The Genocide: What Needs To Be Said

Why wouldn’t you find it despicable to live in this situation? Why should we be a country that depends on other people? What’s wrong with us? Why do we live off other people’s money, off the taxpayers of other countries? How can it be that people who lived in this country two hundred years ago were better off than we are today? What happened? We are descendants of people with integrity, people who were hardworking, people who stood up and fought for their rights. We have been put in a position of being despised, of being held in contempt. We don’t deserve that, and we have within ourselves what we need to stand up to these challenges.

- President Paul Kagame, current President of the Republic of Rwanda, who is acclaimed for his considerable role in ending the genocide in 1994 and his success in making Rwanda an “African success story” in the years following the genocide.

This is not the going to be the easiest post for me to write, nor is it going to be the easiest post for you to read. What follows, though, is knowledge that I believe everyone should have. Not one person on Earth should be ignorant about the things that are about to be said – no matter where you are in the world right now or what’s happened to you today. Ignorance might be bliss when it comes to topics like genocide, but the truth is this: the more we know about the events leading up to what many scholars call the most terrible act of mass murder the world has seen, the more likely we are to prevent genocide from happening again in this country and elsewhere. And, here’s something that might rock your boat a little: When you get to the bottom of this post, you are going to be conscious of Rwanda’s history in such a way that leads you to understand how truly remarkable this country is.

I’m not trying to be melodramatic. I’m simply trying to illuminate some truths that are, in fact, quite liberating once they’re said, done, and put on paper. Remember Leanard, the perpetrator I talked about in an earlier post who killed countless people during the genocide? I remember one thing that he said towards the end of our interview very, very clearly. “The most important thing,” he said, “is truth.” Once people openly tell each other about everything that happened – who he hurt, what she did, who harmed who – that’s when the ball gets rolling. Truth opens the floodgates of forgiveness. When you know exactly what happened, you can start dealing with it.

I recently took a trip to the infamous Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in the heart of the city. There are several memorial centers in different parts of Rwanda, all erected in memory of the 1 million (plus) people who lost their lives. The sites serve to document the events that happened in clear, concise form. The memorial in Kigali was recommended to me by several people.

At the front desk, you’re handed what looks like a very large cell phone, which you put to your ear at the different stops around the Center. You go by number, following a specific route. Starting with 1, the state of Rwanda before colonization even took place, to 35, the implications of genocide in our world today, you travel along a historical timeline in relative darkness, listening as the events progressively unfold, locking your knees in front of each panel or screen that spits historical information at you. You can only look in one direction, and you move forward. You see images that you wish you didn’t see; you hear things you wish you didn’t hear; and you experience feelings you wish you didn’t experience. At certain points in the memorial, I forgot that there were other people around. I had nothing to say to anyone for about 4 hours. It was a dark place.

The genocide was not spontaneous. It wasn’t a bubbling mass of chaotic guerilla warfare. It wasn’t something that just began one day because people had had enough. It was systematic, intentional, and orchestrated. The planning behind it is, in fact, the only way that this many people could have been killed in April, May, and June 1994. Do the math. 1 million people in 100 days. I will not go into detail about the ways in which people were killed, because you can easily look that up if you’re interested. All that I need to say is that the methods used to end people’s lives are agonizing, disgusting, and humiliating. It was pure evil at work.

Most people think of ethnic conflict when they think of the genocide in Rwanda. But there’s more going on here. There was an intense divide between Tutsi and Hutu that grew more deep and more vast in the several decades prior to the onslaught of 1994. After all, the genocide was a planned extermination of the cockroaches (a name very widely given to the Tutsi) by the Hutu. Historically, the Tutsi minority were cattle owners and had dominated positions in government, and the Hutu were farmers. It doesn’t help that there were (and unfortunately, there still remain) distinctive physical differences: Tutsi tend to be taller, darker, and more slender, their long noses their most identifiable feature. Hutu tend to be more stout, their noses shaped differently.

