Chilling ghost of Rwanda genocide lives on two decades later
The Standard Digital News - 9 hours ago
A horrifying picture after the genocide. [PHOTOS: FILE STANDARD]
By TONY MOCHAMA
KIGALI, RWANDA: On Monday, Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta offered
the country's first formal apology to Kigali for Kenya's laissez faire
attitude during the 100-day genocide that claimed more than a million
Rwandese lives.
The apology came at the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the
genocide, what the French would call 'c'est le commencement de la fin'
(the Beginning of the End) and that will formally end on July 20th,
the day the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) chased the Rwandese army and
genocidal militias out of the country into Goma, Zaire.
On the evening of April 6 1994, the genocide in Rwanda began and by
the time it stopped 100 days later, it had claimed the lives of
800,000 Tutsis and 300,000 moderate Hutus.
That is 10,000 people being slaughtered on a daily basis, or more than
400 human beings an hour, or 60 souls slain every minute for 100 days.
Hounds of Hell
See also: Why easing the wage bill burden should be collective responsibility
Rwanda is a real life horror story whose ghost from 20 years ago still
haunts the region.
Thomas Kalimindi, a Rwandese, had just turned 33 and was about to
celebrate both his birthday and his quitting of a biased 'Radio
Rwanda', where he had worked for a decade.
His wife Jacqueline had baked him a cake.
Kalimindi was in the bathroom when his wife came pounding at the door,
telling him hate radio station RTLM had just announced the death of
President Juvenal Habyarimana, whose plane had been shot down by a
missile, sending it to crash into his own palace's backyard.
Man and wife listened in chilled fear as radio RTLM went on to warn
listeners to expect 'the sound of bullets and grenades exploding here
and there over the next three days.'
After the 10pm bulletin, the radio did not go off air as normal and
instead played music all night, a sure sign that the worst hounds of
hell had been loosed in Rwanda. (Why is it that during coups, the
murderous juntas want music played nocturnally on the radio?)
In another, more affluent neighbourhood, a Tutsi couple, Odette and
Jean Bapiste, were having a whiskey with a disabled neighbour, Dusabi,
who was celebrating his acquisition of a new TV set and VCR player.
"Honestly, I was going to die if I did not have a TV to watch," Dusabi
kept saying happily, presumably with the 1994 World Cup coming up in
two months' time, then.
At 8.14am when the news of the death of the Rwandan president broke,
Jean Baptise had the premonition to get his wife and children into his
jeep immediately and flee to Butare, which had a Tutsi Governor.
Unfortunately, Dusabi never got to watch his TV, as he was one of the
Tutsis murdered by Hutu Interahamwe that very 'first' night of April.
Paul Rusesabagina, General Manager of Air Sabena-owned Hotel des Mille
Collines, has spoken of the hour after the felling of President
Habyarimana.
"At first, the streets were eerily deserted. But within an hour, just
an hour, roadblocks had been set up all over Kigali and the killings
began in earnest."
RTLM radio's regular phrase over the next week became the exhortation:
"The graves are ready but they are empty. Who will help us fill them
up?"
See also: Why easing the wage bill burden should be collective responsibility
The suspected master co-ordinator of the Rwandese genocide was one
Colonel Theoneste Bagasora, now serving 30 years behind bars for his
role in the chaos.
The colonel was a close intimate of Rwanda's First Lady Madame
Habyarimana, and a charter member of the Akazu, whose militia, the
Interahamwe, were charged with being the death squads that would
cleanse Rwanda of its entire Tutsi population.
"I am brewing the Apocalypse," Bagasoro had bragged in January to some
high-ranking army associates.
Cowardly of ways
By dawn, as the sun rose over Rwanda, army killers had surrounded the
home of moderate Hutu Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and shot
her entire family.
She fled over a wall but was shortly slaughtered in the back garden of
a European neighbour's house.
At this time, Rwanda had no legitimate leadership, and the wolves were
on the loose.
The 10 Belgian UNAMIR soldiers assigned to guard the Prime Minister
were outnumbered, disarmed, taken prisoner, driven to Camp Kigali
barracks, tortured, murdered and mutilated to send a message that the
genocide would not be stopped by foreign forces.
The UN, in the most cowardly of ways, got the message. Foreign
embassies rushed to shut embassies and evacuate their nationals. Radio
RTLM gloated: "You cockroaches must know you are made of flesh! We
will kill you all."
That first week of the Rwanda genocide, drunken militias fortified by
whiskey and assorted drugs plundered from pharmacies and various
apothecaries were bussed from site to site, to massacre Tutsis on
sight.
A councilwoman in Kigali offered the killers 50 Rwandese francs for
any severed Tutsi heads they brought her, a practice that became so
often by the end of that first week in April. It was called 'selling
cabbages'.
Josh Hammer, the Newsweek correspondent who spent 24 hours in Kigali
on April 13 1994, exactly 20 years ago, reported seeing, one night in
Kigali, a Red Cross ambulance stopped at an Interahamwe roadblock and
several wounded Tutsis who had survived a massacre yanked out. Then
the slashing and screaming began. When it ended, several minutes
later, a gang of young men, literally soaked in blood, their clubs and
machetes dripping it, raced past him down the street singing in
jubilation.
See also: Why easing the wage bill burden should be collective responsibility
By the end of that first week, then, the genocide was in full flow,
neighbours killing neighbours, Hutus going to work with machetes to
hack down Tutsi colleagues, doctors murdering wounded survivors of the
massacres in hospitals, and even Hutu extremist school teachers
slaughtering their young pupils in cold blood, for the mere crime of
being Tutsi.
Genocidaire financier
What is not a crime is killing Tutsis and their 'traitor' Hutu
sympathisers! The de facto law of the land at this time was that every
Hutu citizen was responsible for joining in what was now called 'the
Work.'
If a person to be killed was let go or survived death by one party, it
was the responsibility of the next party who came into contact with
them to murder him or her.
That is why Kenya's long harbouring of genocidaire financier Felicien
Kabuga and others of his ilk, let alone our turning of our back to our
little neighbour in its one hundred days of horror, is something Kenya
should well apologise a thousand, or even a million, times for.
Incidentally, Kenya has always denied that Kabuga ever lived here.
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SIBOMANA Jean Bosco
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