All the Bourgmestre's Men: Making Sense of Genocide in Rwanda
1998; Indiana University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1527-1978
Autores Tópico(s)Global Peace and Security Dynamics
ResumoBy the time I arrived in Rwanda in early October 1994 as a UN human rights monitor, genocide had become a mundane element of daily life. The evidence was strewn across the landscape. In schools, churches, rural dispensaries, soccer fields, cassava fields, and on lonely hillsides, small heaps of bone-filled clothing and mummifying bodies testified to the massacres. The scale was enormous. I walked across sites so densely covered with bones that no matter where I walked, fastidiously stepping over the skulls and femurs, I was still treading on slivers of ribs and finger fragments. I walked in and out of silent houses that were open to the sky, the zinc roof panels having been peeled away by pillagers. Inside there were corpsesliterally families of bodies-of those who had once resided within. Even as late as December 1994, many bodies remained unburied, exposed to dogs and the seasonal rains. This was the human face of genocide: the loneliness of corpses lying face-up and open-mouthed in puddles of mud on living room floors. No longer was genocide for me an abstractiLn, an intellectual puzzle I could take on as a historical problem. And there was another face to the genocide, one with lips pursed in vengeful hate: the embittered survivor. In military fatigues, it was the determined face of the small boy-the only among his siblings-who now served as a kadogo, or boy-soldier.' His AK-47 strapped to his back, he served his officer with the wholehearted faithfulness and the no-holdsbarred viciousness of a traumatized orphan who sees his commander as a father-the only family left in his world. In civilian garb, genocide was the face of the government-recognized survivor (for not all survivors of the 1994 killings, which included Tutsi as well as Hutu opposed to the extremist faction of the Habyarimana government, are entitled to status; the label is ethnically exclusive and reserved for Tutsi). This would later denounce former neighbors, or even strangers, whose lives had not been shattered in the same way. The
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