Kigali Genocide Memorial

I have been avoiding genocide related activities outside of my internship responsibilities. While I am interested in the topic and I am loving the experience I am gaining, day after day of genocide related topics and work is draining. Instead I spend my weekends as I have reported here, watching football, reading, and admiring beautiful livestock. Today I decided to leave my internship early and go to the Genocide Memorial in Kigali. 

While it was a difficult afternoon, I’m glad that I went. The memorial is on the side of a hill overlooking a valley of vegetation and the grounds are beautiful. I started by going through the museum which has one floor devoted to the Rwandan genocide and a floor that has four exhibits focusing on four different genocides in the past century, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Cambodia. The information was presented well and the photographs were devastating but well done and demonstrated what needed to be shown.

One room in the memorial is lined with various artifacts recovered after the 1994 genocide. Have you ever repeated a word over and over and over again until it you no longer know what you are saying and the word loses all meaning? If you haven’t, pick a word and repeated it continually for ten minutes or so. Imagine that same experience but in looking at human skulls. There were so many bones and human remains that an individual bone lost all meaning in my mind. I stopped being able to process what I was seeing. I imagine that I am not the first person that has experienced this in that particular room.

The last exhibit in the memorial is the Children’s Memorial. Pictures of children are displayed on the walls with description of the child underneath along with their age and cause of death.

It’s hard to describe the emotions accompanied with my trip this afternoon. The easiest feeling I can identify came after leaving the Children’s Memorial and entering the rose garden and surrounding burial site where 250,000 people are buried. As I walked out I overheard a group of Americans speaking. One man said that he could not believe what the Rwandan government had done to their people. Another man said that since the government had built this memorial, maybe it was turning over a new leaf.

Seriously? You went through the entire museum and you still cannot identify the fact that

1.    The Rwandan government that committed genocide and the current government are not the same bodies. No genocide perpetrators are still operating within the government, which is not the case for many other countries.

2.     The Rwandan government is one of the most successful in transitioning to a stable nation and avoiding ethno-national tension. Within one generation, ethnic identity in Rwanda has been completely transformed.

3.       The U.S. and other Western countries are to blame for harboring genociders and refusing to return them to Rwanda for trial. So basically, it's the West that is not turning over a new leaf.

It is people like those two men that cause me to constantly apologize for my country while I am here. It’s disgusting.