Op-Ed: Rwandan genocide gone but never forgotten Special

Kigali - Rwanda is a beautiful country, and is home to inspirational people, but due to its sad and difficult past, traumatic memories still haunt them today.

Rwanda, the land of 1,000 hills is a beautiful country full of natural beauty and breathtaking views. Although they have a complicated past the people of Rwanda are full of colour not only in their dress but in their inspirational attitude to the future of their country. It was just 16 years ago in 1994 that an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred in less than 100 days, all while the international community closed their eyes. Sixteen years is not a long time to have passed, and the people of Rwanda cannot be expected to erase the pain and trauma of what happened in such a short space of time. I had the unforgettable opportunity to visit Rwanda, and although I didn't stay for as much time as I would have liked I still got to experience modern Rwanda and visit the Genocide memorial museum in Kigali which was a humbling yet intense experience.

Natalie Peart

Women of Rwanda

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The people of Rwanda are incredibly welcoming. Taking the time to wave and smile at you in the street, perhaps uttering a quiet 'mzungu' (foreigner) to their friends, children jump and wave eagerly running after you and asking questions in the English that they know. Not once was I asked for money or made to feel guilty for being a tourist in their country but giving nothing back, much like I was in many other countries on my travels. The people of Rwanda are genuine and warm, especially when you think about what they may have been through. When I walked through the streets of Ruhengeri and Kigali I couldn’t help but look at people and wonder what their lives were like? What happened to them or their families in the past? Were they Hutu or Tutsi? I would look at old men and women and wonder if they survived an attack, I would see people walking down the street with no arm or missing both legs and you know that they are a survivor. Or they may have actually killed people? Girls my age would seem so happy but then thinking about the fact that they could be orphans, they would have been eight at the time of the genocide. Old enough to understand the brutality but too young to understand the reasons. But then again who does fully understand why genocide happens? Why so many thousands of people could be killed by friends and neighbors and why nothing could be done about it. Back then most of the Rwandan population belonged to the Hutu ethnic group who were traditionally crop-growers but for many centuries the country also attracted Tutsi’s from Northern Africa who were herdsmen. For 600 years the two groups lived together in harmony and shared the business of farming, as well as language and culture. There have been thousands of intermarriages between the two groups, it was never thought of as an issue. Because of the nature of their agricultural roles, Tutsis tended to be landowners and Hutus the people who worked the land.

Natalie Peart

Rwanda, Country of 1000 hills

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A wedge was driven between them when the European colonists moved in. It was the practice of colonial administrators to select a group to be privileged and educated. The Belgians chose the Tutsis, the landowners and to European eyes the more aristocratic in appearance. This introduction of class consciousness unsettled the stability of Rwandan society. Some Tutsis began to behave like aristocrats, and the Hutu to feel treated like peasants. An alien political divide was born. By 1959 the Hutu’s had seized power and were stripping Tutsi communities of their lands. Many Tutsis retreated to exile in neighbouring countries where they formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). In 1962 a politically inexperienced Hutu government took charge, facing Tutsi resistance. Seclusion went on for years, Hutu’s declining Tutsi’s the right to an education. Until in 1990 RPF rebels seized the moment and attacked: civil war began. A ceasefire was achieved in 1993, followed by UN-backed efforts to negotiate a new multi-party constitution but Hutu leaders and extremists fiercely opposed any Tutsi involvement in government. On April 6 1994 the plane carrying Rwanda's Hutu president was shot down. The Tutsis were accused of killing the president and Hutu civilians were told by radio that it was their duty to wipe out the Tutsis and moderate Hutus who weren’t anti-Tutsi, aswell as Tutsi wives or husbands. Genocide began. What happened after that everyone knows, thousands of Mothers, Daughters, Wives, Husbands, Brothers, Sons and Fathers were massacred. The actual number of deaths has never been confirmed, sources vary and in all honesty I think it is near impossible to know the actual amount of bodies that were left abandoned on the roadside or in bushes or buried by families and never to be found, it is thought that over the years millions of people were killed. Of course, Rwanda is now a safe country with millions of pounds worth of ‘guilt money’ being ploughed into the economy each year. The international community stood by and did very little until it was too late so foreign aid is of high importance in this country.

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Apologies about the upsetting image taken during the genocide.

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After the genocide around two million Hutu killers, their families and supporters and anyone else who feared reprisals fled to Zaire (now Congo) to refugee camps that was stocked full of care and medicine and run by aid agencies who were not in the country to protect the deceased. Aid workers could not and would not separate those involved in the massacres from innocent refugees. This angered the new Tutsi-led government in Rwanda, who wanted to bring the guilty to trial. Congo wanted to clear the camps so in 1996 the refugees were forced out. Many returned home. Only two years after the genocide, killers and survivors found themselves living side by side – sometimes for lack of choice in the same house. Radio stations broadcast exhortations once more, but this time Rwandans were urged to welcome the returnees as brothers and sisters. The new President's message was endlessly repeated: 'The Rwandan people were able to live together peacefully for six hundred years and there is no reason why they can't live together in peace again. Let me appeal to those who have chosen the murderous and confrontational path, by reminding them that they, too, are Rwandans: abandon your genocidal and destructive ways, join hands with other Rwandans, and put that energy to better use.' (source, 'we survived the genocide' book by the Aegis Trust) There has been tension and aftermath to the genocide, I personally cannot comprehend living in a country where thousands if not millions of people were killed who lived together for years peacefully and then only two years later had no choice but to forget about everything and go on living normally. Alongside people who killed my friends and family, working for, living with or being served by men or women who massacred an entire family because of a ‘tribal name’. Trials are still going on today, sixteen years later. In Arusha, Tanzania just earlier this year I managed to attend the trial for a perpetrator, Alphonse Nteziryayo who was the commanding officer of the military police at the time of the Genocide and is accused of murder. He was first arrested in 1998 but due to the legal system in Africa his trial as well as hundreds of others are still going on with no sign of a decision of their fate in sight. At the court-house in Arusha I found the media relations office and was kindly given some official information for the trials. I’ve got lists and lists of names of ‘murderers’ who still haven’t been arrested and let's be honest probably never will be in fear that it will lead to more political instability. Some of the detainees as listed in the information have even died before they had the chance to get to trial, it just shows what a long process this is and with UN lawyers from around the world heading the trials, as admitted by them before there is no sign to a clear end. I of course write all this information from secondary sources, I wasn’t there nor do I know the country or anyone in the country well enough to make a personal judgement. What I do know is what I felt at the Genocide memorial museum in Kigali. Anyone who goes there and does not feel any emotion is a robot, I will not describe the rooms or the set out or the way it made me feel seeing skulls and photographs of victims and the messages played on video by survivors who saw their families get murdered by a machete or knife. It is something personal, something like going to Auschwitz a little more closer to home and something that everyone needs to see and feel for themselves. If anyone reading this has never watched the movie Hotel Rwanda then get on Amazon now. This is only a glimpse of what it must have been like but the memories of scenes from the film made for entertainment value sends shivers down my spine so imagine what it would be like having real life memories and living side by side with the families or the people who killed your family every day. Incomprehensible.