E-Mail This Article to a Friend Back to the future As the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide approaches, human-rights activists ask how to prevent such atrocities from happening again BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

CHANTAL KAYITESI of Dover, New Hampshire, was a married 29-year-old college student with a two-month-old son, living in Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali, when she awoke on the morning of April 7, 1994, to learn that the airplane carrying Rwanda’s president, Juvénal Habyarimana, had been shot down during the night. For months, persecution of the Tutsi ethnic minority by extremists within the Hutu majority had been rising, with political assassinations and group killings of civilian Tutsis becoming increasingly common. Extremist Hutu hate radio had been promising an apocalypse in which Tutsis would perish, and "death lists" of Tutsis to be killed were known to be in circulation. Now Habyarimana, an extremist Hutu who had reluctantly agreed to share government power with Tutsis in the "Arusha Agreement" the previous August, had been killed. Nobody knows who shot down the presidential airplane, but the extremists blamed it on Tutsis and used it as an excuse to unleash the genocide.

"On the radio at five o’clock in the morning, we heard that the president had been killed in the plane crash," Kayitesi recalls. "Then they just played classical music. I knew they were going to start killing."

She was wrong: they had already begun. Extremist Hutus of the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement, or MRND) unleashed a long-planned, meticulously organized attempt to exterminate the country’s Tutsi population. In the next 100 days, an estimated 800,000 to 1,200,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered. That first morning, the MRND executed Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu, and took over the government. They also slaughtered 10 Belgian members of the United Nations peacekeeping force that had been in Rwanda to oversee implementation of the Arusha Agreement signed by Habyarimana, leaving their dismembered bodies piled in a heap at Kigali Hospital and prompting the UN to withdraw its troops.

By the time Kayitesi heard the news that morning, it was too late to flee. Overnight, as one of its first steps, the MRND had established roadblocks preventing Tutsis, like her and her family, from traveling. These roadblocks, where armed MRND troops searched all vehicles, kept Tutsis immobilized where they lived as militia groups swept through to kill them — starting in Kigali. Kayitesi and her husband, a professor at National University, believed that families in the university compound would be evacuated to safety by the international troops. They waited along with Kayitesi’s younger brother and sister, who were visiting to see the baby.

"The militia came into the school and asked everyone to show identification," Kayitesi says. "They separated the Hutu and Tutsi and took us [Tutsis] outside, all in one line, to be killed. My baby was on my back, my husband was behind me, my brother and sister were in front of me, and all the militia with their weapons were surrounding us. Then a soldier came and took me and my husband out of the line — someone in the army thought we looked like we had money. I asked them to take my brother and sister, but they only took us. I gave them all the money I had, 20,000 Rwandan francs. A few feet away we started to hear them being shot."

The bribe saved them for a day; her husband had another 20,000 francs they doled out to keep them alive and eventually got them out of Kigali. After a month of dodging the ever-expanding killings, Kayitesi hid in a shop while her husband went to find a friend who he hoped would help them. Instead, as she later learned, the friend had joined the MRND and ordered her husband shot, and his watch and pants taken.

After hiding in the shop for another month, and then in a woman’s home, Kayitesi fled on foot with Claudine, a 15-year-old Tutsi who had been repeatedly raped by a militia member. As they ran through the sorghum fields, feeding spaghetti to her baby, Steve, to quiet him, they could see men with flashlights searching for them. They eventually found their way to the advancing rebel army, which sent them to a refugee camp until the killing ended. Her parents had been slaughtered in their house in the southern Rwandan city of Butare. Her house in the university compound was stripped of all her possessions. But she and her son had survived.

Kayitesi and other local Rwandans are preparing to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Tutsi genocide this month. Events are planned around the world, including here in Boston (see "Commemorating the Rwandan Genocide," page 27).

Although there are perhaps only 20 Rwandans in the immediate Boston area and between 200 and 250 in New England, this is the only US region outside of Washington, DC, where a committee was formed to plan for the 10th-anniversary commemoration, according to Gerald Caplan, author of the report Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide and chair of the Remembering Rwanda Project that is coordinating and promoting local 10th-anniversary events (visit www.visiontv.ca/RememberRwanda/main_pf.htm). That’s in large part because of activists like Kayitesi, who helped found the Association of Genocide Widows (Association des Veuves du Génocide, or AVEGA) to aide Rwandan women who lost their husbands in the massacre, and Jean Nganji, a Rwandan living in Lowell, who has devoted his spare time to the commemoration project. Nganji was living in the US when the genocide started, and could do nothing while family and friends in his homeland died. Many local Rwandans were refugees in similar positions in Tanzania, Congo, or Burundi.

