Our journey began at four o’clock in the morning, when our trusty driver, Paul, picked us up in his 10-seater van. After collecting our fifth recruit, Susanna, we headed toward the Ugandan-Rwandan border.
Eight hours of driving later, we had to stop for three hours to fix the breaks…apparently they weren’t working properly! While we were stationary we received a text from a friend telling us that Kigali – Rwanda’s capital and also the city we were heading towards – had been subjected to a series of coordinated grenade attacks the day before. As scary as that sounds, and I’m not denying that I wasn’t frightened, I’ve learned since being in Africa that this type of activity is a common occurrence. Most often it’s politically motivated; in Rwanda, its national elections are this summer and the attacks were a product of the pre-election tension that is so common in Africa. I don’t think complacency is the right word, but I guess I’ve adjusted to my circumstances. If this had happened in London then the whole country would have been in disarray, yet in Africa, incidents like this are viewed as minor inconveniences when compared to decades of civil war, colonisation and genocide that so many African countries have experienced.
Back on the road by three pm we got to the border two hours later. Adam and I had budgeted to spend $60 each for visas, however it turns out that the British supposedly helped to end the genocide and therefore Brits can enter for free. The same applies to the Americans – so our friend Hannah was exempt also, however Susanna, an Aussie, had to pay her 60 bucks. I’m not sure what I was expecting once we entered into Rwanda. We thought officials at the border would notify us of the terrorist activity, but no one said anything. By the time we’d done our due diligence and were back on the road it was getting dark. The road leading into Kigali hugged steep precipice-ridden hills to the right, with sheer drops into darkness to the left. Uganda and Rwanda had experienced several landslides in the preceding few weeks, and the remnants littered the road. I was a little scared; scared of being stoned to death by the loose rock above me, and also of what we might be faced with when entering the capital city.
It turns out there was nothing to be worried about. Entering Kigali there was no behaviour to suggest that anything was out of the ordinary. When we got to our hotel we asked the staff about it and they played it down. Whether that was because they were trying to protect us as white tourists coming to stay in their centrally located hotel, or whether they really did view it as a minor, run-of-the-mill pre-election incident, I’m not sure.
The following morning we got up early and headed for the Kigali Memorial Centre. The centre opened on 7th April 2004, marking the ten-year anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda where over 1,000,000 people were murdered over a 100-day period. On average, 10,000 Rwandans – mainly of the Tutsi tribe – were killed per day. The centre is built at the site chosen for the mass burial of the 250,000 victims of the genocide in Kigali. The memorial has three exhibitions: one is to document the genocide in 1994, one is a children’s memorial, the last an exhibition on the history of genocide around the world.
What can I say…I walked around the exhibitions for two hours with tears streaming down my face. I had to keep reminding myself that this only happened 16 years ago – in my lifetime. I can’t believe that the international community let it happen. The human rights abuses and atrocities that occurred are unbelievable. My understanding of the genocide is so much greater now, and that meant learning some horrific things; the main one being that the genocide was indirectly caused my Belgium. Belgium occupied Rwanda during World War One, and consequently was given a mandate to indirectly govern the country from 1923 up until Rwanda’s independence in 1962. With colonialism came identity cards, segregating the 18 different clans that previously lived together harmoniously. The Belgians made these distinctions racial and elitist, with the Tutsis wrongly identified as being 15% of the population, because they had more than ten cows per household. 84% were again wrongly identified as Hutu with less than ten cows. The Rwandans were split up according to their wealth and with this came tensions.
Simultaneously the Catholic Church – imposed on Rwandans during colonisation - increasingly conveyed the ‘Hamitic’ ideology that portrayed the Tutsis as the superior group. Subsequently most chiefs and sub-chiefs were Tutsi, with Hutus rarely gaining any privileged positions in society.
After independence Rwanda became a highly centralised, repressive state with a single-party system. The regime was characterised by the ethnic cleansing of Tutsis. When the Hutu, Major General Juvenal Habarimana, gained power through a coup d’état in 1973 he established the Interahamwe, an extremist Hutu youth militia that gained enormous popularity. Their ‘Hutuness’ was promoted at the expense of Tutsi lives and by 1990 the ideology of Hutu power and the eradication of the Tutsi influence was largely established.
The second thing that shocked me is that the genocide was rehearsed; it was planned to the extent that every Tutsi’s name in Rwanda was written down in a document used to systematically kill every living tribe member. The death lists had been prepared in advance. As early as December 1990, Kangura – a leading propaganda newspaper – had published the “Hutu Ten Commandments”, which stated that any Hutu associating with Tutsi neighbours and friends was a traitor. In the end, more than 20 newspapers and journals incited the hatred of the Tutsis. A weapon that they used in their propaganda was to claim that the Tutsis were planning a war that would leave no Hutu alive. This was a lie.
The third absurdity was that the UN could have put a stop to the genocide before it began. An informant code-named ‘Jean-Pierre’ who was a former member of the security for the President of MRND, Hutu President Habyarimana’s party, came forward with information that was ignored. He told the UN that 1,700 Interahamwe had been trained in army camps and were registering all Tutsis for an extermination plan that would kill up to 1000 Tutsis every 20 minutes. He was willing to warn about the dangers of Hutu extremism in return for his security. His protection was not provided. The head of the UNAMIR passed this information on to secretary general’ s military advisor in New York. No action was taken in response to the fax. Not long after this Jean-Pierre disappeared, his fate never to be known.
When the genocide began, the violence spread like wild fire. Women were beaten, defiled, humiliated and in the end murdered often in front of their children and husbands. Any sharp object was used to smash, pulverise and abuse children. People that were shortly before friends, who ate dinners together and looked after each other’s children, turned on each other. Moderate Hutus, who refused to enter into the bloodshed, fled to refugee camps in neighbouring Uganda to avoid being murdered or imprisoned themselves as traitors.
The fourth horrifying truth is that 5000 UN troop members were sent in to Rwanda simply to take non-nationals safely out of the country. A UN commander, Lt. Gen. Dallaire, estimated that it would have only taken this number of troops to stop the genocide altogether. Instead, the UN mission was recalled.
From the start of the genocide, not one additional peacekeeper or armoured personnel carrier arrived in Rwanda before the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) victory in July. The international community stood back and watched as millions of people were systematically brutalised and murdered.
The consequences of the war for the people of Rwanda are immense. The few women whose lives were spared were often raped by men with HIV on purpose to spread the infection. Burying the dead in dignity was almost impossible due to the costs. Mass graves are all over Rwanda, with no idea of who is beneath the ground. For those that survived, the trauma they will forever experience is unimaginable. But being a poor country, the means to counsel and support these people is lacking. What’s more, the Tutsi victims are living day by day with neighbours who are Hutus, some of whom would have murdered someone they know. The wounds of the country are far reaching.
To my complete surprise however the city of Kigali was so developed compared to that of Uganda. The roads were clean – no rubbish to be seen. They have strict road systems and gardens of flowers that line the streets. There are street lamps and endearing gates. It is remarkable. Some theorists argue, such as Paul Collier, that after a civil war a state has its greatest opportunity for reform and change in policy and this may be the case in Rwanda. Uganda is a different story. The civil war only affected the north of the country, yet the south does not have the infrastructure or the policies of Rwanda. I can’t say I know the why they are so different.
The memorial centre was a fantastic insight into the genocide. Rwanda’s story is so sad, but on the surface they seem to be coping and recovering remarkably well…despite the grenade attacks.
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