Last Rwanda day already. After a week of seeing, and
meeting, Rwandans and the heartfelt determination expressed everywhere
: "Never again" and "Always remember", proclaimed on lorry windscreen
stickers, T-shirts, in graffiti on walls, and of course at the frequent
memorials, it's time to pay our respects at the Genocide Memorial which
is the resting place of 259,000 victims.
The museum runs of course through the historical timeline,
the run up from 1990 when anti-Tutsi radio and printed propaganda
(eerily echoing the Nazis) really got going, conspiracy theories about
the shooting down of the presidential plane carrying the Hutu general
(who'd in effect already masterminded the establishment and arming - in a
deal with the French government - of the Interahamwe forces to conduct
the genocide), and whose death (along with the president of neighbouring
Burundi) was treated as the immediate trigger for the killing frenzy to
begin.
Interviews with survivors give the unbearably horrific but
still bald facts and stats real force; worse yet are the taped "trials"
(which look to be along the lines of South Africa's truth and resolution commission) where perpetrators
seemed to me still frighteningly capable of describing what they'd done,
without very much evidence of remorse or belated realisation of the
dreadfulness of it.
But... how does a man punish his neighbour for, one
day, suddenly murdering his family? And how does he continue to live
next door to him afterwards? You can only hope that the knowledge of
rooms of cracked skulls and bones (displayed "so that no one can ever
deny that there was at genocide") prick consciences every day.
But I found the worst of all was the last room, containing
life-sized photos of fourteen children, with a short list for each of
cosily banal facts : a favourite food or sport or song - but then...
their last words and the way in which they were murdered. Unbearable.
Though shaken and subdued, we perked up for a lunch date with Marc
(a friend of a friend of a friend who's been in Kigali for 3 years,
working for DiFid) who had kindly given us some words of wisdom when we
were planning our trip and put us in touch with our driver.
And then to the airport and adieu Rwanda. Gorgeously
beautiful and chillingly shocking, endlessly smiling and crushingly sad, buoyantly optimistic while still quietly mourning.
Hugely recommended!
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