Horror and hope.

This is my story, the story of a young girl, who, once in her life, saw hell.

I am not the only one, we are thousands upon thousands, for whom life has been broken by human madness. I am writing, to let the world know what happened in this small heart of Africa.

I come from a modest family of four children. My mother was an office secretary and my father a businessman. When the genocide began, I was 14 years old and in the second year of my secondary school.

The genocide was sheer horror. All the Tutsi families were hunted down, and mine were not spared. Every one of my immediate family members were killed, including my grandparents, and even the baby sitter who worked for us. Tutsis were hunted in the streets, in the swamps, and all over the hills. They were killed by machetes, or shot. And finally their houses were plundered and burned.

When the genocide begun I was taken with my aunt, uncle and their two children, together with other refugees, to a Belgian Red Cross centre. A week later, someone warned my uncle that the militia were planning to kill him. When they came, my aunt and the two kids weren’t there. It was just my uncle and me out in the bush. We were returning home when four men with machetes called us. They told my uncle that he knew why they had to kill him, and then they began to attack him with their machetes. He pleaded with the militia not to kill me, telling them that I was the daughter of a neighbour. The men told me to run and rejoin others at the Red Cross Centre. And then they hacked him to death with their machetes.

It is difficult to me to express what I felt at that moment. My heart and my head were empty. Today, I feel a big sadness – my uncle was a good man, and he did not deserve such an atrocious death.

I made it safely to the refugee centre and I escaped the massacre because a Catholic priest helped my aunt, myself and her two children to run away.

I was still young when I lost my parents and it hasn’t been easy to continue life without them. It’s not that easy to survive alone when you’re just 14 years old – to go to school and make a success of your studies when you have nobody to care about you and encourage you. But I had no choice, I had to carry on living – for me and for them. It is only that which helps me not to fail.

Today, almost 10 years later, my country has made astonishing progress in reconstructing itself. The country is secure, and poverty has been reduced. Many refugees are returning to the country. The administration, the schools and the hospitals work. We adopted a new constitution and we’ve come out of the transitional period ended by the presidential elections of last August. Many will say that the elections were not fair and transparent but I think, for the Rwandan community, what mattered most was to find a way to recover a normal political life, and to give the population a real hope of democracy.

But it’s not there yet! We can’t forget the thousands of people in prison charged with genocide. and it will take hundreds of years to process all the cases. I don’t have much faith in the International Penal Tribunal for Rwanda – many genocide survivors will agree with me that the tribunal is not making the efforts it should do. It looks to us as though they don’t know what genocide is, they haven’t seen anything, and it’s as if they are not taking it seriously.
The big challenge for Rwanda is the removal of the spectre of genocide. In spite of the impression the country tries to give, genocide and hatred still cast a long shadow. The Rwandan is a secret and discreet person and doesn’t come to the point easily. You can’t guess what he or she feels about you, just as in 1994 you were unable able to guess that your neighbour, friend or colleague could wake up one morning and decide to kill you.

In the same way, we can’t guess what will happen tomorrow. If we continue to keep silent, then we will continue to see arbitrary detentions and disappearances like those which took place just after the genocide or during the presidential elections, where people suspected of having a genocidal ideology were rounded up. There will be other injustices too.

I know that reconciliation is not simple – it demands many efforts from everybody. I chose to study journalism, in memory of what happened to my family and my country. I want to talk about it, and not to let the world forget. But it’s also important for me, personally – because when I can write and talk, it means that I’m alive.

The road is long, but I have faith that we will rise again, because I can see how much we have achieved already.

 Rwanda: The background
 DFID in Rwanda

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