Kigali & Nyamata

This one's probably going to be pretty long; I've got a lot to explain.

Saw President Kagame's house last night. Lots of soldiers with assault rifles guarding it. Came to the realization today that nearly every business in downtown Kigali is guarded by a security guard with a shotgun.

Woke up this morning and got on the bus to the Kigali Genocide Center. The center includes a large museum similar to the Holocaust museum in D.C. There are also 15 completed mass graves, as well as two that are still open and being filled as bodies are found. There are currently 258,000 genocide victims buried at the Kigali Genocide Center. Security was tight- we had our bags searched by guards with AK-47s at two different checkpoints and had to pass through a metal detector. The museum was very enlightening and did not attempt to hide any of the west's involvement in the genocide. It was very blatant about the involvement of the French especially. There was one photo that really stuck out to me- it was of President Habyarmana and the French Prime Minister riding in a parade float next to each other waving, with the Rwandan and French flags in the background. It was from 1990. I learned quite a few new things about the French invlovement...even "we wish to inform you" was pretty reserved in its accusations compared to the stuff at the museum. Very blatant about the Interhamwe training, weapons trades, and the real purpose of Operation Turquoise.

Another thing that I guess I never really understood was the full extent of the information revealed by "Jeane-Pierre" on January 10, 1994. I had always known that he had revealed the locations of the weapons caches and the general outline of the plan to UNAMIR, but I didn't know that he had also told them of the plan to brutally mutilate Belgian troops as well as the fact that the elite Hutu Power clan was no longer operating under the authority of Habiramana. Kofi Annan held a copy of the Hutu Power plan for genocide in Rwanda on January 11, 1994.

Let me say that again:


Kofi Annan held a detailed copy of the Hutu Power plan to exterminate the Tutsis in Rwanda on January 11, 1994.


He responded by ordering Dallaire not to seize the known weapons caches and tightening his rules of engagement.

In mid April, in response to the killing and mutilation of 10 Belgian troops serving with UNAMIR, every country excepting Guinea withdrew their troops. They feared another Somalia.

In May UNAMIR II was established, but they never went, because they were waiting on 50 tanks from the US that were never sent.

Over 1,000,000 civilians died.

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After leaving the Kigali Genocide Center we drove to Nyamata Church, about an hour southeast of Kigali.

When the first Hutu Power regime was elected in 1961 and the Tutsis were first persecuted, many were forced off of their land and on to some of the worst farmland in the country. Although Rwanda is highly fertile, this part of the country, called the Bugasara, is the worst. The source of one of the Nile's tributaries (via Lake Victoria), the Bugasara is a giant swamp surrounded by rocky hills. Although the Tutsis made up about 15% of Rwanda's population in 1994, by that time they made up around 60% of the population in the Bugasara, making it a particularly bloody place in the spring of 1994.

In 1992, during one of the pre-all-out-genocidal massacres, thousands of Tutsis in the Bugasara took shelter in Nyamata Church and were protected by an Irish nun. Trying to stay under the international community's radar, the presence of a westerner was enough to keep them safe in 1992. Not so in 1994.

As the genocide began in earnest in April 1994, over 10,000 Tutsis fled to Nyamata Church for shelter, thinking that they would be once again safe and with no better place to go. When the Interhamwe arrived on April 13, 1994, they found the place packed. They killed 4,000 in the church yard, broke through the doors with grenades, and killed 6,800 inside the chruch. Seven survived. To ensure death to all Tutsis, pregnant women had their bellies slashed open and their babies torn from them and killed. The Interhamwe used the altar to do this. The bloodstained altercloth remains there today, with the bullet-riddled tabernacle behind it.

Today the church remains much as it was in the spring of 1994. The clothes of the victims remain in the pews, but the bodies have been moved to mass graves behind the church. The sheet metal roof is filled with bullet holes and bloodstains remain on the walls from where small children were bashed to death.

Our tour guide was one of the seven survivors of Nyamata. His two brothers and both parents were killed there, and his sisters were raped and murdered at home. His grandmother is his only surviving relative. He was 9 at the time. He was knocked unconscious and fell in a pool of blood and was passed over by the Interhamwe for dead. He woke up two days later and spent 9 days in the church before fleeing to hide in the marshes with other survivors from the village. He hid in the marshes for three weeks, being hunted by Interhamwe with dogs until the RPF arrived.

In the center of the church are stairs down to a crypt. In the crypt are several hundred skulls, femur bones, and a single coffin draped in a purple cloth. This coffin is given a special place of honor because of what the woman went through. She was a Hutu woman who had left her arranged-marriage Hutu husband for a Tutsi man whom she loved. She was raped over 30 times, had her child cut out from her belly, was stuck on a stake, and then had her child skewered onto her chest. It is for this reason that she was given a place of honor in the memorial.

Outside by the side of the church is the grave of the Irish nun, as well as the parish priest.

Behind the church are two large crypts in which 21,600 femur bones and 10,800 skulls are arranged on racks. It is easy to tell the manner of death from most of the skulls. We were permitted to descend into the crypts.

We returned to Kigali and spent the rest of the day at the Iris, trying to recuperate.

Tomorrow will be what is probably the most taxing day of our trip. We will leave early in the morning for the four hour drive to Butare, Rwanda's second-largest city. After spending some time in Butare, we will drive another hour to a technical college where and even larger massacre than the one at Nyamata took place. Then we will drive all the way back to Kigali. I may not have time to get to an internet cafe tomorrow.

Until next time,
Drew