Looking Where The Blood Once Flowed

Trauma is a weird thing. Experienced, it leads to all sorts of repression, covering up, avoiding, or compensating, as well as growth, change, dealing with the experience, sharing, and recovering. Witnessed or observed, trauma can be both easier to understand and sympathize with and harder to grasp fully and empathize with; one can tell how awful an event is, but at the same time there is a distance, a barrier that prevents one from appreciating how deep that awful event goes.

I'm not sure what the difference is, exactly, between experiencing and observing trauma, having done both. I would suspect that when you experience it, you feel the depth of a trauma and then seek to paper it over and avoid it, hoping to get on with your life at whatever cost. When you observe it, you seek to get to that depth of the trauma as much as you can so as to appreciate the pain others felt and to help them whatever way you can. In both instances, the depth is lost, either under an inability to sink down and explore others' watery trenches or a struggle to steer away from one's own undertow.

There's no way for me to tell you that I now understand the Rwandan genocide or that I can relate to you what Rwandan survivors and normal people actually feel 16 years later. No more than there is a way for me to tell you that I understand my mother's death 6 years ago or how I actually feel about it 6 years later. In both cases there is a sad depth, and occasionally the tremors that those inner plates set off reach the surface - in grinding teeth at night or respectful silence as a survivor sheds tears when telling her story again - but a lack of the necessary knowledge, understanding, and even courage to get plumb that depth.

I can point out some of the interesting tremors I observed in Rwanda's memorial process and in the way people live with the legacy of genocide. So let's go to that.

As I hinted at in the previous post, the way the country preserves the memory of genocide is hitting a period of transition. The main effect of this change, it appears, will be to bury all or most of the bones and change the experience from one of evidence and thrusting the visitor's face in the horror to one of teaching the visitor of the genocide. We still got the evidentiary, horrific version, so let me tell you about it.

Nyamata church with 16 year old clothing deposits.


Having the horror of genocide thrust in our faces was both jarring and numbing. Jarring in the sense that we saw the skulls, saw the clothes, saw sites of genocide as they were 16 years ago. The clothes in the photo above, that is, were the clothes those who died in the genocide were wearing. The big dark stain you see in the corner of the building below is one of blood. The building is a Sunday school at Ntarama. Children were hiding in the Sunday school and children were the victims therein. I leave it to your minds to tie these sentences together as you wish. This was, for many of us, the most affecting memorial site.

But, as with so much of life's experiences, the subtle display was more effective than the over the top. We later went to Murambi, a memorial site closer to Butare, a major university city in the south of Rwanda. There the display was somehow more graphic than skulls or clothes. The history, in short, was that Murambi had a church that was the site of genocide - many Tutsis fled to church, which had been safe havens in previous times of violence, only often, too often, to be betrayed by either church officials or just the predictable nature of their actions, as militias and the army found their victims more easily - and then a base for French soldiers who came as part of Operation Turquoise, the UN sponsored "peacekeeping" mission I mentioned in the previous post that kept peace mostly for those who inflicted genocide and war. The French soldiers buried the victims and then set up volleyball courts and other activities of leisure over the graves, per the current Murambi memorial's info. After the war and RPF assumption of control throughout the country, the graves were exhumed and many of the skeletons were preserved in lime and placed on display in 20+ barracks-like rooms on the grounds.

This is really gross, both in numbers and in effect. And it could be viewed in two ways. I subjected myself to every room, to the lime smell, and to the relentless pace of genocide site-seeing, to at least witness what they wanted to show: child skeletons, baby skeletons, bodies on top of each other, children in parents' arms, tufts of hair on some skeletons, clothes still on the skeleton, a baby in the arms of an adult, and most of all the look of horror frozen on all the faces, and the defensive, helpless poses they ended their lives in. I thought I had no right as a foreigner, as a visitor who claimed to be interested in Rwanda and its past, and as a representative, unwitting or otherwise, of an international community and western world (and the U.S.) that failed to do anything productive to prevent this genocide, to look away.

Others in our group, coming from a Judeo-Western perspective, found the display disgraceful to the memories of those people and all sufferers, and felt that the preservation of the bodies was self-defeating: the bodies did not look authentic enough to serve as evidence against genocide deniers they thought, so what's the point? (No photos were allowed inside any of these sites largely to prevent more foreigners from sneaking photos of the sites and then claiming the photos served as proof of a fabricated genocide). I understood their point.

Ntarama Church.

