#SharetheJourney – Redeeming Tragedy
This and the photos below are by Wendy Karr Johnson of our visit to the Kigali Genocide Memorial
Facing humankind’s inhumanity is daunting. Yet you have come this far and I encourage you to stick with me a few moments to share a tragedy as large as any in history as we seek to learn from it. For failure to remember the great tragedies in our history could doom us to repeating the cycle. And for the group of pilgrims on the Episcopal Migration Ministries pilgrimage now underway in Kenya and Rwanda, the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 was ground zero for a series of events that would engulf the heart of the African continent. Yes the events of this hundred days came out of an ongoing history dating back to at least Rwandan colonization by Germany in 1895, but something turned in 1895 to bring in many nations.
Earlier this week, our Pilgrimage visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial where a tour guide took us through exhibits documenting the genocide in context of Rwandan history with photos and some videos. This straightforward telling of the genocide was quite devastating in its own right.
On April 6, 1994, persons unknown at the time shot down an airplane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira as it approached landing in Kigali. Everyone on the plane died. This news made hardly a ripple in our country, but in Rwanda, the Hutu Power movement used the incident to incite the broad scale mass killing of those identified as Tutsi and those who sympathized with them. Over the next roughly 100 days, members of the Army, police, militias and armed civilians killed more than a million people, often with machetes and clubs. Infants and children were also killed as brutally as adults. Rape and torture were also part of the frenzied killing. Nearly twenty percent of Rwanda’s total population and roughly seventy percent of the Tutsi then living in Rwanda died. The genocide had been planned and prepared for by the nation’s political elite.
I knew from my own reading of the book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. The title comes from a letter to the president of a church association by Tutsi pastors. The denomination president was later convicted of aiding in the next day’s killings of those church members. As the genocide memorial painfully shows, he was not the only religious leader using the sanctuary offered by a church to lure members to their deaths.
The details of the Rwandan Genocide would be terrible enough, but we know too of German atrocities against the Jews and others, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and genocides in Guatemala and Bosnia in more recent decades. None of us can make this a problem faced by others. In fact, naming people as other is the first step in the slide toward such atrocities. For when we name another human other, then we begin to blame the problems we face on that group, we will tend to dehumanize them and then we have seen time and again how inhumanity follows.
The Genocide memorial included a room with photos of several thousand of the 250,000 victims buried just there in 14 mass graves. There was another room with additional skulls and bones of victims and a third with the stained and damaged clothes from around the capital city. Finally an exhibit had large photos of children shown in life. Beneath was a plaque giving the child’s name, age at time of death, favorite food, favorite activity, sometimes last words and always how the child was killed. This amplified the impact of all that came before. And just as my own tendency to want some old fashioned smiting, there were quoted from survivors. I found it hard to read through tears the words of a young man who was praying for vengeance from God and his mother told him not to do this. She told him he was to forgive, even if they killed her. These words were uttered as the genocide continued. I am not worthy so much as to carry that woman’s sandals.
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While I believe that earthly justice is needed and those who planned and promoted the killing should rightly have faced criminal proceedings, I could also see the benefit of the communal approach taken for most of the cases where perpetrators told their stories, usually while giving the hidden location of some they killed so to offer closure to families seeking to bury their dead. In so doing, many were able to find a path toward healing.
Forgiveness is an issue we al face. Seeing such forgiveness offered in response to seemingly unforgivable acts is humbling. This was not the only response and the fleeing Genocidaires were to lead to destabilization of neighboring Zaire, which further led to a war involving Uganda, Rwanda, Congo, Angola, and other nations led to many hundreds of thousands more deaths and much more rape and torture in the process. So while it is hard to imagine such powerful forgiveness as embodied by the woman warning her son to pray not for vengeance, but forgiveness, we can readily see how bad the situation gets when we insist on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
We concluded our visit by laying flowers on one of the mass graves and then walking amid the beautiful gardens on the grounds of a site dedicated to preserving the story of one example of the worst of human cruelty. It was a small act. Yet, if the whole world could continually remember with small acts the loss created by our indifference and cruelty, then we could begin the much harder task of redeeming tragedy. For we can not take away the immense suffering that has occurred, but we can work toward redeeming it.
Frank
For more on our own personal forgiveness, see my:
Forgiveness Means Forgetting and Other Myths
and
How Much Sin Is Too Much to Forgive?
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