Kigali
RWANDA
Kigali Genocide Memorial Center
By AARON
Monday, March 21, 2011
Family Guy Intro:
(Brian and Stewie are on a German tour bus.)
German Tour Guide: You vill find more on Germany’s contributions to ze arts in ze pamphlets ve have provided.
Brian: Yeah, about your pamphlet… uh, I’m not seeing anything about German history between 1939 and 1945. There’s just a big gap.
Tour guide: Everyone vas on vacation. On your left is Munich’s first city hall, erected in 15…
Brian: Wait, what are you talking about? Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and…
Tour Guide: We were invited. Punch vas served. Check vit Poland.
Brian: You can’t just ignore those years. Thomas Mann fled to America because of Nazism’s stranglehold on Germany.
Tour guide: Nope, nope. He left to manage a Dairy Queen.
Brian: A Dairy Queen? That’s preposterous.
Tour guide: I vill hear no more insinuations about the German people. Nothing bad happened. Sie werden sich hinsetzen. Sie werden ruhig sein. Sie werden nicht beleidigen Deutschland. You will sit down. You will shut up. You will not insult Germany. (Throws his hand up in a Hitler salute.)
Brian: Uh, is that a beer hall?
Tour guide: (Snapping out of it) Oh yes, Munich is renowned for its historic beer halls
It was funny. Hell I laughed. But the bitter truth is that to this day, some people still adamantly deny that the Holocaust ever took place. Maybe it was because no one wants to remember such a disturbing past event, maybe it’s because those who had something to do with it are ashamed. Regardless of this, after it was all said and done, the world looked upon that time of tragedy and death and said, “Never again”. If only it were that simple.
At the end of WWII, Germany lost power in numerous areas around the globe, and as this was happening, the Belgian government entered in and took over Rwanda, working with the Rwandan Government to help put an end to decades of Civil War between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. For some reason, Tutsis were seen by the Belgians as being a more advanced tribe, so as time progressed, preferential treatment was given to the Tutsis by way of power positions in the government, grants for research, and aid in education and the sciences.
Around this time as well, the Belgians started issuing ID cards, separating the Rwandan people by tribe and thus creating an even bigger rift between the already volatile tensions that existed between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes.
Seeing the Tutsis as the “superior” tribe, a Tutsi was placed (by Belgium) as head of the government, but after finding out that their newly appointed president wanted to bring power back to the Rwandan people and out of the hands of Belgium, Belgium quickly staged a coup and the Hutus were soon in power.
Around 1990, refugees north of Rwanda came back to reclaim the government and what broke out was civil war. By 1993, peace talks were in negotiation, however no resolution came to pass between the Hutu and Tutsi. The UN was sent in to further negotiate a cease fire, but what happened next would shock the world.
April 6th, 1994: The Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana is assassinated as his plane is shot down in approach to the capital of Kigali. No one knows to this day who was responsible, but within hours the Hutu military were in action.
By first killing the top 10 UN leaders there at the time, the UN reacts by pulling out the rest of it’s workers in a mass evacuation – just as the Hutu government had planned. (During this time, a French UN General asked the UN for 5,000 troops with a guarantee that he could stop what would soon ensue. He was rejected and forced to leave the country with the rest).
What happened over the next 100 days was simple and brutal: the mass genocide of the Tutsi people, along with any sympathizers not loyal to the Hutu cause. Women were raped. Men were slowly hacked apart to ensure maximum torture. Babies were grabbed by the ankles and smashed against brick walls repeatedly while their parents and siblings were forced to watch. Children’s heads were split open with dull machetes.
Thanks to the ID cards issued by Belgium, identifying a Tutsi was easy. Thanks to the media propaganda portraying the Tutsi as “evil” and “greedy” that had been resident over the years from the Hutu government, an already violent dissension between the two groups exploded like a powderkeg, and the result was after 100 days, around 1,000,000 Tutsi had been killed. That accounts for 20% of the population of the country. That is equivalent to 60,000,000 Americans.
The UN eventually sent troops back in, and the Tutsi militia (the Rwandan Patriotic Front) was able to reclaim control of the government, but it was already too late. The world had stood by and watched as a country imploded on itself; as neighbor turned upon neighbor, friend turned upon friend. This all took place in 1994 – around 50 years after we had said, “never again” but regardless, it did happen again.
So where does that leave us now? Rwanda is still feeling the effects of the genocide as pretty much everyone in the country has been directly or indirectly affected by the killings 17 years ago. As poet and philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, so Rwanda is doing its part to remember its past and those that were brutally killed.
The Kigali Genocide Memorial Center is located in the capital of Rwanda, and is a reminder of what can happen when we do forget our histories. It is a memorial and also a graveyard where over 200,000 victims are buried and where locals and outsiders alike can come to learn about what happened before, during and after those fateful 100 days. There are video testimonies from genocide survivors, and a heart wrenching memorial to the children that were lost, giving their favorite foods, things they loved, and to keep reality in check – the method in which they were killed. There is also a genocide museum, dedicated to other mass, calculated murders that have taken place around the globe and the after-effects of the people who were the victims.
Kigali is now a busting modern city with high-rise buildings, nice restaurants and immaculate hotels. Seeing it now, you would have never guessed that less than 20 years ago it was the epicenter for one of the worst genocides in the history of the world.
Talking to one of the many friendly locals in the city, you can’t help but be moved, knowing that if they are over the age of 16, that they survived and witnessed the mass killings and most likely had lost a relative or loved one in the process. Almost all of the 200,000 Hutus responsible for the genocide are either incarcerated or still in hiding in the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), and either await trial or possibly face a lifetime of never returning to their home country. Meanwhile, in the new Rwandan government, they are prohibiting discrimination based on race, ethnicity or religion, and also passing laws forbidding emphasis on Hutu or Tutsi identity in most types of political activity.
Rwanda is now a country rebuilt, and while we witness the resilience of its people, and their resolve for moving forward, I still wonder if we as a world have truly learned from our mistakes. We said “never again” after the Holocaust, yet did nothing as millions of people were systematically assassinated yet again.
If we truly are doomed to repeat our history if we do not remember it, we must make every effort to remember not only the good times, but the bad as well, otherwise those who have fallen victim will have died in vain. So thank you to the founders and workers at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center for providing us with a brutally honest and graphic depiction of what took place, in order that we might learn from it and not repeat the same mistakes again.
