It has been a year since I first visited a genocide memorial, and the impact of that visit has not lessened over that time. If I close my eyes and I can transport myself back to the room of children, whose smiling faces hang in living colour from the walls of the National Genocide Memorial centre in Kigali. I will never forget the choking feeling or the full-body reaction I had reading about the horrific fate of these precious little children, many of whom were the same age as my nephews. Having not lived through the realities of the genocide, even now after working on genocide issues for 18 months, I cannot fathom the loss of a child, mother, brother, aunty, in such barbaric manner. Thinking of those children in particular still brings tears and is something I can barely speak about.
So it was with much intrepidation that I went with 7 friends to the memorial at Murambe. The memorial stands on the site of a technical college which was built but not yet used, in Murambe district. According to our guide, 55,000 Tutsi crowded into the rooms of the school seeking shelter from the interahamwe (militia). In an effort to weaken those in hiding, the electricity and water was turned off and the people were left thirsty and hungry for three days before the killings began. Out of those 55,000 people, only 4 survived the massacre. Can you imagine? I won’t even attempt to try and imagine what it must have felt like hearing rooms full of people being slaughtered day and night, knowing that it was a matter of time before they can to mete out the same fate on you. We were privileged enough to meet one of the survivors who had been shot in the head (the evidence still plain to see in the form of a hole in the front of his head) and only managed to escape at night because the interahamwe thought him dead. He fled to Burundi with the physical wounds but more incomprehensible, the emotional weight of the loss of his children and his wife.
The memorial at Murambe is unique in that when bodies were exhumed from mass graves after the genocide, those which were at the lower levels had been protected from the elements and the lack of oxygen had prevented the decomposition process. In visiting the memorial you are taken through rooms of bodies which have been preserved in lime so that the form of the people is still largely intact, including their facial expressions. One room is full of children and babies, the most defenceless and innocent of victims. It is not my place to try to paint a picture of what you see when you are inside those rooms or the smell of the dead. The point of these memorials is for people to visit and remember those who were killed so that no-one forgets, and the horrors of genocide can never happen again. For me, it is important for every person to confront the reality of genocide, seeing the large numbers of bodies laid out and engaging with the reality of man’s ability to inflict such pain and suffering on his neighbours. It is all too easy to sit in Europe, or New Zealand, or the Americas and wax lyrical about the horrors of the events of 1994. Yet, that distance puts a barrier between those who lived through the genocide and those who merely observe the aftermath. Perhaps if we all walk through those rooms in Murambe we would realise that the genocide was real, it was not a piece of unfortunate history for which the international community should carry guilt. It is a real, ongoing trauma which, unlike us in the West, the Rwandese people live with every waking moment, whether consciously or unconsciously. The phrase “Never Again, Ne Jamais,....” is a great motto but one which often rings hollow. I urge everyone to come and see the memorials for it is only through this that we can start to really act on those promises made to the Rwandese people and
Never Again” will be a reality.
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