REMEMBERING GENOCIDE:

REMEMBERING GENOCIDE: Early April 1994 was the time when that year’s terrible genocide in Rwanda was started. It then continued for a further 100 days, in the course of which around a million of the country’s seven million people were killed. In a very hands-on way.
Every year recently, inside Rwanda, the government has devoted the first week of April to genocide remembrance, and the observation of this solemn commemoration has started to spread a little outside the country.
I’m here in Arusha, Tanzania, the city where the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which was the UN’s main (ex post facto) response to the Rwandan genocide. Friends who work at the ICTR note that April 7– the day when the commemorations inside Rwanda come to a peak– passed in the Court with no word about it being uttered by the various international judges and lawyers who work busily there, developing the “professional field” of international criminal law with what sometimes seems like scant heed being paid to the actual who were affected by the genocide.
But this evening, a local, mainly-Rwandan church had organized a commemorative service– and the guest/speaker of honor was Adama Dieng, the Registrar of the ICTR, which was a lovely gesture, much appreciated by the other participants.
The commemoration turned out, actually, to be mainly a very Pentecostal-style chuservice, with lots of great singing and clapping. I had seen and participated in several such services when I was in Rwanda last year. The evangelical Christians seem to have made hundreds of thousands– maybe millions– of serious converts in the country, after the Catholic hierarchy was so compromised by its involvement w/ the genocide.
Anyway, many of the evangelical-style modes of worship seem to have a strongly healing, cathartic effect on people whose whole universe was torn apart by the genocide. Inside Rwanda, in many congregations, Tutsis and Hutus worship and work alongside each other in such churches. (And that includes inside the local Quaker “churches”, which is what they call them there: Eglises des Amis.)
Our commemoration here was held in a cavernously vast, ill-lit barn of a church building. One of the people I was with said that the joyful singing seemed a bit out of place on such an occasion. But I think it was really more the way these people– many, many of them direct survivors of the genocide– have chosen to reconstruct some meaning in their lives. There were, anyway, some solemn words from a pastor– who reassured people that though things may have seemed bleak, “at least God knows what’s going on.” Also that what had happened, “had exposed the continued workings of evil in the world.”
The bulk of the day before that, I had spent at the ICTR, watching highly paid international lawyers quibble over tiny sub-details in an extremely complex case. I was reminded, of course, of the comments made by both Rebecca West, at Nuremburg, and by Hannah Arendt, during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, that such trials dealing with major atrocity can easily end up being extremely legalistic, not to mention just plain boring.
Apparently, though, I’d arrived at a “good” day, drama-wise, in the trial of some of the media people involved in whipping up race-hate in Rwanda. On the witness stand was a well-known Rwandan radio announcer called Valerie Beremiki who was appearing as a witness for the defense of an accused radio-company official The wrinkle here being that Valerie herself is on trial inside the Rwandan justice system, where as a top suspect she may well be subject to the death penalty. So the South African judge was every so often at pains to remind the very robust cross-examining lawyer that Valeries had good reason to avoid self-incrimination…
Anyway, more on the court later. I haven’t seen much of Arusha, though it seems like a great place. I came in through Kilimanjaro International Airport, drove past the mountain to get here, and noted a number of Masai young men riding around on bikes in their beautiful red cloaks, bearing their herding sticks crosswise across the handle-bars…