On 19th April 1995 twenty six year old Timothy McVeigh drove a lorry-load of explosives into and later blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City in the State of Oklahoma, USA, killing 168 people. Apart from the immediate visible signs of the murders, injuries and material destruction there was the invisible signs or “the trouble within” as one research four years showed: at least six people who survived or lost loved ones committed suicide, nearly half of the people who were in the immediate vicinity of the blast had psychiatric disorder and a third developed post-traumatic stress disorder. Six years later survivors and family members needed counseling and many of the survivors lost marriages or custody rights because of new addictions. “Every time we see something devastating it brings back the sleepless nights and the nightmares, dang ball of wax. It might be an airplane, an ambulance siren or a yellow Ryder Truck” Paul Howell then 58 years old who lost a daughter in the terrorist bombing was quoted as saying. It is 15 years since the plan to wipe out Tutsis from the face of the earth was implemented in Rwanda by Hutus; killers drunk with decades’ old propaganda of ethnic hatred and dehumanization of Tutsi people. Many times people are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the dead and the physical wounds of the victims and not “the trouble within”. Conservative estimates indicate that; all survivors with cognitive abilities at the time lost close members of their families, all saw a dead body of someone they knew, 60% saw the killing of a relative, every survivor at the time saw at least one mutilated or decomposing human body during and after the genocide, 60% personally knew the people who killed their dear ones and a sizable percentage experienced physical and/or sexual violence. There are children who saw the motionless and possibly naked bodies of adults whom they had always treated with respect and awe. Who counseled these people? Who cast away the sightings, whispers, the voices and appearances of their departed relatives that appeared when they sat alone or went to bed? Who attended to the post-traumatic stress disorders eating away at their inside? Who argued with these people that suicide was a dishonor to their departed love ones? Who attended to the anger and pain welled up inside them? Who helped these people to deal with the sleepless nights, the nightmares and “the dang balls of wax”? Then there are killers who chopped up, ate and hacked to death people they grew up with, in-laws, friends and relatives. They possibly remember the severed limbs, the flow of blood gushing from the dying, the opened bellies, the terrified looks on their victims, the begging for mercy, the cries and moaning of the dying and the sight of the dead. They remember as they lie in their beds in the darkness of the night, as if it happened yesterday jumping the lifeless decomposing bodies of their friends, neighbors and schoolmates with whom they shared a lot, as they fled the imminent arrival of Inkotanyi and on to Zaire. Who counseled these people and what words were possibly said to them? Who washed away the three decades poison of hatred stamped in the memory of these people? Who said to them that they could co-exist with people who were once referred to as “snakes and cockroaches”? What do these people do when the cries of toddlers they disemboweled come to them in the middle of the night? Where do they hide when the women they raped and then killed accuse them in the middle of their sleep? There are the young men and women who sacrificed their youthful years to fight for a place they could call home and then saw with their eyes the evil handwork of the killers who said Rwanda was “full” and could not accommodate more of her people. Many suffered different degrees of physical incapacitations which are visible but who attended to these peoples’ emotion pain? Who soothes the emotional wounds of the young men whose joy was shattered by killer’s instrument of death through their bodies? Did the different people who call Rwanda home get over the invisible wounds and pain eked deep in their souls or is it lurking underneath like spores of Anthrax in the riverbed? Unlike the victims and survivors in the affluent Oklahoma those in Rwanda cannot tell they have a problem because of what they went through and some of the people who should help do not because they think the victims are “weak” or they are “mad”. As we remember the Genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda please pray the survivors and those with whom they live and please remember they are not “mad” or “acting”; they need help like you and me. Ends
