Last week the three of us piled in the car and took a long road trip west to visit Burundi and Rwanda. The highlight of the trip, er, the lowlight – okay, the most significant part - besides visiting some friends in Burundi was visiting the memorials for the genocide in Rwanda that took place in the early 90s.
I’ll write about the other parts of the trip in another entry on this blog later, but I want to give you my impressions of what we saw in Rwanda here first. We made sure we saw Hotel Rwanda before we visited. If you haven’t seen this movie, do watch it (because chances are you’ll never get to Rwanda like we did). It’s not as well-made as Schindler’s List, but it’s in the same genre and it will hopefully affect you just as much as Schindler’s List did.
When we left Burundi, we drove north into Rwanda and stayed the first night in a medium-sized city called Butare, a pleasant tourist stop with all the helpful services. About 30 km outside the city and outside a village along a rural road is the campus of a former technical school. It’s set among the hills surrounded by hamlets where people raise their animals and grow their food. All along the main road to get to the adjacent village are churches and schools. It’s a quiet, peaceful setting – today, that is. But maybe it’s only quiet because of people’s remembrance and reverence for what happened there, or maybe it’s so haunted by the horrible memories that no one dares to disturb the quiet of the place that is trying to heal its wounds.
The campus was actually never used as a school because it was under construction during the genocide. At one point, for about a week, 50,000 members of the Tutsi tribe fled and took shelter there before they were all massacred. It was later discovered that the very ones who told them they should flee there for “safety” were the government itself, which was behind the genocide. Now the campus is a memorial to the genocide, since so, so many people died there. They were buried in mass graves and then exhumed, and some were reburied elsewhere. This would all make the place significant enough and reason alone for one of the country’s major memorials to the genocide.
But what makes this place significant is the graphic way it portrays the genocide. Inside four blocks of six classrooms each are the dead bodies of a few thousand victims of the genocide, and when one “tours” this memorial/campus, the main part of the tour is viewing these dead bodies. So imagine walking into a minimally finished classroom (just the basic concrete walls and floors), and on three or four wooden-slat platforms are rows and rows of dead bodies placed side by side. To me, they looked like mummies with no clothes, and they had all been preserved with lime, so they were mummies that were bleached white. And like actual mummies, their muscles and flesh had wasted away, so they were mostly bones covered only with a layer of leathery-looking skin (again, very white). They weren’t skeletons – bones only – but contorted, twisted dead bodies.
What hits you first when you walk into each room is the smell – most probably the lime. And then the sight, of course. You see people’s faces – not a skull with empty eye and nose sockets – but covered with skin. Occasionally you would see a tuft of hair on top of a skull, and that, to Sarah, was chilling. There are things like this that remind you that these were real people – living, breathing people with lives and families and who worked and grew up – at one point. To me, they were first many, many dead bodies, and I had to mentally remind myself that, although they were bleached white “mummies,” they all once looked like the Africans with dark brown skin, like the small group that was following us around room to room (the main tour guide spoke broken English, but I think having a baby and being the only visitors there at the time attracted a few other people who appeared just to be hanging out there for the day). What was the most sad and shocking was the sheer numbers of the bodies you could see – and this was only a portion of the murdered who were exhumed and chosen to be preserved so they could be put on display at this memorial. Why did they do this, I asked the man. “To remember,” he said very firmly, but with a taste of bitterness in his mouth, it seemed – like why should something like this have happened and been forced into their memories.
Also sad and shocking was remembering that the last thing every single one of these people knew was fear and pain. When the killings happened, women were raped, some people were made to kill their children and husbands first before they themselves were killed, and people were beaten, hacked to death with machetes, or shot.
