One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [29]
Melanie was forced to change her cultural heritage, abandon her language, and has formed an attachment to her teacher. If she were to embrace her past, embrace the memory of her mother and her mother’s people, she would be in danger. I could not determine with which army the husband of this teacher fought, but it is possible that the dangers of failure to adapt, of forming new bonds with this teacher, are more than psychological and could come from within the family that cares for her. Luckily, it seemed, Melanie enjoyed her relationship with her teacher, who genuinely seemed to care for her. At the time we met, she did not seem to be suffering from the sense of loneliness that plagues many unaccompanied minors. Perhaps because of the effectiveness of her assimilation, she managed to make friends and find supportive adults, unlike another Tutsi boy I met, Justin.
Justin, fourteen years old, lived in Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda. Unlike Melanie, he often felt lonely, isolated, and afraid. He was a tall, gawky kid who liked to study and read when he had the chance. He did not have many friends. Justin fled to Congo with his mother during the genocide in 1994. His father didn’t make it out, he told me.
“We lived in Congo for a while, then the war there started. People were killed; people remained behind, desperate. That is where my mother was killed.”
I have to assume from the time he fled that Justin is from the Tutsi ethnic group. This is not a subject we would discuss openly in this refugee camp. It would not be safe.
In April 1994 Rwanda President Juvénal Habyarimana was assassinated. Within a few hours, the Hutu Power government, built on a platform of ethnic superiority to Tutsi minority, accused Tutsi extremists of orchestrating the assassination. They called on the population to kill every Tutsi in the country as a matter of national security. Though the outbreak of violence seemed spontaneous to outsiders, General Roméo Dallaire, the UN force commander in Rwanda at the time, observed, the Hutu Power Movement had been preparing the mass slaughter for months. As early as February, teachers had been recording the ethnicity of their pupils, even though children were not required to carry ID cards. It would not become apparent to the general what had really been going on until teachers began murdering their Tutsi pupils.
On the night of April 6, the Hutu ethnic majority in Rwanda began a campaign of extermination against the Tutsi minority and against moderate Hutus. In around a hundred days, or three months, more than 800,000 people were killed. Most of the violence was committed with farming implements, hoes and machetes, mostly by bands of young men, the interhamwe, which translates as those who attack together. The interhamwe later fled to the Congo, providing the pretext for Rwanda’s invasion and occupation.
There are accounts from the spring and summer of 1994 of neighbors killing each other, of priests and nuns killing their Tutsi parishioners or moderate Hutus, of mixed families turning the blades on their Tutsi wives or husbands or in-laws, caught up in the genocidal fever. Thousands of Tutsis and Hutus opposed to the genocide fled to the Congo and Tanzania to escape the killing. Paul Kagame, an exiled Tutsi soldier, led an attack on Rwanda from Uganda and took over the country. He stopped the genocide by the end of the summer. The interhamwe and the former Hutu Power politicians—the architects of the genocide—along with hundreds of thousands of innocent Hutus, fled from Kagame’s army into Mobutu’s Zaire. The images of this exodus, captured in vivid photographs by Sabastião Salgado, seem like a relic of another time, biblical or medieval, but certainly not the end of the twentieth century, certainly not 1994.
When conflict erupted in Congo (then Zaire) in 1998 after the ouster of Mobutu, many Congolese