Sounds and Sights of Crime
Rwanda and Burundi Genocide Revisited
– Social Justice Where are You?

I woke late Sunday morning, grey skies had me go back to bed after doing the break of dawn chores.
I am awoken to the sound of a gurgling, as if a person is caught, drowning in their own spittle, with their nose blocked and being sucked into their lasts breaths. The sound of banging then reaches my ears, as if something heavy is being beaten on to a coconut shell, the sound resonates just a little because of the changes of density inside the shell.
These are differing elements reaching me and I fear since, as we all would, putting the sounds together and only come up with horrifying pictures in my own mind.
I head to the window, then immediately the door to shout and holler my knowledge as a witness to the actions of two young, brutish, men clubbing a third man with stones. I shout as best as I can in the primeval manner to send a battle cry. I am powerless to physically intervene within the next five minutes. The barrier, a solid stone wall topped by an electric fence, is testament to the general manner we acknowledge the dichotomies of those with, us, and those without, the majority.
But in this setting, the majority of people are law abiding, following social customs, rules and respecting others with feelings of mutual, social, responsibility.
Why this appalling situation? What ever drives someone to rip the shirt from another person’s back while holding on to him to hit him with a stone? I saw the young man bring the stone down twice as I shouted. He stopped and realised he was now having another person bearing witness to his actions. His crime; fore it is a crime even if this is a vigilante move. His partner in crime broke off as other people reacted to the gurgling cries of the victim. The victim is bloodied but fortunately did not fall to the ground where he would have received real injuries and been robbed of whatever goods and chattels these two thugs were after.
When the rescue party arrived, we start to give a few thanks. Give thanks? Yes, only, only, hearing the sounds of blood gargling in an injured man’s mouth and the heinous thunk of a stone hitting another human’s skull seem like a blessing. A gun was involved; perhaps these thugs thought the cost of a bullet too high for this robbery now gone badly wrong.
Maybe a lesson for many in this: People are sanitised in the 24/7 reporting of violence somewhere else, never happening to us. Gun crime happens in the bad neighbourhoods — does it? Bombs, bullets and brutal behaviour belong in those places where we send drones. Let us defend our borders, and yet violence is insidiously creeping through in different forms as we sanitise it.
How many people would be murdered if, instead of pulling a small trigger and firing a lump of metal into another human being’s body they had to take the lump of metal and pummel the other person with it to extinguish their life? Sense is we would have far few murders.
I worked in Burundi in early 1994 assisted those fleeing the Rwanda genocide. It immunised me to seeing people hit with stones and bricks, mercilessly and ruthlessly attacked. When arriving in Rwanda in August 1994, I now recall the gangs of youths running through markets in south west Rwanda with machetes, pangas, heavy bladed working tools for agriculture put to use in the harvesting of people. Ethnic cleansing on unprecedented scales. I had expunged the memories from my head and heart. This grey Sunday morning , my mind does go back, my immunisation worn off.
Sadly, I realise we have not moved forward from the thuggery we witnessed then. For all the pompous talk of international justice and the constant reports of human rights abuses, the abuses propagate and injustices remain too apparent. For all the sophistication of targeted killings set in technological warfare, the underlying tenet is:
We are a violent and self-serving bunch
Designed to live socially,
Bedevilled by manipulation undoing any socialability in the name of greed, power and the pursuit of domination.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent — Isaac Asimov
No peace without justice. No justice without equity.