Talk about a powerful sensory and physical experience – visually, with smells, and definitely viscerally. I remember being hit this way physically when going through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and getting to the room where there were hundreds of shoes on display. The smell of old leather and sweat left in the shoes hit me first, and in that way I was reminded of the humanness of it all – that the victims of that genocide wore shoes and were ordinary people just like all of us. But this was the same sensation with the smell and a lot more – not just an object that a human used, but the human him/herself – his/her body. And it was the same sort of experience of visiting a concentration camp like we did in Germany – only worse. On our visit to Dachau, outside Munich, I remember feeling like I could hear, in the emptiness of the place, the thousands of people who had been there. I could hear their voices in the cramped living quarters, and especially when I stood inside the gas chambers, the very place people were slaughtered. But in that place, what I “heard,” the sensory experience, was inside my head. What hit me hardest in the concentration camp was seeing the ovens where bodies were incinerated. In those places, they killed people and then wiped off the face of the earth any last trace of them – that’s how much Jews were hated. But there, in that place in Rwanda, there was a visual reminder – a trace, a body - of who had been there and who was killed, and it made it much more real, tangible, but also stark and scary.
I could have taken pictures of these dead bodies, but I just would not have felt right in doing so. I felt I needed to leave them there without taking anything away with them out of respect and for their dignity. I did search on the web for some photos that others had taken at this place, and here is one:
I didn’t want to, but I made sure to look carefully and thoroughly at some bodies in some of the rooms. Yes, I looked at faces. Occasionally there was a hand on a face, and it made me wonder if that person was killed and frozen in their last pose while they were alive, one of shock and horror – a hand over a mouth that was gasping or shielding their eyes from witnessing murders in those very classrooms. Occasionally a hand or foot was broken off. There were sunken bellies and lots and lots of contorted, writhing bodies.
There were all sorts of people in all of the rooms – young and old, tall and short. There were babies and toddlers. We did not bring Lexi inside any of the rooms with us (one of the people walking around with us kindly watched her). But I saw several bodies of children who appeared to be about Lexi’s age, and I thought how awful it was to have children killed, or even how awful it is that this sort of thing is happening in her lifetime – that such horrors are still going on in her world today.
It was strange, but a woman with our tour guide went ahead of us to unlock each room (each opened to a passage outside). She did it as if there were ordinary things inside, as if to invite us to her museum of many rooms. I guess I couldn’t really expect her as a memorial employee to be falling apart emotionally in opening the door to reveal something horribly sad. This was simply her job and she had done it many times before. But could one ever get used to doing that job? Before we started visiting the rooms, I dreaded what we would see. Our Lonely Planet guidebook had described what was there, but I didn’t know what all these dead bodies would look like. I almost expected to see people’s faces and be able to look into their eyes (dead bodies like one sees at the new crime scene on the crime shows on TV).
Again, there were 24 rooms like this in all. After seeing 12, I said I had seen enough.
Our tour guide wanted us to see just one more, which was a little different than the rest. Inside on one platform were 150 skulls neatly lined up, and on the other platforms were other types of bones that had been separated from bodies.
It was everything you can imagine it was – haunting, chilling, shocking, alarming, horrific, sad, etc. It was all almost too much.
I’ll write about the other parts of the trip in another entry on this blog later, but I want to give you my impressions of what we saw in Rwanda here first. We made sure we saw Hotel Rwanda before we visited. If you haven’t seen this movie, do watch it (because chances are you’ll never get to Rwanda like we did). It’s not as well-made as Schindler’s List, but it’s in the same genre and it will hopefully affect you just as much as Schindler’s List did.
When we left Burundi, we drove north into Rwanda and stayed the first night in a medium-sized city called Butare, a pleasant tourist stop with all the helpful services. About 30 km outside the city and outside a village along a rural road is the campus of a former technical school. It’s set among the hills surrounded by hamlets where people raise their animals and grow their food. All along the main road to get to the adjacent village are churches and schools. It’s a quiet, peaceful setting – today, that is. But maybe it’s only quiet because of people’s remembrance and reverence for what happened there, or maybe it’s so haunted by the horrible memories that no one dares to disturb the quiet of the place that is trying to heal its wounds.
