The Tragedy of a Genocide

The tragedy of genocide leaves deep scars within the society. Civil war does not leave such an indelible scar. In civil war it is brother to brother, but in arms. When the conflict is resolved or one is overcome by the other, the arms are laid down; they shake hands and get on with rebuilding the society. With genocide the process is not so simple. The rift is very deep, almost insurmountable, the pain excruciating. In civil war, the issue is usually outside; abstract, In the case of the USA, the question of slavery, elsewhere, often political reasons. It is not engrained in a personal enmity of one section of the society towards the other. On the one hand, you are left with those who survived three months of absolute horror, isolation, desperation and paralyzing terror. A world where all is hostile, where every structure you ever believed in fell apart and turned into a killing machine against you and yours, for no apparent reason. Yesterday, you lived side by side; you shared the charcoal, the salt. Your children played together. Today, you are the prey, to be hunted and slaughtered viciously and mercilessly. You don’t even know quite how you survived when so many of your kin have been felled around you. You had reached the point of resignation, of giving yourself up to the slaughter to alleviate the awful pressure. You have almost come to the point of thinking that it’s normal for the Tutsis to die. You are even told so by those you deliver yourself up to, but who prefer to send you on your way so convinced are they that others are just waiting to finish you off. “The Tutsis are all dead”, they say, “There’s no point in you trying to still stay alive, they’ll get you anyway, so you might as well resign yourself to the fact”; That is a great tragedy when one faction of the society has mentally obliterated from their beings your right to exist. Your right to exist has been disqualified, you have been disqualified, and you have been struck off the field, you have been bowled out. How do you recover from this trauma, how can you continue to live, to believe in a life again when all those close to you are no more, that loving mother, father, little brother, sister, baby brother? How do you go on, everyday, when you know their particular smile will never again light up your day? How to you continue to live alongside those who inflicted this horror upon you and your families, or what’s left of them? This is the crucial thought, how to endure the sight of them, be able to speak to them, be even civil to them. This is indeed a huge challenge, how to reconcile their existence with the absence of your loved ones and coming to grips with your own shattered life. On the other hand you have those who carried out this genocide with full consent and participation of the authorities of the country. It became lawful to kill, not only that, it was approved and applauded by all. The more Tutsis you killed, the greater you were. You even induced your own children to kill. Now that all’s been said and done, how do you face those who have survived this holocaust? How do you relate to them in everyday life with this chasm between you? How do you look them in the eye, smile at them, and ask them politely how they are? How do you feel about what happened now that the killing frenzy is over and the country has once again become a state of law? Whatever happened to values such as, “Thou Shalt Not Kill”? How could churches become slaughter houses when these Christian values were supposed to be deeply anchored in the society? How could some members of the clergy become participants in this killing orgy and still reconcile themselves to the values they were supposed to be upholding. How could the World just sit back and let it happen under their very eyes? Then the Jack-pot question, how does a government go about trying to fix this tragic situation? How to go about mending the breaches; build a sense of a nation, a people, once again? The challenge is enormous, the task gigantic, requiring great wisdom, restraint and tolerance and in this the leaders of this country have shown their ability to carry out this daunting feat in the face of all odds. The least the World could do would be to recognize this and do everything in their power to encourage and uphold instead of undermining and plotting in the most despicable manner. This was everybody’s genocide and nobody is spared the responsibility in the shame of its having ever existed. Genocide is a crime against humanity and we are humanity. Ends

Opinions

The Tragedy of a Genocide