All That Is Bitter and Sweet (62 page)

Set up by the Belgians and the Catholic Church, the Hutu majority took over Rwanda at independence, and some seven hundred thousand Tutsis fled to other countries to escape an eruption of ethnic cleansing that began in 1959. Still, more than a million Tutsi remained in Rwanda, some intermarried, and most lived in peace with their Hutu neighbors. In 1990, a Tutsi rebel army known as the Rwanda Patriotic Front invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda in order to force power sharing with the Hutu government. After years of fighting, the United Nations brokered a peace accord that would allow the Tutsi diaspora to return and establish a multi-party government. This enraged Hutu nationalists, who viewed the Tutsi as “cockroaches.” A fanatic Hutu propaganda machine had been whipping up paranoia and hatred of the Tutsi and their sympathizers. On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Rwanda’s president was shot down as it was landing in Kigali. Within an hour of the president’s assassination, the army and
Interahamwe
had set up roadblocks in Kigali, and an orgy of orchestrated mass murder began.

There is no part of Rwanda that was spared the rampage of
génocidaires
. Local militias had lists of the names and addresses of Tutsis and moderate Hutus, and they hunted them down and killed them with their bare hands in their homes and in places of sanctuary. It was intensely personal murder. The swing of a 50-cent Chinese machete once wasn’t enough; they were hacking and hacking, mutilating, annihilating, burying people alive among the dead, cutting tendons, and coming back later to finish the job.

Half a million women were raped during the genocide, with men who knew they were HIV-positive taking the lead. Many of the women later died of AIDS—a way of extending the killing spree for years. Children were made to murder their parents (and in the case of boys, rape their mothers and sisters), parents to murder their children, before they themselves were killed. As many as ten thousand people who had flocked to a church outside of Kigali for sanctuary were killed by grenades or hacked to death on once hallowed ground. It is unfathomable, yet it must be fathomed.

What is just as unbelievable is that the genocide could have been stopped within days with a modest intervention from outside troops. The general leading the UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda was begging for assistance, predicting what was coming, and saying how very little he needed to avert the murders. Instead, the UN drew down its forces, and member states refused to intervene in what was insanely branded a “civil war,” even as reports of the massacres were appearing in
The New York Times
and other world media. An American transport plane arrived early on to evacuate the U.S. embassy personnel; had it been carrying troops, they might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Instead, we—you, me, our government, the world—did nothing.

The killings stopped only when the Tutsi rebel army, led by Paul Kagame, who is now Rwanda’s president, resumed its invasion and took over the country. Hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees and
Interahamwe
escaped across the border into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where merciless armed militias are still creating havoc in that war-torn region.

As I moved slowly through the exhibits, I could feel my legs becoming heavier, almost immobilized. At times I was close to passing out, and I’d have to catch myself up and reconnect with my breath. I would feel pain so deep, the rest of the world ceased to exist and I would be swallowed entirely in it. Prayer did help as I was sucked inexorably further into the memorial. Whenever I started to lose my mind, I would begin to pray for the souls of the dead.
May you rest in peace. May you rest in peace
. One million and more times,
May you rest in peace
.

One of the round rooms of the exhibit had victims’ clothing suspended in midair by filament. The arrangement of the clothes uncannily suggested the posture of the body that had occupied them; the empty garments expressed surprise, violence, pitiful and useless self-defense. The clothes were all sizes, and I stood, weeping and haunted, in front of a child’s colorful sweater, filthy from where the body had lain in the muck. At that little child’s age, that would have been my favorite sweater, it was so cheerful. It reminded me of the rainbow painted on the entrance to the tunnel from Marin County to the Golden Gate Bridge, so optimistic! Next to it was a tattered Superman sheet. God have mercy on us all. Was the person sleeping and hacked to death in her bed? Had a wildly panicked mother grabbed the sheet to tie her youngster to her back so she could run from her rapists?

Another room had horizontal rows of filament to which survivors had pinned photographs of their loved ones. Rows, rows, and rows, images from family parties, official documents, snapshots of reluctant-looking elderly that perhaps an amateur family historian took to have for future generations. The exhibit was almost unbearable.
Murder, murder, murder
, it silently screams.

I paused at the memorial guest book. I couldn’t see the page for the tears blearing my sight. What did I say? How did I tell the survivors of such monstrosities anything consoling? How did one apologize to the dead? Feeling useless and incompetent, I wrote, “I am sorry, I am so sorry.”

Kofi Annan, head of the UN’s peacekeeping forces at the time, and other world leaders, including President Bill Clinton, have offered their apologies for failing to stop the genocide. Clinton says he “did not fully appreciate” the speed and intensity and orchestrated nature of the killings and has called his failure to intervene the greatest regret of his administration. He has been making amends ever since, visiting the country often and committing massive resources from the Clinton Foundation to help bring about Rwanda’s recovery.

