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The leading perpetrators of the genocide — most of whom were educated at European universities — planned the killings for at least three years in advance. They imported an estimated 85,000 tons of munitions and more than half a million machetes, which were distributed to MRND members and stored in secret caches for rapid deployment. (An informant’s warning about these weapons, and the specific plans to precede a Tutsi genocide with the killing of Belgian peacekeepers, was forwarded in January 1994 to UN headquarters, which took no action.) They trained special death squads called the Interahamwe, drew up plans for quickly establishing roadblocks around the capital, and distributed "death lists" of important people to kill first — all well before the genocide began. This preparation made possible the swiftness, precision, and ferocity of the killing. "It was Nazi-like in its sophistication and its pace," Power says. Only 20 of the genocide’s core perpetrators have been prosecuted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Another 57 prosecutions are in progress, including the cases of 10 suspected perpetrators who’ve been indicted but remain at large. "There was a time when it seemed there was an effort to capture them, but now it doesn’t seem like it," Rutagambwa says. The efforts are being reinvigorated, says Farhan Haq, UN spokesperson for Rwanda. "The Rwanda tribunal has captured many of the big fish, but obviously that’s not enough," Haq says. Last Friday, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan issued a call to governments to assist in turning over suspected war criminals, specifically mentioning Félicien Kabuga. A Rwandan businessman, Kabuga is suspected of bankrolling the genocide, including the purchase of weapons. Beyond the "big fish" being tried by the ICTR, there are thousands of lower-level suspected perpetrators who were arrested in the genocide’s aftermath. For years little happened with them — there were too many for the Rwandan courts to process, and nobody wanted simply to let them go back to live among their victims. To solve the problem, the country has performed a series of locally based "Gacaca" trials, where people of a town gather together to bear witness for and against the accused (gacaca is the green where village elders traditionally met to settle disputes). Anyone can rise to speak, for or against each defendant; the process serves both to mete out justice and to provide a public accounting of the atrocities. "It’s very intimate," says Michal Safdie, a Cambridge artist whose photographs of two Gacaca trials in November 2002 will be displayed at Harvard as part of the commemoration. "I was so worried that people would start fighting, but they didn’t. They have to live with each other. It is beyond understanding." The trials of the perpetrators can serve another function, says Karen Murphy, senior program associate for Facing History and Ourselves. Trials explore the facts, which can help in the process of recognizing and preventing future genocides. Otherwise, she says, we will always be responding to the aftermath, rather than the early warning signs. "There is a pattern of ignoring things to the point where they become unimaginable," says Murphy. "Do we need 500,000 people to be murdered to say that there were elements of genocide? ‘Genocide’ is too late." Power says that the prevention of future genocides — which is the theme of her book — should be the most important facet of the Rwandan-genocide commemoration. "My obsession is, if it happened again we would do the same thing," she says, meaning that the West would sit idly by and do nothing. "I don’t want others to have to deal with this aftermath." Power specifically points to western Sudan’s Darfur region, where the UN believes 700,000 Muslims have been deliberately displaced from their homes by government-backed militias, and where civilians are reportedly being systematically killed. The international organization Genocide Watch lists Sudan, along with Ethiopia, Burundi, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, at the "genocide massacre stage," meaning that mass killings are under way. It lists five other countries at the genocide "preparation stage," which involves a mixture of small-scale killings, isolation of the target group, and arming of the genocide planners — conditions similar to those in Rwanda before the president’s plane went down. None of these current situations has commanded much public attention or US-government action. "It’s a big deal if you can get your message on the streaming ticker at the bottom of CNN," says Josh Rubenstein, executive director of Amnesty International’s Northeast US office, in Somerville. "Nobody should be proud of their reaction to the events 10 years ago in Rwanda," Rubenstein says. Furthermore, despite a predictable round of "never again" promises, the world’s governments and international organizations still have no established criteria for responding to genocide. That includes Amnesty International itself. "We do not have a policy of humanitarian intervention," he concedes. Barsamian and Lowenthal agree that persecuted groups like their own have been better at promoting "never forget" than "never again." But they both note that their focus is changing. "It’s critical that we acknowledge each other’s genocides, so that we can start to understand why these things happen," Barsamian says. The UN and other international bodies have also been making a renewed effort to push for serious, worldwide definitions and policies regarding genocide; conferences this spring in Sweden and The Hague have demonstrated the interest, if not yet the results. Haq says that although international efforts have been lacking, individual countries have taken