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Jim Cowan

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Rwanda is a beautiful country

I found it hard to believe that some of the people I met must have participated in the 1994 genocide, hacking Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus to death with machetes. Men, women and children hacking and being hacked until 800,000 people were killed in 100 days. It says something about humanity to acknowledge that even in poor Rwanda, where running water is an almost unaffordable luxury, ordinary people were able to execute the most efficient, fastest genocide in the history of the world.

Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC meet at the top of this mountain. Tutsi refugees from previous killings fled into Uganda, the DRC and Tanzania during the second half of the twentieth century, some of them over these mountains. In 1994 the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), a highly-disciplined army of refugees led by Paul Kagame, invaded from Uganda and ended the genocide. Kagame is now the President of Rwanda. He is also probably the most talented military and political leader alive today. The story of his disciplined army stopping the genocide while the rest of the world stood aside, and then closing the refugee camps where the genocidaires fled to and were protected by the rest of the world as refugees when they were really murderers fleeing from justice, is worth reading.

I've read a lot about the genocide - I thought that understanding it would shed some light on why people behave in this way - but what I learned was that the behavior was a product of colonialism, and when the UN, at the behest of powerful governments, failed to stop the genocide, goverments' and individuals' moral failure compounded a human tragedy.

The most compelling books I've read are:

The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Bill Berkeley. An account of brutal governments in post-colonial Africa and how and why the world lets them get away with murder, rape and other brutalities, sowing the seeds for the Rwandan genocide.

Shake Hands with the Devil: Romeo Dallaire. The Canadian general commanding the UN mission in Rwanda details how the UN leadership and Security Council members failed to act to prevent the genocide.

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Phillip Gourevitch. Stories of ordinary Rwandans caught up in the genocide, and interviews with some who participated in the genocide. This is the best account of the failure of the world to prevent the genocide and while supporting and later protecting the genocidaires of the interahamwe.

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