The campus was actually never used as a school because it was under construction during the genocide. At one point, for about a week, 50,000 members of the Tutsi tribe fled and took shelter there before they were all massacred. It was later discovered that the very ones who told them they should flee there for “safety” were the government itself, which was behind the genocide. Now the campus is a memorial to the genocide, since so, so many people died there. They were buried in mass graves and then exhumed, and some were reburied elsewhere. This would all make the place significant enough and reason alone for one of the country’s major memorials to the genocide.
But what makes this place significant is the graphic way it portrays the genocide. Inside four blocks of six classrooms each are the dead bodies of a few thousand victims of the genocide, and when one “tours” this memorial/campus, the main part of the tour is viewing these dead bodies. So imagine walking into a minimally finished classroom (just the basic concrete walls and floors), and on three or four wooden-slat platforms are rows and rows of dead bodies placed side by side. To me, they looked like mummies with no clothes, and they had all been preserved with lime, so they were mummies that were bleached white. And like actual mummies, their muscles and flesh had wasted away, so they were mostly bones covered only with a layer of leathery-looking skin (again, very white). They weren’t skeletons – bones only – but contorted, twisted dead bodies.
What hits you first when you walk into each room is the smell – most probably the lime. And then the sight, of course. You see people’s faces – not a skull with empty eye and nose sockets – but covered with skin. Occasionally you would see a tuft of hair on top of a skull, and that, to Sarah, was chilling. There are things like this that remind you that these were real people – living, breathing people with lives and families and who worked and grew up – at one point. To me, they were first many, many dead bodies, and I had to mentally remind myself that, although they were bleached white “mummies,” they all once looked like the Africans with dark brown skin, like the small group that was following us around room to room (the main tour guide spoke broken English, but I think having a baby and being the only visitors there at the time attracted a few other people who appeared just to be hanging out there for the day). What was the most sad and shocking was the sheer numbers of the bodies you could see – and this was only a portion of the murdered who were exhumed and chosen to be preserved so they could be put on display at this memorial. Why did they do this, I asked the man. “To remember,” he said very firmly, but with a taste of bitterness in his mouth, it seemed – like why should something like this have happened and been forced into their memories.
Also sad and shocking was remembering that the last thing every single one of these people knew was fear and pain. When the killings happened, women were raped, some people were made to kill their children and husbands first before they themselves were killed, and people were beaten, hacked to death with machetes, or shot.
Talk about a powerful sensory and physical experience – visually, with smells, and definitely viscerally. I remember being hit this way physically when going through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and getting to the room where there were hundreds of shoes on display. The smell of old leather and sweat left in the shoes hit me first, and in that way I was reminded of the humanness of it all – that the victims of that genocide wore shoes and were ordinary people just like all of us. But this was the same sensation with the smell and a lot more – not just an object that a human used, but the human him/herself – his/her body. And it was the same sort of experience of visiting a concentration camp like we did in Germany – only worse. On our visit to Dachau, outside Munich, I remember feeling like I could hear, in the emptiness of the place, the thousands of people who had been there. I could hear their voices in the cramped living quarters, and especially when I stood inside the gas chambers, the very place people were slaughtered. But in that place, what I “heard,” the sensory experience, was inside my head. What hit me hardest in the concentration camp was seeing the ovens where bodies were incinerated. In those places, they killed people and then wiped off the face of the earth any last trace of them – that’s how much Jews were hated. But there, in that place in Rwanda, there was a visual reminder – a trace, a body - of who had been there and who was killed, and it made it much more real, tangible, but also stark and scary.
I could have taken pictures of these dead bodies, but I just would not have felt right in doing so. I felt I needed to leave them there without taking anything away with them out of respect and for their dignity. I did search on the web for some photos that others had taken at this place, and here is one:
I didn’t want to, but I made sure to look carefully and thoroughly at some bodies in some of the rooms. Yes, I looked at faces. Occasionally there was a hand on a face, and it made me wonder if that person was killed and frozen in their last pose while they were alive, one of shock and horror – a hand over a mouth that was gasping or shielding their eyes from witnessing murders in those very classrooms. Occasionally a hand or foot was broken off. There were sunken bellies and lots and lots of contorted, writhing bodies.
