Never Again

What do I tell you about the Rwandan genocide? It seems that the more I learn about it myself, the further muddled it becomes. It wasn't just 100 days in 1994; the groundwork had been laid for decades, and the repercussions continued to claim lives for years after. The story is far more complicated than just Hutu vs. Tutsi. There were extremists and moderates on both sides, and killing bloodied the hands of government forces and a rebel army and organized militias and ordinary citizens (not to mention the various foreign abettors allegedly involved).

The single event that sparked the inferno of death was the fatal shooting-down of a plane carrying the Rwandan president on the night of April 6, 1994 -- the exact circumstances of which have remained a mystery even to this day. What is certain, though, is that widespread slaughter began immediately, methodically and earnestly: one author reports, "The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killings since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." Husbands killed their wives; priests, their parishioners. Children killed children, and mothers with babies on their backs killed mothers with babies on their backs.

Rwandan survivors are committed to remembering these atrocities. They've dedicated memorial sites all over the country, in almost every little town. And from April 7-13 each year, they observe a week of mourning for the dead (between 500,000 and 1,000,000, depending who's counting). There is no school during this time, and businesses are required to be closed all day on the 7th and in the subsequent afternoons.

I'd had simultaneous dread and curiosity about what it would be like to be here during these days. Truthfully, I felt a little awkward about being here at all, like I would be intruding on a private time that I couldn't possibly understand. How would people act? We have a Memorial Day, too, I mused. What do we do? Oh, yeah -- Have a picnic. Go to the beach. Somehow I doubted that's what would be going on in Rwanda.

I opted to lay pretty low. I listened to President Kagame's speech on the radio. He grew up in anglophone Uganda, and he tends to slip in and out of English without a second thought (helpful for me, though I'm guessing it might be frustrating to many Rwandans who listen to him). Throughout the week the radio played various pop tunes decrying the genocide. Some were catchy, upbeat; for the songs in Kinyarwanda, you'd never even guess the ghastly things they were referencing... until your ears happen upon those unmistakable syllables, jen-o-seed. But it's great to know the radio is being used now as a constructive medium for solidarity, as opposed to the horrific role it played 16 years ago in enjoining Hutus to kill the "cockroaches."

I spent a good part of the week reading Shake Hands with the Devil, the two-inch opus written by Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, Force Commander of UNAMIR, the UN peacekeeping mission to Rwanda. (Aside: He declares his most beloved spot in the country to be Kinihira, which I could literally see out my front window as I read. A little surreal.) Dallaire was on the ground from August '93 to August '94, and he saw the worst of the worst. A million dead is a whole lot of bodies -- he tells of rotting bodies piled into dump trucks, dismembered bodies stacked on the side of the road, bloated bodies clogging up the rivers. Rats actually grew to the size of small dogs as they feasted on the endless supply of decomposing flesh.

The book is subtitled "The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda," and that is the message Dallaire drives home: yes, by all means, the machete-wielders and gun-toters are the ones ultimately responsible -- but we the international community could have done something to stop them and chose not to. It's heartbreaking as he details the support he repeatedly begged for from UN member states, with little response. Mid-bloodbath, one U.S. government rep asked for an accurate count of the death toll so far, because "estimates indicated it would take the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans to justify the risking of the life of one American soldier." But how many U.S. soldiers were risked in Yugoslavia? How many so far in Iraq? Is it worth it now? When it comes to human rights, Dallaire raises the question: are some humans "more human" than others?

The crazy thing is, looking around this place, you'd never IMAGINE the horrors that happened only 16 years ago. Kigali is modern, clean, organized, and above all safe. As I learn disturbing stories about now-familiar landmarks there and elsewhere in the country, I have so much trouble reconciling the past with the present. I try, really try, to picture these terrifying scenes that I read about. How is it possible?

I was thinking: I wonder what Germany felt like in 1961, 16 years on. Well, guess what? That's the year the Berlin Wall was built. But here, killers and victims now live side by side. In peace. Sound idealistic? It's somehow the astounding, unprecedented reality here.

Over 42% of Rwanda's population today were born after 1994. They will build the better tomorrow. Turns out maybe, eventually, unbelievably, there is a happy ending after all.

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We bear witness today not just to Rwanda's suffering but also to its renewal -- to survivors who have rebuilt shattered homes and restored battered lives -- to parents who have taken orphans into their arms and their hearts -- to refugees who have found the courage to go home and start anew -- to soldiers who have laid down weapons and taken up tools that build -- to men and women who have won fresh prosperity and brought new comfort to their neighbors and their region -- to leaders and public servants who have strengthened the institutions that enshrine the rule of law and ward off the temptation of turmoil -- to ordinary citizens who have searched their wounded souls and chosen healing over strife, forgiveness over grievance, and reconciliation over revenge. Just as genocide cannot happen without thousands of individual decisions to destroy, recovery happens only with thousands of individual decisions to create.
- Ambassador Susan E. Rice
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
April 7, 2010