Rwanda

Visiting Rwanda during the 12^th anniversary of their genocide was like parachuting into an abyss. For a split second, relative to the country’s now everyday calm, the trauma of their 100-day nightmare erupts forth with the force of a volcano.

Somehow in mid-April I found myself one of only three white Westerners surrounded by a mass of nearly 75,000 mourners who had just spent the last week exhuming the bodies of their family members for a proper burial. The remains of often up to 30 people, now safely occupying each coffin, had once been hastily hidden in shallow backyard graves or tossed by their killers into a local latrine. I followed the funeral procession slowly, feeling absurdly out-of-place, as a parade of rumbling pick-up trucks led the way carrying nearly 200 caskets neatly draped with purple crosses and dripping with tears from hovering family members.

Our destination was the Kigali Memorial Centre, a heartfelt, yet painful testament to the terror that drenched this tiny country, the size of Maryland, just over a decade before. Massive underground tombs surrounding the Memorial lay waiting for this year’s burials, offering some token of honor for lives so carelessly lost. Already nearly 50,000 massacred Tutsi rested below, nine coffins-deep.

As we snaked our way through village streets, I tried to imagine the sheer intensity of the fear one must face as a target of such hatred with no where to escape and no one to help. Darfurian women and children flashed before my eyes, racing barefoot across a desert with scarcely a tree for shade, and clearly no protection from attackers bent on their destruction.

The magnitude and speed of the violence that reached every corner of this small, but beautiful country in 1994 leaving just under 1 million people slaughtered is still unfathomable. In the Kigali Memorial Centre photographs of beautiful, happy children hang somberly over small plaques which read:

Fillette Uwase
Age: 2
Favorite Toy: Doll
Favorite Food: Rice and chips
Best Friend: Her dad
Behavior: A good girl
Cause of Death: Smashed against a wall

Ariane Umutoni
Age: 4
Favorite Food: Cake
Favorite Drink: Milk
Enjoyed: Singing and dancing
Behavior: A neat little girl
Cause of Death: Stabbed in her eyes and head

Patrick Gashugi Shimirwa
Age: 5
Favorite Sport: Riding bicycle
Favorite Food: Chips, meat and eggs
Best Friend: Alliane, his sister
Behavior: A quiet, well-behaved boy
Cause of Death: Hacked by machete

I’m not sure anyone can completely, consciously understand what drives such atrocities. But what was painfully clear to me after just one day in Rwanda was the devastating emotional impact of genocide long after the violence ends. You might expect it intellectually, but you cannot really feel it until you are standing there on their soil…

As the survivors assemble for each commemorative event or funeral, the quiet distress that must permeate every daily action of neighbors living side-by-side their family’s killers begins to flood the senses, standing hairs on end. Mourners crowd together under tents, seemingly pleading with nature to spare them this time from the same fierce rains that twelve years ago were unable to dissuade mobs from their vicious tasks. Suddenly a woman begins to scream – it is usually a woman, as it is so often the case that the women bear the greatest burden of such suffering as mothers who lost their children, as widows who lost their husbands and as precious souls whose bodies were claimed as the spoils of war by their captors.

Immediately trauma workers standing by in red first-aid vests dive into the crowd with refined skill. Within moments, the tightly-packed audience gives birth to the shrieking, gasping woman as she is led away arm-in-arm with her rescuers, dragging her feet, sobbing and screaming in a language you need not speak to understand. The fragile facade begins to crumble and the collective wound again expels grief, anger, sadness as survivors unwillingly relive or uncontrollably release their pain.

For some, this anguish may be the only thing they can count on showing up each day. They certainly couldn’t count on us.

Not only does the emotional trauma run broad and deep, but genocide itself is far from over. It slowly kills its victims daily. Here, twelve years later, women suffer from HIV/AIDS contracted during rape by known-infected attackers intent on producing Hutu babies and eliminating those who would bear them into the world. Widows struggle alone to support their hungry families, having to choose daily between food or school fees. Child-headed households of orphans grow up without the examples of loving parents, soon to become parents themselves. Other sole survivors still exist homeless, preferring to spend a lifetime bouncing weekly between generous hosts rather than reside among neighbors that slaughtered, ousted or failed to protect their families.

The Rwandan government seems to be making honest efforts towards addressing these issues, but the problems are obviously too great to have resolved in even a decade. There is some international presence here, but most of the world would have forgotten Rwanda if it weren’t for Hollywood.

I spoke with a group of women from Kigali, many of whom contracted HIV from rape during the genocide. They told me that after the conflict, they did not feel like they had a right to exist. It has taken them twelve years to find each other, form this support group and come to the realization that indeed they do have a right to exist.

Do we agree? Do we believe they have a right to exist? Do we believe the survivors from Darfur have a right to exist? You see, just as we failed the Rwandans during 100 days of terror in 1994, we failed the Darfurians in 2003, 2004 and 2005. Shall we fail them again in 2006? What exactly does “Never Again” really mean? What exactly does the Genocide Convention call for in terms of international intervention? How many years does it really take for the international community to respond to genocide? Every day we fail to act, we are not only responsible for many more lives lost, but we are responsible for hundreds more survivors who will live out the rest of their lives irreparably wounded by the violence and hatred that has chased them so far.