The broken pledge of 'never again'
Barry Egan recalls the scenes of utter horror he witnessed in Rwanda
after the genocide there 20 years ago
A Rwandan refugee girl stares at a mass grave where dozens of bodies
have been laid to rest in this July 20, 1994 file photo. April 7, 2014
marks the 20th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide which killed 800,000
people.
BARRY EGAN - PUBLISHED 13 APRIL 2014 02:30 AM
Last Monday was the 20th anniversary of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
It was an almost methodical attempt to wipe out the country's Tutsi
minority over a hundred days of hell. Hutu death squads using machetes
slaughtered into bloody oblivion almost a million innocents.
After the Second World War, the international community made a solemn
promise that there would never be another genocide like the Nazi mass
killings of Jews.
That promise was broken in Africa 20 years ago.
Entitled To hell and back: How nations torn apart by atrocity or civil
war can stitch themselves together again, a piece in the current
Economist magazine put the past horror in context: "Working by hand
rather than with the industrial methods that the Nazis used to kill
Jews, and at more than three times the speed of the Holocaust,
militias known as Interahamwe from the ethnic Hutu majority, and
others, slaughtered at least 800,000 Tutsis (and Hutu moderates) to
remove them from shared land."
The mass murder in Rwanda, some say, ended the illusion that the evil
of genocide had been eradicated in the world after the Second World
War. The West did nothing to intervene and the bloodbath remains on
the conscience of the world. In hindsight, much of the bloodshed could
have been avoided.
Knowing that the Hutus were on their way to Mugonero, seven Adventist
pastors wrote a letter to their superior Elizaphan Ntakirutimana ,
president of the Adventist Church in Kibuyu, pleading for outside
help.
"We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our
families," they wrote.
The reply they received from the head of the church in Kibuyu was
chilling and prophetic: "Your problem has already found a solution.
You must die."
A survivor of the massacre in Mugonero had another version of the
pastor's letter: "You must be eliminated. God no longer wants you."
When the Hutu death squads descended through the church doors, the
Tutsis thought God would somehow protect them. Almost everyone in
their path caught a glimpse of hell instead that April day 20 years
ago.
Some 2000 Tutsi men, women and children were massacred by Hutu thugs
in a church at Mugonero which they believed would be a sanctuary.
Crying children, hiding in confessional boxes, were murdered for
sport.
I was in Rwanda in 1994 for the Sunday Independent a month after the
genocide happened. I saw the price of the West doing nothing.
On my first day in Goma in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the
Congo) - where the Tutsi refugees had fled - I played football with
some kids in a UN camp. It wasn't like any ordinary football game.
There would be up to 40 excited kids on each team at a time.
I'll never forget seeing a teenage boy with no feet, just stumps,
sitting watching the kids his age playing football in the dirt. You
couldn't help but marvel at the relentless spirit
of these young children who had lost everything. The barbarism they
had encountered first hand would haunt them for the rest of their
lives. Yet all that some of them wanted to know was how
Manchester United were doing that season in the league.
But they had their football stories to tell - the day the Tutsi
football team's bus was stopped by Hutu soldiers at gunpoint. The
Tutsi players watched as their team captain was beheaded in front of
them. They were then forced at gunpoint to kick his head around in the
dirt. Once this little game was over, the Hutus applied their machetes
to the footballers' feet.
There was also the horrific story of the 20 Belgian soldiers working
for the UN who were captured by Hutu militia. One by one, they were
tortured, mutilated and murdered. They were found with their genitals
stuffed into their mouths. After a while, these stories ceased to
shock you. I heard a dozen or so stories like this on my first day in
Goma.
Decades ago, it was said that Tutsi children were known for their
beautiful height. There was a racist myth, put about by the well-fed
Hutu propaganda machine to incite further hatred, that when the Tutsis
were in power, they would only allow children of certain height attend
schools. This was supposedly the reason the Hutus cut off the feet of
so many Tutsi children.
On my second day there, I watched as a Tutsi woman, who had been
caught in a bomb explosion, had her leg amputated in a makeshift
operating theatre on the banks of
Lake Kivu.
