need to learn from it....


Imagine being held down and watching as your neighbour killed your child, using a machete to slowly cut off each limb before finally decapitating them. Imagine then being raped repeatedly before having your genitals cut off and being left to die. Could you imagine a group of teenage boys coming in to your girls’ dorm, herding you together, before opening fire with machine guns? Could you imagine surviving and lying beneath the bleeding, dead bodies of your friends, waiting till it is safe to escape? Is it possible for you to imagine being a four-year-old hiding in the shadows watching as your father is slowly murdered with blunt clubs and machetes, then seeing your mother raped to death? Could you possibly imagine begging, not for your life to be saved, but to die by a bullet rather than a machete; and then having to pay money for the bullet that will kill you? Can you imagine the putrid smell of a million bodies polluting the air of an entire country? Or seeing thousands of bodies clogging up a river, so it cannot run its course?

Can you imagine yourself hearing these stories, seeing these pictures, then turning off the television and going about your normal, comfortable life; eating your lavish food and complaining about the small taxes you have to pay to your democratic government? Can you imagine?

Fourteen years ago a small African country came onto the international radar for all the wrong reasons. But for the most part, it was only a blip. It appeared, and then as the world turned its head in apathy, it disappeared again. Eventually, the truth began to surface in graphic images and horrifying stories.

Genocide. Dare we use the word again? Could history really repeat itself as a people attempt to exterminate a whole group of others…. and the world stands by and watches. ‘Acts of genocide’ or ‘genocide’? Whatever the politicians, media or historians decide to call it, it happened. Fourteen years ago, in the small African country of Rwanda a tragedy occurred. And though the world was slow to act, slow to understand, we must now see the full tragedy. We must hear the stories. Because what happened in Rwanda mattered then, and it still matters now.
What would possess someone sitting in their nice, comfortable, middle-class existence to obsessively read and research every story they can find about such a gruesome, evil part of history? Why overwhelm our ordered, mostly logical lives with the evidence of immense chaos and tragedy in a tiny insignificant country on the other side of the world? Why does my heart break, and yet I cannot stop seeking the truth, cannot turn away from the horrific stories and repugnant pictures?

This is a story of a country so torn apart by hatred and greed that it turned a people to violence and war.

This is a story about a world so filled with greed, apathy, politics and rationalism that it can fail to save a million souls from the hands of a murderous government.

In April 1994, I was an eleven year old, living in a comfortable and quiet street in the outer western suburbs of Sydney. I was completely oblivious to the fact that an entire world away thousands of children, and adults of all ages, were fighting for survival.

In April 1994, the fragile peace agreement that was holding back civil war in Rwanda was broken one night with the death of the president, Juvenal Habyarimana. The plane in which the President was travelling crashed mysteriously over Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. It was this event that became the signal used to initiate a strategic, methodical and planned assault on the Tutsi people, and those moderates who were seen as sympathizers of the Tutsi’s. For the next 100 days, chaos and terror reigned in Rwanda. Hutu extremists took control of the country and preceded to secretly order the extermination of all Tutsis. The Rwandan Patriotic Force, a rebel army made up of Rwandan refugees (largely Tutsi in origin) also began to fight its way towards Kigali. Caught in the middle was the small UN peacekeeping force sent to Rwanda to oversee the implementation of the Arusha Peace agreement. Whilst civil war and murder happened around them, this force attempted to save those they could from danger and alert the outside world to the reality of what was happening.
There is a long, complicated history that led to the events in Rwanda. Years of ethnic hatred and violence. Years of political factions, propaganda and civil war. Years of intimidation, corruption and planning. And there is also a long, complicated history since the events of 1994. Nothing about Rwanda’s story appears simple, black or white, good or evil. Yet the more I discover about this period of history, a simple question keeps rising within me….. Why did it take so long for the powerful international community to act?

From what is now known, many people in the UN and in separate governments around the world had access to information about what was happening in Rwanda. A lot of time was spent debating what kind of response the international community should give…. And very little response was actually given, until it was largely too late.

In the fourteen years since the Rwandan genocide, much has been documented and debated. The most important work, I think, comes from those who were there, those who witnessed the atrocities, and those who took the time to stay and experience life with the Rwandan people in the months following. The stories of survival, of utter devastation, of living amongst death are the most poignant. So, too, are the stories of moving forward, of reconciliation, of the possibility of hope. I am constantly amazed at the resilience of people who have been abandoned by the rest of the world. What power and redemption are in the hearts of a people who can pick up the remnants of a life and seek to move ahead. And yet the story of the Rwandan genocide is far from over.

Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire believes that, “at its heart, the Rwandan story is the story of the failure of humanity to heed a call for help from an endangered people”[1]. His autobiography is one of the most profound works published about Rwanda. Dallaire, the Force Commander of UNAMIR, the UN mission stationed in Rwanda leading up to and during the genocide, is explicitly damning of the response of the international community, and believes that if intervention had been quicker, much of the tragedy could have been averted. Reading of his experiences living in the midst of war and devastation, with little ability to intervene or attract the attention of the outside world, moved my mild interest in this part of history to outright anger and instilled a deep passion to bring attention to this story.

The stories of the Rwandan Genocide are an indispensable lesson of history. The international response to the stories are too. I believe that it is critical to study these events, if we, as the world community desire to improve human rights, human dignity and seek equality for all humans across the globe. In Histories Herodotus says that the purpose of his writing is “to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time”[2]. The cliché that knowledge is power would indeed become true if history drove us to action. What possesses me to obsessively read and research every story that I can find about such a gruesome, evil part of history? The answer lies in my hope that the more aware we become of tragedies such as what happened in Rwanda, the more we will be driven to speak out, and act, against injustice.

As Dallaire has said, “Too many parties have focused on pointing the finger at others, beyond the perpetrators, as scapegoats for our common failure in Rwanda….none of that will bring back the dead or point the way forward to a peaceful future. Instead, we need to study how the genocide happened not from the perspective of assigning blame – there is too much to go around – but from the perspective of how we are going to take concrete steps to prevent such a thing from ever happening again”[3]. What happened in Rwanda was a tragedy for so many reasons. However, hope and redemption can be found if we honour the stories of Rwanda’s history and learn from them.

“Like Leontius, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self knowledge – a moral, a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, as horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offence is necessary to understand its legacy.”
- Philip Gourevitch[4]

Rwanda is still a tiny, insignificant country in the middle of Africa, fighting for survival. Poverty, war and injustice still prevail every day. The emergency is over, and so the international community turns away…. Our compassion is diverted elsewhere, and that small African country continues it’s journey of restoration mostly alone. If the stories of the Rwandan Genocide mattered then, what will you, and I, do about it now?


[1] Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, Shake Hands With The Devil (London: Arrow Book, 2003), 516.
[2] Herodotus, Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3.
[3] Dallaire, Shake Hands, 512-13.
[4] Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (London: Picador, 1999), 19.