April

I see him there, the Torso Man, propped in a wheelchair in the grass along the sidewalk. The first time I saw him I thought my eyes were deceiving me, that somehow my mind had erased his lower half. I occasionally see him on my walks during lunch, and I avert my gaze because it somehow seems gratuitous to look at him. How did this happen to him?

I see those gardeners pruning grass and bushes using machetes. I have seen it for 7 months now, and it still shocks me. No lawn mowers or real gardening clippers. Just machetes. I wonder how people can stand to see them and not be reminded of their painful past. Would it have been worthwhile to ban these things?

I see the house and sometimes wonder whether it was standing that year, and if it was, I wonder about the marks on the kitchen floor. How did all those chips in the tile get there?

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April 7th kicked off an official period of remembrance for Rwanda – a week without sports (hotel swimming pools were drained, gyms were closed, and soccer matches were banned) and merriment (bars and clubs were shuttered).

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100 days

The genocide lasted about that long in 1994, starting April 6 and ending in mid-July. In that time, nearly a million people were slaughtered.
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I have refrained from making commentary on the genocide in this space mostly because, as a muzungu and newcomer to this country, I don’t feel comfortable talking about something that I only first heard about from Anderson Cooper reporting on Channel One during high school homeroom period.

So let me restrict my thoughts to the following: on the whole, I have been surprised by how seldom – on the surface – the people bear the outward marks of genocide. Naively perhaps, I came prepared to be continually jolted by the human scars of an unspeakable inhumanity.

Instead, I have met Rwandans who are rather stoic and reticent about the divisions that caused the bloody rift in their nation… As a muzungu, I am not privy to the nuances in relationships among Rwandans themselves, and though I have the overwhelming sense that the country is moving forward, I hear little and big things that make me think that the wound is still quite raw.

The little things…

The email had the form-letter air of most company-wide notices:

“Earth Station informs all RWANDATEL Staff the death of one staff member, THEOPHILE GATARE, happened last night in a moto accident at Kanombe around 20:00.”

The news it brought sudden and sad.

Even though I had never met Mr. Gatare, I felt a palpable sense of loss as a junior member of the Rwandatel community.

But unbelievably, the story would become much worse. Far more scandalous, in fact.

Apparently his death was no accident.

The car that struck down Mr. Gatare was driven by the Executive Secretary of the Kigali City Council, Mr. Peter Uwimana.

http://www.newtimes.co.rw/index.php?issue=13460&article=4640

Allegedly, Mr. Uwimana may have intentionally targeted Mr. Gatare because Mr. Gatare testified against one of Mr. Uwimana’s close family relatives in a Gacaca court.

“Meanwhile some furious family members have alleged that there might have been intentions of killing Gatare in a purported road accident because he testified as a witness in a Gacaca court against a close relative to Uwimana.”

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Gacaca (“gah-CHA-cha”)
(wikipedia.org)

The Gacaca Court is part of a system of community justice inspired by tradition and established in 2001 in Rwanda, in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. After the Genocide, the new government struggled with developing just means for the humane detention and prosecution of the more than 100,000 people accused of genocide, war crimes, and related crimes against humanity. By 2000, approximately 120,000 alleged genocidaires were crammed into Rwanda’s prisons and communal jails.

From December 1996 to December 2006, the courts managed to try about 10,000 suspects: at that rate it would take another 110 years to prosecute all the prisoners. To speed things up, some prisoners were released: In two rounds in 2004 and 2005 about 50,000 prisoners were released. Just recently (January 2007) it has been decided to release another 8000 prisoners.

However, the courts needed a more expeditious means of delivering justice. In response, Rwanda implemented the Gacaca court system, which has evolved from traditional cultural communal law enforcement procedures. However, the system has come under criticism from a number of sources, including the Survivors Fund, which represents survivors of the genocide, due to the danger that it poses to survivors. There has been a number of reports about survivors being targeted for giving evidence at the courts.

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So Mr. Gatare, after surviving the genocide and losing his wife and 4 children, perished tragically in a seemingly senseless act of revenge, leaving behind his new wife and 3 children.

Incomprehensible, really.

The big things…

Just last Thursday, during the week of remembrance, someone threw a grenade into the Genocide Memorial (an impressive museum and tribute) grounds, killing a police officer and wounding another…

http://www.newtimes.co.rw/index.php?issue=13498&article=5519

That same day, someone drove his car into a procession of students leaving a memorial service, killing one student and injuring a handful more. The report mentioned that the driver did not have a driver’s license, but the whispers among people suggest that the driver did it on purpose…

http://www.newtimes.co.rw/index.php?issue=13498&article=5521