Cows got thinner and thinner the closer we got to Nakivale. More kids have runny noses; fewer houses are made of concrete. They are made of mud and sticks and have tarps for roofs, weighed down with more sticks to prevent them from blowing away or collapsing during the rainy season.
I sat next to a man named Oliver on the way to the camp. He is a lawyer, a Rwandese refugee, a Hutu living in the camp with thousands of other Hutus, who claim they are innocent of the genocide crimes many are accused of committing.
Oliver told me his side of the story, which began with the “real” facts: 50,000 Tutsis, at most, were killed in the 100 days of genocide (80,000 by most counts, 1 million according to Rwandans). No more could have been killed; there were so few! So many had fled Rwanda long before 1994… although there were no massacres before the 1994 genocide; apparently the Tutsis had other reasons to flee their country.
See, genocide wasn’t planned; even the radio programs just “incited hatred,” but never promoted killings. Hutus are simply naturally “brutal,” and they loved their president (who, he claimed, was killed by the RPF), so they, actually only a few, according to Oliver, picked up their machetes and started killing when their president was assassinated.
Hutus are also naturally merciful, so many tried to hide or save the Tutsis, as Oliver did (of course!) during those three months. But Tutsis are ruthless. When the revenge killings began, no Tutsi tried to save a Hutu. So the real tragedy is the 1.5 million Hutus that were killed after the genocide (the figure from most sources is 25-40 thousand, most killed when the RPF was still trying to stop the killing).
The people sitting in the camps – most are innocent. And they want the guilty ones to be punished, of course. But the gacaca courts in Rwanda punish the innocent and free the guilty (makes total sense for Rwandans to free those who killed their families and friends..)! If there is no evidence other than one witness’ testimony, a man must be acquitted; if there are no survivors from a killing, a man must be acquitted. SO the innocent people in the camps cannot go back to Rwanda.
Reconciliation is not actually happening in Rwanda. People simply say it is because the government, under the new divisionism/genocide ideology law, will put them in prison if they say anything different. Tutsis are teaching their children to hate Hutus, pointing them out on the playground, and taking them to memorials (memorials! God forbid!), while Hutus in the camp are doing the “right” thing: not teaching their children anything about ethnicity or the genocide.
Oh, and the bones in Murambi are not Tutsi bones. They’re Hutu bones that Tutsis dug up from graves to make the genocide seem worse than it really was. (I suppose the scars on survivors’ faces, the missing limbs are made up too?)
They appreciate what Kagame has done for Kigali’s economic development. But still, the only barrier to reconciliation, the only problem for Rwanda, is Kagame. Because they have proven that the democratic process is impossible in Rwanda (Evidence: Kagame, a Tutsi, won), they must “prove him wrong militarily.” The armies in the DRC and Burundi etc. have more weapons than you can imagine, and they will act very soon, Oliver said with a chuckle. The grenades in Kigali were too militarily weak to be the rebels’ work. They were the government’s ploy to scare people into letting the government squash anything resembling opposition in these months before the elections.
The scariest part about this conversation was not the BLATENT rejection of everything I’ve learned in the past month; it was that some of his story might actually be true. What if the grenades were the government’s doing? Everything about the genocide itself was false, but I don’t have a clue as to what is true about the current regime… for all I know, Oliver’s story that Kagame had police beat his parents when they were searching for him could be true! For all I know, Ingabire’s associate (Ingabire is the opposition candidate, her associate was accused of genocide recently) was in Sweden in 1994, like Oliver said, and the government is using anything it can to reduce her influence.
NO IDEA what to believe about that, but I do know that those bones in Murambi, those survivors I saw, were real. It was beyond disrespectful to say that they weren’t… beyond disrespectful to say that there were no killings in 1959, the year my Tutsi family fled to Uganda and stayed for 35 years.
It’s interesting that Tutsis were in the same spot in 1990. Refugees with nothing to do, no country to call home until they mobilized the RPF and invaded Rwanda that year. Now these refugees say they will do the very same thing…
i lived there
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