There were all sorts of people in all of the rooms – young and old, tall and short. There were babies and toddlers. We did not bring Lexi inside any of the rooms with us (one of the people walking around with us kindly watched her). But I saw several bodies of children who appeared to be about Lexi’s age, and I thought how awful it was to have children killed, or even how awful it is that this sort of thing is happening in her lifetime – that such horrors are still going on in her world today.
It was strange, but a woman with our tour guide went ahead of us to unlock each room (each opened to a passage outside). She did it as if there were ordinary things inside, as if to invite us to her museum of many rooms. I guess I couldn’t really expect her as a memorial employee to be falling apart emotionally in opening the door to reveal something horribly sad. This was simply her job and she had done it many times before. But could one ever get used to doing that job? Before we started visiting the rooms, I dreaded what we would see. Our Lonely Planet guidebook had described what was there, but I didn’t know what all these dead bodies would look like. I almost expected to see people’s faces and be able to look into their eyes (dead bodies like one sees at the new crime scene on the crime shows on TV).
Again, there were 24 rooms like this in all. After seeing 12, I said I had seen enough.
Our tour guide wanted us to see just one more, which was a little different than the rest. Inside on one platform were 150 skulls neatly lined up, and on the other platforms were other types of bones that had been separated from bodies.
It was everything you can imagine it was – haunting, chilling, shocking, alarming, horrific, sad, etc. It was all almost too much.
In other buildings, we were shown some of the victims’ clothes and where some French peacekeeping troops stayed.
The next day, we drove on further north to the country’s capital, Kigali. There they have the country’s main memorial. It was established by a U.K.-based foundation that educates people on genocide. It is very well-done and presents the background to the genocide – the history of the country during colonial times, explanations of the cultures and tribes, and the players in the genocide. If the earlier memorial was the visceral, sensory one, then this one provided well the intellectual side and presented the irrationality of the genocide. One could blame just about anybody – or everybody – for the genocide. You could go back and blame the countries that first colonized Rwanda – first the Germans and then the Belgians. One interesting fact about what these colonizers did is to essentially create the Tutsi and Hutu tribes. Apparently before the Germans colonized the country, there were many tribes there, and then the Germans decided arbitrarily that one group was the one who owned ten cattle or more, and the other group owned fewer than ten cattle. Over the decades, the Tutsi and Hutu tribes were pitted against each other in various ways, which ultimately led to the genocide. But again, whom should one really blame? You could go back a long way or else look at recent events and players in them. But one finger that should be pointed is at the rest of us – the international community at the time, the group of nations in the West who basically did nothing but sit and watch this genocide taking place. People from Kofi Annan to Bill Clinton have later admitted that they had the power to do something to stop the killing and regret not taking more action.
At this museum/memorial are gardens where there are also mass graves of victims. We also learned from the displays there of other sites of major massacres. In some cases, huge numbers of Tutsis were killed when they took sanctuary in their churches. In one case, the pastor allowed all of his parishioners to be slaughtered inside his church. In this genocide, humanity was at its worst.
