Rwandan genocide survivor moves audience to tears
BY ROBERT SIBLEY, OTTAWA CITIZEN FEBRUARY 26, 2014
Genocide survivor Chantal Mudahogora speaks about her escape from the
1994 Rwandan genocide, marking the 20th anniversary of the genocide
against the Tutsi in Rwanda, one of the darkest moments in human
history.
Photograph by: Bruno Schlumberger , Ottawa Citizen
'A piece of you is always dead,' Chantal Mudahogora tells audience at
Canadian War Museum
OTTAWA -- Chantal Mudahogora could not hold back the tears. And by the
time she finished her haunting recollection of surviving the Rwandan
genocide, neither could many in the audience.
"You train your brain to die," she told the hushed crowd as she
related how she at one point during the mass killings of 1994 expected
to die. "Then suddenly you live. But you can't train you brain back to
life. A piece of you is always dead."
Mudahogora was not the only speaker at an event Wednesday at the
Canadian War Museum to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1994 genocide
in Rwanda against the Tutsi population -- politicians, diplomats and
human rights activists were on hand, too -- but her speech was
certainly the most moving as she described the circumstances leading
up to the mass killings.
Over a 100-day period, from early April to mid-July of 1994, as many
as one million mostly ethnic Tutsi Rwandans -- about 70 per cent of the
ethnic group's population in the country and 20 per cent of Rwanda's
total population -- were killed by the majority Hutus. It was planned
by senior politicians and carried out by the Rwandan Army, the
national police, government-supported militias, and a good portion of
civilian Hutus. Behind the genocide was an ongoing conflict between
the Hutu-led government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which had
been established after earlier bouts of Hutu violence against the
Tutsi population.
To her surprise -- and guilt -- Mudahogora survived the horror where
other family members, including her sister, did not.
"Twenty years may seem a long time," she said, but not for those who survived.
"Twenty years of pain, 20 years of suffering, 20 years of bad
memories, nightmares and loneliness; when you're in so much pain, time
doesn't mean much."
That pain sustains the requirement of remembrance, as far as
Mudahogora is concerned. "We have an obligation, a duty, not to
forget," she said, borrowing a famous statement from Holocaust
survivor Elie Weisel. "'Having survived I owe something to the dead,
and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.'"
Other speakers echoed the sentiment.
"We have an obligation to remember," said Liberal MP Irwin Cotler.
"The international community will only prevent the killing fields of
the future by remembering the killing fields of the past."
"There is no arguing the world failed Rwanda," said Conservative
Senator Rev. Don Meredith, who led the audience in praying that "not
another Rwanda take place."
But it was Mudahogora's portrait of genocide that held the audience
members in silent thrall and left them in tears. She described how the
situation gradually worsened in late 1993 as marauding Hutu militias
and gangs began terrorizing Tutsis, including those they had for years
lived beside as neighbours.
Initially, she said, most everyone thought the world, the
international community, would not allow things to get worse. "We were
naive. We trusted the peacekeepers. We trusted the diplomats. We
trusted that the international community would be there to save us."
It wasn't, and situation worsened. Tutsis were dragged from offices,
schools, and homes, never to be seen again. People would go to work,
uncertain that they would make it home at night. Then, in April 1994,
the killings began in earnest. Throughout the country, in co-ordinated
attacks, Hutus descended on Tutsi neighbourhoods, throwing grenades
into houses, forcing people out of hiding, butchering them on roads.
Children, women, and men were hacked to death. Many fled to churches.
It didn't help.
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