For the rest of my time in Rwanda, as we drove through the now clean and orderly capital, as we drank in the lovely countryside, my mind would occasionally run an automatic slide show, imposing the detritus of genocide on what I was seeing. It really was incomprehensible that such protracted filthy evil transpired ever, anywhere, but especially in a place this pretty and seemingly serene.

This country is close to the very bottom of impoverished nations, ranking 159th out of 177. Yet our hotel was terrific, with a sparkling azure pool surrounded by palms. I had a little suite, and as part of my meditation each morning, I stood at my window drinking tea, watching a woman with a handmade broom sweep the street below. This had to be the cleanest country in Africa, if not the world: All the lavatories in Kigali were clean, and there was toilet paper available in public places everywhere. The streets and fields were free of litter; those ubiquitous plastic bags clogging gutters everywhere on earth were banned in Rwanda. And this was also the safest country in Africa, Papa Jack had assured me.

The government keeps a tight rein on its people to enforce a national identity without ethnic divisions. The downside of this extreme vigilance is an authoritarian streak in the government and a restriction of free expression, particularly among political opponents of the ruling party, that is easy for a Westerner to perceive as over the top. One PSI staffer was jailed for rolling his eyes at a traffic jam caused by the discovery of a genocide victim’s remains. As a foreign visitor, I was told to expect that my telephone and emails would be monitored at the hotel. But President Kagame himself told me that when we have lived through their many genocides (1994 was actually but one in a long series), we will have the experience and the right to judge their genocide prevention policies. I really can’t come up with an adequate counterargument to that.

Looking at the extreme nature of what transpired, the government reckoned that extreme solutions were necessary, and the positive result is one of the most dynamic governments in the entire world. President Kagame and his cabinet seem to spend every waking hour looking for innovative ways to modernize Rwanda and improve the lives of all its people. They rely heavily on international aid but have a can-do attitude about rebuilding their country themselves. The government partners directly with all NGOs and encourages local participation. For instance, of the 150 people PSI employs here, only 4 are non-Rwandan.

After my wrenching morning at the genocide memorial, I was looking forward to meeting those staff members and absorbing their positive energy. The offices were housed in a two-story brick building set into a small hillside. There was a rondel of cosmos growing by the PSI sign and a small fleet of tidy white trucks parked in front. I met with our country director, Staci Leuschner, and the staff for a briefing about our mission here. The challenges are massive and all too familiar: lack of infrastructure, lack of health care providers, an explosive birth rate and high infant mortality, endemic malaria, lack of safe water (only 2.5 percent of Rwandans have piped water), and the prevalence of STIs, HIV/AIDS, and other preventable diseases and issues that keep the entire population subsisting on less than a dollar a day.

What is quite special about Rwanda is that the Ministry of Health is attacking these problems in a holistic manner, creating a health care system from the grass roots up, with an emphasis on prevention and primary care delivered by community health workers through a network of local clinics and district hospitals. (They even have a basic national insurance plan with 97 percent enrollment!) What NGOs do here, as in poor countries everywhere, is fill critical gaps in services, education, and product delivery where the government and private sectors are lacking. Governments often have little if any infrastructure, yet magically those fizzy soda pop drinks are ubiquitous, as are mobile phones. Hence, PSI focuses on markets—those consumer goods prove they exist—employing private sector techniques to make markets actually work
for
poor people. The same networks that make cigarettes available in every corner of the earth can be leveraged and grown to make healthy products and behavior-change communication accessible to hundreds of millions of people. In this way, positive development contributions are made to local economies, increasing employability by adding to job experience. Plus, the initiatives and campaigns appeal to local folks, because they are generated by locals.

Below the PSI office building is a garage/warehouse for our medical products, many of which bear the proud stamp of USAID, and it is from here we begin to distribute them to clinics and pharmacies and sometimes directly to the poor people who need them. The warehouse staff here, as in most of the sixty-five countries where we have programs, include formerly prostituted women whom we have been able to reach via peer education. As a result, many have been able to exit from prostitution altogether. I visited women who have created a co-op in which they pool their money to buy supplies in bulk, bringing down their individual costs. They make wonderful crafts to sell, and the two sources of income have allowed them to improve their lives substantially, progressing them along the continuum from exploited, informal work to more dignified, formal work with a measure of security and social protections. Plus, they increase their business savvy, allowing them to identify further entrepreneurial opportunities for income generation. There are many reasons to marvel at the “ingenuity of the poor.” It is fascinating to see poverty reduction solutions in action and how one good action opens the way for yet another.