Rwanda and the Genoside

Ok, this is gonna be a bit of a sad post; there isn't much funny or light hearted about the Rwandan Genocide, (or Jenocide as they spell it at the memorial).

All the same I feel oddly compelled to write honestly and fairly comletely about what I learned. Partly because I respect the message of the memorial centre that that the lessons of the Genocide can only be learned if people know about it. And partly because I was saddened by my visit to the memorial and would like the opportunity of remembering why, long after my memory is dulled by time. So if you don't want to know, skip this post...

There won't be any photo's of nasties hiding further down, so it's safe for those of you with kids looking over your shoulder.

We had the option to go and see a second memorial where they've preserved the remains of the 50,000 killed in a building by scattering powdered lime on them, Apparently you can walk around the rooms and see the "room of kids killed with machetes" or the "room of families forced to kill their own before being murdered themselves". But after one memorial we felt we'd had enough bad images and didn't go.

So the roots of the problem go back to the Belgians who were given control of the country at the end of WWI. They set about segregating people according to tribe; Tutsi's and Hutu's. Both tribes existed but lived in harmony and more importantly, equality. The Belgians decided anyone with more than 10 cows was a Tutsi, and this applied to his decendants too. They then began to favour the Tutsi's giving them white collar jobs and opportunities which were denied to the Hutu's comprising 87% of the population.

Now the memorial blames the Belgians to some extent for the genocide due to the racial segregation they instigated. Personally I think that's a bit rough, Rwandans had independence long before the genocide and should have sorted the inequality problems out.

So independance came along and a Hutu government eventually came to power. They issued a manifesto which condemned Tutsi's, made it treason to trade with, marry or have sex with a Tutsi. All the media began propulgating a racist message. This clearly went far further than any desire to redress the wealth balance between Tutsi's and Hutu's. Many Tutsi's began to emigrate.

Although there was a small peace keeping force in the area, the UN largely ignored the situation. If the situation in the coutry was not obviously bad enough to require preventative action at diplomatic level at least, the Rwandan leader left a UN conference stating openly that he was "going home to plan an apocalypse". You'd think that was a clue wouldn't you.

Shortly after, the French completed a large arms deal with the Rwandan government. The finances for which were guaranteed by the French Governent. I suspect that if I knew more about world arms dealing, I wouldn't be surprised at this and would be ashamed of the record of most western countries. I'm told that 95% of the AK47 rifles in africa were made elsewhere. All the same the French seem to have knowingly and blatently supported a regime intent on internal civil war or worse, and they have escaped unpunished. Perhaps sending peace keepers into a country at the same time as selling arms to allow a war gets you off the hook? (More on the French peace keepers later though).

A member of the Rwandan presidential security team came forward to the UN commander. He stated that the president was losing control of the extremists and offered details of the weapons cache's and plans in return for his safekeeping. The local commander was unable to offer protection due to a dadly worded UN resolution. He promptly dissapeared and hasn't been seen since. I hope he's living somewhere warm and safe, but I doubt it. The UN resolution forbade UN troops from offering protection without specific UN council sanction. The idea being to prevent promises of asylum being made to war criminals. Sadly in this case the rule centralised power in brussels which was too slow to react.

At about this stage the UN council made an odd concluion at one of it's meetings. It condemned the increase in racially motivated violence in Rwanda and at the same meeting ordered half the peacekeeping troops home.

The Rwandan govenment planned and then launched its genocidal attack. People were already carrying identity cards stating their race and so the lists were drawn up in advance. The army and police set up road blocks and stormed houses. They killed every Tutsi they found, anyone who sympathised with them and anyone else who was in the way.

That is a reality which I find hard to comprehend, but I find the next bit beyond my comprehension; the local Hutu population joined in...

A church Reverend offered 250 of his congregation safe haven in his church, barred the doors and then ordered the bulldozers in. They all died.

2M people were killed in the end. 10% of a 22M strong population, 13% of which were tutsi. The genocide was incredibly effective.

People who once babysat a families children, came and killed the family. The children who hid and survived testified to watching it. Friends turned on friends and families upon themselves. It is still common for people to live on the same street as people who took part in the killings and perhaps killed their mother, brother or child.

One of the survivors we saw on video estimated that 5% of the population were neutral and 5% opposed actively. The other 90% were "evil". It's hard to believe till you hear from a 23 year old who saw a family friend lead a group into their house and throw her sisters in the ceptic tank to die. She would have bee 10 at the time.

Ceptic tanks were commonly used, they seem to have proved a convinient mass grave system. Some people weren't killed, just thrown in to be trampled by the people already inside. One tank was 20 bodies deep.

Some women were allowed to live. Only after they'd been raped by known HIV+ males though.

There are more examples, but I feel tired even of writing them, I felt pretty low after the visit to the memorial where I learned all this. So I'll give some examples of the good people.

A local medicine woman(79) hid people in her house and frightened the hutu's away saying they the evil spirits would haunt them if they forced into the house; it worked. A woman hid people in her house, even making taller feet for her bed so more people could hide. A man dug trenches, covered them with wood soil and then potato plants and fed a hoard of people who hid beneath them through bottomless dustbins, seemingly just taking out the rubbish. Oddly these success stories full of bravery and self sacrifice made the whole story far more emotive to me than the horror stories had alone, I think they gave it a sense of reality for me.