Something else spurred me on at this site and others; the strange willfulness of the guides. In this case, I mean the guides representing each site, though it could include our young Rwandan guide - he claimed that anyone who didn't look at these things was showing weakness, though that stance was part of his own repression and recovery from his trauma, an incredible story that saw him and his polio-stricken mother tramp across Rwanda to Congo, a 3-week journey undertaken when he was only 4 years old. So his stance, considering his experience, is understandable.

And that stance and similar experiences may be what was behind the way our guide at Murambi kept pushing me and a couple others along the site. She, a cute woman in her 30's with a bright, toothy smile, walked a room ahead of us, waiting for us to advance, and barely concealing her disappointment when somebody else peeled off and stopped looking at the rooms. I sensed that she almost deliberately pushed us into this experience, as if to say, "Here, you silly Mzingu. You want to visit Rwanda? You want to understand the genocide? Keep looking then. Here it is. Welcome to the bed that everybody in the world helped us make. Sleep well." But she did all this, as everybody does, with a smile.

A chalkboard in the former outpost for Belgian soldiers killed at the beginning of the genocide in a ploy to get the UN to pull out their mission (which they did). The writings are angry notes left by the affected Belgian families for commanding general Romeo Dallaire, who is generally viewed as a noble man in his conduct regarding the genocide, hamstrung by the bureaucracy behind him.

This same sort of dissonance emerged in our meetings with survivors. We met with a couple kinds of survivors, in terms of mentality. When volunteering, we painted houses for young (20s and 30s), relatively cheerful and recovered men and women who were unlikely heads of households, orphaned 16 years ago and forced to lead their families. They were eager for our help and almost rehearsed in their thanks and happiness at our being there. Especially considering the narrow amount of time we had to help them, I felt that something was off; it could have been just me, but I wasn't sure that we were helping as much as receiving an opportunity to help, and while the side benefits of hanging out with these survivors were there for both us and them and us, there was a strangely unsatisfying, self-absorbed taste left in my mouth.

When we visited survivors who were not as well off, there was a stranger dynamic. One young woman in a survivors' village on the outskirts of Kigali broke into tears while recounting her story. We sat and listened sympathetically, eager to be as supportive as we could and to show our gratitude for her sharing our story. Our interpreters, young men who worked in an organization dedicated to helping survivors, were strangely nonchalant and even jovial as they listened to the survivor's testimony for the proverbial nth time. I suppose they didn't need to be shedding tears or donning dour looks, and the survivor didn't seem to care, and maybe they even cheered her up, but there was something slightly off about this scene.

 The woman second from left is the one described below.

But in our visits to survivors we also saw incredible things about Rwanda as a land and as a country. We visited a widows' village (also on the outskirts of Kigali, a major flaw in Rwanda's survivor aid program), where we met one poor woman who couldn't leave her room from depression. The guide who brought us there, a woman in her 40s, was better about bringing us together in the appropriate tone, and perhaps we brightened the widow's 10:00 hour for a few minutes, but there was not much we could do.

We did marvel, however, at the cheery garb of the other widows in the village, and even more so at the workers in their village. You see, amongst a village of mostly women between the ages of 35-55, all survivors of the genocide, the people repairing a house that recently lost a roof in a storm were genocide perpetrators. Criminals, prisoners, in other words, who were from other areas but who nevertheless inflicted crimes on other people that these widows suffered from themselves. "The prisoners depend on the women," our guide told us. "They get their water from the widows, and so they have to work together." We all thought this would be a grave security risk and a frightening thing for the women, but apparently it works out.

Our man was also adorned in cheery garb, I might add.

There is one last major, stunning inconsistency in visiting genocide sites and survivors in Rwanda. Perhaps it is not an inconsistency, but the universe's way of leveling us out and reminding us of who we are and how life is never just one way or another. Each site we visited was set in natural beauty, in gorgeous vistas and amazing scenes. And beyond the natural beauty offering a stark background to the human horrors, there was also the human beauty: each place we visited had people around who either worked at the site, or lived near the site, or went to school near the site, and their kindness lifted us up out of whatever funk we fell into. Whether or not we had a right to feel that funk, whether or not we could appreciate the trauma of the country on any significant level, and whether or not any of this mattered, the beauty that came after each sad experience added a clear gloss over everything we did. We didn't forget what we saw, and the horror did not diminish, but we did at least feel a little bit better. Each little bit counts in dealing with trauma, one way or the other.

The view from Murambi.
 

After the Great Fall

 This is a somewhat rambling post on the political situation in Rwanda. Outside of the usual scope, I guess, but this is my main (only?) writing outlet these days. And it's still about Rwanda.

