Remembering Rwanda

In Belfast, a city no stranger to violence, entire neighborhoods of people are wiped out as mobs use any weapons they can lay their hands on to exterminate the other side: not just guns but kitchen knives and garden implements, but whatever is sharp or blunt and lies close to hand. In towns and villages across the rolling green countryside, before the horrified eyes of the world, few are spared this whirlwind of murder, and bodies are stacked on the roadsides, in gullies, in fields, as the killers’ speed on to the next targets.
Even local radio stations are suddenly consumed with bloodlust, inciting the mobs to more efficient extermination.
It couldn’t happen — not in Northern Ireland. But genocide did happen, in a similarly pretty little country 10 years ago this week, in Africa: Rwanda.
And the world stood by and did not act to stop the genocide. With astonishing speed and efficiency, Rwanda’s ruling Hutu majority rose against the Tutsi minority and in less than four months slaughtered 800,000 people. The exact total is unknown and some Rwandans round the figure up to one million. Observers believe it was the swiftest mass killing known to history.
What makes the Rwandan genocide even more incongruous is that before the 1994 slaughter, the country was upheld as a model of successful humanitarian aid and development. A tiny, fairly poor and landlocked land of 8 million people in central Africa, it boasts decent main roads, a moderately successful economy and — even in 1994 — many Western aid agencies established in country.
Almost no one saw the genocide coming, even though for weeks and months prior to April 1994 local Hutu radio stations broadcast messages of hate calling on Hutus to prepare to kill Tutsis. The month before the genocide started, World Bank statistics continued to suggest that all was rosy in Rwanda.
Ten years after the genocide, Rwanda has made a recovery of sorts, remarkable by many estimates. There is peace, though some visitors speak of not a true peacefulness but, rather, an enduring sense of stupefaction from the still-stunned population.
The country’s government has arranged for mass remembrances this week. Around the world, people remember as well, haunted by a close second thought, that while 800,000 people were murdered, the international community stood by and did not act to stop the killings.
It is a thought that is central to the message delivered this week by Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame.
Kagame demanded of the world’s leaders and organizations, if they thought that such genocide could not happen again, given that so little was done to stop it in 1994. Most heavily criticized was the Clinton administration in the U.S., probably the only government in the world that could have intervened massively and promptly and brought the genocide to a halt — or at least forced the issue through the United Nations.
“How could a million lives of the Rwandan people be regarded as so insignificant by anyone in terms of strategic or national interest?” Kagame asked.
“Do the powerful nations have a hidden agenda? I would hate to believe that this agenda is dictated by racist considerations or the color of the skin, I hope it is not true.”

Mob mentality
In the period immediately after the genocide, one of the first international workers to be sent to Rwanda was Dominic MacSorley, a Belfast native and veteran of the Irish relief agency Concern Worldwide.
MacSorley shared some of his most vivid memories in a recent interview. He worked in Rwanda for three years after the genocide.
“The scale of what had happened was not believable,” he said.
Bodies were being buried by the time he arrived in early June 1994, but piles of rotting corpses could be found all over the countryside.
“It felt safe, tranquil, beautiful,” MacSorley remembered. “It was a model of international relief work. It had a good infrastructure. It had a vibrant economy. There were questions, if it had all these advantages, why the hell did this happen?”
Three key factors contributed to the genocide. First, Rwanda is divided between two groups, Hutus and Tutsis. Second, it is a small, heavily overpopulated land. And third, a long-running cause of anger was the control of land. It’s common to see tiny plots of land cultivated for food along the sides of roads.
This still does not explain the murderous rage that overtook some Rwandans in 1994. The genocide saw pillars of the community — priests and nuns, school teachers, police officers — leading murder groups, singling out families for murder, encouraging the killers to kill, to kill without mercy and to kill efficiently. MacSorley visited a jail after the genocide where he saw some of those who had committed genocide. He had the terrifying feeling that some of the brooding men behind bars were still “high” from their murderous deeds.
Reflecting on the genocide, MacSorley still finds it inexplicable. But he remembers a small incident from the Northern Irish Troubles, which he said came to mind when he went to Rwanda.
In 1988, days of violence followed the SAS killing of three IRA members in Gibraltar. First, at the funerals of the three in Belfast, loyalist Michael Stone opened fire and killed three mourners.
At the funerals of these three, two British army corporals drove through the funeral cortege and were dragged from their cars, brutally beaten and murdered by a mob from the funeral.
“That mob mentality is a very, very small representation of what happened in Rwanda,” MacSorley said.
Encompassing the full horror of genocide is impossible for any one human mind. MacSorley says he has “snapshots” in his memory of sights that still upset him. Most vivid is the memory of a young woman explaining calmly to aid workers about her family — one of the greatest undertakings of the post-genocide years was matching children and young people up with any remaining family. Babies were found with no memory of their parents, their name or any identity.
MacSorley recalled: “She had a deep machete wound in her skull, the wound crawling with maggots.”
The genocide changed Rwanda and Africa in profound ways. The two million Rwandan refugees who fled into Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other neighboring countries helped destabilize an already uncertain region, helping it down the road to a decade of war, chaos and death, also largely ignored by the rest of the world.
Because significant numbers of the Hutu killers were Catholic priests and nuns, survivors have turned their backs on the Catholic church. Muslims, one percent of the population before the genocide, were known to have sheltered people fleeing the killers and have since seen many former Catholic Rwandans convert to Islam.
One survivor, 10 years old at the time of the genocide, told a reporter recently: “When I realized that the people I was praying with killed my parents, I preferred to become a Muslim because Muslims did not kill.”

Can it happen again?
Motivated as much by guilt as by a desire to help, Western governments poured even greater resources into Rwanda after the genocide. Today, the countryside is as idyllic as ever, shimmering in the hot African sun. Rwanda is still deeply divided, though on the surface all is peaceful. A relief worker told this reporter in January 2003 that having worked with small country communities in Rwanda for a couple of years, he confidently believed that there was enough hatred just below the surface for another lightning-fast genocide to occur.
And no one can adequately explain what happened — why educated people, doctors, nurses, priests, schoolteachers, not only took part in the genocide, but were its leaders, chiding their groups of killers for not killing fast enough.
One killer who confessed could only explain it thus: “It was as if we were taken over by Satan. We were taken over by Satan. When Satan is using you, you lose your mind.”
MacSorley said his most vivid memory of Rwanda is one that carries with it a slender hope. It is of Concern’s founder, Fr. Aengus Finucane, visiting one of the sites of slaughter in Rwanda.
In a book for visitors to sign, “Aengus wrote three words,” said MacSorley. ” ‘God forgive us.’ And I asked him why he hadn’t written ‘God forgive them,’ and he said simply, that we are all guilty. The genocide happened before our eyes and no one tried to stop it. We must remember. Otherwise it will happen again.”