A Horror To Remember: A Rwanda Travelogue

During my visit today to ?No Pasarn!, a link in their blogroll caught my eye. 100 Days of Rwanda seeks to document that dark stain on modern history. The author describes the project:

April 04, 2004
100 Days of Rwanda Project

On April 6, 1994, ten years ago this week, the small African nation of Rwanda began a journey down one of the darkest roads in human history, when the death of its president sparked the start of a virulent genocide that claimed over 800,000 lives... while the world stood by and watched.

Frontline aired an excellent program last week about the indifference shown to Rwanda by the Clinton Administration and by the United Nations, among others, and the efforts of other Westerners to try and save lives. (Alison Des Forges' Leave None to Tell the Story, Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You..., and Romeo Dallaire's recent book Shake Hands with the Devil are all also out there and are invaluable resources.) The genocide in Rwanda lasted "only" 100 days. Three months where an average of 8,000 Rwandans were killed every day. It's occurred to me that one way to attempt to begin to understand, in a small way, the un-understandable, is to at least experience 100 days of being conscious of Rwanda, of what happened there, over the same stretch of time that it took hundreds of thousands of people to die.

We talk about "blogging" as a sort of ongoing thing... but it can also be an act, a finite effort with a beginning and end. I thought of creating a blog called 100 Days of Rwanda, where I would set out to present links to stuff (historical and present-day) about this country that Americans still don't know much about, and about what happened there ten years ago. It would be a learning process for myself, at the very least.

In the next 100 days I hope to learn a lot more about Rwandans of all backgrounds and their ongoing story. I encourage people to also remember Rwanda in their blogs and .sigs this spring. Further commentary on this project is posted at my personal blog.

July 14, 2004
Personal note:

The "100 Days" is a somewhat arbitrary period, but it is the most commonly cited approximate time period for the catastrophe known as the Rwandan genocide.

When I started this project, I wondered if the experience of digesting the Rwandan genocide and civil war in "real time" chunks (at least, day by day) over the same period of time that it unfolded, would provide some sort of added insight.

It's been a long three months, but it seemed to go by fast, until I sat there the other night and tried to remember everything I'd written down since April 6 and all the various emotional reactions I had. I would have to say that the single thing that affected me the most emotionally was what occurred at Benebekira convent on Day 25. But there were many other things I learned that will stand out in my mind about what happened in Rwanda.

It is a far more intimate view of the genocide than much of what I have encountered elsewhere. Excerpt July 06, 2004

In the village of Ruganda, the New York Times reported, sympathetic Hutu families were still hiding Tutsi from officials.

Despite the ferocity of the propaganda and the violence, bonds of loyalty and friendship have survived among Hutu and Tutsi. Here in Ruganda, one Hutu family has been harboring Tutsi since April -- 30 at first, now 8, mostly children whose parents were killed. "I had no problems with Tutsi; they were my neighbors, and I am a Christian," said Anne-Marie Mukarukaka, 31, a court stenographer. Other Hutu in Ruganda know that Tutsi are hiding in Mrs. Mukarukaka's house, but they have not betrayed them. Mrs. Mukarukaka has even informed the village authorities, who are all Hutu. For these villagers, being a Hutu or a Tutsi never really mattered.

This is a large project and will take some time to read. It seems to be well documented. I have concluded that the author is a Democrat from a cursory look at the personal blog, but the author doesn't seem to be an apologist for the Clinton administration or the United Nations.

"Lest we forget" would be a good summary. I do fear, however, that someone will probably be doing a similar project on the genocide in the Sudan at some time in the future. At this point I don't see much evidence to the contrary.