#nyamata

Nyamata Genocide Memorial Centre

The Nyamata Genocide Memorial is based around a former church 30 km (19 mi) south of Kigali in Rwanda, which commemorates the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The remains of 50,000 people are buried here.

Nyamata Church comes up on TripAdvisor as a tourist attraction to be reviewed and rated with stars. There's something very wrong about this.

So much life, so much love, so much lost

On the 24th of February I traveled to the Bugesera district to Nyatama and Ntarama Churches, which lye around 35km out of Kigali, Rwanda. My visit was not for religious reasons but one of education, humility and respect. In 1994 Rwanda lost 800,000 people in just over 100 days to the hands of a few who evoked genocide on this beautiful country. Rwanda as a whole has suffered unmentionable evil, but these churches have very unique and heartbreaking stories. The Bugesera district was one of the areas most devastated by the genocide. From a population of 62,000 only 2,000 survived.

My first stop was Nyamata Church. The smiles and warm hello’s from the local people on the way almost made me forget the dark history this area had suffered no more than 19 years ago.  During the genocide, churches were seen as safe havens from the persecution, so many Tutsi’s crammed into them for their assumed protection. Unfortunately on the 14th of April 1994, Nyamata Church was anything but safe. Over the following 5 days 10,000 people were systematically slaughtered inside the church. The militia came in shooting but soon resorted to more barbaric means. Nearly all of the victims met their fate at the hands of a machete. The crypts are full of evidence of the cruel end these peaceful people met. Today, clothes of the victims are spread across the church, a stark indication of the immeasurable lives lost. Daylight can be seen through the bullet holes that pepper the ceiling and the fabric on the alter still bares the bloodstains from those who thought they had found sanctuary.

From Nyamata, I traveled to Ntarama Catholic Parish. Again the surrounding countryside spoke nothing of the violence and anguish that had plagued the area less than two decades earlier.  Doors ripped off, stain-glass windows broken, and major damage from grenades tossed inside.  Once inside, the weapon of choice during the genocide, the machete, was used once again. Skulls showed visible signs of the violence – long cracks along craniums from machete blows, holes punched in by spearheads and one skull still with the spearhead lodged in it. Our guide, who had lost his entire family during the genocide, took us up to the former kitchen where he informed us that the militia herded victims inside before setting it alight. The last building I entered was the nursery. A very graphic image greeted me when I walked inside. A big brown mark at the front of the room was all that was left of the appalling and unfathomable evil that took place in this room. Young children and even toddlers had their heads shattered against the brick wall. Their blood and brain matter is all that is left of the time they spent on this earth. I sat alone, staring at this cold reminder of history and though to myself ‘so much life, so much love, so much lost’.

It is hard to connect one emotion to the things I have seen. Is it disgust, sympathy, anger…I just don’t know. All I know is that the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust and was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What scares me most walking the streets today, seeing the smiles and hearing the hello’s from the local people is not knowing if they were a victim or a genocidaire. 

An excerpt from Philip Gourevitch’s ‘We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families’ sums up what I cant.

‘I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge – a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, as horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offence is necessary to understand its legacy’