R.I.P. 1,000,000 victims of the Rwandan Genocide (Graphic Images).

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Fri Jun-12-09 04:29 AM
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R.I.P. 1,000,000 victims of the Rwandan Genocide (Graphic Images).

Edited on Fri Jun-12-09 05:23 AM by armyowalgreens

"The most horrible and systematic human massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis."-Bertrand Russell

15 years ago today, men and women, children and adults, were dragged into the streets of cities like Kigali and executed in mass.

The only reason for this holocaust was because the victims carried the identification of "Tutsi" or "Tutsi sympathizer". Few times in history has there been a more horrific example of the consequences of bigotry and ignorance than the few months in 1994 when millions upon millions of people were forced from their homes, beaten, mutilated, raped and, in many cases, murdered as others watched in terror.

1990 � October; RPF rebels invade in the hope of creating a power-sharing situation with Habyarimana. They are opposed by government troops � the FAR (Rwandan Armed Forces) � equipped and trained by France and Zaire.

1991 � March; a cease-fire is declared. Recognising they need motivated support, the FAR begins training and equipping civilian militia known as �interahamwe�, meaning �those who stand together�.

1991/2 � Local persecutions of Tutsis, including murders, are carried out.

1993 � August: following months of negotiations, Habyarimana and the RPF sign a peace and power sharing agreement � the Arusha Peace Accord. 2,500 U.N. troops are deployed to Rwanda to oversee its implementation, under the command of Canadian General Romeo Dallaire.

1993/4 � President Habyarimana delays implementation of power sharing; training of interahamwe increases. The extremist Hutu radio station, � Radio Mille Collines � starts broadcasting calls to attack Tutsis.

1994 � April; President Habyarimana restates his commitment to the Arusha Peace Accords. Extremist Hutus are alarmed by this development.

1994 � April 6th; President Habyarimana�s aeroplane is shot down. He and the President of neighbouring Burundi are killed. The blame is placed on the Tutsis. Massacres of Tutsis begin.

1994 � April 7th; the FAR and the interahamwe set up roadblocks. They round up thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutu politicians, including women and children; most are massacred using �pangas� � machete-like weapons. U.N. forces are forbidden to intervene, being only allowed to �monitor� the situation.

1994 � April 21st � 10 Belgian soldiers are killed; the UN reduces its forces in the country from 2,500 to 250.

1994 � April 30th � the situation is debated in the United Nations Security Council. They refuse to declare it a �genocide�, which would mean they would be forced to intervene.

1994 � May 17th; the U.N. agrees to send 6,800 troops and policemen, mostly African, to Rwanda with powers to defend civilians, although this is delayed because of arguments over who will pay the bill and provide the equipment. A Security Council resolution says �acts of genocide may have been committed.�

1994 � July 17th; the RPF invasion troops reach the capital, Kigali. The massacres finally stop.

The Hutu extremists and interahamwe leaders escape to refugee camps in nearby countries, where they are placed alongside Tutsi refugees. In many cases, these men continue to exercise power within the camps and the killing of Tutsis continues. It is the crisis of refugee movement around Africa that makes the world �wake up� to the genocide.

Between 800,000 and 1,071,00 Tutsis, and including some moderate Hutus, were murdered. Many more were mutilated, maimed or physically scarred for life. The mental anguish and the trauma cannot be measured. A steady number of people have been convicted in the International Court of Justice; those Tutsis who returned have been encouraged to assist in the �closure� process of Rwanda through local hearings or �grass courts�(gachacha).

Massacre at Nyarubuye church
BBC
Fergal Keane

The killers came on a spring afternoon, as many as 7,000 men crowding down the narrow lane towards Nyarubuye church.

Nine days earlier the plane carrying Rwanda's Hutu President, Juvenal Habyirimana, had been shot down flying into the capital Kigali.

Within hours the slaughter of members of the Tutsi minority as well as moderate Hutus had begun.

