This post is the second in a three-part series on the Rwandan Genocide. The first post, “When the Nightmare Began,” was published April 6, 2024, and can be read here.
How do you survive all that trauma, especially when it has been inflicted on you by people so close to you?
My wife and I recently attended an event at our local library which included three speakers who had lived through terrible atrocities in their countries of origin. Today they have all found haven in Oregon. Of the three speakers, one had survived the genocide in Cambodia, the other the war in Bosnia.
The third, and of special interest to me, was Emmanuel Turaturanye. He and his sister and brother survived losing more than a hundred relatives, including their parents and siblings, in the Rwandan Genocide.
Thirty years ago, between 500,000 and 800,000 Rwandans were dying at the hands of their neighbors and two million others were fleeing in every direction. It would all be over in a hundred days. Well, not really, for the refugee crisis would fester and ensuing war would rage in Central Africa for the next decade.
Photographs of genocide victims. Genocide Memorial Center, Kigali, Rwanda.
Initially the world was mostly oblivious to what was going on, just another problem in Africa – or so thought far too many outsiders. Confusion reigned because of civil war, ongoing conflicts, and occasional smaller-scale atrocities. The worst of the killings would end before outsiders realized this was not merely a blood feud between two groups or some spontaneous uprising, but rather premeditated extermination of one group by another.
Emmanuel shared how he found the will to live so that he could tell his story. Long after his ordeal, overwhelmed by unresolved trauma, he was contemplating ending his own life when he heard a voice asking him, “What are you doing?”
Three times the voice spoke and on the third time, it reminded him that his dad Isaac was in heaven. The voice asked him whether what he was doing would make his father proud.
Emmanuel’s father had been the pastor of a church. Though few suspected tensions to rise to the level of genocide, conflict had been brewing for years. Emmanuel and his family were considered Tutsis, more of a class or social status than of a distinct tribe from what Emmanuel understood, for the Hutu shared the same language, religion, and so much else. But his family had faced discrimination – being called foreigners (Ethiopians), being denied jobs and schooling, and were required to carry ID with the Tutsi label.
Then it all blew up in early April 1994. A crowd of Hutus, members of Emmanuel’s own church, carrying guns and machetes, surrounded the pastor’s house. Emmanuel survived because he was outside the house, cooking the family meal with his little sister. He grabbed her and ran, chased by the mob as everyone in the house was slaughtered.
Emmanuel and his sister kept running until they could run no more and then they hid in what they thought was the safety of a government office. But it was a trap for them and six thousand other Tutsis who had squeezed into the building. Somehow Emmanuel and his sister escaped yet again and found refuge – under a bed in the home of a family friend, a Hutu woman of all people. There they were able to remain until the killing subsided three months after it all started.
Today we are faced with cries of genocide in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere. Even our own president is labeled Genocide Joe by those who disagree with his support of Israel. But as horrific as these conflicts might be, are they all truly genocide?
Definitions are important. We are not talking Hatfields and McCoys here.
At minimum, genocide means the intentional destruction of a people. But legal clarity in definition is critical for bringing justice to bear. In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of several specific “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
The Early Warning Project differentiates between mass killings and genocide. By their definition, a mass killing is when “1,000 or more civilians within a country [are] deliberately killed by armed forces in the same country…over a period of a year or less, because of their membership in a particular group.” Genocide usually includes mass killings, but not all mass killings are genocidal.
Key concepts to keep in mind when speaking of genocide are, “a people,” “denial of the right of existence,” and “intent” as in premeditation. When did the atrocities in Rwanda cease to be a civil war and become a genocide, for example?
When I was in college in the early 70s, I met a classmate – an international student or refugee, I don’t remember which – from Biafra, the short-lived country in Nigeria where the Igbo (also spelled Ibo) had faced atrocities at the hands of the Nigerian government. As many as a million people died in the conflict, mostly from a famine imposed deliberately through blockade during the war, though there were other atrocities including deliberate bombing of civilians, mass slaughter, and rape.
But was what happened in Biafra a genocide? Some legal scholars argue that the Nigerian government’s starvation policies were deliberate, thus genocidal. Others point out that Nigerian leaders never intended to exterminate the Igbo, but that they were fighting to retain control of them. “Wiping out” a people, not wreaking havoc to control them, is what defines genocide. In genocide, even children are targeted so you don’t have to deal with them when they grow up.