In the end there were so many open mass graves that they had to start shooting dogs who had aquired a taste for flesh. Most aid organisations withdrew; the red cross and aid des frontires (the french equivalent) stayed. Some of the stories we heard sounded like shell shock, one survivor told of seeing a baby breast feeding itself on it's dead mother and doing nothing, she was to stunned to register what her eyes saw and walked on. The aid agencies who stayed are full of brave brave souls.

The world at large did nothing. The commander of the UN forces stated that 5000 troops would be sufficient to quash the unrest. He was denied the remit to do so, but was given 5000 troops to evacuate aid workers and expatriates.

The Tutsi's invaded. They had been emigrating for some time to Congo and Uganda and they returned to stop the Genoside. They forced the Hutu's to flee. Some went north and west to Congo and 6000 Rwandan Hutu soldiers are still in force there. Many more fled East to Tanzania and Uganda. Here the aid agencies met them and started to provide aid. There were three flaws in the plot.

First the aid agencies didn't understand who they were recieving and there were more killings and rapes in the refugee camps.

Second the French sent troops into Rwanda to create a safe haven for the Tutsi's fleeing the Hutu's. Unfortunately they also created a corridor through which the Hutu leaders and perpetrators could flee. Many of the leaders still live in exile and have not been arrested. Given the close relationship between the French government and the Rwandan government prior to the Genocide and the arms dealing that went on, this mistake looks suspisious.

Third, the world at large and the aid agencies misunderstood what was happening in the country and labelled it civil war. It wasn't civil war, the invading Tutsi's took control of the capital Kigali and restored peace. But in the interrim the UN peace keepers did nothing and the aid agencies (with 2 exceptions) did not enter the country to help those inside.

The reaction of the wider world was incredibly slow. As one example, the US promised some armoured personnel carriers (16 I think) but they took a month to arrive.

That's about the end of the info I got from the memorial. There was another section which dealt with other genocides for comparison. The Germans and WWII was there, so was the former Yugoslavia/Bosnia/Serbia, Cambodia was there with Pol Pot and the Khmere Rouge leading the killing. Vietnam invaded Cambodia to stop the atrocities while the wider world did nothing. They then retuned Cambodia to it's people, I found something oddly pleasing to see the Vietnamese comunist regime doing good.

There was also a T shirt with
"He who forgets the lessons of history/RWANDA,
is bound to repeat them IN DARFUR"
I still know nothing about Darfur other than it is troubled, in the news alot and on that T-shirt. My next job is reading up on that.

But I felt there were a few questions unanswered. The first was how do you convince half of a country to hate the other half that much and then persuade them to kill everyone in sight in the most horrible way they can? If I thought I could answer that I'd take up a new profession, get rich and stop all the wars. So I skipped research on that one.

The second was what happened to all the protagonists who escaped and how much was the current trouble in the Congo related to that? So I did some digging in the web....

The memorial told us that those leaders who were captured were being tried in Arusha Tanzania. Something like 110 had been arrested 14 found guilts and 1 released so far. Rwanda was trying those who were accused but not "war crime leaders". It has resorted to the traditional local trials held by local chiefs augmented to include elements of modern judice prudence. The scale of the task is so great they they had little choice. As I mentioned it is still common for killers to live on the same street as survivors.

The Congo is interesting though. It has twice been invaded by Rwanda looking for rebels in the hills, trying to capture or kill them, since 1994. It survived recent democratic elections without decending into civil war, much to the surprise of the wider world. There is a force of around 6000 Hutu's in the east of the country who's stated claim is to recapture Rwanda in much the same way the Tutsi's did to end the genocide. This time presumably the aim would be to restart it. There is a General with around 5000 troops who claims to be trying to protect Tutsi's in eastern Congo from the 6000 Hutu's. This may be true and there have been some racial killings in the area, but there are 2 other possibilities. He could want power, 5000 troops is a force great enough to threaten the Congo government and he has refused to joing the Congo government even though their aims of protecting Tutsi's and eradicating the 6000 strong Hutu force are alligned. Secondly, he may well be an agent of Rwanda, he and his troops fought with the Tutsi's in 1994 to end the genoside and many of those who fight for him are Rwandan. A few respectable web pages such as the BBC hint at links between the US, UK Rwanda and his forces.
So now we have a 3 way struggle in the congo; the Congo army, the 6000 hutu's and the 5000 under the rouge general. One of the reasons they are not managing to fight and eradicate one another is that the Congo is the size of western europe and has 200k, of paved roads, just finding each other must be tricky. But there's another reason and it comes in the form of a 4th armed force, and this one is better trained and better equipend than all the other 3 put together. That's right. 6000 UN peace keepers.Their remit is to protect civilian life. So they can't attack any of the other 3 unless attacked or unless there are civilians in the line of fire. None of the other 3 wants to take them on, either for diplomatic reasons or for fear of losing. But the other 3 can't manage more than a skirmish because the UN peacekeepers will find a conveniently placed civilian and pull the two sides apart. It's a mexican standoff that has so far lasted for 13 years. The world truly is an amazing place.

By the way those of you with keen eyes will have noticed that we had 3 armed guards at the top of the mountain which borders Rwanda Congo and Uganda. They told us the buffalos there were dangerous, we didn't believe them either. We're now nowhere near the border so you can stop worrying. Until we fly into Ethiopia that is. The UN has carefuly arranged the deadline for the Ethiopians and Eritreans to agree on their border for the 30th November. Both sides are massing troops on the border "to ensure they don't invade". With a truly prophetic sense of timing, we fly into Addis abbaba on the 30th Nov..... (won't be going to the top of any mountains that border those two coutries then.)