This post is about the Rwandan genocide. It is grim reading in parts and parental discretion is advised. If you don’t want these disturbing images in your head you might want to skip this one.
The church at the small town of Nyamata, 30 kilometres south of Kigali, has pews covered in piles of the blood-stained clothes of those who were massacred here. It has a glass cabinet in the basement that a school might use to showcase their trophies. Here it is filled with 150 human skulls, almost all with fractures or holes where the bone has been crushed. Stacked above the skulls are femurs and hip bones. In a decorated coffin underneath the skulls lies the body of a Rwandan women who was raped by 29 men before being impaled on a stake from her groin to her head with another running through her pregnant stomach. She was put on display outside the church while Hutu militia systematically killed 10,000 people here. This is not a story of long-distant medieval barbarity. This happened in the first half of 1994 in what could almost be described as three months of collective madness if it had not been so well planned. Calling it madness lets the perpetrators off too lightly.
The Rwandan genocide is impossible to totally comprehend. There are reasons but no excuses for the death of 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus. I can’t pretend to be able to totally unpick the reasons one group of Rwandans decided it was a good idea to wipe out another group, but here is some background to what happened.
While there had been clans in Rwanda in pre-colonial times, it was the Belgians who ramped up the divisions between these groups and decided that there would be three ethnic groups in Rwanda, the Tutsis who are generally taller, fair-skinned and cattle ranchers, the Hutus who are generally shorter, darker and farmers, and the Twa who are pygmies and the original inhabitants of the land. Ethnicity was decided by such colonial methods as measuring the width of noses and calling anyone a Tutsi if they owned more than 10 cows. Ethnicity is now given as 84% Hutu, 15% Tutsi and 1% Twa.
With this division in place the Belgians then decided to favour Tutsis with greater education and the majority of the powerful positions in society as they felt they were the superior race. This obviously led to resentment from the Hutus. When the Tutsis began calls for independence, as was becoming common across Africa in the first half of the 20th century, Belgium switched allegiances to the Hutu majority. There was a struggle between these two groups as to what kind of independence should be implemented. The Tutsis wanted a fast transition to keep the existing power structure in place which favoured them. The Hutu majority wanted a switch to democratic elections which would obviously favour them with their much larger population.
This struggle for power seems to lie at the heart of the conflict. From the 1950s on there were massacres on both sides. When the Hutu government came to power in the late 50s many Tutsis left the country in fear. The current president, Paul Kagame, grew up in a refugee camp in Uganda. A Tutsi rebel movement called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) developed from these exiles and threatened to invade the country in the early 90s. In the lead-up to the genocide a peace deal was brokered between Hutus and Tutsis which would lead to Tutsis being integrated with the Hutu dominated army and a power sharing agreement. Flying back from talks to settle this agreement, the plane carrying the Hutu president as well as the president of Burundi (the small country to the south of Rwanda with a similar ethnic make-up and divisions) was shot down. For a long time it was not clear whether this was done by Tutsi rebels or Hutu extremists unhappy with the peace deal. The week we arrived the latest investigation into the downing of the plane, conducted by French judges (as French crewmen were also killed in the crash), concluded that the missile was fired from a base held by loyalist forces from the Hutu president’s Rwandan Armed Forces. This was the incident that triggered the genocide.
It is clear that the genocide had been planned by the Hutu extremist leaders for some time. They had trained a militia called the Interhamwe with the express intention of killing as many Tutsis as possible. Propaganda had been running for some time in newspapers and radio de-humanising the Tutsis by calling them cockroaches and snakes and by stoking the fear that the invading Tutsi rebels would massacre Hutus, so the Hutus should get in first and try to wipe out the Tutsis. For example, the ‘Hutu Ten Commandments‘ issued by one of the leaders provided that Hutus who married, befriended, employed or did business with Tutsis would be branded a traitor; and that the Hutus must ‘stop having mercy on the Tutsis’. Land pressure was also a factor in one of the most densely populated countries in Africa. Killing Tutsis meant that their land could be stolen as well.