Just six months ago Nganji and Kayitesi were having trouble generating interest in the commemoration; they were unable to get a single university, individual, or organization to participate or partner in the planning. Although that sounds surprising, it’s not unusual; genocide often takes time to surface in the public consciousness. "It’s amazing, but between 1945 and 1961 there was almost total silence" about the Holocaust, says Larry Lowenthal, executive director of the American Jewish Congress chapter in Boston. "The Jews weren’t even talking about it." The World War I Armenian genocide in Turkey was similar, says Anthony Barsamian, chair of the Armenian Assembly of America, in Boston. "The people who are witness to it are the best advocates, but the people who are witness to it are usually so traumatized that they can’t even speak about it for several years," he says.

But the lack of interest Nganji and Kayitesi were facing six months ago has changed in the last few months — not just in Boston but all over, it seems, as word of the genocide’s 10th anniversary has spread. Last December 23, the United Nations designated April 7, 2004, the "International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda." The Holocaust Museum, in Washington, DC, is preparing a special exhibit. A panel discussion on the genocide last week at Harvard University, featuring Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, who led the United Nations Rwanda peacekeeping force, drew a standing-room-only crowd at Taubman Hall.

Local Rwandans sense that the 10th anniversary is their best chance to get the world’s attention. But they wonder how best to use that attention. How should the world commemorate the Rwandan genocide?

THE MOST obvious answer is, of course, simply by remembering the genocide. And that is what Nganji has tried to emphasize in the local events. A memorial mass at Boston College for the victims, for example, which has been planned as part of the commemoration, will be followed by a memorial garden tribute. Survivors will place pictures of their lost relatives on trees.

Because the outside world did little to acknowledge or intervene in the genocide, Rwandans have feared from the beginning that their story would be ignored and forgotten. When the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel army comprising primarily Tutsi refugees, defeated the MRND in July 1994 to end the genocide and establish a new government, people were actually ordered to leave their relatives’ bodies unburied, recalls Father Elisée Rutagambwa, a Rwandan native studying at Boston College, who returned to Rwanda from Burundi after the genocide to find that most of his family had been killed. "They needed people to come and see that this had happened."

In large part because of the change in government, the Rwandan genocide has been one of the best documented in history, says Samantha Power, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. Nevertheless, attention tends to focus on the role played by the West — namely its failure to intercede — rather than on the Rwandan victims themselves. Because of this, Power explains, the Rwandan genocide "has become a symbol of what we are still capable of allowing." In that vein, she adds, "I do think the Rwandans feel invisible."

Many local Rwandans want to ensure that the genocide is remembered from their point of view. They’ve been doing this, in part, through speaking engagements. Claude Intare, for example, a student at Clark University and a survivor of the genocide, spoke to an 11th-grade class at Charlestown High School last fall. The students were studying the Rwandan genocide in an elective class, using a curriculum developed by the Brookline educational organization Facing History and Ourselves. Dianelys Mejia, a student in the class, might forget some history lessons, but she says she’ll always remember that Intare’s sister survived the killings by pretending to be dead in a pile of bodies. She lay beneath her mother’s corpse, which hid her breathing.

Perhaps more important than remembering what happened, however, is bringing the perpetrators to justice. Punishment of the guilty must take precedence if commemoration is to have meaning, Rutagambwa says. He fears that without punishment of individuals, history will cast the genocide as a generalized Hutu-Tutsi tribal struggle, rather than as a campaign by a group of anti-Tutsi extremists. In Rwanda, the extermination of the Tutsis centered around an aim of ethnic purity, an African version of the Nazi Aryan ideal, explains Rutagambwa, who has written about the history of post-independence Rwanda. "The ‘project’ was not for all of the Hutus. To qualify to be a ‘real’ Hutu, you have to be able to put all four fingertips into your nose," he says. A great many of the dead were Hutus deemed either politically moderate or racially impure.