Rwanda

November 1st, 2007

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

Over the past two days I have visited the graves of 255,000 people.

Rwanda. Land of a thousand hills – and it’s true. The landscape here is lush and green, with tea farms carved into the hillsides and Dr. Suess – puff top trees dotting the countryside. The roads wind and weave through the hills and valleys, and I’m reminded of the winding back roads of Missouri, Shepherd and Strecker, and of learning to drive on them while dodging deer in my headlights. This country is nothing short of absolutely beautiful: tea farms carved into hillsides, gentle pastoralists herding their cattle across a valley, and green green green everywhere. Kigali, too, is a wonderful city, with clean, paved roads and drainage systems for the rain. The boda-boda motorbikes even have helmets for both themselves and their passengers!

Yet underneath the veneer of a modern, shining city on a Hill, with French and English and native languages being thrown around casually, there lies a very dark and truly hideous past just under the red clay soil.

We visited the Genocide Museum on our first day there, and then on the second, we visited two of the churches that served as sites of massacres of Tutsis by Hutus in those one hundred unfathomable days of 1994.

Things I can not forget: a picture of a baby on a blanket, with a caption saying he was bludgeoned to death. Walking into a mass grave and seeing no fewer than five hundred skulls surrounding me. Blood stains on the walls of the churches.

We learned while we were at the first church, the one where 5,000 people were slaughtered (men, women, children, infants) that it was only this past March when Rwanda actually cleaned up the site of the massacre – before then, they had let the dead lie in the church exactly as they were found at the end of the genocide, exactly how their slaughterers had left them.

It is horrific.

The churches are turned into tombs, and Rwanda does not bury her dead. She leaves their flesh to carrion because there can be no reconciliation on this earth for this. There can be no going back. Rwanda leaves her dead unburied so that the world can see her bowels ripped out, may see the fields of white skeletons, their arms still reaching out, yearning, for the help that would not come. A sacrilegious snapshot of the unthinkable.

The dead cannot be buried for there will never be peace for them. The years will pass, the people will mourn, the courts will convict and sentence and the world will apologize, but for these souls there can never be peace. There will never be rest. They were victims of one of the most heinous acts of all of human history. They were cut down in sanctuary; their infants were smashed against the Stations of the Cross. Pregnant mothers were raped in front of their children; fathers forced to slay their daughters and sons. There can be no going back. There are some horrors that can never be undone, and some evil that, once loosed upon the world , can never be put back. We may challenge it, we may fight it back, but unholy War yet sits on her ferocious weapons, bound behind her back with a hundred knots of brass; she groans horribly with bloody lips.

There are no words in any language or in any age to begin to describe the atrocities of any genocide, including the one here in Rwanda. It is the ultimate sin, for its perpetrators deemed to believe that their fellow human beings were less than human, were not their brothers and sisters and flesh and blood. It is unspeakable; it is horrific; it is apocalypse and Hell.

O, on what a thin string our humanity hangs. How tenuous is our civilization, how fragile are our city walls. In Rwanda, humanity failed. Chaos reigned for one hundred hot days under the African sun, and the world watched with detached curiosity as a country devoured itself with cormorant ferocity.

Evil, too, is when good men do nothing. The world failed Rwanda. Atrocities such as these – genocides, ethnic cleansings, massive refugee creations – simply cannot occur without either the explicit or implicit consent of the community as a whole. In this age, that community now means the world at large. It means the implicit consent of Europe, of the UN, of America. Whether we like it or not, our parents’ generation and their leaders have blood on their hands as well. One of the things that I learned in the museum was that the military forced used to evacuate the American and Europeans embassies would have been more than enough to put down the genocide.

The sins of the fathers will always be visited upon the sons. You break one of man’s laws, you go to jail. But you cannot break God’s laws. All one need to do is look at race relations in America a hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery and see how we’ll we’re doing to figure that one out. You can not, as a civilization, enslave, subjugate, colonize and exploit another civilization without there being horrific consequences down the line for both parties. The categories of Hutu and Tutsi barely existed on the ground in Rwanda until the race-crazy 19^th-century Belgians came and put everyone into groups. And now, there are entire families and villages simply wiped off the face of the map in Rwanda. They remain nameless because no one was left alive to identify their remains.

What peace on earth can we possibly bring for this?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

 

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