Yesterday marked the 15th anniversary of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. April 7th is the National Day of Commemoration and marks the beginning of the Week of Memorial. Each year the government selects one of the many memorial sites throughout the country to hold the National Commemoration ceremony at, and this year Nyanza was chosen. It is in Kicukiro (kee-choo-kee-ru), outside of the city of Kigali, and just up the road from where I stay when I'm in Kigali.
At this site, on April 11, 1994, 2500 people were massacred. Only hours before they had been under the protection of UN soldiers at Kicukiru Technical College. But after 10 UN soldiers from Belgium were killed trying to protect the woman who should have taken over the presidency after President Habyrimana's plane was shot down, the UN decided to pull out the vast majority of their soldiers (that is, the white ones). Only about 150 UN soldiers remained in Rwanda, charged to fulfill their mandate of "preserving the peace". At Kicukiro Technical College, the UN soldiers were told to evacuate the westerners and abandon their post. People tell me that as the soldiers were preparing to leave, Interahamwe (the trained civilian militia) were standing outside, with their machetes and clubs in hand, just waiting for the opportunity to begin killing those inside. People begged the soldiers not to go. They begged the soldiers to take them away. But they had orders from UN Headquarters--sitting in their offices thousands of miles away in New York, making decisions that determined the lives and deaths of millions, seemingly unaware that these were actual humans they were dealing with and not pictures in a video game. So the soldiers left, they left those thousands desperately seeking refuge at the school, and they left millions in Rwanda lost in a horrible nightmare that some never woke from. Some, passing me on the roads today and working their fields, still sometimes get lost in that nightmare, unsure when it began or if ended.
After the UN soldiers left, the victims were marched up the road and into a patch of forest, where the many facets of the fragility of humanity played out in horrific proportions. 2500 were killed. Men, women, children, for nothing more than a word: Tutsi. Decades of prejudice, economics, power plays, politics, and social stigma worked hard to create the opposing dichotomy of Hutu and Tutsi, divided by a canyon filled with fear, anger, hatred, and greed.
That patch of forest is now the Nyanza Memorial. Yesterday tens of thousands gathered there to honor the memory of loved ones and countrymen, to remember what happened and reaffirm their promise (the promise of the world, I might add): "Never Again". It was a formal affair and most of it was in Kinyarwanda so I didn't understand much of what was said. "Icyizere" (which means hope) was frequently affirmed, especially by President Kagame. Cal Wilkins, who was in Rwanda when the genocide happened, and stayed throughout those hundred days, shared his story and spoke about the power of Presence and the power of standing together. One of the survivors of Nyanza (there were only hundred, or less), also shared his story. Many around me wept. Some women, in listening to his story, remembered their own and were overwhelmed with grief. First I heard one woman wailing loudly in the distance, then another, and another. Some of them, wailing does not describe it, they were screaming as if they were under attack at that moment. Some of them were screaming words, I do not know what they were saying, I only understood "OYA!" which means "NO!". Their wails were heart-wrenching. Their screams eery and disconcerting. At one point a foreigner sitting behind me whispered to her companion "Oh my gosh, this is just too much." There were Red Cross and other medical staff there to help them, carrying them to an area away from the crowd to counsel and comfort them. For the next few hours the silence of the crowd, the encouragement of the speakers, and the comfort of the songs were periodically pierced by the wails and screams of women lost in their memories. There is a price to remembering.
For me, bearing witness to their pain is to too small a cost. For me, remembering the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 brings shame--shame that the Western World, which declared after the holocaust that it would ensure genocide would happen "Never Again", failed to recognize and respond to blatant and forewarned genocide Rwanda. Needless to say the Clinton administration is not terribly popular here, and while people are huge fans of Obama, there is trepedation that he has filled the White House with so many staffers from Clinton's administration.
I watched part of a film called "Rwanda '94", it was powerful and I highly recommend it. In it, one woman tells her story, and she ends by saying that she asks only for people to listen to her words because if you cannot bear witness to her life and to the history of genocide, then your ignorance is as bad as the genocide itself. In his speech Cal Wilkins said your story is the most powerful thing you have. Don't let their voices fall on deaf ears. Listen, though it is painful. Learn, though it will disturb you. And pay attention to the world and to our leaders: peace, like war, does not happen accidently, we must actively pursue it.
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