In all of this darkening nightmare, two young Irish lads, Tom Boyce
and Paul Keys from Goal (with whom I was there in Rwanda for 10 days),
were piling the corpses, one by one, on to the back of a truck. Tom
and Paul were probably two of the most inspirational people I've ever
met in my life. All day, every day, in their GAA jerseys, they would
pick up dead bodies and put them on the back of a truck.
"There was a cholera epidemic in the camps and 40,000 people had died,"
John O'Shea told me when I met him in Dublin in 2008. "Tom and Paul
had to pick the dead bodies up quick so the cholera wouldn't spread.
They had to pick the dead bodies up like rugby balls and fling them on
the back of lorries."
Dead bodies, dying humans and motherless babies so malnourished that
their eyes seemed to bulge out of their sockets. Some of the babies
would be dead the next morning when you went back to see them. The
babies who survived cried ceaselessly for their murdered parents.
The babies were so tiny and light that when you picked them up in your
arms you could hardly feel them. The older ones, still little and
helpless, sat listless in groups. Their eyes would light up when the
Goal workers came in, smiled and cuddled them.
I couldn't believe my eyes at times. Arriving on the first day, most
of us probably felt some fragment of the emotion which the 99th
Infantry
Division felt entering the Dachau camp in May 1945.
In the Zaire camps run by UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees), the brutes who had murdered at will were fed at the feeding
stations as were the relatives of those whom they had butchered. It
was insane to watch them standing there, faces lacking any remorse.
Beside them were the spiritless creatures whose lives they had ruined,
ghostly human beings, weak and ill, their clothes dirty and tattered,
their faces etched with a pure hopelessness. Their eyes seemed empty
when you caught their glance.
You could smell death in the air, and see the corpses everywhere. The
ditches and latrines were over-burdened with the fetid, decomposing
corpses of those deemed to be enemies of the Hutus. Each person's
story was more horrific than the last.
"The Interahamwe made a habit of killing young Tutsi children in front
of their parents, by first cutting off one arm, then the other," a UN
official in Rwanda said of the Hutu militia.
"They would then gash the neck with a machete to bleed the child
slowly to death but, while they were still alive, they would cut off
the private parts and throw them at the faces of the terrified parents
who would then be murdered with slightly greater dispatch."
The stories of what went on a month earlier couldn't but turn your
stomach. It made you lose your faith in human beings, or humanity, or
God, or anything that was supposed to be good about life or the world.
Asked whether what he had seen in Rwanda had shaken his faith in God,
a French priest replied: "Absolutely not. But what happened in this
country has destroyed my faith in mankind forever."
How these people were ever going to be able to forgive their
neighbours for what they did to them seemed impossible. But it appears
to be happening slowly in Rwanda (a country described by the Global
Corruption Barometer recently as now "the least corrupt country in
sub-Saharan Africa" - with its capital Kigali one of the safest cities
in Africa.)
Last Sunday, I read an extraordinary piece about reconciliation in Rwanda in
The New York Times magazine. With portraits of the living victims
beside their perpetrators, the stories told were inspiring because
they were about the power of forgiveness and truth.
Godefroid Mudaheranwa, said of Evasta Mukanyandwi: "I burned her
house. I attacked her in order to kill her and her children, but God
protected them, and they escaped. When I was released from jail, if I
saw her, I would run and hide. I decided to ask her for forgiveness.
To have good relationships with the person to whom you did evil deeds
- we thank God."
Evasta said: "I used to hate him. When he came to my house and knelt
down before me and asked for forgiveness, I was moved by his
sincerity. Now, if I cry for help, he comes to rescue me. When I face
any issue, I call him."
"When someone is full of anger, he can lose his mind," said Karorero,
another survivor of the genocide. "But when I granted forgiveness, I
felt my mind at rest."
Sunday Independent
http://www.google.ca/gwt/x?gl=CA&hl=en-CA&u=http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/the-broken-pledge-of-never-again-30180669.html&q=broken+pledge+never+again
--
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