Driving around Kigali, it is possible to forget the genocide, to forget the civil war of 16 years ago. The city is relatively prosperous and growing. People smile and volunteer friendly conversations more than a shell-shocked or closed populace would. While there are many organizations, governmental or otherwise, who are headquartered in the center of the city and whose focus is on preventing genocide, aiding survivors, or other related issues, there is not a noticeable survivor presence in the city.

In some ways, the government and the people would like the genocide to be put past them. The country is seeking to gain a reputation as a tourist destination, and they are seeking to grow a modern service economy, and they are seeking to do both these things in part by shedding the main word association publics in the west have with Rwanda, genocide. It is not that the country seeks to forget, of course; many argue that the continuing legitimacy for the Kagame regime is tied as much to the fact that he led the forces that ended the genocide as to the fact that he has rebuilt the country thoroughly since that time. Many in Rwanda would like to remind others that there's more to the country than genocide history, is all.

The memorialization of the genocide is in an interesting transitional period. Many of the sites we visited were preserved monuments to brutality as much as anything else; skulls, bones, clothes, and even in one place full skeletons remained intact and on display as a testament to what happened. This on the one hand is an effort to display the very real effect of the 1994 genocide and to ensure its memory endures; on the other hand, there is not a great amount of respect for the bodies of those who died.

So the memorialization is changing, in part. Our guides hinted to us that sites such as Murambi, Ntarama, and Nyamata (I'll go more into them in the next post) may be radically different in 4-5 years, with the bones finally buried and the focus of the exhibit shifted in some way. The Kigali Memorial Center, whose exhibit was furnished by a company that also organized our tour of the country, is a model for what's to come in many ways: a very informative museum-exhibit combined with mass graves, a wall of names, several symbolic gardens or statues, and a heavy dose of witness testimony. It's a very fine exhibit, as far as that goes, and if the genocide sites can be shifted from bare bones evidence of the genocide, literally, to informative and testimonial based sites that still capture some of the experience of the history, that would be a good thing for the memorialization process. Then again, if they do indeed follow through on their plans to do things like transform the former President Juvenal Habyarimana's (his plane was shot down on 6 April, 1994, triggering the genocide which would start the next day; he had long been aligned with genocidal forces, though his signing of a peace accord may have been the final straw in leading him to sacrifical lamb status) house into a national museum and party site - our visit came during preparations for a wedding later that day - perhaps the memory will not be as well preserved.

But let's go back to the history itself, and the impact it has on the country to this day. Without giving a footnoted, academically cited, and overly detailed summary of Rwanda's history, I hope to not reduce it too much. I also hope not to mess up too much.

In essence, Rwanda was part of a kingdom with Burundi before the arrival of German and, after World War I, Belgian colonizers. The colonizers solidified the vague racial categories of Tutsi and Hutu by formalizing people's identity via identity cards, backing up the categories with pseudo scientific (eugenic) theories on the differences between the two groups, and placing the smaller Tutsi group in power, leading to newly emphasized tensions between the two groups. Towards the end of their colonial reign, the Belgian leaders decided to give up on the Tutsis and backed Hutus for power. Hutu leaders, sensing the opportunity to take advantage of their people's anger over being subservient to Tutsi interests, built their power on racial grounds, and when the Belgians left, they initiated several cycles of violence against Tutsis.

These cycles continued until 1990, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a largely Tutsi-exile army, and the Rwandan national army fought a civil war. The RPF, co-led by current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, was a better organized army and gained ground and leverage. The Rwandan government was also constrained by economic struggles (there was a great drop in coffee prices, an export crop Rwanda relied on) and donor nations eager to see Rwanda make peace, leading to a peace accords. The Arusha Peace Accords didn't include all necessary powers and provided for a shaky power-sharing government, but at least was sensed to be a path forward.

Instead, the President Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down on April 6th, 1994. It is still a hot topic of dispute as to who killed the president; Rwanda and its allies, as well as more experts, believe that the Hutu Power movement surrounding the president (who was a Hutu and a hard-liner, at least before conceding to the peace process) killed him as a way to launch a genocidal campaign and consolidate power - they felt that using a scapegoat of the minority Tutsi group (15% of the country's population) would rally the majority behind the government and keep them in control. Many in France (a strong supporter of the genocidal regime) and a few others believe the RPF was behind the assassination. Most circumstantial evidence points to the Hutu Power group being responsible, and I have a hard time seeing why the RPF would have done it, for what it's worth.