This fellow student from Biafra was the only member of his extended family to have escaped. He and his family were Christians being attacked by Muslims. Genocide and mass killings are no respecter of religions. Nazis in officially Christian Germany tried to wipe out the Jews. Buddhist Myanmar has attempted the same to the Muslim Rohingya, Atheist China has targeted the Muslim Uyghurs, Muslim Iran threatens to eradicate the Jews in Israel. The list goes on and on. In Rwanda, it was Christian against Christian, often even from the same local church.
As was the case with Emmanuel’s church. The Hutu killers and the Tutsi victims had grown up together, had worshipped side by side, had even intermarried. In the genocide, none of that mattered, not even if they were the closest of kin.
As I read story after story and book after book on the Rwandan genocide, I probed further into what gives birth to something as evil as genocide. Some of the seeds are innocuous-sounding, others are overtly evil.
Ben Kiernan in his massive tome on genocide includes a section on the Rwanda experience. He references the colonization of the Tutsi and Hutu by Germany and Belgium, and subsequent revolutions and coups.
Throughout his book, Blood and Soil, Kiernan explores “four telltale characteristics of genocide that recurred regularly from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first: the preoccupation of perpetrators with race, antiquity, agriculture, and expansion.” His conclusion is that “the cure and prevention of the crime of genocide must lie, at least in part, in the diagnosis of its recurring causes and symptoms.”
In my readings, I’ve also noted other traits of genocide:
- Dehumanizing. As I said in my first post, Hutus began otherising Tutsis by calling them “cockroaches” and other dehumanizing and degrading names long before the genocide broke out. Call someone a name long enough and that becomes their identity in your mind as you become desensitized to their humanity. Moreover, the explicit and stark distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi had been contrived, as much a colonial imprint as anything inherent in the local culture – and the definitions were specifically made to establish order of value.
- Systemic. The acts of genocide within a society are not isolated or spontaneous but are universal and well-orchestrated in their intentions. Emmanual’s story is but one of hundreds of thousands of stories from Rwanda. Elizabeth Mehren, who includes Emmanuel’s story in her book I Lived to Tell the World, references organized rape squads in Rwanda. She reports that between 250,000 and 500,000 Rwandan women were raped. This violence of rape was both universal and orchestrated.
- Authoritarian. Genocide is executed by authoritarian leaders who demand unquestioning loyalty. Philip Gourevitch is the author of the award-winning We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. While some presumed the genocide to be the fruit of a failed state, Gourevitch countered that Rwanda’s “genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history”.
Whether current conflicts in today’s world will be defined as genocide is difficult to say – and perhaps too early to determine. Genocide is a horrific term, best applied only where it truly fits, and best left to careful analysis and legal determination, not to popular or mob definition.
But a more immediate question comes to mind and one we must get a grasp on, especially if we are to welcome refugees of genocide into our communities, which I believe is our collective God-ordained responsibility. How do you survive all that trauma, especially when it has been inflicted on you by people so close to you?
After Emmanuel heard the voice, he attended church with a friend where the story of the Prodigal Son was being preached. There and then he gave himself over to Jesus. But that was only the beginning. The next step was learning how to forgive. Merhen tells Emmanuel’s fuller story. In short, he eventually returned to the village where he was born and reconnected with some of his family’s killers, walking through distinct processes of forgiveness and reconciliation.
As Emmanuel and his fellow survivors concluded their stories in the library that day, the audience was invited to ask questions. I had listened as Emmanuel talked about forgiveness and reconciliation. It is obvious – three decades on – that a lot of forgiveness and reconciliation has been going on in his life. Even neighbors who had murdered his family were invited to his wedding in 2013.
But what I wanted to know was whether, in forgiving and being reconciled to his neighbors, he had also been able to relearn how to trust them. Emmanuel was thoughtful and honest up there on the stage, as were the other presenters. They admitted that relearning trust is not an easy task. Forgiveness, reconciliation, and rebuilding trust are all separate albeit related processes, and they remain ongoing in their lives – and perhaps throughout their lifetimes.
In the third and final part of this series on the Rwandan Genocide, we’ll talk more fully about what recovery from trauma of such a magnitude looks like. To be sure you don’t miss the final part, subscribe for free to this blog here. If you are interested in seeing the sources I’ve used in this post and other references on this subject, please check out the resource page on my website.