initiative in recent crises. He points to the interventions of Australia in East Timor, France in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the US in Liberia and Haiti. "The systems by which countries and the United Nations respond to atrocities have improved," Haq says. BUT WHAT about the response to the aftermath? Ten years after the genocide, Rwanda is pitiably poor, ranking 152 out of 162 nations on the United Nations Human Development Index. When the genocide ended and the perpetrators fled, they left little of the country’s limited resources behind. "They emptied the country — the money from the banks, the cows from the farms, everything," says Rutagambwa. Like many local Rwandans, he plans to return to assist in his country’s reconstruction — but has little to return to. His family’s property has been claimed by someone else, he says. Despite significant improvement, thanks in large part to international grants, some 90 percent of the people still survive on subsistence farming. Some Rwandans and observers hope that this 10th anniversary will spur people to help now, rather than just lament what happened in the past. "They want people to come and invest," says Sister Ann Fox, executive director of the Paraclete Center, an educational organization in South Boston. Fox has been to Rwanda three times and is working to raise money to start a girls’ school in Butare. A recent Michigan State and Texas A&M initiative created a 1000-farmer cooperative that grows coffee for international sale. "A little money goes a long way there," Fox says. Economic recovery is one thing — but other scars of the genocide remain. "The top priority, I think, are the women," says Kayitesi. The UN has estimated that more than three percent of all the country’s women were raped during the genocide, and that half of those raped were infected with HIV/AIDS — along with thousands of the children they gave birth to. An estimated five percent of these victims and their children receive antiretroviral treatment — while those who infected them, in many cases, received the treatments thanks to their rights as prisoners of the Rwandan government. Tuberculosis and malaria are also problems, says the UN’s Haq. Huge numbers of women were left widowed, and hundreds of thousands of children were orphaned. "These children were very, very wounded," Rutagambwa says. "There was nothing you could do to satisfy them." "I went to a boarding school with eight hundred kids, and probably three or four hundred were orphans," says Fox. "Even the Hutus — the innocent Hutus who were forced to flee the country — these people have suffered a lot," Rutagambwa adds. When Safdie — a daughter of a Holocaust survivor — traveled to Rwanda a year and a half ago to photograph the Gacaca trials, she found that the genocide permeates life there. She spoke with a woman in her home, where she was raising all the children of her siblings who had been murdered. "I had been worried, how was I going to portray something that happened so long ago through photographs? But [the genocide] is not only about the past, but about life today," Safdie says. The impoverished country’s government has been able to do little for the survivors. And people have, not surprisingly, lost faith in their institutions — including the Catholic Church, which played a central role in Rwandan life before the genocide. Several priests and nuns have been convicted for complicity in the genocide; a bishop was tried and acquitted. Many Rwandans believe that others who remain in positions of Church leadership today were also involved or passively stood by. "The Church can still play a big role in uniting people," says Rutagambwa. "But they need to acknowledge what happened, and change the leadership." Rwandans don’t trust their schools, either. Immediately after the genocide ended, the new government declared a 10-year ban on teaching history — all history. The idea was to take the time to understand what happened and how best to teach it. The ban expires in June, and those questions must now be addressed. Murphy is helping to develop the new curriculum. "We don’t want to build our future on the old lies," Rutagambwa says. But how long does it take to understand genocide? "I was sitting across from a senior person in the Ministry of Education who said, ‘Is 10 years too soon?’" Murphy says. Rwanda’s government doesn’t even acknowledge ethnicity anymore — a deliberate attempt to erase the decades of prejudice that preceded the genocide. "It was taught in school that Tutsi did not matter," says Sam Mbanda, a Rwandan who now lives in Boston. Rwandan citizens are no longer called Hutu or Tutsi, a huge change from decades of carrying ethnic identification cards, which dated back to Belgian colonization in the 1930s. "The first time I learned I was a Tutsi was in first grade," Kayitesi says. "My teacher asked everyone whether they were Hutu or Tutsi. I had to ask my father." In fourth grade, she says, the teacher asked the Hutu students, and then the Tutsi students, to stand up so she could count them. "My friends stood up with the Hutu, so I stood up because I wanted to be with them," she recalls. "But my teacher knew my family and made me stand with the Tutsi. That day, those friends refused to play with me because I was different." Kayitesi is now raising her own son, the one she carried and breast-fed for three months while running and hiding from the killers. He turned 10 in February. She will bring him to place a picture of his father in the Rwandan-genocide garden memorial tribute this month. David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com page 1 page 2 |
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Issue Date: April 2 - 8, 2004 Back to the News & Features table of contents |
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