Reply #19: Where are they now? Stories...

[uppityperson]

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gUmXyPbZwnaRRTLZHRT-qiwDeQewD98LJMKO0

Teen survivor of genocide awaits US graduation

Two years ago, Candide Uwizeyimana could not speak a word of English. A survivor of the Rwandan genocide, she lost her family and later was separated from those who rescued her from an orphanage, fed and housed her and paid for her education. Survival was the focus of her first 16 years. But drive, determination and some luck have given Candide the opportunity to live a completely different life in the suburbs north of Seattle, where she saw snow for the first time and is about to graduate from high school.

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Rwanda was filled with fear and panic in 1993, a year before the country would explode in ethnic violence that would claim as many as 1 million lives. Villages in the mountainous region of Gikongoro in southwest Rwanda were not immune from the atrocities.

Life was becoming unbearable for Joseph Rurangwa and Beatrice Nilabakunzi and their five daughters, Candide and her four sisters, Leaticia, Adeline, Angelique and Theodette. When the family dog started bringing home human body parts, the couple decided it was time to leave the village where Candide had always lived. Amid the crackle of gunfire they set out on a dusty road, joining a stream of people trying to escape.

For 3-year-old Candide, it was a confusing and scary time. Men and women were yelling at each other, children were crying, and all Candide could hear was the insistent voice of her father urging her and her sisters to walk. Somehow they made their way to Congo, about 50 miles away, and settled in the Kashyusha refugee camp in Kinshasa. The United Nations provided food, clothing, medicine, blankets and plastic sheeting to craft into huts....(much more)

http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news-story.aspx?storyid=200906101202dowjonesdjonline000608&title=ex-army-doctor-gets-life-over-rwandan-genocide

Ex-Army Doctor Gets Life Over Rwandan Genocide


KIGALI, Rwanda (AFP)--A former military doctor in Rwanda has been jailed for life over her role in the 1994 genocide, public radio said Wednesday. Anne-Marie Nyirahakizimana, a major and medical doctor, detained a year after the genocide in which some 800,000 people were massacred, was tried by a local traditional "gacaca" court in southern Muhanga district. "After deliberation, the jury sentenced her to life imprisonment," the heaviest penalty in the country which abolished the death sentence in 2007, said Radio Rwanda.

She acknowledged failing to attend to Tutsis wounded in during the bloodbath, saying she was too busy caring for wounded soldiers. According to Radio Rwanda, witnesses told the court that she had also ordered her bodyguards to slaughter Tutsis....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7246985.stm

2008
Genocide hatred lingers in Rwanda schools

As US President George Bush visits a memorial to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the BBC's Geoffrey Mutagoma finds that "genocide ideology" can still be found in the country's schools. Mataba village nestles amid northern Rwanda's green mountain peaks and verdant valleys. Peasants plant their potato crops along the undulating ridges of fertile volcanic earth. But the roots of deep hatred are also growing fast in the local secondary school.

"We first discovered the problem when we saw writing on the toilet walls saying Tutsis are bad and they should be killed," headmaster Mfitumufasha Eden told the BBC. "We found students referring to colleagues as snakes." Fourteen years after the genocide, research in 32 schools by a committee of MPs has revealed an ugly reality - ethnic hatred is still prevalent in most of them.
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Most of the students here are too young to remember or understand the genocide in 1994. The headmaster believes Hutu pupils learn to hate Tutsis from their parents at home. Other schools have experienced the same problem. In some, teachers were themselves accused of sowing the seeds of hatred among pupils.

In one school, Nyagahinika, investigators found teachers using publications from the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND), Rwanda's former ruling party. The MRND is accused of planning the 1994 genocide....

Finally an in depth article about the survivors
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7981964.stm

Rwanda's ghosts refuse to be buried

Fifteen years after the start of the Rwandan genocide, the country is still battling with its demons, author Gerard Prunier writes for BBC Focus on Africa magazine. The ghosts still wander in the hills above the Great Lakes, both in Rwanda itself and in the neighbouring Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Like most ghosts, they are very much alive.

They are the survivors of a horror they will never manage to forget - those the Rwandans call "bapfuye buhagazi" or "the walking dead". These are the girls who had abortions after being raped by the interahamwe (the Hutu militia which carried out the killings), the widows, the mothers who saw their children slaughtered before their eyes, the children who grew up after seeing their parents die, the killers haunted by remorse and the killers who feel no remorse at all.

The ghosts are also the bystanders who pretended there was nothing they could do, the innocents later unjustly accused of murder, the guilty perpetrators who fear discovery and those who are known and who are blackmailed, the Hutu refugees who never came home and who still live in DR Congo, the Tutsi refugees from the Congo who fled the massacres there and who still linger in Rwandan camps, the madmen and the broken women.

In many ways, the perpetrators of the genocide have succeeded. They have managed to encase the whole country in a gigantic airless bubble where everybody pretends that life goes on but where, in many ways, it actually stopped on 7 April 1994. The perpetrators have never apologised. In fact, no truth and reconciliation commission based on the South African model has been offered to them, where the real perpetrators are actually present and can be cross-examined....(more)