Victims of Rwandan genocide endure memories of trauma nearly 3 decades on

By Gulcin Kazan Doger

ISTANBUL (AA) — Though 29 years have passed since the Rwandan genocide that killed about 800,000 people in 100 days, survivors still suffer the traumatic experience.

Activist Consolee Nishimwe, who was 14 years old when the genocide began, told Anadolu that the ideological basis that made the genocide possible in the small East African nation was laid during its colonization under Belgium.

"Tutsis and Hutus were social classes. When they came, they had to switch what they didn't divide and conquer. Now, what was social classes became ethnicity," Nishimwe said.

According to Nishimwe, the Belgian colonizers worked to separate the two groups as different races, taking biological measurements to solidify their thesis and documenting the membership of individuals to make it official.

"They had to ... measure the nose and the height and, and then, they would say these are Hutus and these are Tutsis. And then, they issue ID card."

The division made its mark on Rwandan society, from education to the media.

As a Tutsi, Nishimwe said she was subjected to discrimination by her teachers in primary school, while broadcaster Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) was used as a propaganda machine to spread hatred among extremist Hutus.

The RTLM radio was founded by extremist Hutus in 1993 and made provocative broadcasts until 1994, the that the genocide began, she said.

Journalists were "just making fun of Tutsis and saying you are cockroaches," she explained. Such terms "were used a lot through the radio," she said, adding that it was horrible experience to hear them as a child.

RTLM's broadcasts played a central role in the ensuing genocide, igniting one of the bloodiest in history, Nishimwe said.

- Rape used as a weapon

The genocide, in which more than 1 million people were killed, targeted the minority Tutsis after the death of the country's Hutu president at the time, Juvenal Habyarimana, and his Burundian counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira, also a Hutu, when their plane was downed by a rocket attack on April 6, 1994.

Hutu extremists used the incident "as a way of saying Tutsis murdered him (Habyarimana), which was not the case because already a genocide was well-planned," added the activist.

"Immediately, we had to go into hiding."

Nishimwe lost her father and three younger brothers in the mass killings that followed. Today, she only has a few of her family members on her mother's side.

"We lost many people and our family. Rape was used as a weapon in the genocide. I was raped and as a result, I am living with HIV," she said.

She now lives in New York, where she moved in 2001 and wrote a book, titled "Tested To The Limit," about her experiences.

"I am not afraid (to return to Rwanda)," she said, noting that the barriers to her return had been emotional rather than physical, to be able to "face everything" in her country.

- Killing lists

Stephen Rapp, a lawyer and former US ambassador for war crimes, said that more than 70% of Tutsis were killed in the genocide.

The evidence was so strong that, after several hearings in 2006, the appeals chamber decided the incident should be called genocide without further proof, Rapp said.

Canadian general and commander of the UN Rwanda Support Mission Force, Gen. Romeo Dallaire, sent a message to New York three to four months before the genocide to say that extremists were planning to "kill" in Rwanda, he said.

Before the genocide, extremists made "lists of moderate Hutus and Tutsis that would be the first to die," he said, underlining that this made it very clear that there would be a genocide.

In 2018, the UN General Assembly designated April 7 as the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

The International Criminal Court of Rwanda, tried the perpetrators of the genocide, but has been criticized for its inability to punish them.

*Writing by Gozde Bayar in Ankara