Gisozi Memorial

This weekend I went with my friend Frank to the Gisozi genocide memorial. Even though we have both been here three months, neither of us have gone. Frank is leaving soon though and we have been saying for months that we would go. So on Sunday we hailed a couple of motos and made our way.
The memorial is located in a house, which before I went, meant to me that it would be small and not very powerful. Coming from the US, it is fairly indoctrinated in me to think of bigger as better, bigger as more powerful, bigger as the only way to be truly impressive. Well, in the case of a genocide museum, bigger would be overwhelming and unnecessary. The museum is located on two stories in a house that is probably about the size of an average American house, say about 2000 feet. The lower story is devoted to the Rwandan genocide.
We began by walking through a tunnel that begins with the history of Rwanda before colonization, which explained that Hutu and Tutsi are not true ethnic groups, nor was the designation particularly important before colonization. Rather, the German colonizers, as so many other colonizers have done, found it expedient to divide and conquer, designating all people with ten cows or more to be Tutsi and all people with less than ten cows to be Hutu and giving preferential treatment to Tutsis, using this new "ethnicity" to govern in abstentia. When the Germans lost WWI and the Belgians received Rwanda as a colony (because of course countries are like commodities and can be traded around), they modeled their governance after the Germans, keeping Tutsis in power. In the early 1960s, the Belgians began to give power to the majority Hutus as they prepared to leave the country and grant independence. With this transition, wide-spread violence against Tutsis began. After 70 years of rule by one minority ethnic group, the repressed majority sought retribution and the first wave of genocide began leading to millions of people fleeing the country to Congo, Burundi, Uganda, and for the wealthy, Europe and the United States. Despite peaceful attempts to come back, refugees were denied repatriation to Rwanda and many were forced to live in refugee camps. While refugee camps fostered the formation of rebel groups, willing to take military action to go back to their homes, the government of Rwanda, led by Hutu extremists and militarily supported by the French, armed and trained Interhamwe, youth militia. The sole purpose of the Interhamwe was to fight the enemy. And the sole enemy was the Tutsi.
All of this is detailed through pictures and writing. Nothing is particularly shocking about it or new information, other than seeing pictures of the youth militia. The boys, for they really are just boys, were trained to be killers and filled with hatred at such a young age, they are just as ruined as their victimes. No one survived the genocide without scars. As you continue down the tunnel, it details the years immediately leading up to the genocide. Radio ads spouting the doctrine of ethnic cleansing, ten commandments of how Hutus should treat Tutsis, and the increasing attacks on the government by the RPF, composed of refugees determined to institute democratic government and force the return of thousands of refugees.
Continuing down the tunnel, the pictures and video become more graphic and the reaction more visceral. There is a video that is not for the faint of heart or stomach, which shows the murder of a man by another with a machete, children with festering wounds in their heads, and dozens of photos and videos of the hundreds of dead bodies simply left to rot in the street. It is unbelievable to look at the video and know that in the peaceful and clean streets I walk on everyday, human beings were left like garbage. Along with that video, which is silent, there are others which interview survivors of the genocide and one which captures a perpetrator recounting the murders he took part in. What was somehow the most shocking to me was the pictures of the planners of the genocide. I had somehow assumed that the men (and women) exuded evil, that looking at them, I would know that they are somehow devoid of humanity. But it isnt the case at all. In the photos, the architects of the genocide are jovial, even beneficient-looking people, which somehow made it even worse. If these men and women, who are clearly human, are capable of planning such inhuman acts, what are any of us capable of?
Along the tunnel there are machetes, ancient guns, chains, all implements of death, preserved in glass cases so the viewer can see that it was not sophisticated technology in the hands of highly trained soldiers that led to this destruction, but simple and outdated tools put in the hands of regular people and transformed into weapons through a campaign of hatred and fear. Finally, we exited the tunnel into a small atrium which on one side had mounted news stories of the reaction of the west (which is to say none) and the evacuation of people in danger (which is to say only white people and sickeningly, government officials who orchstrated everything). Particularly disheartening is the observation that the number of soldiers used in evacuations would have been sufficient to prevent the genocide from happening. On the other wall, in perhaps the only heartening display, are the stories of those who protected others. Sheltering and feeding people, putting themselves in extreme danger (anyone who was suspected of sympathizing with the Tutsis was considered just as bad, if not worse than Tutsis themselves, and put to death), simply because it was the right thing to do. Once out of the atrium, there is a series of small rooms which house different exhibits. One is a room that is full of bones, skulls, arm bones, leg bones. The skulls are perhaps the hardest to view, because there are many that are almost shattered or have perfectly round holes, the work of a single bullet. Yet somehow this room is the easiest to view. The next room is a display of clothing, the clothing that people were wearing when they were killed and abandoned. Perhaps the most surreal to me was the running shorts and Cornell sweatshirt that one man wore. Within this room, there is another video interviewing survivors about the burden of survival, the guilt, the anger, and the enormous effort to forgive. Finally, the last room is filled with photos. Walls lined with photos of men, women, and children. For me, this was the hardest. To be completely surrounded by photos and to know that it is but the smallest fraction of those who were killed... it is staggering. And again, another video.
On the second floor there are smaller displays describing other genocides; Namibia, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Cambodia, the Balkans. It becomes too much. At some point, numbness just overtakes you and it is impossible to react to the worst that humanity is capable of. Or so you think...
And then the childrens room. The childrens room is simple, small, stark, and without doubt, the most evocative part of the museum. It is a series of four small rooms, and within each room is three to four life size photographs of children. Babies, children, teenagers. And under each photo is some small description of their personality, their likes, their dislikes, their age, their dreams, their last words, and how they were killed. It was here that I cried. It is sickening to see a photo of a beautiful two year old girl in a baptism dress, read that her favority activity was playing with her father, and then read about her brutal murder. Even here, I dont want to write about it. It is too difficult to actually detail inhumanity and madness. Writing it makes it real.

So anyway, that was how I spent my Sunday. Although the whole museum took only two hours to walk through, it was exhausting. Leaving the memorial, both Frank and I were dragging our feet, barely able to walk up the stairs, and certainly not in the mood to hail motos and haggle for price. A larger, bigger, brasher memorial would have been too much. Already it was too much to take in, anything more would have been lost.

Im not sure that this blog is really satisfactory to me. There is so much to say about the memorial but at the same time describing it is nothing like experiencing it. What is truly important to me, what I got out of it and what I want to emphasize, is that although this happended in Rwanda, it is not a tragedy only of Rwandans. The West was responsible for not reacting, for sheltering and continuing to shelter those who planned the genocide. Certainly it was Rwandans who planned the genocide and Rwandans who were killed, but the country distinction is a false one. It was humans who planned the genocide and humans who were killed, and that is what we need to remember. By thinking that it was only "them" that could do that to "those", we leave ourselves open to the artifical distinctions that make it possible in the first place. We are all responsible for each other.