Rwandan genocide anniversary: reflecting on the lives of survivors 20 years on

Updated April 08, 2014 13:01:57

It has been 20 years since the Rwanda genocide began, killing 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu people in a 100-day slaughter. Former ABC Africa correspondent Ginny Stein reflects on the lives of the survivors left behind to rebuild and remember.

I don't know his name. He probably told me the day we met, walking up to me in that nondescript cemetery on a hill just outside Rwanda's capital Kigali, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was.

What I do remember was his gentleness and the story he told me.

I saw him first in the distance, then watched as he walked towards me quietly. For a while he watched as I filmed.

I had been lost in the row after row of simple wooden markers. Some bearing names and dates, other not. Some jumbled and ragged, others not.

Here lay possibly hundreds of people, a tiny fraction of those slaughtered in the 100 days of madness that claimed the lives of 800,000 Rwandans 20 years ago.

Now, as I read the stories that are starting to emerge on the 20th anniversary of that slaughter, of the awfulness and the quiet heroes of that time - and there were many - my mind keeps going back to that young man.

On that day, eight years ago, he walked up to me wanting to know if I was OK. 

Rwanda at this time was still a scary place. I was a woman on my own, a foreigner, of which there were few at that time, filming in a cemetery where his parents and his siblings lay.

Factbox: 1994 Rwandan genocide

  • Started by Rwanda's Hutu-led government and ethnic militias
  • Began on April 7, 1994 and continued for 100 days
  • 800,000 minority Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu people were killed
  • Tutsi rebels seized power in July 1994, ending the genocide
  • International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted a number of political, police and religious figures involved in the killings

But he also wanted to make sure I knew what had happened here. He wanted someone to know his story and that of his family.

He told me how he had survived - hiding under a sea of dead bodies, a small child missed amid the slaughter. Not much more was said. Really, that was enough.

He was now a student. He was lucky, someone had claimed him as their own. They weren't related, but they were now, by history, by the blood of the past.

Back then, Rwanda was a very different place than it is today.

At that time the wounds of many were still very raw. Deep, deep pain may have been dulled by time, but it can never be erased.

I also remember a man whose name I can never forget. Gromo, as Gregory Alex was called by his friends, was an American who found himself in Rwanda at the worst of times and who came to call it his home.

He headed the UN's humanitarian assistance team during the genocide, delivering food and assistance to UN safe houses under constant gunfire.

He was a survivor, but one who like all survivors from that time would be forever scarred.

For years he fought to bring justice to those he worked alongside during that time. As did one of his best mates, Charles Petrie, who was working for the UN at that time, flying in and out of the country, trying to get the world to respond to a genocide no-one seemed to want to know about.

I remember standing alongside Gromo as he read out the names of UN staff killed during the genocide.

The vast majority, Rwandans, had been hunted down. It was a simple memorial within the UNDP compound in Kigali.

What made this hard for him to bear was knowing the role one man, a former colleague named Callixte Mbarushimana, had played in their deaths.

Together with Charles Petrie, they fought to make Mbarushimana and the UN, as his employer, accountable.

Five years later, I returned to that compound. The memorial was still there. It was a working day. The compound was busy with comings and goings. No-one paid a glance at the memorial, but I did.

Gromo died last year from cancer.

Petrie resigned from the UN after a long but ultimately failed battle to push the UN to pursue accountability within its ranks.

Mbarushimana was arrested and tried but the case against him did not proceed due to lack of evidence.

Gromo is remembered, and I remember the photos of the UN staff he showed me that day eight years ago of the colleagues he lost.

Florence Ngirumpaste and her family were among them. I never knew them, but through him I felt like I did. Their photos remain vividly etched in my mind.

You are all remembered, and so too the boy whose name I do not know.

Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, death, crime, murder-and-manslaughter, rwanda

First posted April 07, 2014 11:47:45