Let The Devil Sleep: Forgiving The Rwandan Genocide

I don’t think we stop and reflect enough on how we got where we are today, or what we learnt from it. Perhaps we could save ourselves a lot of heartache by learning from others along the way, and the things we observe.

Today, 20 years ago, a horrific 100 days of killing commenced in Rwanda that left 800,000 people dead. A horrific act that the world later came to, of course, condemn slowly. I say slowly because it took the world a (relatively) long time to act.

However, I’m not criticising something that has been, for it is in the past. The reason I bring up the topic at all, aside from marking the anniversary of the tragedy, is that the world could learn a lot from the forgiveness and progress that the Rwandans have made to get them to where they are today. It’s likely that many youth of today wouldn’t remember this making the news, or be aware of the existence of this terrible occurrence, but it would be a travesty to allow the world to forget something in our recent history that devastated the lives of so many.

Click To Watch Video at www.trocaire.org/rwanda: Let The Devil Sleep

As a white, western female who only began to read about the genocide relatively recently, I was horrified to see the brutality with which the lives were taken. I remember growing up seeing it on the news, and I remember hearing conversations that referred to it, but I think as a child, I was deliberately sheltered from what was happening. Perhaps the news was deliberately sheltering the world from what was happening, after all, it would have been very difficult to report without shocking the world. Perhaps that was what was needed. It was hard to comprehend the stories of survival which were so fantastically removed from the normalcy of my life, that it felt completely fictitious. It sadly was far from fictitious.

Without dwelling too much on the genocide itself, nor delving into accusations of complicit behaviour at an international level, we should draw some recovery and reconciliation points which are far more important, we should recount a brief history of what happened for those of you who are not familiar.
The genocide was essentially a mass killing of Tutsi and moderate Hutus in the country in the context of the Rwandan Civil War which had been in ceasefire from 1993.
The government began arming civilians with weapons, allegedly dating back to 1990, following a Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invasion.

A year before the 100 days of violence began, the president, Juvenal Habyarimana, imported 500,000 additional machetes into the country. Despite being used as traditional farming implements, this was not to be their use, this time.

On April 6 1994, an airplane carrying the president was shot down, and the following day began the mass killings. The killings were brutal and indiscriminate and affected every age, right from the unborn, and targeted Tutsis on the grounds of ethnicity by Interahamwe – a Hutu paramilitary organisation.

It divided neighbourhoods, families, and even those who were seeking refuges in churches. It is reported in one incident alone, that over 5,000 people who were seeking refuge in Ntrama church were killed by grenade, machete, rifle, or burnt alive.

Rape became a tool endorsed by Interahamwe and aside from being hugely violent in nature, caused a spike of HIV cases in the population that did survive. Victims numbered around 10,000 a day, although because of the chaotic nature, it was difficult to conduct accurate death toll record counts.

I recently read a fascinating autobiographical account of Leah Chishugi on her own account of survival of the genocide, called “A Long Way from Paradise: Surviving the Rwandan Genocide”. She did a fantastic job of recounting the truly horrific scenes with only a minimum amount of the devastation that she must have witnessed, which gives you the most eye opening and powerful window that you could imagine into the world of a girl caught up in this horror. To all of you who wish to understand the personal side of the conflict beyond the politics, and see how reconciliation and a desire to build a new life can focus you, I very highly recommend this book.

I feel that nothing I will ever write will do justice to the suffering of those in the situation, but that should not stop us remembering what happened, and what we can learn from it. The point of this reflection is not to dwell as such on the past recounted by media or survivors. Despite every inch of horror that we will never really know, nor understand, this country is really one of hope and reconciliation.

Rwanda’s gross domestic product has grown by an 8% average in the last few years. Museums and memorials have been constructed to ensure that the population, and the world, do not forget what has happened.

Finally, and possibly almost unbelievably, the people have embraced forgiveness. Stories have emerged of neighbours finally being able to embrace the very neighbours, or childhood friends who slaughtered often their entire families.

They have learnt that the only way to survive and progress is to put aside the hatred that had fuelled the killings in the first place.This is the key to their survival. This enables them to stop being eaten by anger and hatred from within. It stops them from seeking revenge for every person they lost, and allows them to share a meal with those who were once enemies.
It is this that I most admire them for.

What if we were to take this attitude into western issues and conflicts? To apply this ethos into our day to day lives. Wouldn’t we be much happier? Wouldn’t we let a lot of our daily irks go?

Let The Devil Sleep – Rwanda, 20 Years On – Photo Credit – Trocaire, Flickr, January 2014

I grew up watching conflict in Northern Ireland, (which is nowhere fathomably comparable to the horrors that Rwandans have faced 20 years ago, and I certainly don’t claim it to be), and find it difficult to watch the bickering and pain that one ‘side’ chooses to inflict on the other.

How can it be good for anyone not to be able to let go, and not be able to forgive? What size of a massacre does it take to bring us to our senses? Does the fact that killings took place here over a long time desensitise us to it? What if it all happened at once? If your entire family was brutally killed, your neighbourhood savaged, and the women violently raped, could you forgive? You’d most likely say that you wouldn’t, but look at the future you would leave yourself – one founded in the past, and a violent, miserable incident in the past at that. You would have no future worth living. It’s not viable. These people in Rwanda have looked at the options to live in the past, or to move on from it, and they’ve chosen life worth living. That means embracing forgiveness, no matter how hard it is.

I look around at the world today and almost feel the cracks deepening. It saddens me that we’ve not learned from the mistakes in the past, or the good that has come from some of them.

Desmond Tutu perhaps sums it all up best when he said that “There is no future without forgiveness” and I think we can all learn something from that.

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