A Story of Hope from Rwanda

As I shared just a couple of days ago, April is Genocide Prevention Month. With her permission, I'm posting my friend's story here. While there is a risk in sharing this story, it must be told, or as she said, "people need to be aware". This is the presentation she shared [emphasis mine]...


Throughout History :

1915-1917: The Armenian Genocide

1940-1945: The Jewish Genocide

During the 70: 3 million Cambodian killed during by the Kmer-Rouge regime.

1994: The Tutsi Genocide in Rwanda

Today the Genocide in Darfur!

An Irish Statesman, Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of Evil is for good men to do nothing.”

The Rwandan Genocide was unique in its speed and inhumanity. Rwandans were killed by the hand of others Rwandans, with whom they shared the same language, the same culture, the same country! Within 3 months; from April to July 1994 over 1 million Rwandans Tutsi and Hutu moderates were killed.

Take a second and think about it: that means more than 8000 people per day! But to understand how our country reached this extreme point we need to look back in the past.

The foundations of post independence Rwanda were built on a legacy of utter disregard for human rights and the rule of law. Starting from 1959, tens of thousands of innocent Tutsi men, women, and children were killed in the name of a revolution called “The wind of destruction”. Hundreds of thousands more were deprived of their homes and other property and banished to refugee camps inside the country or driven to exile, mainly in the neighboring countries where they languished for over thirty years.

Atrocities and other gross violations of human rights organized and carried out by the governments of the day continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Government repression against Rwandans who remained inside the country escalated and intensified, irrespective of ethnic identity. The independent press was suppressed. Political opposition was harassed, to the extent that deputies representing opposition politicians in the First Parliament had all been killed by 1966 and Rwanda was soon declared a one party state.

This entrenchment of dictatorship and gross violation of fundamental human rights went hand in hand with institutionalized discrimination akin to apartheid. Access to education, employment or public service was strictly governed by quotas based on ethnicity or regional provenance. We were reduced to second-class citizens in our own country.

The Tutsi were repeatedly killed with such impunity that when 1994 came, hundreds of thousands of our country men and women responded to incitement to kill us again, this time with unprecedented ferocity. The institutions of the state and public officials responsible for public order and for protecting the population turned around and organized the genocide that was unique in its barbarity, speed and scale, and one that will remain a grim reminder of mans inhumanity to man.


The Immediate Aftermath of the 1994 Genocide
July 1994 found our country on its deathbed. The air was filled with the stench of death: heaps of corpses were on every inch of the land while others floated freely on lakes and rivers. Within the space of one hundred days, over a million Rwandans had perished at the hands of their compatriots, who used every implement imaginable: guns, grenades, machetes, spears, axes, bludgeons or just pieces of wood. A number of victims were burnt in their houses or in churches, while others were smashed against walls and rocks, or just thrown into pit latrines and other deep pits to die there.

Only a few people out of those targeted survived this pogrom, mostly those who were left for dead. Some others were able to hide in ceilings or swamps, and others miraculously escaped the eye of the rampaging, different killer groups. Even those who survived were maimed, and all were left with dreadful wounds.

Their wounds were both physical and mental, as they had all witnessed this horror, as well as the death of their relatives and neighbors; some of them killed by their other relatives and neighbors: fathers killing their children, husbands their wives, wives their husbands, children their parents.

I was not in Rwanda at the time of the genocide but my family is a typical example of what happen in Rwanda in the last decade.

My mother left Rwanda at the age of 2 years old in the late 1950s; her family was deprived from their home and land. They became refugees in Burundi where she grew up, went to high school and later on studied in Belgium. She came back home 40 years after in the late 1990s.

My Dad left Rwanda in the early 1970s. He was at the time in his second year of medicine at the national university of Rwanda. During a night of terror all Tutsi were listed and order to be killed by other students, colleagues and professors. He was miraculously saved by his Hutu roommate who hide him under the bed and lied to the others student that he hadn’t see him. In the early hours, he jumped over the windows and walked many kilometers to the neighboring country Burundi, where he found protection with others Tutsi students.

In 1994 all his remaining family in Rwanda, his mom, grand-mother, sisters, brothers, cousins and friends were killed. Of his 7 brothers and sisters alive at the time only one survived. We are still looking for the bodies our family members.

I was born a child of refugees; like [some of Rwandan friends studying in Germany] and many more young people of my age in Rwanda, but today we have a country! Rwanda is overcoming its past and is building a future for its children. Today we want to believe that we are all Rwandan, with no Hutu or Tusti distinction. Wounds might still be open and survivors are struggling to forgive but there is hope and there is faith.

Today, 15 years after the genocide, Rwanda enjoys peace and security. Refugees have returned to their country, primary education is free for all children, all Rwandans have access to minimum health service, investors are welcomed, empowering youth and women is a priority for the government.

Today Rwanda wants to forgive but not forget.
Today Rwanda says, "Never Again!"

I hope that I have been able to help you better understand the situation. We have to keep the memory alive and put our strength together to say "Never again" in Rwanda. "Never again" for such crimes against humanity. "Not again" in Darfur.

Thank you very much.