Either way, the genocide began the next day, April 7th, 1994. For 100 days, Hutu militias and government military forces killed between 500,000 and 1.2. million (the most common estimate is 800,000) Rwandans, mostly Tutsis, though also moderate Hutu political figures and Hutus who stood in the way. The genocidaires had studied their history well, and used tricks from the Holocaust to Somalia to carry out their genocide and disengage the international community. This was a classic case of the world standing by and watching, at times even doing less than helping - when the UN finally "sent" in a mission, it was a French led army in the Southwest that did nothing more than provide an escape route for the genocidaires fleeing from the RPF forces who had relaunched their fighting in response to the genocide. The genocide only stopped when the RPF won the war and assumed control and power of the country.

The Rwandan genocide was renowned for its brutality. Rwanda is a small country (population between 8 and 11 million over the last fifteen years), and to carry out such a genocide required participation from many people in the country, including ordinary people, neighbors hunting or snitching on their Tutsi neighbors. Families with mixed marriages were torn apart. Major tools for carrying out the genocide included machetes and a local weapon that was basically a wooden stick with a nail on it.

The only other thing I'll say about the genocide before moving to firsthand observations is that it is still unclear how true and how constructed the racial identities are. One popular belief was that Tutsis came from Ethiopia, and so many Hutus "sent them back" to Ethiopia via rivers. Common stereotypes say that Tutsis are taller and more beautiful, while Hutus shorter, stockier, and thinner. Others say that there is, or was, no real distinction between the two groups, and that the term Tutsi was affixed to anybody who had ten or more cattle; as such, Tutsi/Hutu was a class distinction. At this point, or at least at the genocide's point, the distinctions became hardnosed facts, but it should be remembered that there was no primordial, inherent reason for the population in Rwanda to bifurcate into two major groups (there is a third, the Twa, which makes up 1% of the population and is usually considered incidental to the racial politics of the country).

This history also has to be remembered when considering the current political condition of Rwanda. President Kagame has strong control of Rwanda, having recently won re-election with a 93% vote, a number most people consider not to be doctored. But there were a few numerous high-profile disqualifications of opposition politicians from the race, and so 93% isn't a wholly safe number to throw out either; in general, whenever somebody is elected with 93%, there is cause for suspicion.

It is hard to find people who will dispute the notion that Kagame and his team have a strong grasp on the political space in Rwanda. The dispute begins in assessing the implications of that control. On the one hand, Kagame is undoubtedly popular, especially in Kigali - you can't go far without seeing Kagame t-shirts sold or worn, and signs of his campaign hung ubiquitously even a month after the election. Rwanda has grown, Kigali is booming for an African city, and the country appears to be much safer and stabler than most societies would be 16 years after a wrenching social trauma on any scale, never mind one that wipes out an eighth of the population.

At the same time, as my German friend on the trip pointed out, one should get uneasy whenever one man has so much power. Even if the government's intentions are good, it is not healthy in the long term to have such focused control. For example, the government has led a very positive idea of reeducating the people to believe in "banyarwanda", or the people of Rwanda. As in, "we are all Rwandans, not Tutsis or Hutus." A great idea that hopefully will set in to eradicate any racial reasons for Rwandans to discriminate against each other (or for outsiders to encourage dissension and divide and conquer, as was the source of all these problems). But if most people still know who's a member of which group, as we were often told, or if most people perceive the political beneficiaries of the current system, i.e. the people in power currently, to be Tutsis, this system and concept of a new Rwanda hits a blurry border with older systems of privileged people and groups.

For all this, I would like to return to the history and to the bias of Americans and the West. It's easy for us, feeling ourselves to be in an open, democratic society where the political space is far wider (whatever our problems), to criticize a country like Rwanda (similar issues affect westerners' views on Israel, but this is not the space for that). We did not have a tortuous genocide rip asunder our nation within the past two decades; World War II tore apart Europe and led to change, but the main perpetrators were convicted and the general population (i.e. Germans) atoned for their grievous faults, while many of the victims left (Jews, most obviously). America's genocide happened hundreds of years before and was swept under the rug; the country has survived just fine despite the treatment of Native Americans, thanks.

We should consider, then, what would happen had there not been a strong control of the political space. Everything I heard suggested that there are still people in Rwanda who are eager to stir up racial divisiveness. Without getting on the slippery slope too quickly, we can see that racial divisiveness is the foundation for genocidal ideology. This is the government's justification for the disqualifications from the previous election and other political crackdowns that strike us as overmuch. We could be right in thinking this, but can only reach a fair conclusion if we consider the full context.

