Rwanda: The Beauty and the Horror

For an internship with the United Nations ICTR, one is paid with the following: your ID badge, a certificate saying “Thanks”, a stellar reference letter if you have a gorgeous, gregarious and wonderful supervisor (hint, hint Maggie and Chiara) and the outside chance of hitching a free ride on the UN plane that runs to Kigali, Rwanda twice-weekly.

At least, in theory, it runs twice weekly. First, there must be a real reason – usually a witness being brought to the tribunal to testify or being taken home afterwards. For an intern to get on, there must be additional seats. An intern finds out about additional seats approximately 12 hours before take-off, and so needs to have applied “just in case” on a weekly basis. Add to that the cost of oil, plane repairs and general UNism, and the approximate odds of getting a plane ride to Rwanda and back are about that of Bobby Clarke winning a Nobe peace prize.

Somehow, I managed to get both. Thus it was that on Friday morning past, along with Lindsey (USA), Andrea (Canada), Kaisu (Finland) and Matthjis (Netherlands), I found myself at Kilimanjaro Airport, boarding the UN Beechcraft plane, en route to Rwanda. After reading about, watching movies on, drafting legal opinions for and generally being fascinated by the country, I was going to see it first hand.

I’ll let you know now – in Rwanda, it’s impossible to separate the marvelous from the macabre, the beauty from the horror. A small country – about half the size of Scotland – managed to have a million people slaughtered over the course of about 100 days. This is not easy to forget. Thus, this post is written in the same way – mixing the wonderful with the terrible and the tragic with the terrific. Such is life in Rwanda now.

The trip started great – the view of Mts. Meru and Kilimanjaro from the plane window was fantastic. Admittedly, this may have been because we actually gave Meru a haircut and complimentary shave with our right wingtip. Once we stopped marvelling at the daring-do of our pilots, who don’t worry about such small landscape features as “mountains”, we enjoyed the rest of our flight eastwards to the capital. Well… Lindsey et al. did. I passed out in my chair and drooled enough liquid to sustain the elephant population of Kenya.

Adding to the intrigue of the flight in was the fact that Bocar – the ICTR Chief of Press – had given me an envelope containing US hundred dollar bills to be given to a mysterios ‘Mitesh’, with no reason given. Sure, the prospect of carrying foreign money into Rwanda for an unknown purpose may SEEM sketchy, but if you can’t trust the UN… who can you trust?

We arrived at security, where the Canadian and American passports were whisked through quickly – and for free (thank you, Romeo Dallaire!) – and then spent a nervous 10 minutes while Kaisu and Matthjis begged, cajoled and pleaded their way through… despite not having all the required documentation. They perservered, mostly on smiles, and were let into Rwanda. For Kaisu, sadly, the good news took a brief downturn when she found out she couldn’t get the UN plane back to Tanzania since there would be a protected defence witness on it… and as a member of the prosecution team, she was out of luck.

With that, we were off. Lunch in Kigali was had at the Hotel des Mille Collines – Rwanda is known as the land of a thousand hills – best to known to most people as hosting Don Cheadle and Nick Nolte. It – and its hotellier – did serve as a save haven and place of compassion during the genocide, protecting hundreds of Tutsi Rwandans from slaughter.

We wouldn’t be sleeping there, however. Our offer of 100 Rwandan Francs (about 20 US cents) and a bottle cap was apparently not quite enough to cover the $200US price tag a room merited. Thus – get we to a nunnery! For the much more reasonable price of 6000 Rwf, Matthijs and I were able to share a room with two beds in a convent behind the Eglise de St. Famille – another place where Tutsis had sought refuge, though with far more tragic result. The pastor at the time, it seems, had been in collaboration with the Interahamwe – the militant wing of the party to which the genocidaires belonged, and handed over the Tutsis who had been in the church.

The afternoon was spent wandering the halls of the genocide memorial in Kigali, reading the stories of genocide survivors… and more difficult, the stories of those who perished. The Hall of Lost Tomorrows, where 15 or so children’s demise is documented with pictures is especially hard to get through without emotion. One kid – who was around 11 at the time of genocide, so would have been 25 now, was basically my twin: he liked sports, chips (fries) and Tropical Fanta… the only difference was that I was in Canada bemoaning a baseball strike, and he was killed after watching his mother die.

The evening was much more light-hearted, as we went to an expat bar called La Republika. Highlights included me spending 10 minutes trying to determine which bathroom was male and which was female from the carved figures, commenting on the total lack of morals of the three 50+ white businessmen who had picked up 23 and under Rwanda “ladies of negotiable affection” and enjoying the view over the rolling hills of Rwanda.

The next morning, after waking up with the sun, showering, and towelling off with the previous day’s t-shirt in lieu of the neatly folded towel sitting on my bed in Arusha, we all went our separate ways. Lindsey, who had previously lived in Kigali and had different priorities, went to one of the swanky hotels to hang out by the pool. Kaisu and Andrea took a taxi out to two memorial-site churches in villages about 25km out of town. Matthijs and I, on the other hand, wandered around Kigali by foot looking for the Natural History Museum (there was a geocache there) and then stumbling upon the Kigali prison. All of the genocide prisoners – mostly people who murdered or raped, but didn’t plan the genocide – are clothed in bright pink prison suits and set to work around the city. From the vantage point of the road alongside the prison, Matthjis and I were able to see prisoners – looking kind of like the Pink Panther – working away. The fact that we saw around 150 was a somewhat unnerving thought, though not as unnerving as the idea that many people will be already out of prison, or will have escaped justice altogether. It makes you look at the person beside you on the sidewalk a little differently. (That said, Kigali is infinitely safer than Arusha – I never once felt even slgihtly threatened. It was orderly, clean and friendly – and my French went a long way to ensuring my safe and convienient travels. To the long suffering Mmes. Schnarr and Wakeford, a belated – but heartcfelt – merci beaucoup.)

