Rwanda is green and clean, a marked difference from the yesterday’s serving of Kenyan diesel and red dust. You are either walking up or down, as the nation is made up of a collection of hills, not quite mountainous, and yet more than the foothills of the Rockies.
Most peoples first thoughts of Rwanda must be of the genocide, particularly for Canadians who have listened to General Dallaire’s memories of his time here during the 100 days. I suppose this is why my first stop today was at the genocide museum. Situated on the side of a hill (like all buildings in Rwanda), the museum walked us through the history of the divide created between Hutu’s and Tutsi’s. People formally known for their integration, were actively reruited by foreign government policy and interference to discover that which divided them. Measurements of noses, and the amount of cattle were the defining differences. With that, the minority Tutsi were elevated and the remaining 82% Hutu and 1%Twa were relegated to secondary citizenship.
Eventually the majority revolted, a new system of discrimination was instituted to replace the old. The radio called for the cockroaches to be exterminated – dehumanizing the Tutsi. Militias were trained, they practiced on smaller groups, killing a few dozen here, a hundred or so there. Eventually you get good at what you practice, you don’t even need to think about it anymore. The new 10 commandments of the Hutu were developed and promoted in 1990. 1. No Hutu should marry a Tutsi. Then nine more of the same. This document seems strange to me, it resonates much more strongly than similar lists. If I had first seen this list of rules in Auschwitz, I wouldn’t of blinked – the Nazi atrocities are so well known that it is easy to simply consign them to evil in the abstract. I can’t do this as easily with this document, it feels to immediate, too modern – I can’t ignore it as ancient since it was written so recently,
The video showed men, women and so many children brutalized and burnt. the trace of a bullet across a child’s face, the grainy swarming and hacking death of men by neighbors who carried the machetes. Yesterday, they had fed one anothers children, today they cut off their fingers.
After walking past the images, we heard the voices of survivors, wondering why they are still here? Guilty somehow, as only a victim can comprehend.
The footage of the Gacaca, the traditional community court, is so unpretentious. A man in a pink shirt stands and faces the community. He recounts his story, of who and where he cut his neighbors daughters with his knife, he tells the names and is asked to slow so the official record-keeper can write everything down. He speaks so matter-of-factly, listing the others who were with him, the people he collected, what they did. The community listens, it seems to me impassively, perhaps the horror has been so common, too common. Perhaps the silence is simply the best response to the unasked questions why? Maybe they have learned that you cannot ask why, there is no rational reason. Is evil rational?
The wall of photographs only carries the images of 2000 people, of the more than 1 000 000 who died. It seems a pitiful percentage, and yet their faces fill four walls. They are similar in their commonality, these are not the mugshots of bureaucracy, not the efficient record of a system recording the inputs of the machinery of death such as Cambodian memorial walls. Instead these are photo plucked from the albums of everyday life. Young men standing outside a shop, a crate of bottles in the foreground. A woman, obviously cropped from her wedding photo, the dislocated arm of her husband encircling her waist. People smiling, posed and unposed, unaware that they were all soon to be images on a memorial of murder.
I pass through the children’ memorial garden and read their bewildered questions, we head towards the car, and as I am about to walk away, a final small wooden sculpture is revealed, the simple caption, “I did not make myself an orphan”
Mark Crocker
