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Phil Carpenter |
I met with three Rwandan genocide survivors in the Butare area about two hours outside Kigali, Rwanda’s main city.
All three knew Désiré Munyaneza, the Genocidaire from Butare who was convicted of war crimes in Montreal for his role in the genocide. He had fled to Canada to try for refugee status, but got caught instead.
It was hard to find people who were willing to talk, but thanks to a kind young gentleman with many connections I managed to interview the three. People are afraid. Just two months ago two survivors, Francois Gasirabo and Jeannette Nyirabaganwa, were killed and their bodies dumped in a river after they testified at a trial. Genocide survivors are still being killed here if they testify or are expect to testify, and one of the women I interviewed calls “a silent genocide” that’s continuing. She along with another woman I interviewed, fears for her life.
Words can’t express fully how horrifying the stories are, so I’ll shut up now and share these stories with you. They might be reading this blog through translation. All three speak French and Kinyarwandan, but very little English. If you choose to, please leave a message for them here so they know that people outside Rwanda do care. To say that they are having a rough time with what they have experienced is a major understatement.
A LADY CALLED “X”
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“X” covers her face to avoid recognition. THE GAZETTE/Phil Carpenter.
She calls herself “X” for the interview because she doesn’t want to get killed for doing it, or for anything that she might say.
She knew Désiré Munyaneza before the genocide as a young man who worked for his rich father, a well-known businessman in Butare. He seemed like a nice man who had a reputation as a playboy, she says, and would routinely try to pick up women.
Before the genocide Butare was beautiful. It was a centre of culture, and as a teacher one of her favorite places to visit was the local library. Families intermarried and there were no problems to speak of. That is why Butare was the last place to start the killings, and why it was so hard to believe.
The day after the president’s plane was shot down, she said there were soldiers all over the streets. They had heard about killings in the rest of the country, but Butare was isolated from what was going on. Around April 20th the roadblocks started going up, and she saw Désiré and other Hutus manning them. Eventually, she says, it became clear who was to be targeted for killing.
For a while she was allowed to pass roadblocks without being checked because she said everyone knew her as a Hutu. But then one day someone claimed that she was in fact Tutsi, and she was thrown in the basement of Désiré’s father store, with 17 other women. That’s where he kept the women he captured from the local university before they were killed. Three days later she was released, but not before he hit her in the back with a stick he always carried. She never saw the 17 women again.
She was 7 months pregnant at the time, and tried hiding in various places, because they wanted to kill her unborn child. Finally some nuns hid her in a place downtown where she managed to see some of the horror. One thing that stays in her head is the way they would light people’s hair on fire before killing them. The men they would kill right away; the women were first raped, and then killed.
Why Désiré did the things he did, she doesn’t know, but thinks that her had a genuine hate for Tutsi women. He had always called them arrogant. So deep was his hate, she believed, that he couldn’t even bring himself to rape them with his body; he’d use his stick.
She doesn’t care if he’s found guilty or not, as long as he comes to understand the evil that he did.
Martin Uwariraye
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Martin Uwariraye at the Butare bakery where he hid to survived the genocide. (THE GAZETTE/Phil Carpenter)
Martin is a businessman in Butare who says Désiré Munyaneza used to eat at his restaurant before the genocide. Like “X” he remembers Butare as a thriving place when Hutus and Tutsis mingled and intermarried before the genocide.
He says that things actually started getting bad in 1990 when he was jailed for 6 months on suspicion of being a spy for the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the then “rebel” group headed by the current president Paul Kagame. For the genocide, he too remembers that the killings started around April 20th, the last place in the country. Before that when the troubles began, Hutus and Tutsis patrolled the streets together to make sure that things were secure. Everyone knew of the killings in the rest of the country, but it wasn’t immediately clear what was going on. It wasn’t until the interim president came from Kigali and had a meeting with the city officials that Tutsis were targeted.
To avoid getting killed, he first hid in a forest close to the National University of Rwanda. Afterwards he hid in a bakery on his property where he stayed until the end of the genocide. His entire family including his wife and 14-year-old son Eric was slaughtered.
Munyaneza, he says, was one of the ringleaders in the Interahamwe, the gangs who did much of the killings. One day he fired shots at Martins store door, and then destroyed it. Unlike many survivors he said he’s not afraid of speaking out. In fact he testified against Munyaneza to Canadian officials in Kigali. He jokes that he survived the genocide because God spared him, and he saw a lot of killing, so he’s not afraid of death.
He hopes Munyaneza gets life in prison if found guilty.
She Calls Herself “L.O.”
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“L.O. Covers her face to avoid recognition. THE GAZETTE/Phil Carpenter.
“L.O” testified against Munyaneza at his trial in Montreal, and continues to testify against Genocidaires at local trials. She too fears for her life, and our interview had to be done at a secluded spot in a car so she wouldn’t be seen talking to the media.
Munyaneza was familiar to her because she used to see him working at his father’s store before the genocide. Beyond that she knew nothing. She also says that Butare were much intermarriage before the genocide, but says also that there were jailings in 1990 on suspicions of spying for the RPF.
Killings were late to start in Butare she says. One reason was that the governor was Tutsi, but once he was killed, things began to get ugly around April 20th.
She said she saw many terrible things, and for her the experience was horrific.
Two of her 3 kids got killed with her husband, while she was taken by one of the ringleaders and used as a sex slave fore the duration of the genocide. It got so bad that the man who enslaved her would crush marijuana and force it inside her to try to get her aroused, she says.
An order was given that she was not to be touched, and that’s how she survived and witnessed so much of the things she can’t forget. Munyaneza, for example, would use his father’s car to transport captured women from the university and the hospital, and have them raped before killing them.
She doesn’t know what pushed him, and says he was like an animal. She figures that he learnt from his father who, in the 1959, killed Tutsis and looted their land. In fact, she believes that much of the property he had before the 1994 genocide was stolen from Tutsis back then. For the 1994 genocide, many of the machetes used in the massacre were bought at his store, she says. The other thing she found strange was that Munyaneza’s mother was Tutsi.
She says when she saw his face in the courtroom in Montreal, she felt like a tree, having being toughened by all she experienced in the genocide. She hopes he is found guilty.
Published on May 22, 2009 on the Montreal Gazette’s photo blog ‘The Lens’