Two more points about that context, and here I will draw parallels to the situation in Israel. Interestingly enough, there are many parallels between the two countries, if not quite as much as Rwandans especially would like there to be. But the history, the international position, the internal development, the emphasis on security and independence, the controversial issues hovering around, the kindness and defensiveness of the people, and the beauty of the land are just a few of the similarities that these two countries share. What follows could be said about either.

Rwanda has achieved a lot since the genocide of 1994. Undoubtedly aid has helped, and similarly undoubtedly I haven't actually been to any other African countries to compare Rwanda to. But from all I heard and saw, Kigali especially and Rwanda as a whole has grown substantially in the past 15 years and has surpassed its neighbors in many ways. I never really felt in danger in Rwanda (well, not counting the drive through the mountains of west Rwanda in thundering rain at dusk; I felt fairly in danger then), though the presence of armed personnel around the city and the country was a little alarming. All to say that while it is not unambiguously so, Rwanda is a growing country that has done well, and that has ambitions to do better - Kagame has gone on the record in many places about his desire to outgrow the need for aid. This is commendable, and should at least be weighed against the costs of certain political limits, for the time being. In Israel, this growth is at a far more advanced level, but also should be considered when looking at the country as part of the Middle East and as part of its political issues.

The other point is that when external pressures encourage Kagame and Rwanda to open up, or Israel to achieve peace and make sacrifices towards achieving that peace, for example, they are not just doing it to waste their breath or punish the nation in question. In Rwanda's case, true political freedom and a sense of real unity forged under the label of "banyarwanda", where neither former racial group is benefiting more than the other, would be the true sign of recovery from the genocide and emergence as a modern and rising African nation-state. That is not as easy as it sounds in the sentence above, of course, and outsiders need to be cognizant of the challenges facing Rwanda. That doesn't mean they can't help and prod Rwanda to keep moving forward.

We were in Rwanda for the release of the UN Congo report, a report detailing the many abuses that occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo over a decade of fighting. Rwanda was implicated in this report, and the wording suggested that Rwanda could be accused of genocide against Hutu forces in the east Congo.

This naturally infuriated just about everybody we met in Rwanda. The report has been accused, justifiably, of poor sourcing and lack of context, and generally appears to be a shoddy effort, for the UN or otherwise. Rwanda's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a sharp 30-page document refuting the UN report (which ran 566 pages), and they had every right and justification to refute it (we actually befriended one of the authors of the report during our time there). It should also be noted that just about every other African nation implicated in this report also refuted the findings, and that only Rwanda's role in the report and their reaction has been covered to a significant degree in the international media.

But even in this clearly flawed report and justified response, there are gray shades to consider. Rwanda's ire emerges most from the term "genocide" - the report accuses them of killing tens of thousands of people, whereas the Rwandan genocide saw, as I said, 500,000-1.2 million die. Any equivalency of this even on the report's terms would be foolish, and Rwandans fear that were the term genocide to be slapped on the Congo, the international community's opinion would slide back to a "cycle of violence, they are all bad" mode, which would tarnish the Rwandan government's legitimacy and more significantly the nature of the trauma Rwanda suffered. Then when you consider the limited validity of the report, or the many missing contextual factors - for example, the Rwandan report (which I would link, but their site is struggling right now) points out how many Hutus the Rwandans repatriated to their country, and their goal of bringing all Rwandans back to Rwanda, which doesn't easily fit in with genocide. Accusing Rwanda of supporting genocide on any grounds is a wholly dangerous and arguably existential threat to the country and its safety, as Rwandans see it. They are wholly right on this.

At the same time, I have a hard time doubting that atrocities were committed in the Congo, and that Rwanda's troops just like so many others had a hand in committing them. Some transparency is needed in dealing with this problem. As with many situations in Israel (the Goldstone report being the most obvious recent one), just because the report itself was wholly flawed and shoddy doesn't mean it didn't reveal serious issues that need to be dealt with. Israel has dealt with it to some degree; Rwanda needs to figure out if they are ready to as well.

Rwanda has done tremendously in recovering from their genocide, growing their country, and dealing with their internal issues over the past 16 years. Our thrilling and successful visit showed me nothing less. That said, the government still needs to open up and solidify its emerging democracy as a truly free and open place. That doesn't happen in a day; it will be very interesting to see how far along the country gets in the next 7 years before Kagame's term ends and, under constitutional law, he has to step down from the presidency. It will be an important test for the country, to say the least. And progress will go a long way towards breaking any last remnants of the cycle of violence that did lead to the genocide.