Since my first year of college, I have had a personal interest in the Rwandan genocide; spending much time outside of my academics researching and studying the issue. In fact, a major part of my time at Brandeis is dedicated to the Girl Effect, an organization I founded in my freshman year that aims to sustainably empower impoverished women in third world countries. Working with Foundation Rwanda was our first major project.
Since the moment I first read a testimony of a female rape survivor of the genocide, I have not been able to sit comfortably. What kept me awake at night regarding the Rwandan genocide in particular was the specific military strategy of “living death.” Living death is the concept that death could be extended beyond death itself through the transmission of HIV. The Hutu’s used this concept as a foundation of their military strategy to rape and infect as many Tutsi women with HIV as was possible during the genocide. The desired result: that although these women would be spared the massacre that met their families, they and their children born of rape would be left to live a life of “living death.” Not only suffering the trauma’s of rape, witness to the massacre of their families, and of having to love a child born of their rape, they would also now be living with a terminal illness. The Hutu’s used this strategy to insure complete extermination, not only in this generation, but the next as well.
Prior to studying this particular strategy, I had only read faint warnings of this type of strategy resonating from the Bosnian ethnic cleansing of the 1990s. Military leaders clearly defined rape as a stated strategy of war in order to strike the community at their most vulnerable position and ensure they would never return to their home villages. In what was called the Ram Plan young women were specifically targeted for repeated rape, with the goal of impregnating as many as possible, thus forcing them to bear “little Serbs.” The strategy from meeting minutes was later revealed by Italian journalist Guiseppe Zaccaria. To paint you a better a picture, one letter from a Serb battalion commander heading a rape death camp read:
“Sixteen hundred and eight Muslim women of ages ranging from 12-60 years are now fathered in the centers for displaced persons within our territory. A large number of these are pregnant especially those ranging in age form 12-30 years…the psychological effect is strong and therefore we must continue.”
The addition of HIV to this strategy is what made this particular case unbearable to me and what is now unfortunately occurring in the Congo sleep depriving as well. However, as NY Times columnist Bob Herbert described learning about the war in the Congo, “ Perhaps we’ve heard so little about them because the crimes are so unspeakable, the evil so profound. It is as if, in these particular instances, some window to what we think of as our common humanity had been closed,” (Herbert A21).
And it is this very fear that kept me away from Rwanda, but ultimately brought me here now. The truth is I knew I wanted to come to Rwanda since the moment I first learned of what happened here, but I waited for three years until I heard what was happening in the Congo. It is evident that Hutu war strategy is spilling across borders. So what did I fear? Simply, that I did not have the capacity to even begin to understand the level of trauma experienced by these survivors, that human connection would not prevail as a healing tactic, and that reconciling what happened in Rwanda would be impossible. And that for the first time in my life, common humanity would come into question.
But I realized, as I got distracted from my physics readings by daily articles on the Congo, is that I could not wait until the time was right, or till I felt ready. Because post-genocide reconciliation can never replace reconciliation now. And because, who could ever be ready or feel completely capable of aiding anyone in that position? I had to just stop reading, and ignoring and get on the next plane over to the conflict-zone. Understandably, doing this unprepared is not really going to work, but if you have prepared to your best capability then learning on the ground is the greatest insight you can give yourself and anyone you want to help.
You have to know the culture, the people, the land and their history. You have to know how what has changed, what daily life feels like and what people do not tell you because you are a foreigner. So the first time around you probably can’t do anything significant, Haiti taught me this. But being there is the first step. So I took it.
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