Among the killers marching to the church were Gitera Rwamuhuzi and his friend Silas Ngendahimana.

The Tutsis, including Flora Mukampore, had fled to the church believing they would be safe.

The local Mayor, Sylvestre Gacumbitsi, gave orders to the police to shoot, and then the peasants moved in to kill - hacking, slashing and bludgeoning their neighbours to death. Between five and ten thousand Tutsis were killed.

Rotting bodies

When I reached the scene weeks later the rotting bodies lay twisted terribly, skulls smashed open, faces frozen in the last terrible expression of violent death. How could men do this, I asked myself.

It is a question that has haunted me for a decade. Ten years after the slaughter I met some of the killers. Most are in jail but will soon be released under the government's Gacaca programme after confessing their crimes and apologising.

Gitera Rwamuhuzi is the most confident of his group and the natural leader. He smiled and shook my hand warmly.

He is an intelligent, complex man - and a ruthless killer. Before the genocide he was a local criminal gang enforcer and is said to have killed as many as 100 people, with his gang responsible for 300 deaths.

He has confessed only to three murders. "Whoever is telling you that story is exaggerating to try to make my name look bad," he says.

NYARUBUYE CHURCH MASSACRE

Gitera: A Killer's Story
Flora: A Survivor's Story
Panorama: The Killers
BBC One, Sun 4 Apr 2215 BST
Gitera describes lying on the ground at Nyarubuye while the soldiers opened fire. He saw a Tutsi man trying to escape from the church and ran over and struck him on the head, killing him.

He blames Satan, a common theme among the prisoners. Responsibility is passed out of their hands to some supernatural force. There are no guilty men, only victims of dark forces.

But he also believed he was going to be killed by the Tutsis. "We thought that if they had managed to kill the head of state how were we ordinary people going to survive?" he says.

Gitera describes killing his next door neighbours.

"They looked traumatised. They were people who had lost weight because they had not eaten for days. After killing the mother the toddler fell by her side," he says, crying.

They helped me to sit up and I noticed the maggots falling off me
Flora
Cyasa Habimana refuses to be photographed with the others, believing he is a man of greater substance. He also reads from his diaries, believing they justify him.

The Interahamwe militia group leader says he was a tool of more powerful men. He is cunning but with no imagination, an ex-army sergeant with a reputation as a hard man and a good organiser. He was persuaded to train the Interahamwe by an army colonel.

Cyasa does not blame the devil. He says the colonel gave him a new set of tyres for his truck and threatened to kill him if he did not comply.

He says he was not at Nyarubuye but was involved in attacks elsewhere in the area in which thousands of Tutsis died.

To the survivors, Cyasa was a monster, devoid of pity. He is now under sentence of death.

You have to understand mercy wasn't part of the deal. The government had given them up to us to be killed
Silas Ngendahimana
Silas Ngendahimana was tending his crops of sorghum when he heard that the president's plane had been shot down.

At Nyarubuye church Silas carried a large impiri, a club studded with nails which he used to beat a Tutsi woman to death.

"You have to understand mercy wasn't part of the deal. The government had given them up to us to be killed," he says.

He points to his prison issue pink shirt, saying: "There was a water tap that was running and mixing with the blood. The ground was pink like this shirt."

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.

Buried alive

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.

I don't know why this happened to me. I was a good person. It wasn't my fault I was born a Tutsi
Marie was raped 100 times and is now dying of AIDS
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.

When we last met during the genocide, Flora had a serious head wound and I thought she had suffered brain damage. A decade later she is still suffering, but is lucid in her descriptions and has forgotten nothing.

She was at Nyarubuye church. The killers, including Gitera, hacked towards her with machetes, axes and hoes. I remember Gitera telling me: "It was as if we were competing over the killing."

Flora was knocked to the ground by bodies falling on top of her and the Interahamwe assumed she was dead. Later, one of the killers spotted her moving and smashed her head with a hammer.

