It was bloody and relentless tit for tat genocide, ‘legitimized’ by the reality of foisting revenge. We are informed that Tutsis were separate by dint of a mocking privilege found in skin pigmentation. None of the darker-skinned garbage men, Joe-lunch-buckets, unemployed sons and daughters of previous massacres, were going to deny a century of oppression had occurred. It was written on everybody’s face, rich as Belgian chocolate.
Follow the history leading to the large scale event in question, one imagines ever since Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness at the turn of the previous century, in a sense, the definition of a cockroach grew, uh, legs. It grew out of the lighter skinned Tutsis utilizing privilege like a club, for making slaves out of darker skinned brothers and sisters must have become second nature to the Tutsi. They must have enjoyed the privilege of committing atrocities on behalf of Belgians, establishing an apartheid or a different sort, growing Belgian-sized bellies off the fat of the land, until becoming targets in a 100 day massacre of 800,000 (light-skinned, previously privileged) Rwandans.
The light-skinned Tutsis, they say, had been Belgian-favoured who found themselves about to be victims upon the Belgian departure. Oddly, Tutsis were unprepared, or unable to continue in governance over the facile social organization. Something like this occurred in Cambodia, after French Colons were forced out, and Khmer Rouge eventually rose to commit atrocities on the ones educated and presumably favoured by the French. (A genocide trial is getting underway in Cambodia. In 1975 if you wore glasses, carried a book, or wore a tie, the KR marched you out of the city at gun point and killed you. For a segment of society, everything goes further than time standing still. Time ceases to exist.)
In Rwanda the light-skinned and educated, bureaucratic and former, ruling class Tutsis fell under the constant radio cacophony demanding door-to-door hunting for Tutsis. From the pictures, the hunt was in suburbia. People who once enjoyed the advantages conferred upon an elite, these privileged were conveniently easy to spot.
History informs that when Belgians left with all the authority, the privileged were standing around without machetes. These are the ones who fell under machetes and occasional pistol shots to the head to finish the deed. In film and photos showing the event, and there is a surprising amount of film and footage, bodies are lying outside the entrances to decent-looking housing, prime real estate is filled with bodies. The genocide was not committed in shantytowns.
Meanwhile Hutu ‘leaders’ told Hutu people to kill or be one of the ones they kill, and this became one of the ‘distinctions’ in the selection of victims. Furthermore, besides the job of cleaning up the country of its severe cockroach infestation, some or all of the Hutu perpetrators of the genocide admit they were tempted into the action by offers of land ownership, banana trees, and so forth, post-genocide. Such promises may well be unfulfilled, according to reports, but such promises were incentive to kill those who controlled the business of land deeds (if only how to file them). By personal accounts, pictures, films, and an increasing historical record of books, the world is aware a genocide of some kind occurred. A few Tutsis are putting pen to ink. A few Hutus are pleading in courts around the world.
This much is sure: the Rwanda School of Radio Broadcasting Genocide 300 intensive 6 day program (bring your own coffee cup) makes them the most dangerous institution on earth. They churn out broadcasters to deliver convincing messages about killing formerly privileged people for being cockroaches. Now it is the publishing houses making the rounds with books.
These stories are for hard to resist, and indeed these are important stories to expose to the reading public. More importantly, in Canada, they are listening to testimony in the trial of Desire Munyanesa, facing seven counts of crimes against humanity and on trial in Montreal. Before the trial broke for the summer they heard about a man in Rwanda, unnamed, who resides on what (must be a truly mystical place in Rwanda called) Death Row.
Rwanda has people stepping out of the woods and alleys and up from the creek beds to make reports. One landed on CBC news television at the end of May, ’07, in which appeared a woman named Eugenia, nicknamed ‘The woman with a crooked walk.’ Hers’ was a story of permanently disabling injuries and survival in the middle of genocide. She lives with a story of machete wounds, and continues to live around perpetrators of the murderous assaults.
Therein lies the crux of the story. It appears on some level the crimes against humanity are misdemeanors in Rwanda. One assumes from this posture that Tutsis must have been accustomed to the reign of death in Rwanda and probably bore a century of guilt for atrocities on Hutus. Only recently have reports emerged of people being convicted and sentenced to death for genocide in Rwanda. Indeed the Canadian court paid a visit to Rwanda to take the man’s testimony on death row. No reports are made of executions having occurred, but how surprising would it be? Usually the story is astonishing for the amount of forgiveness being displayed. Forgiveness is not always there, but that it is there at all, this is astonishing.
This level of acceptance is surreal to most sensibilities, yet, as the report on Eugenia showed, people pick up their lives in Rwanda and often go forward in lock step with the perpetrators of atrocities. This Eugenia woman had spent 13 years since the 800,000 killings of a short few months undergoing little healing and no forgetting. The reporter noted, Rwanda has many people making peace with the conflict, but Eugenia spent days mainly in recollection of a brazen massacre of her children with machetes, her children calling to the Hutus they would “stop being Tutsis.”
In this case it was a life sentence in court for the perpetrator, however, killers after sentencing these Hutus have since been freed and they return home. This level of madness, nevertheless, calls upon the prevailing authority to permutate into an organization to deliver redress in society. Once a week, the CBC reported, across Rwanda, the “‘Gachatcha’ reconciliation program” takes over the country and citizens fall into gatherings to tell stories and give descriptions of the suffering. The reporter suggested Eugenia had been a frightened survivor and today the fear continues, because she is struggling to deal with serial Killer Eric Kasamarandi living nearby.
His explanation, after all the apologies for callously hacking her children to death on her lap, “We were driven to kill by Invisible enemies that invaded our souls.” Returning to proceedings against Desire Munyaneza, a Quebec Superior Court opened the first-ever War Crimes trial in Canada, Mar 31 07.
Identities will remain concealed from public in Canada and the world because people in Rwanda, SURPRISE, still live with the threat of unexpected death. Witnesses in the Canadian court are ID’d in court by alphanumeric designation to protect them upon their return to Rwanda) and bear horrifying testimony that is practically too much for civilized ears. Many of the testimonies are of things never heard in Canadian courts. Witness C15 said she and others took refuge at their local government office, “hoping for a quicker death by bullets, rather than being hacked to death by machetes.”
Munyaneza, 40, is faced with seven counts of ‘crimes against humanity’ (under new Canadian law) including rape, murder, and pillaging. Munyaneza arrived in Canada from Africa in 1997 and RCMP began investigating him in 1999. He was arrested in Etobicoke, Ontario, in 2005 (CanWest News Service, Mar 30 07) The trial resumes in Sep ’07. [Rwanda: When using machetes it takes 100 days to kill 800 thousand people — an important calculation made by somebody close to the machete procurement office. Genocide trials are what the CIA, chief apologist for the Military Industrial Complex, calls BLOWBACK.
