Crap! I Have a Blog!

Today Rwandans are commemorating the 11th anniversary of the start of the genocide here. I can’t presume to understand what people who lived through it or returned to rebuild in its aftermath are thinking or feeling today. I’m having a difficult time understanding my own feelings. All I can say is today is different from yesterday – looks different; feels different. Businesses are closed. People are quieter. There’s a general stillness in the air that magnifies what normal life is still going on – cars and motorcycles going by, conversations, footsteps on muddy roads, children playing. It feels like the heavy burden of remembering, that everyone seems to carrying around with them every day, today has flooded these valleys of the “Land of a Thousand Hills.”

My good friend, Mary, and I started off today by going to the memorial in Gisoze, just outside downtown Kigale. We knew there would be a memorial there but we wee uneasy about attending. This is a city of survivors in a country of survivors and we didn’t know if there was room at a small ceremony today for outside onlookers. We decided to take a taxi to the memorial and decided how we felt when we got there. The place was just starting to fill up when we arrived. We parked and our driver, who we had come to know a little bit on previous trips around town, got out and inquired about the ceremony to get us an idea of whether we should stay. His opinion was that we could, that there would be other westerners attending, but we still felt like we were intruding on something intensely private. We decided to leave and attend a larger ceremony at the city’s stadium tonight. There’s nothing in our experiences here or in what we saw to make us think we would be unwelcome, but we wanted to avoid the chance that we would be a distraction or an intrusion on other people’s grieving.

The ceremony was in part a funeral. On our way back up the hill into town we stopped on the side of the road out of respect for a procession of cars and marchers going to the Gisoze memorial. Among them were trucks carrying caskets to be buried at the site along with the other 250,000 victims of the genocide who were killed in the capital. When we were there last week we were told that as the various court systems, that are still trying accused perpetrators of the genocide, progressed, information was coming out that was revealing the locations of undiscovered bodies. The bodies were then being brought to the memorial site to be interred in the mass graves there. The staff at the site was struggling with the decision to begin construction of an additional tomb for the undeterminable number of bodies that would be discovered in the future. The people being brought to the site this morning, escorted by the survivors, were probably only recently discovered – almost 11 years after their deaths. I can’t know how many families are just now finding closure for their lost loved ones, or how many of these victims were members of families of which there were no survivors. It’s remarkable how few of the 250,000 buried at the memorial have even been identified. Those that have are named on a wall above one of the tombs but there aren’t more than a thousand names on the wall. Similar memorials and mass graves dot this tiny country, and are the final resting places of over 800,000 people.

While I’m fighting the temptation to give a history of the genocide, there are some points that I feel compelled to express today. Most importantly is that this tragedy was preventable. It was neither “spontaneous” nor the result of “age old animosities” as it has been described by some western commentators. It was a premeditated act that was discovered in the planning stages by members of the international bodies designed to detect and prevent these types of horrors. The warnings and calls for preventive action were mishandled by weak and disorganized institutions, and ignored by political leaders who decided that their interests lay in not acting. For its part the publics with the ability to force a response did not muster the political pressure to force their leaders into action.

This particular case of genocide did take place in the context of a series of conflicts, (that should have served as a warning of the potential for large-scale violence). To the degree that these conflicts were based on ethnic identities those identities were largely the result of flawed scientific theories of ethnicity created and manipulated by western colonial powers seeking to create political systems in African countries, and elsewhere, that would make them more manageable for colonial rule. While the distinctions of “Hutu” and “Tutsi” did exist as socio-economic and ethnic distinctions before colonial rule in East Africa, they were not nearly as rigid and divisive before they became the basis for a strict ethnicity-based political hierarchy by the colonial administration.

My point is not to lay blame on the west but to point out that ethnic violence and animosity is not more inherent or inevitable in African cultures than it is in any other. Present day African conflicts result from complex mixes of historical, economic, political, social and other factors. Africa’s apparent isolation is an illusion. Being probably the slowest region in the world to modernize should not indicate that Africa has had immunity from historic forces of globalization. The centuries-old trade in natural resources and human labor has impacted Africans perhaps more than most of the world’s peoples. From my current vantage point on this particular hill in Kigale, Rwanda I can see that Africans have both benefited and suffered from the forces of globalization. My limited understanding of African history of an equally mixed picture, but the effect is undeniable. One has only to look at our own African-descendent populations and the impact that they have had on our dominant cultures – from music and literature to political and spiritual values – to sense the contribution Africa has made to who we are. Check your almanacs for statistics on the amounts of natural resources obtained from the continent to see the impact Africa has on our economies. What is clear is that we non-Africans are unalterably tied to African peoples in our histories, our cultures, our economies, our religions, and our moral consciousness. They are more like us that we collectively know, and we are more like them. Indeed the idea of a distinct “we” and “them” is a convenient fallacy.

This fallacy is what cries out to me the most today. Eleven years ago the world outside Africa hid behind the myth of “us” and “them.” It was happening to “them.” It was being carried out by “them.” We looked on with horror at what was happening, but we were both paralyzed and comforted by the concept of “us.” A history of “us” and “them” provided an acceptance of the idea that we can’t understand “them” and that an inherent difference made it more difficult if not impossible to either understand what was happening or to intervene to stop it. Both of these errors were our failures and our crimes of omission. The events and actions that led to the genocide in were not exclusive to Africa or Rwanda. They were political, economic and social phenomena that have and do occur in all parts of the world. There were also people, African and non-African, who understood what was happening and who tried to warn the world and compel it to action. The forces of ignorance and the great divide of “us” and “them” were too powerful and entrenched to overcome. The non-African world withdrew into “us.”

Many opportunities to prevent, contain, or minimize the genocide were missed as the world’s decision makers decided to repeatedly retreat. In hindsight these decisions look to me like moral failures but also rational political calculations. The fact that political leaders could have acted but didn’t because it would have been more costly for them personally to do so is what distresses me most. It points to the fact that we, the human race, still have a level of tolerance for the crime of genocide under certain circumstances. While we have crated some international systems to deal with the kinds of crises that can lead to genocide, and we have prevented or stemmed potential ones since the Holocaust drew the world’s attention to the greatest crime in humanity, we still don’t have institutions strong enough to act in the necessary time and strength required for prevention, and we still don’t have the moral will to insist that our leaders live up to “never again” when they are acting in our name.

Other than expressing my feelings on this particular day in this particular place, my purpose for writing this dispatch is to ask my friends and family this rhetorical question: How can we help to create a world that truly means it when it says the words “Never again”?