Site Visits

First, a disclaimer...

Yesterday I visited 3 genocide memorials here around Kigali. They were unlike any memorials I have ever seen and I will try to describe them to you here. They were extremely shocking to see in person. For those of you who have good imaginations I'm going to try to recreate some of what I saw, felt and ever smelled...

Our first stop on the trip was at Gisozi genocide museum. It was an effective mixture of history, multimedia presentation and personal stories. The museum is rather blantantly the history from the victors point of view (In this case the Tutsi led RPF), but nevertheless it is effective. To read someone's final words and to see the clothes they were wearing when they died, and to see the machete that cut them down, it was very moving. However, being a museum, you were somewhat removed from some of the horror of it all. Also on the site is a mass grave holding thousands of murdered human beings.

The second stop was Ntarama, a little outside the city. The site we visited was a catholic church. This particular church (a sanctuary, kitchen and a Sunday school) was where nearly 5,000 men, women and children took refuge diring the 1994 genocide. All but 10 of those were killed. The sanctuary still holds the remains of many of the victims of this massacre; their skills and bones line a number of shelves spanning one whole wall of the church... from floor to ceiling. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. Those in the sanctuary primarily died from grenades and pangas (machetes). Those seeking refuge here spent their final days packed tight, struggling to survive in what would soon be their final resting place. As we walked into the sanctuary, a very distinct and new smell reached my nostrils. After fourteen years, the smell of dying and dead human flesh still plagues this place. A human slaughterhouse. Thousands of articles of clothing line the pews and the rafters of this small building. The kitchen and the Sunday school have also remained intact after all these years. Those who spent their final days here were burned to death.

At Nyamata, similar atrocities occured, only in this place twice as many, 10,000, were killed by panga or gun or worse. The lone coffin in the sanctuary is that of a young woman who was raped multiple times in the moments before death and was then killed with a long sharp stick that impaled her from her private area all the way out of her mouth. In this church, as in the last, thousands and thousands of skulls and bones were piled on shelves in a claustrophibic basement, packed as tight as they were in their final moments, robbed of their humanity. It was easy to see wheter someone was killed by panga, or their skull was smashed by a club. The lucky ones were those with the single hole in their skull... the ones who died without being tortured. It was also similar to Ntarama in the way that thousands upon thousands of bloodstained and tattered clothing lined the pews of the church. The room reaked of death and suffering. All in all, 41,000 people are buried on these grounds.

These visits were both very horrific, but I do believe they helped to put some of the big numbers in their place. 800,000 means nothing, the only number that matters is 1. These genocidaires didn't killed 800,000 men, women and children. They killed one, then killed another, then another, and another and another.These were humans, same as you an me. One thing that struck me was a tshirt of a victim that read "Cornell" in big red letters. It seems to be to be a strange irony to give someone a Cornell tshirt but then do nothing as this person is slaughtered. "We," the west, did very little in the face of such obvious eveidence. Crimes against humanity, what does that mean? What crimes? What is humanity? Is it you, is it me? What about 1 million Rwandans. The real crime against humanity is "our" inaction when people were being slaughtered.

But yet, we don't fail to show up to the memorials to the dead, do we. We sign the guest book along with hundreds of other westerners and write something like, "I'm sorry we didn't come to help," or, "never again." Why do we do this? What is the purpose? It is becuase we have some strange fascination with death and the "atrocity tourism" that comes from mass killing? Do we go to learn? Or to try and feel some emotion? Or to relieve some kind of guilt? Or to feel more human? What is it?


I hope this has been more than just shocking...

Where is the Peace,
Matt