Never Again

February 18

16 years ago one million and fifty thousand people were killed in just 100 days during the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis. I spent this week in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. It is a clean, quiet, modern, and lush green city. But as I look at people’s faces or as we drove through the streets it was impossible not to remember their history.
The Tutsi minority had been put into power by the colonial Belgium power and since then tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis were high. In the spring of 1994 for 100 days straight Hutus raped, tortured, and killed their Tutsi neighbors, friends, husbands or wives, even their children. That is an average of 10,000 people a day being killed. We visited the genocide memorial, a beautiful and impressive history and memory of the genocide. On the grounds there are 250,000 people buried in the mass graves. We then visited the prison where men and women convicted of genocide are still serving their sentence. It was an interesting interaction. The prison has about 4,000 people, although some are serving for crimes other than genocide. We were warmly welcomed, the prisoners danced for us, played music, even made speeches of reconciliation and the need for their country to continue to develop. The meeting ended with all of us getting up to join some of the prisoners in traditional dance. It was terribly awkward but so fun… they were just people… until I remembered what they were in prison for. Why did they do it? Who did they kill? Were they sorry? The director of the prison who gave us a briefing afterward was a Tutsi women whose whole family had been killed by the Hutus. What enormous amounts of grace she needed to care for and direct a prison full of people guilty of genocide. This is the battle the whole country faces and they work to reconcile themselves.
The next day we visited a church where 10,000 people were killed. Women, children, and old men had fled to the church when they could go nowhere else for “surely they wouldn’t be killed in the house of God”. It was the pastor of the church who organized the mass killing of everyone in the sanctuary. The clothes that they were wearing are still piled high on the pews. Blood stains and bullet holes litter the church and the skulls on display serve as a reminder of each individual that was killed. There are 40,000 people buried at that site.
This is not ancient history. I was 6 years old while this was all going on. But no one in the international community responded to the situation. It is estimated that the number of troops sent to evacuate all Foreign Service people from the country would have been enough to stop the conflict. The UN peace keeping troop’s request for 5,000 more was also denied. Everyone watched and no one responded until it was all over. Since then there have been many leaders (including our own President at the time) to come out and apologize for not responding or even taking the blame. And they each promise that never again will this happen. While being in Rwanda I heard from three different sources that there were people who were certain that there will be genocide in Rwanda again… I pray that they are wrong. Whether in Rwanda or another part of the world, I hope that we all keep our promises. Never ever may we allow this to happen again.