Kigali is built on three separate major hills, along with a number of smaller hills in the outlying areas. To get from A to B and back again, the best method is to take a motor-cycle taxi. These are, effectively, biwheeled death machines, that zip in and out traffic like electrons in a particle accelerator. The best part is that a ride across town costs about 500 Rwf – $1US – and is done in a manner that provides you with perspective on how happy you are to be alive. Part of this comes from the adrenaline and the wind in your hair – the other part from the sweet relief of being back on the ground where the driver isn’t trying to shave .03 seconds off Andretti’s best time over 2km.

Part of the reason Kigali felt so safe was that there were very few street vendors trying to press antiques of dubious authenticity and “hand-carved” statutes that bore “Made in China” on the bottom. This is because the majority of the vendors, upon request of the government, upped stakes from the downtown and set up a permanent series of stalls on formerly-government property a little way from the downtown. The Caplaki Craft Community was a neat example of positive work by a government, since Matthijs and I both went to look around, and left a little lighter in the pocket than we’d arrived.

Since it was still early, Matthjis and I walked into one of the more ‘rural’ areas of urban Kigali – where the houses were basically four mudstone walls with a tin roof. Considering the sizable amount of children – and adults – our presence at a small local shop drew, they don’t get many white people in that part of Kigali. I held a digital photo-recorded “who can make the biggest mouth contest” – won handily by one young lad whose photo (not published here) clearly shows a lack of tonsilitis.

The plan for the evening was to catch a bus to Butare, in the south of Rwanda, but first things first: there was a FREE soccer game between the national teams of Rwanda and Burkina Faso being played at the stadium in Kigali. (This same stadium had both been a place for UN soldiers to be able to guard a relative handful of Tutsis from atrocity during the genocide, and a staging ground for anti-Tutsi speeches in the leadup to 1994.) The place was packed – and whenever Rwanda had a chance to score, was incredibly loud. Spectators who, for whatever reason, irked the police were escorted from the game, mostly through usage of billy-club and hard shoving. We, as the only white people in the entire stadium (seriously… there were 6 total whites among about 30 000 people, 5 of which were us) were away from the chaos. Kaisu – blonde and fair – drew more stares than would the Pope in a gimp costume during Toronto’s Pride Parade. The game ended in a 1-1 draw, eliminating Rwanda from African Cup qualifying, sadly. On the plus side, we all got to go bananas when Rwanda scored late in the first half.

We caught a bus to Butare immediately after the game – after a frantic search for a sketchy money-changer. We drove through the now-dark hills, with rain thundering down, and me – once again – sleeping away the transport. The lady beside me appreciated the fact I kept my mouth closed this time.

The main reason we had gone to Butare – now called Huye – was to visit the Muirambi Memorial Centre. Found at the site of a former technical school, 60 000 Tutsis had taken refuge on this hill when told they’d be safe there by the prefect of the region. He, naturally, airlifed in Interahamwe who slaughtered 50 000+ of the men, women and children. Their bodies were piled into mass graves (later the site of a French soldiers volleyball court! Always classy, the French army) and covered with powdered lime. The former classrooms of the technical school are now filled with wooden-slat tables, on each of which lie 10-12 bodies, disfigured by corrosive lime and still wearing a semblance of a look of pain from their death. There is nothing to prepare you for them – and nothing separates you from them. If you aren’t careful, it is very easy to get a foot caught in your belt loop. This is a very powerful place to be, and the silent immediacy of the bodies – frozen in their death throes – is terrible to behold. (Note: I have decided not to post the photos of the corpses that I was invited to take. While I think it appropriate that they be shared, so the horror can take hold, this is not the appropriate medium. – Rivers)

It was with admitted relief that we left the memorial and went back to Butare proper, to visit the National Museum and have lunch. Regardless, however, the images of the genocide – never truer than those rooms – will linger for a very long time.

We caught a bus back to Kigali after that, winding through endless hills, each one terraced for agriculture. The green of the plants mixed with the red of the soils and made the Garden of Eden look like a Chicago bar parking lot. (Also adding to that was the woman vomiting into her baby’s blanket beside me… only instead of being alcohol induced, the poor lady (and her baby) were suffering from malaria.) The interns once again split up. I made a last-second dash to the craft market, Kaisu waited for Matthijs (who’d split off from the main group to visit the site of the cases he’s working on) and Lindsey collected me to go to her swanky hotel (where she was happy to pay the $150US) for dinner. This is only notable in that my return to the convent featured a motorcycle taxi driver who had no idea where I wanted to go, and thus required ME to direct HIM through Kigali.

A few drinks on the hills of Rwanda, back to bed at the nunnery, a motorcycle ride to the UN in Kigali in the morning and my brief sojourn to Rwanda was over. The UN – and here I need to eat my former words – managed to get me safely to and from Rwanda on multiple forms of transport, making up a bit for their earlier incompetence. The people of Rwanda were friendly and obliging, and usually thrilled to see whites wandering around. The memorials were touching, powerful, tragic and unforgettable.

After having studied and worked on genocides for, basically, the last 3 years, you can begin to grow a little academic about the subject. Numbers, names, dates and trials all take on a formalistic, dry approach. The story of the kid who loved Tropical Fanta did a damn good job of humanizing the horror, and it’s for him – and the hundreds of thousands of others – that I went into work again today with renewed vigour.