Being in Kigali today, if you knew nothing about the genocide and if you were, say, visiting the city on business, you would probably never know that the country had been torn apart in such a violent way so recently. The city is busy, alive and vibrant. It appears the economy is booming, and there’s a construction boom all over town. People are out on the streets, and business workers downtown go out to lunch and enjoy themselves. There are huge plans to clear slums and put up 5-star hotels all over the city. Foreign investors have bought large tracts of land where slums are, built new housing for the slum’s residents in other areas, have paid them for their land, and will put up their hotels. Huge houses selling for US$400,000 are being built in new neighborhoods. Business areas will be cleared in 2010 and new areas developed. Even the original Hotel Rwanda – the Hotel des Milles Collines (Thousand Hills Hotel), which, surprisingly, is right downtown – is being renovated to capitalize on the increase in tourism and its fame from the movie. We tried to go there for a drink and dinner after our tour of the city but discovered the whole place is closed. It is great to see the country moving forward, but we were a bit puzzled about who would come to stay in the 5-star hotels – can any Rwandans afford it, or what else in the city would attract tourists to come and stay there? The tourist office is very professional about marketing the capital and other parts of the country, but I wonder what reputation the country has beyond the genocide. Unfortunately, people know Rwanda well only for its violence and genocide. I didn’t see the tourist office saying, “Come to our formerly war-ravaged country to relax and enjoy yourself! We’re not killing each other anymore!” But I wondered how and why they expected tourists to come – for what now after the genocide?
On our city tour, we also saw where ten peacekeepers from Belgium had been killed early in the violence. This spot is now a memorial as well. And at various places around the country, sometimes in rural areas, by the side of roads, are smaller memorials. Some are in the form of a small plot of land that looks like a graveyard. Inside these are probably a large common grave for many people. They are usually decorated with some purple fabric and painted with words like “RIP” and “We will never forget you.”
Also a few times while driving through the country, we passed a prison and could see prisoners outside working (behind fences). I found a travel article that a journalist had written about her visit to Rwanda, and she had noticed these prisoners as well. She wrote:
"...in the car, Foufou, my driver's daughter, had pointed out crumbling houses bombed by the killers, smaller memorials and even pink-clad prisoners convicted of war crimes toiling in the fields.
Also a few times while driving through the country, we passed a prison and could see prisoners outside working (behind fences). I found a travel article that a journalist had written about her visit to Rwanda, and she had noticed these prisoners as well. She wrote:
"...in the car, Foufou, my driver's daughter, had pointed out crumbling houses bombed by the killers, smaller memorials and even pink-clad prisoners convicted of war crimes toiling in the fields.
"I asked her why they are allowed to roam out in the open.
"'They will not escape,' she said. 'They have no place to go amongst their neighbors.'"
After seeing all of this, but especially the first memorial with all the dead bodies, we were obviously very moved and disturbed by this period in the country’s history. I was outraged – and still am – that such things could occur in the supposedly civilized 20th century – and that they still do in the 21st century in places like Darfur. I am moved enough to write to my representative in Congress (but I just may wait until later next week, since my senator in my last home in the state of Illinois happens to be a man by the name of Barack Obama, and I hear he might be leaving his position soon). I hope you would be inspired too by what I have described to you here to write to your member of Congress and/or the president. In my last full-time job, I worked with my employer’s response to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur as a result of the violence and genocide that is going on there. I could tell you a lot about the many terrible things that are happening there as well – villages being destroyed, women being raped, men being slaughtered – and that continue to this day, even after we saw what happened in Rwanda. I urge you to write to your legislator and ask him/her to work to end such situations like the genocide in Darfur. If you need help with this, to know what issue to write about or who your representative is, the ELCA's advocacy website is one place to find this information. We as Americans are in a position to do something about this because of the unique and supreme power and influence of our country, and if you plan to vote next week, then you know you have the power and privilege to participate in our democracy and elect leaders who have authority not only in the territory of the United States, but power and influence in places like Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Northern Uganda. Tell them, as I will, and as we heard in Rwanda, an echo from the Holocaust of Europe in World War II: Never again!
2 comments:
Thank you for your interesting post. I watched the movie Hotel Rwanda, and read many follow up litterature. Apparantly there are people who denouce Paul's version of the story, what do you think of this?
That's crazy... what a horrible and yet valuable experience! My husband and I often watch movies like Hotel Rwanda and other historical dramas that document horrors of history. Thanks for sharing your perspective and some photos. Very sad...
Brenda @ www.engberts-kaya.com
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