Within hours of the plane being shot down road blocks were being set up across the country and the killing began. Lists of names of Tutsis had been compiled and the Interhamwe went from house to house armed with machetes and clubs where they massacred men, women and children with the aim of wiping Tutsis off the face of the earth. Moderate Hutus, including the female Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, were also killed where they might have stood in the way of the killings.
The genocide continued for three hellish months during which the country completely broke down. The UN had a bare-bones peacekeeping force in place led by the Canadian Lt-Gen Romeo Dallaire (whose book Shake Hands with the Devil is well worth a read on this subject). They did not have enough resources to prevent the killing and since the “black hawk down” incident in Somalia the US and UN were much more cautious about intervening in Africa. Romeo Dallaire pleaded for extra troops and thinks that with 5000 extra he could have saved many people, but none of the countries in the international community capable of providing the needed support did so. Rwanda was abandoned to its fate.
Women were raped by HIV+ men and kept as sex slaves. Children were murdered in front of their parents to wipe out the future generation of Tutsis. They were hacked to death with machetes or clubbed to death, shot or dropped into septic tanks where they were crushed with rocks or simply suffocated under the mass of bodies. People sheltered in churches hoping for safety but were simply murdered here instead. Some clergy collaborated in the killing with one priest ordering that his church be bulldozed with Tutsis still sheltering inside. Bodies were dumped in the rivers and were swept downstream to Uganda in massive numbers giving the crocodiles a feast. Two different witnesses talk about seeing babies trying to drink milk from their dead mothers. Romeo Dallaire talks about being surrounded by dead bodies in a village and seeing a child’s body move. He picked it up hoping the child was alive but the movement was because the body was riddled with maggots. His impulse was to throw the child from him but he somehow regained his composure and placed the child back on the ground. This is a fraction of the horror the people of Rwanda were subjected to. It’s estimated that 800,000 people were killed in the most savage manner possible by their neighbours.
The killing only ended when the Tutsi RPF rebels invaded the country, driving the Hutu militia into the Congo. It’s estimated that two million people fled the country and in one of the great ironies the UN set up refugee camps for the displaced killers and this became the face of the conflict that many in the international community focussed on. The aid supplied in these camps was often sold by the Hutu rebels and stoked the conflict longer than necessary. With the Tutsis in control of Rwanda they systematically hunted down many Hutu rebels in the Congo over the ensuing years.
We visited the genocide memorial in Kigali where 250,000 are buried in mass graves under anonymous concrete slabs. Inside the memorial the leadup to the genocide is explained but it never gets to the root of how one set of Rwandans could be so brutal to another group. Maybe that is impossible to answer. The genocide is lying just below the surface here. It’s miraculous that the country is functioning as well as it does. In the newspaper the fortnight we were there there was a report of a woman committing suicide after ongoing depression since the genocide. The manager of the hairdressers that Sarah went to had his entire family murdered and is now living with his Uncle whose family was also murdered. In theory they could both meet in the street the person who murdered their families. They seemed to have moved on. If you didn’t you would probably go insane.
It was impossible for the new government to jail everyone who committed crimes during this period without crippling the country. Leaders of the genocide are tried before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established by the UN Security Council in November 1994 with judges from a range of African and European countries, in Arusha, Tanzania (we hope to see it in action when we’re there).
Other perpetrators are tried before community courts (Gacaca) in the villages based on traditional justice systems. These require perpetrators to front the community, name all those who participated with them, identify where bodies were put, confront the victims’ families and serve any sentence imposed (from community service to life imprisonment). Whether this process has been enough to heal all the wounds in the long run, only time will tell. It’s hard to imagine that people can simply forgive and forget the atrocities but it says a lot about the character of the Rwandan people that they have rebuilt their country as well as they apparently have, in under two decades since this terrible time.
More photos from the Genocide memorials can be found in the Kigali and Nyamata sets
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