All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [177]
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,