Kofi Annan, who later lead the UN, was there and begged the international community for help. The UN peacekeeping troops stood by helpless without a mandate to use force to stop the massacres. And as U.S., European and world officials quibbled over the use of the word “genocide”, the bodies mounted to many hundreds of thousands.
Blood ran in the streets and the world stood by watching...
A little history:
The Hutu are the ethnic majority in Rwanda, and viewed the Tutsi as a foreign race, instead of seeing them as an ethnic minority. The conflict between the two was not about language- both speak Bantu and French, and it was not based on religion- they are generally Christians.
The division instead was one of class warfare.
The Tutsi were considered to be wealthier, and had a higher social status, and were the monachy until the Hutu overthrew the monachy in the early 1960s.
In 1973, a military group installed Major General Juvenal Habyarimana, a moderate Hutu, in power. The sole leader of Rwandan government for the next two decades, Habyarimana founded a new political party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (NRMD). He was elected president under a new constitution ratified in 1978 and reelected in 1983 and 1988, when he was the sole candidate.
The Helpers:
The Society of Helpers, a religious order had houses in Kigali and the south. In these houses, Tutsis and Hutus lived and worked together. Sr. Liberata Marie Grace Mukagatare was one of the women in the house. Ausiliatrix Sisters, as they are known in French, were well known to me. My cousin, Maryellen Moore, is a Helper, and was in Paris at the Mother House for an international meeting of the order. It was the summer of 1990, and I was traveling in Europe and The Helpers invited me to stay with them just blocks from the Eiffel Tower. I was able to spend six days exploring the city and sharing time with these wonderful ladies. I met Sister Antoinette Gasibirege, who was from Rwanda and of course I remember the Rwandan cross worn by so many of them. It is featured in the banner below.
I sketched it in my diary- it is really beautiful. Simple and beautiful. I remember asking about going to see the house in Rwanda after the Peace Corps...
I still have never been there...
In 1994 the Rwanda genocide saw the Hutu militias targeting Tutsis and moderate Hutus, resulting in a 100-day death toll between 800,000 and 1 million. Most were killed brutally- hacked with machete. Sexual violence against Tutsi women was also widespread.
Sr. Liberata Marie Grace Mukagatare was one of those. She was scheduled to go to Paris that summer for one of the formation sessions for young sisters and had to leave the House and return to her village to get her passport arranged. She was there at home when the genocide broke out.
The Start of Chaos:
On April 6th, the plane carrying Habyarimana and Burundi’s president Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down over Kigali, leaving no survivors. It has never been conclusively determined who shot down the plane with some believing it was the work of Hutu extremists, while others blamed leaders of the RPF. Within an hour of the plane crash, the Presidential Guard together with members of the FAR and the Hutu militia groups known as the Interahamwe (“Those Who Attack Together”) and Impuzamugambi (“Those Who Have the Same Goal”) had set up roadblocks with barricades. The slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus began with impunity. Among the first victims of the genocide were the moderate Hutu Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and her 10 Belgian bodyguards, all of whom were killed on April 7. This violence allowed for the creation of an interim government of extremist Hutu Power leaders from the military high command beginning on April 9.
This sparked the chillingly well-organized extermination.
Begun by extreme Hutu nationalists in the capital of Kigali, the genocide spread throughout the country with staggering speed and brutality, as ordinary citizens were incited to violence by local officials and the Hutu Power government to take up arms against their friends and neighbors.
Sister Grace and her entire family were killed in their village. She was 30 years old.
Thank God, she was the only Helper to lose her life in Rwanda during the genocide. The Red Cross rescued the sisters in Kigali and the sisters in the South fled across the border into Burundi. Maryellen shared with me that at one point, one of the cars was completely surrounded by aggressors and all in the car thought they too would be killed...
The driver, a lay man, one of what I am sure are thousands of nameless heros, paid a bribe to save the sisters and they were allowed through.
By the time the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front gained control of the country through a military offensive in early July, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were dead and many more displaced from their homes.
After the genocide about two million Hutus fled to Burundi, Tanzania (from where 500,000 were later expelled by the government), Uganda, and the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Sister Antoinette Gasibirege and others share their experience with the healing that has been on-going in her country: Capacitar in Rwanda
I pray the healing continues and hope to one day make the long ago planned journey and see this beautiful country. And I remember Sister Grace. Rest in Peace.
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