The Rwandan Genocide - Never Again?

October 17 – 22, 2009

Our group studying Collective Narrative Practices spent 5 days in Rwanda. To my surprise, I found Rwanda to be an extremely beautiful country with a beautiful countryside. It is the “land of 1000 hills” (“mille collines”) and the terracing of the land throughout the country, the cleanliness, the clay tile roofs speckling the hills remind me of countryside in Europe. Plus there is a huge amount of money for construction and development is being spent; it is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. I have heard reference to this being “guilt money” - guilt because of how the horrific genocide was ignored by the United Nations and by the developed countries who had the information about what was happening but didn't intervene when it might have made a difference.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING TWO PARAGRAPH CONTAIN GRAPHIC MATERIAL– SKIP IF YOU PREFER NOT TO READ IT
On several fronts the Rwandan genocide stands out relative to others. It has the dubious distinction of having the greatest number of deaths in a short time: a million killings in 100 days or an average rate of 10,000 per day. It is one of the most physically brutal; civilians were killed face-to-face, often by people they knew or had relationships with, with machetes and other direct means. Body parts were slashed or hacked off, children and babies dismembered, tossed alive into wells and cess pools to drown, and so on. People were encouraged to gather in churches and schools and other “safe” places, then annihalated by the Hutus. We visited one school where 50,000 where slaughtered; a church where 10,000 were massacred. The number of memorial sites in this small country seemed endless. And then, of course, there were the mass rapes of women and girls, many by men who were HIV+.

And, to bring it home to us more personally, we were part of a team supporting trauma counselors for genocide survivors (from the IBUKA organization), people who were survivors themselves. These are people whose entire families and extended families were wiped out. How do you work with a client who is a young woman who is HIV+ because she was raped at age 3 during the genocide? And the counselor whom I spoke with who is raising two teen-age daughters by herself without any extended family because she is the only one who survived? And our taxi driver who is one of the very few Tutsi in the whole western region who survived because he was studying in Uganda at the time? It is pretty hard to take in the vastness of the numbers of people victimized, but one horrible story by a person sitting in front of me gets to me.

I read two books the week we were there, trying to gain some understanding of what happened and why. One was a book, An Ordinary Man, written by the “hero” of the movie Hotel Rwanda. The book was recommended by someone at the airport bookstore as being inspiring. Inspiration is good, I thought, and it was an easy read so I read almost all of it in a couple of days and felt like I was getting some understanding of the events. And then, at the very, very bare bones national tourist agency I saw a book titled Hotel Rwanda: or the Tutsi Genocide as Seen by Hollywood. This brief book is a scathing indictment of the other book and is written by two Rwandan academics. I just had to read this book which said that the other was a fraud of the worst kind. I could easily see serious problems of bias with both narratives.

I visited the Genocide Museum in Kigali, the capitol, and this was a very moving experience as well as somewhat enlightening. One part that really stays with me is their display of genocides in history – the Nazi holocaust, the Armenians, the North American slave trade, the Native Americans in the U.S., the genocide in Darfur. Do Americans accept that our behavior is viewed as genocide by others? Do we use that term in the history books that we give our children to read?

During the memorial period that Rwanda has each year to remember what happened the slogan “Never Again” is used repeatedly. And has anything changed in the 15 years since the Rwandan genocide that would lead me to think that this will never happen again? Hasn't it already happened again? I am not an expert in these matters, but when I see the level of violence that we are willing to accept in the world I don't really see any major changes.

On a related note, I am still very troubled by the statistics shown at the Slavery Museum in Cape Town – the number of adults and children in slavery conditions throughout the world is staggering. As is the trafficking in women and children that is occurring world-wide as sex slaves or for other purposes. And this doesn't count the number of parents who sell their children to others or pimp them themselves because they don't have the money to feed them. Or the violence of people dying of starvation, lack of health care and preventable diseases. For me this is just so very awful,...How can we even begin to think the phrase “never again” has meaning?