Rwanda: A Personal Account
This week marks twenty years since the genocide in Rwanda began. Moved by the news coverage of the commemorations, I scribbled this Facebook status yesterday sharing my own experiences of Rwanda. It seemed to resonate, so I thought I'd share it here too.
Seven years ago I was sitting in a stadium surrounded by perhaps 15,000 people. It was the National Stadium of Rwanda, and this day was the 13th anniversary of the start of the genocide. I was at a ceremony of remembrance. The Amahoro Stadium holds particular significance because, during the genocide, it became a 'UN Protected Site', where up to 12,000 people attempted to live, in conditions described by Romeo Dallaire as 'something like a concentration camp'.
The ceremony began as one might expect: a choir, the lighting of a flame of remembrance. Then the testimonies began: accounts of what happened in a one hundred day period when 800,000 people were murdered in a country no bigger than Wales, the population literally decimated, most by machete, often dying slowly and torturously. For those that survived, many experienced agonising wounds of their own, apparent still in missing limbs, scars just the shape and size of a machete blade.
After a few moments a scream rang out across the stadium, a spine shuddering wail that ascended in a dome above us into the dusky, orange sky. A woman was crying out as if she was about to be murdered. She began flailing about, hitting and kicking the people around her, shouting in Kinyarwandese, which my friend translated for me: help me, she is saying. Help me. They are killing me.
A group of security guards rushed up the stand, grabbed hold of her and carried her out, the peace returning and the ceremonies proceeding. But shortly, just behind me, another woman began screaming, and in the kerfuffle I was pushed hard in the back, as she desperately lashed out at everyone around her. The security guards arrived, and took her away.
Soon the stadium was a cacophony, screams and wails ringing out, the words of the testimonies acting on people's bodies like weapons, transporting them back to the horrors of 1994. After two hours it was too much: I left to return to my hotel. The ceremony continued until dawn. I remember walking away from the stadium through the night, the echoing screams following me down the street.
I have other memories of Rwanda: the men in sugar pink boiler suits on trial in the informal roadside Gacaca courts for their part in the genocide. The school room where the bodies of several hundred people have been left where they died; the spot a hundred metres away where French troops from 'Operation Turquoise' set up a net and played volleyball as the genocide unfolded around them. Gazing out across a beautiful green valley, and then watching as a butterfly descended, and landed on a human jaw bone by my foot.
I remember, also: Vivacious, song filled church services. Sharing coffees and beer with the locals. Taking in the stunning landscape on the back of a motorbike taxi. Feeling safer than I have anywhere else in Africa.
What happened in Rwanda was unspeakable. But the responsibility falls to survivors to bear witness. It strikes me that two of the greatest weapons for peace are knowledge, and understanding, and the greatest justice we can do for the dead is to tell their stories.
That's why I'm posting this today.