Ethnic tension is a noteworthy cause, but there are other reasons, just as noteworthy, that often get overlooked. One is the rampant role that colonization by Belgians and Germans played beginning in the 1950s all the way through the 1990s. To me, this is one of the most disturbing things about the whole picture. There was a long period in Rwanda before colonization took place when ethnic differences were not even an issue at all. While certain nomadic tribes were physically different and gravitated towards different roles in society, there was not a hierarchy. Everyone did their part, living in harmony.

Then the colonists arrived. To get their own share of power, they began to exploit the difference in physicality and roles of the Hutu and Tutsi. They began to beat into the heads of Rwandans everywhere that Tutsi were superior – the elect – and Hutu were inferior – the subordinates. They went even a step further to tell these two ethnic groups that they were enemies, that they had “absolutely nothing in common”(a quote I remember explicitly written on one of the displays at the Memorial). They did this largely through propaganda. Radio, TV, newspapers, billboards, benches. The Belgians and Germans helped issue identification cards nation-wide which revealed ethnicity. Rwandans and Western colonists alike became obsessed with the Hutu-Tutsi divide. There is a screaming reality that the West played a tremendous role in formulating, building, and explicitly defining ethnic differences in the years leading to the genocide. The West contributed intensely to the formulation of genocide ideology. This is not a remote African idea; this is not something we can shrug off as native to impoverished, third world countries, something of a far-away land that we can cry about. I hate saying this: in so many ways, to such a revolting degree, the West did it.

Another cause that gets overlooked is land shortage. Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa. There was too little land for too many people. Everything was (and is) cultivated. Every square inch of hill, valley, mountain, and path. I noticed this immediately on my first trip out into the countryside. No part of the land is wasted. This means that it’s overused in many cases. Infertile land is not uncommon. And in a country that’s dominated by subsistence farming, it boils down to this: people need land to feed themselves. They need land where their cows can feed on grass, where they can cultivate crops to feed big families. With starvation in the air, people become desperate. People killed for land, for survival. Neighbors killed neighbors; friends killed friends; family members killed family members.

Another cause that gets overlooked is corruption in government. Some terrible people in positions of power have punctured the history of this country. Craving power, trying to save themselves and their prestigious positions, they have stopped at nothing to preserve themselves. They’ve used ethnic tension to rally people to their side. They’ve used propaganda. Government officials have murdered government officials. “The government told me to kill the Tutsi, so I did it” Leanard said. The government messed with the minds of the people.

All of these things caused the volcano to rupture. Full-on genocide was seemingly inevitable. And yet, it wasn’t inevitable. There is a certain light that permeates the darkness. There is something inspiring in the books I’ve read, the movies I’ve watched, the visit I paid to the Memorial, the people I’ve talked to. People can resist the status quo. And people did. There are stories everywhere about how Hutu refused to join the militias, how they went into hiding or openly told fellow Hutu they were friends with Tutsi and would die alongside them. There is one story of a group of young girls – all friends, all about 15 years old, some Hutu, some Tutsi – who were herded together by the authorities. They were told to reveal their ethnicities and split up so the Tutsi girls could be violated and killed. The girls told the officials, “We are Rwandans.” They were all killed for giving that answer.

People don’t talk about ethnicity here anymore. Everyone has the same identification card. The streets are safe. The roads are clean. President Paul Kagame, the man who is celebrated virtually everywhere, both in Rwanda and all over the world, got up, took this country in his hand, and started reshaping it. He’s the post-genocide president, and it’s amazing what he’s done. It’s amazing how resilient these people are. No, of course it’s not perfect, but it’s remarkable.

Before I came out here, I told people back home in the U.S. where I was going. The first thing most people thought about when I said the word “Rwanda” was “genocide.” Either they said it, or it was written all over their face. And that’s sad. There’s a lot more to the Rwandan people than this devastating 100 days. I hope that I and you will continue to stay open-minded about what we can learn from the Rwandan people, about what the world can learn from this beautiful time of restoration and change following the genocide.