Rwanda is a peaceful, gentle country, nursing deep wounds, steeped
in grief and immense sadness, trying to recover with a spirit of resilience and
hope while remembering and honouring multitudes of innocent victims.
Visiting the Kigali Genocide Memorial is a harrowing experience
but a necessary act of homage to pay respect to those who suffered such
brutality and try to understand the descent into human depravity.
Almost everyone in the vibrant city of Kigali today lives
with the painful legacy of losing family members; mothers grieve for their precious
children, children, left orphaned, grieve for parents who were not there to
guide them growing up.
I met a beautiful young man working in the hostel. His
cheerful dreadlocks and radiant smile belie a burden of pain. When we get talking
about his hopes and dreams, he tells me his father was killed in the genocide.
He was just a toddler. He’s grown up with his traumatised mother and little
brother. He says he must always remember his father but wants to move on with
his life too, free from the horrendous nightmare of how his father died an
agonising death.
The killing spree began in April 1994. Terrified little
children, screaming women and heroic men defending their families were
bludgeoned to death, hacked with machetes, mutilated, maimed, tortured and
raped in acts of unimaginable cruelty.
The relentless killing was perpetrated systematically:
10,000 victims a day, 400 each hour, seven each minute, for over three months
of madness. Mangled bodies strewn in pools of blood piled high in streets
filled with the sickening stench of death and decay.
Why? The Hutu clan turned on the Tutsi clan, determined to
exterminate the ‘cockroaches’ they condemned as sub-human, inferior and a
threat to their power. But this insanity did not happen instantly; the
murderous rampage by extremists was the culmination of years of calculated
propaganda and indoctrination of hatred against the Tutsis.
The Belgian Colonists sowed the seeds of sinister divisions
in the peace-loving society of Rwanda as early as 1923 when they occupied the
country after World War One. The colonial masters introduced identity cards in
1932 that categorised the Hutu, Tutsi and Twa clans based on fabricated racial and
ethnic distinctions. The Catholic church was complicit, encouraging Hutu
leaders to draft a malicious, racist “Hutu Manifesto” in the 1950s, fuelling
hatred for the Tutsi people.
With independence from colonial rule in 1962, the new
independent Hutu government was determined to continue the persecution of the
Tutsi and 700,000 Tutsi people were exiled between 1959 and 1973.
Some militant refugees formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front
and invaded Rwanda in 1990, unleashing civil war. In 1993 the Rwandan
government and the RPF signed the Arusha Peace Accords and French troops were
deployed to keep the peace.
French Arms
President Habyarimana and his political allies wanted the
peace agreement to fail and entered a $12 million arms deal with a French
company, with a loan guaranteed by the French government.
The persecution of the Tutsi intensified by the 1990s with
men and women jailed and tortured and waves of sporadic massacres of villagers
erupting throughout the country.
As the tension mounted the United Nations and world
governments stood back as apathetic bystanders and did nothing to de-escalate
the hatred and prevent the genocide.
On April 6, 1994, when President Habyarimana’s plane was
shot down, killing him and the President of Burinda, the Tutsi were blamed and
death squads began their pre-planned systematic shootings. The murderous
rampage continued for 100 apocalyptic days until the RPF mobilised troops to
stop the genocide.
Human beings are alarmingly susceptible to propaganda. Once
soldiers suspend empathy and compassion and convince themselves their enemy is
not human but a vile object to be destroyed, they unleash a capacity for
cruelty and perverse atrocities.
Throughout history maniacal tyrants, through a process of
brainwashing that dehumanises and objectifies other human beings, have
convinced susceptible, gullible soldiers to carry out genocide and ‘racial
cleansing’. The gangs of crazed ‘genocidaraires’ in 1994 believed they were
performing a public service by exterminating vermin, not mothers and fathers,
brothers and sisters and children just like their own.
Graphic Records
The Memorial is devoted to honouring the victims as real
people, not just statistics, and providing family members with a place to visit
to remember their loved ones and a way for visitors from other countries to
stand in solidarity with the people of Rwanda.
More than 250,000 people are buried in the beautiful gardens
of the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which opened in 2004, on the 10th
anniversary of the nation’s tragedy.
Most important is the section dedicated to the legacy of the
genocide. 80 per cent of this generation of Rwanda’s children lost at least one
parent. The genocide created hundreds of thousands of orphans and over 100,000
widows and widowers.
Thousands of women were brutally raped and mutilated and
infected with HIV/AIDS. Many died of the disease but today survivors are being
treated with anti-retroviral medication.
Shattered families have struggled to rebuild their lives. Rwanda
is a nation still healing from trauma, a fragile, grief-stricken country seeking
to live in peace with hope, tolerance, compassion and understanding for the
best and worse of human nature.
Visit www.kgm.rw to support
the Kigali Genocide Memorial and the families of victims.
People seeking help and support can contact SURF - Survivors Fund, Supporting Survivors of the Rwandan Genocide
People seeking help and support can contact SURF - Survivors Fund, Supporting Survivors of the Rwandan Genocide
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