Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock)
March 8, 2009 Sunday
Images of slaughter Remembrance of Rwanda
EDITORIAL
THE IMAGES linger. Whether in the photographs of the victims or the
minds of the survivors, the images can’t be erased.
We’ve all seen them: The stacks of bones. The haunted faces of those
who remember. Their stories, too sad to endure, must somehow be borne.
The images come from as many places as Evil stalks: Killing fields all
over the world. Cambodia. Bosnia. Darfur. Now they’re from Rwanda,
which experienced its own mass murders some 15 years ago. There’s a
name for these crimes: genocide.
Today’s guide is Sam Totten. He’s the professor of education at the
University of Arkansas who’s made a study of this madness. It’s odd
double duty. One day he’s teaching aspiring teachers, telling them how
they can help their future students learn. Another day-like this
one-he’s describing the systematic destruction of life: How neighbors
in the lovely African country of Rwanda turned on each other in an
orgy of bloodlust. In about 100 days, beginning in April 1994,
anywhere from half a million to one million Rwandans were massacred-in
a country whose population was only about 7 million.
The reasons for the wave of killings? The usual. Old resentments,
divisions along ethnic lines. Hatred really needs no reason, only an
excuse. In Rwanda, the hatred was stoked by the government itself,
which urged the killers to settle old scores. The weapon of choice in
Rwanda was the machete, the preferred method of slaughter hacking the
victims to death.
Grisly. The victims piled up so high on one road that the bodies had
to be moved aside constantly so trucks could inch ahead without
driving over the dead. There were bodies thrown into rivers in such
numbers that the channels became clogged. Rivers and lakes so bloody
that the water turned red, and often that was the only water left for
people to drink. (You tried not to think about it, one survivor
recalled.)
THE EVENTS are blessedly in the past. But, as always, the past lives
on in memory. In Rwanda, the memories can be almost as bitter as the
experience. It’s one thing to die. It’s another to re-live the deaths
of loved ones again and again, every waking day and nightmare-filled
night, like a tape playing over and over in an endless loop. For many
of the survivors, hell is memory.
Sam Totten suggests that genocides like the one in Rwanda must be
studied so that prevention and intervention become more likely. Lord
knows, prevention and intervention are needed. The wider world has a
long history of turning away when genocides erupt. It happened again
in Rwanda. The world knew what was going on. But it couldn’t muster
the will to intervene, and stop the cycle of death once it had
started. (For a continuing example, see, Darfur, the ignoring of.)
However the genocide ends, whether by outside intervention or just
because the perpetrators are finally exhausted, the end doesn’t mean
the horror stops. It goes on and on in memory. Along with unending
pain, the survivors’ guilt and all the accompanying emotional debris
that litters the mind like those bodies piling up in the road.
In his visits to Rwanda, Sam Totten discovered a curious
disconnect. Rwanda today is a cheerful place. The official version is
that the country is on the mend and the old divisions that led to the
slaughter are disappearing. But if a visitor probes even with the
gentlest of questions, a deeper truth emerges. Fifteen years after the
worst of the killing, the wounds have yet to heal. Rwanda has held its
truth-and-reconciliation sessions; the evidence is presented and the
guilty are urged to confess their crimes, often with the lure of
lesser punishments. The victims then find themselves living back in
the same neighborhoods, often enough with those who murdered their
families, or with close relatives of the killers. It’s an uneasy
co-existence. Who can trust his neighbor after a history such as this?
Some find they cannot forgive. Others find themselves still being
threatened by their old enemies.
There are other casualties. The abandoned children, many of them
babies born to victims of rape during the genocide, have become a lost
generation. There’s widespread destitution, its roots in a family’s
loss of a breadwinner during the violence. The government struggles to
provide basics-food, water, something more than substandard
housing. And there’s little time or energy to devote to healing
wounded mind and souls.
THE OUTSIDE
world can still help. For example, by sending professionals to Rwanda
to train more people in psychological counseling. Like the teacher he
is, Sam Totten has done more in Rwanda than interview survivors and
preserve the history of the country’s darkest days. He spent six
months there last year setting up a master’s degree in genocide
studies at a Rwandan university.
Mr. Totten has also started a scholarship program to help Rwandan
students get college degrees in their own fields of study. A year of
college in Rwanda costs about $1,000-a bargain elsewhere but out of
reach for many Rwandans, no matter how promising they may be or how
much they may want to pursue their education. So far the program has
pledged to pay the cost of college for six students. There may be
more, but that’ll depend on donations.
Sam Totten’s talk concluded with unforgettable images-photographs from
Rwanda. There was a picture of one of the larger memorials to the
genocide, with rows upon rows of human skulls and a pile of clothing
five feet high-the garments of the dead. There was a photo of Patrick,
a smiling young boy who’d once been recorded as saying that his
favorite person in the world was his mother. He was hacked to death in
1994.
Today it is Rwanda, where Sam Totten will return soon. Tomorrow it
could be Darfur, where Sam Totten has also traveled-interviewing,
recording, documenting. There was a time when it was Bosnia, Armenia,
and the charnel house that was all of the European continent under the
Nazis. The list of genocides is long and varied, yet the story is
always the same: Horrible things happened, the world turned aside.
So many victims, so little time to forestall the next horror.