But she survived among the rotting corpses for over a month before being found. "They helped me to sit up and I noticed the maggots falling off me," she recalls.

Flora lost 17 members of her family in the genocide and is furious that Gitera and others are being offered freedom.

"We have been patient, we have been strong - but a killer like that? I don't believe in the death penalty, but surely he should have been locked up for good," she says.

Rape victims

Another girl, who Panorama is not naming, was 20 at the time of massacre. She was hiding when Mayor Gacumbitsi drove past.

"He was a friend of my father", she says: "When I saw him I thought that no harm can come to me."

But Gacumbitsi was angry. He raped her and told the six policemen to do the same. "We are going to rape you to death," she remembers him saying.

She is only alive because a Hutu man, Gacumbitsi's deputy Matthew Fashingabo, and his wife gave her shelter and smuggled her out of the country.

Why had he acted with such bravery? "Because I know that we are all human beings," he says.

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."

The Rwandan genocide and its aftermath
State of the World's Refugees 2000

Ethnic tensions and armed conflict in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa have been the cause of repeated instances of human displacement.The pattern of events in the last 50 years is rooted in a long history of violence, but it is also a story of missed opportunities, on the part of both local actors and the international community in general. Failure to pursue just solutions to old grievances has in all too many cases, years or decades later, led to a recurrence of violence and to bloodletting on an even greater scale than before.

The legacy of the 1959�63 crisis in Rwanda (described in Chapter 2) was the presence of Tutsi refugees in all neighbouring countries. Denied the possibility of repatriation for the next three decades, they nevertheless maintained links with the Tutsi in Rwanda. In the late 1980s, Tutsi exiles in Uganda, who had joined Yoweri Museveni�s National Resistance Army (NRA) to fight against the regime of Milton Obote, and who had come to form part of the Ugandan national armed forces when the NRA came to power, began to plot a military comeback, creating the Rwandan Patriotic Front (Front patriotique rwandais, or RPF).

The RPF attacked Rwanda in 1990. The ensuing armed conflict and internal political pressure led to the power-sharing Arusha Agreement of August 1993, but the accord was never effectively implemented. Tensions between the Hutu and Tutsi increased sharply following the assassination of the President of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu, in October 1993. This resulted in mass killings of Tutsi in Burundi, and then mass killings of Hutu. The subsequent death of President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and President Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi in an unexplained crash as their plane approached the Rwandan capital Kigali on 6 April 1994, was used by Hutu extremists as the occasion to seize power in Rwanda and to attack the Tutsi population and Hutu moderates.

Approximately 800,000 people were killed between April and July 1994 in the genocide which followed. Although a multinational UN peacekeeping force, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR), had been deployed in Rwanda in October 1993 with a limited mandate to help the parties implement the Arusha Agreement, the bulk of this force withdrew soon after the outbreak of violence. This failure by the United Nations and the international community to protect the civilian population from genocide was examined and acknowledged in a UN report published in December 1999.

RPF forces in Rwanda quickly gained control of Kigali and, in a matter of weeks, most of the country. It was now the turn of the Hutu to flee. Over two million did so, taking refuge in the same countries to which they had forced the Tutsi to flee over 30 years earlier. In the absence of concerted action by the international community at the political level, and in the face of ruthless manipulation of refugee populations by combatants, UNHCR and other humanitarian organizations faced some of their most difficult dilemmas.

The Rwandan genocide set in train a series of events that are still in the process of unfolding. They included not only the exodus of Rwandan Hutu from the country, but also the collapse of the regime of President Mobutu Sese Seko and continuing civil war in Zaire (which was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo in May 1997). This war came to involve many other African states, most of them militarily, and became linked to other ongoing wars in Angola, Burundi and Sudan.

May the victims rest in peace and may their families find peace. I hope that humanity learns a lesson from this disgusting act.