The Scars of Genocide in Central Africa

Had it not been for the sea of black faces, I swear we could have been in Europe.  The streets were clean, the stop-lights worked, the road lines were being freshly repainted.  It was hard to believe that exactly twenty years ago, one of the most widely-publicized genocides in history was planned and executed from here.  We were driving into Kigali, and I had expected anything but this.

In the space of one hundred days, almost one million Tutsis and Hutu moderates were brutally murdered by Rwandan Hutu extremists.  Three hundred thousand children were left orphaned.  Seventy percent of the Rwandan population saw someone chopped into pieces with a machete in front of their very own eyes, and seventy percent of the Tutsi population was exterminated.  With these kind of stats, it’s little wonder that when someone says “Rwanda” you think “genocide.”

It’s impossible to visit Rwanda nowadays without being reminded of its dark past.  All around the country, mass graves – the unnamed dead hastily buried – have been transformed into modern memorials of skulls, flowers, and quotations carved into thick marble.  The most famous memorial of all – Kigali’s Genocide Memorial – even comes with a museum describing every brutal detail of the events leading up to, and after, April 6^th, 1994.

Why was Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president since the end of the genocide, seeking to remind people at every turn of the genocide that had happened here?

***

We’d come to Rwanda, that very day, from neighboring Burundi, a country nearly the same size, with the same ethnic composition, and the same colonial history as Rwanda.  In fact, Burundi and Rwanda had been a single country under Belgian rule – Rwanda-Urundi.  The people had been exposed to the same laws, the same cultural practices, the same economic and geographical reality.  The question everyone asks, then, is why were their post-colonial histories so different?

You may be surprised to hear that, actually, they weren’t.  Both countries faced racial hatred between the tall, educated, and outnumbered Tutsis and the stockier, more numerous Hutus.  Both countries faced post-colonial military coups, presidential assassinations, rebel attacks, and civil war.  Both countries even experienced genocides – in fact, Burundi experienced two.  The real question, then, is why does the world not know about Burundi’s?

It’s sad to say, but I believe it comes down to the media’s – and therefore, our – love of violence in the extreme.  In Burundi’s two genocides, less than thirty thousand people were killed.  The murders didn’t happen over intense hundred-day killing sprees.  Next to Rwanda’s horrifying statistics, Burundi’s genocide is like soft porn.  That kind of story, unfortunately, doesn’t sell newspapers, and so Burundi’s genocide largely went on unnoticed by the world.

That doesn’t mean that it hasn’t affected Burundians, though.  The scars of its violent civil war may not be pasted onto countrywide memorials (paid for by the West in Rwanda), but the scars are still present in the minds and hearts of the people we met in Burundi.  The nun I befriended at Banga Guesthouse was happy to drink beer with me, to talk about travel, language, and problems in neighboring countries, but as soon as the conversation turned to Burundian politics and history, her eyes welled up and her mouth shut.  Deus, the park ranger who let us camp outside the parc national de la Kibira, was willing to talk, but the conversation clearly showed the damage the civil war had done:

“It was horrible.  People killing their neighbors.  Their countrymen!  It’s despicable.  I still can’t believe we went through that.”

When I suggested that teaching their children about their recent history might be the way to prevent something like this from happening again in the future, he rebuffed me.  “No.  It’s too horrible.  We can’t tell the children.  They cannot know.  Ever.”

Deus has always worked in tourism.  He is well into his forties now, and already growing his “second hair,” as he calls it.  He blames the grey hair on the stress of the civil war, but thanks God that it’s over now.  “I hope the tourists start coming back so I can do my job again,” he lamented to me.  I can only assume that the civil war was difficult on him economically, as well as emotionally, since tourists haven’t largely avoided the country for the past twenty years.

Perhaps this was why he was so worried about us.  Tourists never asked to camp at the edge of the forest, on the top of a hill overlooking the tea plantation, but when Bruno sets his mind on the perfect campsite, he can be very adamant.  Deus couldn’t say no, but he had a condition: “You have to take two armed guards with you.”  He was paranoid for our safety, even though the country has been at peace for almost a decade.  The scars of his civil war ran deeper than we thought, it appeared.

We camped next to the headquarters instead.  I wasn’t sleeping with two armed guards stationed outside my car.

***

If Burundi had seemingly chosen to forget its recent bloody history, why was Rwanda choosing to remember?

I have to preface what follows as pure conjecture – my own opinion based on research, observation, and a bit of intuition:  I think it works in Paul Kagame’s favor to have people remember the atrocities that happened in his country twenty years ago.  He’s a Tutsi, you see, and one of the leaders of the RPF rebels that had been fighting the Hutu government during the country’s civil war.  He’d been called a “cockroach,” by the Interhamwe (the group of Hutu extremists leading the genocide), and subsequently “the hero,” when he liberated the country from this evil group.

It’s in Kagame’s interest to play the victim-turned-hero card.  Western governments pour in massive amounts of aid and support (making this tiny country one of the most powerful in the region), and his own people shower him with undying support, even when he does questionable things.

And questionable things he has done.

When the RPF liberated Rwanda, two million Hutus fled the country.  That’s twice as many people as were killed during the genocide.  They fled mainly into a few border towns in the Congo (DRC), creating massive refugee camps.  Problem solved, the world forgot about them.  But Paul Kagame didn’t.

Over the following few years, occasional attacks on the refugee camps were ordered by Kagame’s government.  Officially, it was claimed that the attacks were meant to wipe out remaining Interhamweofficials camouflaging themselves among the masses of refugees.  But why, then, did so many civilians perish in these attacks?

The killings in the Congo reached a whole new level in 1996, when the Rwandan government threw its support behind Lauren Kabila’s Congolese rebel forces.  From the eastern edge of the DRC, near the Rwandan border, Kabila marched toward Kinshasa, but his march was anything but direct.  Along the way, he stopped in the Hutu refugee camps, murdering as many as possible.  The remaining refugees would flee, and Kabila’s forces would find them and murder more of them.  Ad infinitum.  By the time Kabila reached Kinshasa, on the western edge of this massive country, his forces had apparently murdered almost as many as the Interhamwe had killed during the Rwandan genocide.

***

When we drove through Rwanda’s capital that first afternoon, it painted the picture of a country recovered from its dark past.  Paul Kagame had transformed Kigali into a city of modern skyscrapers, smoothly-tarred roads, and policemen stationed at intersections to ensure constant law and order.  He had outlawed plastic bags, making his city cleaner than any other in all of Africa.  And Kagame was reminding people more than ever of his heroism by marking the 20^th anniversary of the country’s genocide with countrywide banners.

Yet, despite being able to go to the cinema and buy imported strawberries and order delivery to our campsite, I didn’t fall for Kigali.  Something felt off about it.  It was so clean that it smelled rotten.  Something was hiding behind Kigali’s perfect image.  What, exactly, I’m not sure.  Only time will tell – the world has a way of only discovering awful truths after the fact.