Rwanda is a beautiful hilly green country in the middle of Eastern Africa. It is a very small country and borders Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, and The Democratic Republic of the Congo. The capital, Kigali, is a big city with a population of around 2 million people, very clean, organized, and developed in the western sense of the word. This is where we spent our short three nights in Rwanda.
We spent most of our time visiting various Genocide Memorials in and outside of Kigali. When talking about the genocide in Rwanda it is most often referring to the brutal 100 day killing of 800,000 Tutsi but very few realize that this tragedy was years in the making.
It starting in colonial times when the Belgians who colonized Rwanda decided to separate the native people into different classes. The Belgians based these classes not only off of skin color and nose width but also the number of cattle a person or family owned. At the end of the sorting the Belgians had two main classes, the Hutu and the Tutsi. The Tutsi were the minority of richer and whiter looking people that were used as an enforcement of Belgian rule on the majority Hutu population who where richer and used for physical labor.
The first massacre of Tutsi happened in 1959 when after years of mental and physical abuse at the hands of the Hutu the Belgian rulers flipped the control of power because the Tutsi were organizing for Rwandan independence. Rwanda gained its independence and there were many massacres of Tutsi in the years following because the Hutu remained in power.
Many Tutsi fled Rwanda to neighboring countries but in 1994 the Hutu government tried to execute their “final solution” to kill every Tutsi man woman and child. With the help of French training, guns, and a mass order of machetes they were able to amount a killing rate five times faster then the Nazis managed in the concentration camp. Finally the Tutsi army led by now president of Rwanda Paul Kagame invaded Rwanda and stopped the killing. The world stood by and watched as this tragedy that is still effecting eastern Africa took place and did nothing.
We visited 4 different memorials at churches and schools where Tutsi ran to hide. It was unbearable to see the clothes of tens of thousands of people mainly women and children piled up, or the crushed skulls where they had been beaten to death with a club or machete. Blood stains on the walls from infants and toddlers being thrown into them and sticks and spears used to rape and kill women. It is really and experience that one has to have and that can not be told through words.
Having seen all of this I was amazed at where Rwanda is now. I can not blame any of the Rwandan people for what happened and I do not think they blame each other. Most of the killers confessed to what they did and have been punished and in a lot of cases forgiven. It was amazing to hear a person say if the man who killed my family and wife came up and told me that is what he had done I would forgive him. It is how the Hutu people had been raised in Rwanda for years so that is all they knew and some even said it didn’t feel like they were doing anything wrong during the genocide because that is what everyone was doing.
If you were told to go kill someone who you were raised being told was a terrorist and deserved to die would you?
Elijah Slattery-Heidrick