Remembering Rwanda
April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.
— T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
April is indeed the cruelest month. In 1994, April marked the beginning of the genocide in Rwanda, which would go on to claim an estimated 800,000 lives over 100 days. While this post does not seek to serve as an exhaustive introduction to the Rwandan genocide, it is worth reviewing some basic facts:
- Estimates of the death toll range from 500,000 to 1,000,000. The most commonly cited number is 800,000. For an extended discussion on the numbers, be sure to read Alison Des Forges’ thorough account, Leave None to Tell the Story.
- The victims were predominantly the minority Tutsis, but also included Hutu moderates. These moderates were targeted by Hutu extremists in an attempt to stifle any opposition to their genocidal actions. For example, on April 7, the very first day of the genocide, Hutu militias assassinated Agathe Uwilingiyimana, the moderate Hutu prime minister.
- Even though horrific events defined the genocide from its earliest days, the international response was sluggish and insufficient. It took months for Western governments to start using the term “genocide.” The United States not only refused to intervene, but also supported gutting UNAMIR, the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda. Bill Clinton would later visit Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, to deliver an unspoken “apology.”
Now, 22 years after the genocide, it is the national month of remembrance in Rwanda. I have seen firsthand how Rwanda remembers the traumatic experiences of 1994. This past summer I visited Ntarama, a small community in eastern Rwanda where one of the massacres took place. Two days after the genocide began, the Tutsis in Ntarama took refuge in the local church, believing that no one would hurt them in the house of God. On April 12th, the Hutu extremist militia overtook the church. In the course of three days roughly 5,000 Tutsis were murdered there. Today, the church is preserved as a memorial.
When I visited, we entered through the back door and immediately came face to face with human remains. The shelves spanned the entire back wall of the church. They contained hundreds of bones: femurs, ulnas, skulls. Our tour guide pointed to the coffins that lined the church floor and said each contained the remains of probably 50 people. Each skull told the story of how that person was murdered. Bullets, machetes, clubs, and other weapons all left distinct marks on the skulls of the deceased.
The most jarring of all were the skulls of children. To save bullets, the killers smashed children’s heads against the walls. I saw proof of this practice when I went to the Sunday school room attached to the church. Here the children and babies had hid when the militia overtook the grounds. The walls are still stained with the blood and brain matter of the babies who had been hit against the wall. Visiting a genocide site is intensely emotional and by the end of the day I felt myself mourning for people I’d never met.
Still, I do remember the first person who looked at me at the moment of the deadly blow. Now that was something. The eyes of someone you kill are immortal, if they face you at the fatal instant. They have a terrible black color. They shake you more than the streams of blood and the death rattles, even in a great turmoil of dying. The eyes of the killed, for the killer, are his calamity if he looks into them. They are the blame of the person he kills.
—Pancrace, Rwandan killer at Nyamata, as recorded in Jean Hatzfield’s “Machete Season”
I finished my visit at Ntarama by going to the mass graves which, like the others I visited in Rwanda, are massive slabs of gray concrete. There are roughly 11,000 people interred here from the Ntarama massacre as well as bodies recovered from the surrounding area. Adjacent to the graves is the Wall of Names, a large marble slab engraved with the names of the deceased. Out of the 11,000 who died there, there were only 250 names displayed. I was told that these are the only reported names available, even after 20 years of memorialization and research. The area was primarily Tutsi and entire families and neighborhoods were killed. Recovering names is one of the inherent problems associated with genocide remembrance, for after a certain portion of the community is killed there is no one left to remember the dead. Commemoration becomes complicated. It is harder to mourn the unknown.
The case of Rwanda is particularly difficult for remembrance projects, since it was one of the most “effective” genocides in history. While the génocidaires failed to exterminate Rwanda’s Tutsis, in some areas, they destroyed entire communities. This is what makes the Rwandan case so alarming. These communities will be silenced in history. When we look at Rwanda, it is important to remember all of the voices that we do not hear and all of the stories that were lost.
Indeed, in many cases we know much more about the organizers of genocide than their victims. The perpetrators left behind a “paper trail” of radio transcripts, which tell the story of how they ostracized and attempted to destroy the Tutsi minority. Mass media encouraged, aided, and legitimized mass killing. There has been extensive research on Rwandan hate radio’s dehumanization of the Tutsis. They were called “Inyenzi” or “cockroaches” (anyone familiar with the Nazi regime’s depiction of Jews as vermin will find these parallels particularly striking).
But radio did more than dehumanize. Broadcasters also played up nationalist themes. Tutsis were also called “Inkotanyi” or “enemies,” deliberately conflating Tutsi citizens with the armed Tutsi rebel forces who were invading the country at the same time. Unlike dehumanization, this nationalist frame portrayed Tutsis as enemies who threatened national stability, not just as inconvenient parasites that needed to be squashed. The hate radio broadcasts alleged that most Tutsi civilians, including children, were actively aiding the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a majority-Tutsi rebel force that was fighting against the Hutu militias. Deprived of their civilian status, and declared enemies of the Rwandan state, ordinary Tutsis became targets.
Those who are at the market you will be told things about those children you call street children. You will hear that many of them are Inkotanyi. Look at all of them and then touch on their heads, you will see a sign showing you that there are Inkotanyi. There is a zero sign shaved at the back side of their heads; touch and see. You will see RPF children who, in daytime, make themselves street children but who, in the night disguise themselves and go to inform RPF on the situation.
—RTLM broadcast: May 16, 1994
The radio example underscores an unfortunate reality: more information exists documenting the thoughts of the perpetrators and organizers of the Rwandan genocide than on the experiences of their victims during their final days. On the one hand, all of this evidence gives genocide scholars unprecedented insight into the psychology and propaganda that motivated the killing. On the other hand, the fact that so much is known about the Hutu extremists seems to corroborate the truism that “history is written by the victors.” But today, even though much of the physical and textual evidence only speaks to the thoughts and experiences of the killers, Rwandans are finding ways to recapture the narrative and interpret history in a way that provides dignity and agency for the victims.
Rwanda’s memorialization efforts inspire our own drive to remember the genocide. The #TogetherWeRemember movement has compiled a list of 5,000 names from Rwanda, a number that will grow in time as the movement expands and researchers continue to uncover the names of the deceased.
During this year’s name-reading ceremony, readers from around the world will voice the names that killers once attempted to silence. When we read names, their memory endures.
Today, April 10, 2016, marks the beginning of the #TogetherWeRemember campaign’s global 24-hour live-streamed name-reading ceremony. Watch streaming video starting at 5:30pm EST tonight. Share why you remember and what you remember about genocide using the #TogetherWeRemember hashtag on your favorite social media platform.
[h/t to my blog post on Ntarama and Nyamata from last summer and to Matthew King for co-authoring this piece]
