The horror of genocide

This morning I worked up my courage and spent several hours in the National Genocide Memorial in Kigali. I knew it would be a gruelling experience. 

In this place, the remains of over a quarter of a million victims of the 1994 Rwandan genocide have been given a dignified final resting place. While their remains have come from mass graves all over the country, the row of mass graves here gives them a name and a place of burial at last. The tragic work of digging up mass graves continues. 

The British based Aegis Foundation has funded a fitting museum to tell the story of the massacre. The foundations of ethnic hatred are traced back to the German and Belgian colonial eras when there was a racist fascination with ethnic difference and power and influence were distributed to differentiate. We see traces of this in the history of colonial empires all over the globe and many of the fomented hatreds live on in our time. 

The museum record makes it clear that the massacre was organized by the Rwandan government and had been in the planning stages for some time. The presidents of Rwanda and Burundi died in an unexplained plane crash in April of 1994 and this unleashed the violence. Perhaps more than one million people - men, women and children, were slaughtered in a cataclysmic explosion of violence. The sheer brutality boggles the mind. This was an intended final solution to the presence of Tutsi people in Rwanda. The wall of names makes it easy to see that entire families were killed together.

The museum goes on to cover several other genocides of the modern era - the Jews of Europe of course, the Herrero in Namibia and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.  Common factors are pointed out - the myth of a chosen superior people, danger of being overrun by 'others', the defence of homeland.

A visit to this museum is a timely reminder that we need to be on the watch for divisive ideology in our own countries. The United States is currently led by a person who has called all Mexicans rapists. There are many examples of dangerous thinking emerging in Europe. The monstrous side of our humanity is never far from the surface and it is good to be watchful for it wherever we live. Nuns and priests in Rwanda were convicted for participating in the slaughter. 

The only happier moments in the museum come from reading about the heroic actions of some people in saving innocent lives. 

The long row of mass graves

The list of names goes on forever. Whole families were exterminated.

I