"Genocide Memorial in Rwanda"
In Rwanda in the spring of 1994, Hutu soldiers,
militiamen, and roving gangs murdered 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates in a
period of 100 days.
Some sources place the figure at 500,000, but both
numbers are parameters that represent a sustained rate of killing unparalleled in 20th century collective violence. There were no death camps, no mass shipments of
people to points of extermination. Tutsis were simply killed where they were
found – at home, fleeing, or seeking refuge in some shelter.
There was governmental planning and indoctrination for the genocide, particularly through radio broadcasts, which extolled all Hutus to kill all
Tutsis. The end result was neighbor turned against neighbor in a nation seemingly
gone berserk.
The genocide depopulated areas of the country, so
that murdered Tutsis were often left where they had been cut down, sometimes in
large numbers in schools and churches where they had sought safe haven in vain.
In our brief excerpt from We wish to inform you
that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, Philip Gourevitch’s award-winning
account of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath, he visited a church where
such systematic killing had taken place.
The church and its bodies, left untouched for thirteen
months, was now a memorial.
As a starting premise for grappling with spontaneous
memorials, we defined them as an initial response to violent death, something
impermanent, a first step in the grieving process. Our resource materials add
that spontaneous memorials may be a means of creating an extended community of bereavement.
Did these places of genocidal murder in Rwanda become
spontaneous memorials – or something else?
They are different than our other examples in deeply
disquieting ways. In New York, Oklahoma City, and Clement Park near Columbine
High School, some portion of neutral, public space was taken over and transformed
into what our resource texts repeatedly refer to as shrines.
Can an actual crime scene with the victims still
in place become a spontaneous memorial, a shrine to those violently killed?
It is important to understand that the Tutsi minority,
although so diminished in number and decimated, regained control of the government in Rwanda and found
itself struggling with issues of accountability and reconciliation in a deeply
divided nation with countless orphans and a majority population of perpetrators.
Was maintaining the sites of massacres, the churches, schools, and mass graves, as spontaneous memorials an effort to foster accountability and
to draw those perpetrators into a national community of bereavement? Did keeping those sites briefly intact have that effect?
How could such a divided and traumatized nation begin to heal itself and bring its people back together.
There is another major facet to the Rwanda genocide
that is addressed in depth in Samantha Power’s article from The Atlantic Monthly, “Bystanders to Genocide: Why the United States Let the Rwandan Tragedy Happen.”
Why would the United States, with such current
awareness of the Holocaust, fail to intervene in the face of mounting evidence
that genocide was again taking place? Power’s article and our web links wrestle with this fundamental question.
The tragedy of Rwanda and the irony of the magnitude
of its genocide are perhaps best expressed in the title of an Atlantic Monthly interview on-line: “Never again again.”