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More on Rwanda


A slideshow of Rwanda's 100 Days, courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Some graphic images.

Another slideshow capturing the faces and words of Rwandan murderers and survivors.

Excerpts...

A murderer:

Evariste Maherane is a free man. After six years awaiting trial, he confessed and apologised at a Gacaca hearing. He sits at home near Nyarubuye with his wife, children and grandson...
...He remembers killing a 10-year-old Tutsi boy who had escaped from the church.
Evariste held the wounded boy, dressed in his school issue khaki shorts and shirt, by the neck and battered him with a club. Then they dug a hole and pushed the child in, still alive.
Evariste had a 10-year-old son of his own at the time, and is haunted by the memory of the Tutsi child's arms and legs flailing in the smothering earth. "It was a time of hatred. Our heads were hot. We were animals", he says

A survivor:

Marie was captured near Nyarubuye by Hutus who took her as a sex slave and raped her more than 100 times.
Marie contracted Aids from her rapists and afterwards discovered that she was pregnant. That baby died of Aids and Marie is now in the final stages of the disease.
She says: "I don't know why this happened to me. I was a good person. It wasn't my fault I was born a Tutsi."

I don't have any pithy words to add. I read these testimonies and I feel ashamed at how important I thought my life's problems were in April of 1994. I remember looking at the images of rivers choked with bodies, running red with blood and thinking "Ah, that's Africa for you" and I realize that it was just the sort of bigoted response that North Americans tended to have unless we had relatives who once lived in fear of the Einsatzgruppen, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti or the Iraqi Government.