Rwanda is called the Land of a Thousand Hills. From what I saw of the country this week, it more than lived up to its name. On the bus ride in, I watched as rolling green hills passed by my window overlooking beautiful tea plantations. The roads of Rwanda are the best maintained roads in all of East Africa. The city of Kigali was neat and clean. The traffic laws are obeyed and everything seems to run like a well-oiled machine. These people care about the environment, not building big factories and even outlawing plastic bags. (Seriously, if you have them, they will take them away at the border and give you paper bags instead.) The people were kind and respectful. I can't say enough about the hospitality of the Rwandan people who opened up their home to me the couple days I was there. I wasn't hounded on the street by vendors trying to sell me products. In fact, the only time I was approached on the street at all was by men asking if I needed a taxi and by children who wanted to practice their English ("Hi, how are you?" being the extent of the conversation.) In some cases, I was even called "sister" by strangers. Truly, the people and the land of Rwanda took my breath away.
As lovely as all of this was, my reasons for visiting the tiny country of Rwanda were not so charming.
On April 6, 1994, the President of Rwanda was killed in the sky over Kigali when a missile shot down the airplane in which he was traveling. The identity of those responsible for the attack is still debated but most evidence points to extremists within the President's own party. Within hours of downing the plane, the Presidential Guard began killing people whose names appeared on lists created much earlier (most of these people belonged to or had connections to the Tutsi tribe)- anyone from political opponents to university professors and their students, "regular" people and their families, and anyone who had ever associated with them. Within one hundred days, more 800,000 people-about one tenth of the population of Rwanda-were murdered, not by automatic weapons but by machetes and clubs wielded by soldiers, mayors, and neighbors-all urged to do their work by the twenty four hour hate fueled radio broadcasts. The organizers intent to eliminate a certain people group characterizes it as genocide. Also during this time more than 70,000 women were raped and 350,000 children watched as their families were murdered. *
The two tribes involved in the genocide were the Hutus and Tutsis. The conflict between the tribes began as early as the colonization days. In the late nineteenth century, Rwanda was colonized by Belgium. With the occupation came Catholic missionaries who propogated such racist doctrines as the "doctrine of Ham". At that time, it was easy to differentiate between the two tribes by their outward appearance. Hutus were darker skinned and had wider more flattened noses, whereas Tutsis were lighter skinned with sharper, more pointed noses. For this reason, the Tutsis were trusted by white colonists and were given places in the government, etc. As the Hutus grew in population, however, they began to uprise, creating a genocide in the 1950's which displaced many Rwandans to the surrounding countries. By the late twentieth century, the mixing of the tribes made it impossible to identify who was from which tribe by appearance alone, so all people of Rwanda were required to have ID showing to which tribe they belonged. This was an advantage to the Hutus during the genocide, especially in Kigali where the roadblocks were created and people were forced to show ID. If your ID declared that you were a Tutsi or that you were married to a Tutsi, you were killed on the spot. Much of the genocide occurred in churches or schools, however-places people fled for safety.
While I was in Rwanda, I was able to visit four genocide sites-not many considering the country is littered with them. The attacks were systematically planned and carried out with little resistance. At two different sites, I was able to see the skeletal remains of victims who had not been identified. The budding anthropologist in me was looking for blunt and sharp force trauma wounds to the cranium and estimating ages based on dentition and cranial fusion in the children. I remember picking up one skull turning it around to see the face only to find there wasn't one. It had been completely smashed away by a club. What was more depressing though was what was not there-defensive wounds. Usually in attacks like this, especially ones aimed at a victims head, you expect to see wounds on the radius and ulna, as well as the hands. (Only the long bones of these victims were saved, however, because the small bones often decompose faster.) As I am far from being educated on the subject, I asked the guide about it. She confirmed that not only did they not fight back, they didn't even raise their hands to protect their faces from their attackers.
Conformity is a deeply rooted mind set in Rwandan culture. I mentioned before that everything was run smoothly and people obeyed the laws. For example, in a village where I came to see the memorial, the gates were locked and even though the people in the office had a key, they refused to let me inside without the permission of the Vice President of the district. During the four hours I had to wait to get in touch with the VP, I tried to reason with them to let me in without permission. I told them I had traveled a long way and didn't want to leave without seeing it. I mean, they had the key! Why couldn't they just open the door?! Not only did they refuse my request, it was as if they couldn't even process my request. They couldn't comprehend bending the rules or making exceptions. They simply repeated the rule ("This is how it is done.") and squinted their eyes at me in confusion. You can see with the excellent (for Africa) highway system and the deep rooted culture of conformity, committing genocide in Rwanda was easier than it might have been in other counties.
When I pictured myself touring the memorial sites, I thought I would shed many tears. In reality, I found it very difficult to process any emotion while standing in the same spot where tens of thousands of people were killed for no other reason than their ethnicity. How do you process it, for example, when you are led to the back of a church filled with the clothing of the children who died there and the tour guide looks at you says, "And this is where they slammed the infants heads against the wall"? How do you process it when you are standing in a crypt filled with thousands of skeletal remains and someone says to you "Oh, these are just the ones that haven't been identified." How do you process it when you visit a village where 13,700 people were killed and it takes an (almost literal) act of Congress to open the gates because NO ONE EVER VISITS? Those of you who know me know that it takes a while for me to process things- especially heavy things. The moment did come when I was able to process all of this, however. Unfortunately, that moment was on a bus heading back to Kampala where not a single person around me spoke English. I'm sure they will have fun telling their families about the crazy sobbing wazungu (Swahili for "white person") on the bus.
The fact is that even after twenty years, Rwanda is still healing. I met a Rwandan pastor (who is friends with Rick Warren *name dropping alert*) whose church is still ministering hope to those affected. It is hard to reconcile that humanity is capable of such evil. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has these words to offer: "There very well may be times when God has regretted creating us, but I am convinced that there are many more times that he feels vindicated by our kindness, our magnanimity, our nobleness of spirit...Yet each of us has a great capacity for evil. Not one of us can say with certainty that we would not become the perpetrators if we were subject to the same conditioning as those in South Africa, Rwanda, and other places where hatred perverts the human spirit. This does not for one minute excuse what was done or those who did it. It is however, to be more and more filled with the compassion of God, looking on and weeping that his beloved children, our beloved brothers and sisters, have come to such a sad state. But for every act of evil, there are a dozen acts of kindness that go unnoticed. It is only because the evil deeds are less common that they are "news". It is only because we believe that people should be good that we despair when they aren't. Indeed, if people condoned the evil, we would be justified in losing hope. But most of the world does not. We know we are meant for better."
*Taken from The Bone Woman by Clea Koff
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