8/1/08

Walking amongst the massacred in Rwanda E-mail
Written by Owei Lakemfa   
Friday, 01 August 2008
Going to Rwanda was like being hurled to witness to the bestial level humanity can degenerate. I have a sense of guilt in the massacre of babies and the old, children and adults, boys and girls, women and men, the physically and mentally challenged in Rwanda because I was part of the human race when these massacres took place in 1994.

You are part of this collective guilt because humanity was in a position to prevent the Rwandan genocide, or to check it, but we did not.  

So the hacking to death, strangulation, battering, hanging, burning and drowning of people in Rwanda needed only the will of humanity to prevent it.

After the massacre of Jews in Hitlerite Germany during the Second World War, humanity had vowed "Never Again" would we allow genocide in the world.

To ensure this, the United Nations (UN) in its 1948 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide vowed to prevent genocide and punish anybody who seeks or perpetuates it.

Half a century after the massacre of the Jews, a genocide began in Rwanda right under the nose of the UN which had a 2,500 peace keeping force (UNAMIR) on the ground.

As the massacre took off, the UN debated whether what was on was "genocide" or inter tribal war. Then rather than increase its armed men in Rwanda to check the genocide, the UN reduced the force to 250 to guard foreigners.

So here I was in Kigali, Rwanda in July 2008 exactly fourteen years after the genocide, trying to comprehend why the world stood by and allowed a total of 1,074,000 human beings to be massacred within one hundred days.

Doing this was not my main purpose of visit, but I knew I had to visit at least a memorial site.  So I went to the Kigali Memorial Centre. At the entrance to the Centre a fire burned. Usually it burns in the mourning period between April and July to commemorate the months in 1994 when the massacres were carried out.  

Then I walked straight from the burning fire to confront the fourteen graves in the premises. A total of 258,000 persons were buried in the graves, that is an average of 18,428 persons per grave.  The graves had a total of five thousand coffins with each coffin being terminal home for 3 to 4 corpses.

Since whole families were also massacred, sometimes a coffin held the remains of a family.
Although almost all of those murdered in the days of madness were Tutsis, there were also Hutus murdered either for protesting the genocide or for associating or hiding Tutsis.

Hutu men were murdered for refusing to murder or give up their Tutsi wives or relatives. A country that was six million in 1994 within three months lost over a sixth of its populace!

So many people were killed in such a short time that corpses were pilled up as sand bags at check points and road blocks manned by the mass murders. But, why the construction of such a centre, would it not perpetuate hatred in the country? A message at the entrance of the main hall answered that question.

"We need to learn about the past …. We also need to learn from it". In the Memorial Centre were halls that displayed the bloodied clothes of victims, the various weapons used including machetes, dane guns and hammers.  In a particular hall, I stood transfixed as I starred down at neatly arranged human bones. 

Beside it was a more terrifying spectacle, many skulls neatly arranged. I notice that almost all were small, which meant that they were babies and children. In another hall, I found a handsome boy looking at me. It was the photograph of Master David Mugiraneza. He was ten years old when he was tortured to death.  

Beside him was the photograph of Nadia Kanyange, she was an eight-year old girl when she was hacked to death.  

Some of the masterminds of the genocide are living and moving freely as political refuges in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Malawi, Kenya, Zambia and North America.

When the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) liberated the country and stopped the massacres, the master minds of the genocide led over a million Rwandans into exile using the propaganda that there would be retaliatory massacres.

Tanzania helped to repatriate some of them while in November 1996, Rwandan troops attacked the DRC and brought back over a million Rwandans to resettle in their home country.  

The Rwandan problem is a colonial one with the colonialists and the church led by Bishop Jean Leon Classe perpetuating an official class system complete with Apartheid-like identity cards which classified Rwandans largely into Tutsis and Hutus.  

After a 1959 Massacre of Tutsis under colonial authorities and exiling 700,000 others to Uganda, a largely Tutsi rebel force invaded Rwanda on October 1, 1990. On April 6, 1994, General Juvenal Habyarimana was killed in a plane crash which was blamed on Tutsi rebels.

The following day, the obviously pre-planned massacre of Tutsis referred to as Inyenzi (cockroaches) began.

Today, the remnants of the massacre regime has built a new 10,000 strong army called the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) that is operating out of the DRC. What humanity needs to do is ensure reconciliation, disarm the FDLR and integrate them into the Rwandan society.

More importantly, we need to stop the massacres in Darfur, Sudan which is actually genocide. We must prevent a situation in Darfur where we will regret like Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General did years later when he said.

"In Rwanda in 1994 and at Srebrenica (Bosnia) in 1995, we (UN) had peace keeping troops on the ground at the very place and time where genocidal acts were being committed."






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Jean-Louis Kayitenkore
Procurement Consultant
Gsm: +250-08470205
Home: +250-55104140
P.O. Box 3867
Kigali-Rwanda
East Africa
Blog: http://www.cepgl.blogspot.com
Skype ID : Kayisa66

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