By Max Dunbar.
You Alone May Live: One Woman’s Journey Through the Aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide, Mary K Blewitt OBE, Biteback 2010
‘We watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the blood of the people we were supposed to protect.’
– Lieutenant General Rom éo Dallaire, head of the UN mission in Rwanda
In early April of 1994, scholar and aid worker Mary K Blewitt was taking some annual leave in the UK. Her holiday was interrupted by a phone call from a colleague. Something bad was coming in Rwanda. A prominent Hutu extremist had been killed and the government was responding with reprisal attacks on the Tutsi population. There was talk of UN staff being recalled.
Blewitt’s next call was to her brother. The family were Tutsis and had a sister in the Rwanda Patriotic Front, a big target for the regime. Fearing for his life, she implored Jean Baptiste to get out while he still could. Her brother laughed this off. ‘The UN Blue Berets are here,’ he said. ‘No harm will come to us.’
That August, Blewitt returned to Rwanda. She was researching homelessness in Addis Ababa and got a lift on a UN military Chinook. From the landing chopper her bird’s-eye view was a sweep of desolation. ‘[A]ll I could see were the consequences of the recent fighting: homes that lay roofless, in ruins, with jagged black stones protruding; buildings with fallen beams and shattered glass, walls peppered with holes of every size.’
Over one hundred deadly days, Hutu militias stormed the country, killing up to a million Tutsi civilians. It has been estimated that ten thousand were murdered every day, or 400 an hour, or seven per moment. The Interahamwe hacked people apart with machetes and clubs with nails. They would chop off the Achilles tendon so that victims couldn’t run away. Often they gang-raped the women before killing them. A survivor named Claudine was forced to watch her son’s murder before being raped. A militiaman told her: ‘You alone may live, only so that you will die of sadness.’
The hundred days ended but the damage continued. There was the social and economic cost of the genocide. Somehow Rwanda had to treat the thousands of survivors who had been deliberately infected with HIV and AIDS as well as the injured, the disabled and the disfigured. There was the emotional trauma and horrific memories that survivors would carry for the rest of their days. And there was the deep and enduring grief of the ones who had lost fathers, brothers, children – a grief that may, over generations, curdle into prejudice and ethnic grievance.
Through this shattered landscape Mary Blewitt walked, listening to survivors and giving what comfort she could. She visited the churches where massacres took place and witnessed the exhumation of mass graves. She set up support groups for survivors, lobbied governments to support their needs and worked hard to give the dead a decent burial. Her contribution was such that she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.
Rwanda was one of the international community’s many terrible failures. The UN pulled out when ten Belgian soldiers were killed in the early days of the genocide. Intentional or not, the message was clear. Carry on. We don’t care. After the killings subsided (they were stopped by the RPF, which took the capital by force and then declared a ceasefire) humanitarian groups swamped the broken cities. It was a source of frustration to Blewitt that foreign aid workers acted like a colonial caste, drinking and partying on the balconies of expensive hotels while Blewitt herself pounded the streets through sixteen-hour days.
The great powers showed a cynical indifference to Tutsi suffering. According to Daniel Goldhagen, Bill Clinton had so little concern for the genocide that he did not even have a staff meeting on it. In May 1994 Clinton told the US Naval Academy that America ‘cannot solve every such outburst of civil strife… Whether we get involved in any of the world’s ethnic conflicts in the end must depend on the cumulative weight of the American interests at stake.’ The world agreed that the Rwandan genocide was a battle between two forces of equal strength, probably a result of ‘ancient hatreds’ – that lazy shortland for a racist perception that Africans are naturally temperamental and will throw spears on the slightest pretext.
In fact, the genocide was carefully planned and executed by the Hutu-dominated government. Through 1993 and early 1994 it held peace talks with the RPF. UN peacekeepers were dispatched to establish an interim government and elections. The talks were a smokescreen. The regime had no intention of power sharing. ‘Ironically, in the months before the 1994 genocide, the accords generated much optimism and were seen as a model that offered the prospect of peace and democracy,’ Blewitt writes. She adds in a rueful, bitter tone: ‘Little did we know that all the while the government was planning the killing lists.’
The differences between Hutu and Tutsi were not so much ethnic as occupational. Prejudice was imposed from above, first by the nineteenth-century European imperialists and then by the Habyarimana government. It broadcast crude propaganda that depicted Tutsis as cockroaches. The militias acted accordingly.
Blewitt had her own grief to burden – aside from her brother’s murder, fifty members of her family were massacred in a primary school. Yet she somehow found the strength to connect with others and help others. It’s often the case that we can find glimmers of light in the accounts of absolute human darkness. Blewitt quotes Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel: ‘I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I’ve been closer to him for that reason.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He is Manchester’s regional editor of Succour magazine, a journal of new fiction and poetry, and reviews editor of 3:AM.
