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Bones of grief, bones of memory
Sunday, September 24, 2000
By Anita Srikameswaran, Post-Gazette Staff Writer with pictures by Martha Rial, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Staff Photographer
Many of us may have only a vague recollection of the atrocities that took place in the tiny central African country of Rwanda in 1994. There has been plenty of bloodshed since then in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and other faraway places to supplant those few months of horror that the international community did so little to stop.
And after all, who really wants to remember a genocide?
But that's partly why photographer Martha Rial and I traveled to Rwanda in June. We wanted to find out how this nation of 8 million people is dealing with their gruesome legacy, and how well they have been able to overcome its effects.
During our month long stay, we talked to relief workers and government officials. But we learned the most, of course, from the people who lived through the harrowing days of violence and what came after, and who are now striving to rebuild a society based on democratic principles and ethnic harmony.
To better understand the present, we first needed a glimpse of the past.
We would find it at two rural churches southeast of the capital city of Kigali.
I had a few qualms during our hour long car ride. Martha and I knew what we would see at our destination: the remains of genocide victims. But I did not know how that would feel, or how to prepare for it.
A desire to avoid facing Rwanda's ghosts warred with a sense of duty to those who were brutally murdered. I strove for detachment, but anxious thoughts skittered beneath the thin layer of numbness I managed to achieve.
The two churches stand within 10 miles of each other in the villages of Nyamata and Ntarama. In April 1994, near the beginning of the genocide, thousands of Rwandan Tutsis who sought protection in these houses of worship were efficiently massacred by hate-professing Hutus, in accordance with instructions from their government.
Visiting the memorials was made all the worse by recalling that the array of bones before us came from only one hundredth of the total number of people killed. Some estimate that close to 1 million men, women and children were murdered during 100 blood-stained days and nights.
Across from Nyamata Church, children laughed and played at the nearby school. A new center of worship had been built for the community. The old church preserved the evidence of its own desecration.
After he pointed out the grenade-bent bars of the front doors, the memorial's caretaker, 70-year-old Tarcis Mukama, led us down into a small room below the church's floor, where a large glass case sat. We looked down through the panes and saw that beneath the case's floor lay a coffin marked with a cross. On the display case's shelves, neatly grouped, were bones. Large holes were punched through some of the skulls. Deep gashes were visible in a few of the thigh bones.
No one else had come by that day, but there are some periods when visitors come in waves, Mukama said. He knew some of the families who had been killed within these walls. He had been working there since the memorial opened to the public three years ago.
We climbed up the white-tiled steps out of the small room and walked around the former worship space.
Mukama showed us discolored spots on the walls where blood had dried. He pointed up to the tin roof that had been punctured by bullet holes and now lets in starry points of daylight. There was blood spatter on those high ceilings, too.
The podium where priests once had sermonized looked like someone had scooped out handfuls of it, revealing gray cement beneath the decorative paint. Grenades again. New glass enshrined the shards remaining of the original window panes.
Mukama then took us behind the memorial church to two tomb-like trenches in the ground.
Perching at the top of the stairs, we could see bones collected on the temporary wooden shelves below us. Sunshine brightened only the stairwell. I kept hesitating on the steps, unsure how far I wanted to go. Directly in front of me were several shelves, about 6 feet wide and 4 feet deep. A layer of skulls sat just below eye level. A jumble of bones and bone fragments were heaped up on other shelves.
I quickly ducked behind my medical background. Rib, sacrum, femur, tibia, mandible, rib, femur . . . I mechanically named them to myself. Some bones were just too small to be from adults.
Two aisles extended from the stairwell, each lined front and back with more shelves, all holding bones. I forced myself to walk into the dark, trying to count shelves in twos or threes, but the numbers kept slipping away and I had to start over several times. I am not normally squeamish about bones or blood, but then, this was not an anatomy lesson.
Smells of must and earth mingled together in the chilled air. I made it close to the aisle's end on one side, where a little light still filtered through. Our translator stood there, urging me to come forward. When I looked down and saw that some bones had slid from the lowest shelf onto the ground by his feet, I retreated back to the stairs. Then I peered down the other arm of the tomb, still trying to count.
I calculated there were about 40 shelves of victims' skeletal remains. An estimated 2,500 people died in Nyamata Church.
The sun was warm on my back as we walked back to the memorial's entrance. I shivered then, and again after Martha and I signed our names in the latest of four ledgers recording visitors. People had come from all corners of the world to see what had been done here, including some from southwestern Pennsylvania.
To understand why these memorials exist, it helps to know just how long ethnic rivalries had simmered in Rwanda.
In his account of Rwanda's recent history, "We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families," Philip Gourevitch wrote that tensions between Hutus and the Tutsi minority were fomented by the Belgian colonists who occupied Rwanda from the mid-1800s until 1962.
The enmity turned violent for the first time in the late 1950s. Every few years after that, blood would be spilled. Tutsis would flee into Uganda and other neighboring countries, and then the government would bar them from returning.
Some of the exiled Rwandans joined an army, called the Rwandese Patriotic Front. It invaded Rwanda's northwestern region in 1990, with the goal of toppling the government headed by Hutu Juvenal Habyarimana. The Patriotic Front's threat was later used by supporters of Hutu Power, the faction behind the genocide, to mobilize the Hutu citizenry against the Tutsis.
The genocide was triggered by the assassination of Habyarimana on April 6, 1994. That's when Hutu Power military leaders took over and the slaughter began. Hutus who didn't agree with the anti-Tutsi ideology were killed along with Tutsis.
Three months later, the regime that backed the genocide was ousted by the Patriotic Front, whose soldiers poured in from Uganda. The new government, now headed by President Paul Kagame, a general credited with the Front's victory, decided that many of the churches in which massacres occurred should stand as reminders, and warnings, of the consequences of ethnic hatred.
The experience at Nyamata was a disturbing glimpse into the genocide. The visit to Ntarama Church was far worse.
A sign outside said in French, English and Kinyarwandan that there were about 5,000 people killed there.
We walked through the gates into a quiet, treed sanctuary. A few goats grazed in the shade while their owner sat in the grass and watched.
A roofed structure had been erected near the church. Table tops lined each side, with a narrow aisle in between. One side was a long gray pile of bone fragments, bits of fabric, tattered clothes, dirt and plant material. These were remains that had been collected from the surrounding bush and brought back to the memorial.
On the other side, arranged in neat rows like huge eggs, were about 500 skulls. Small, large, intact, cracked. One or two were still wrapped in scarves, indicating they were women. What looked like thick black hair had slipped out from under one discolored and dirty kerchief.
The guide at this site, Dancira Nyirabazungu, 47, walked with us as we peered into the small church.
Grenades had blown out the bricks in several places, leaving gaping holes. We could not easily walk into the building because it had been left untouched since the time of the massacre inside. Remains of victims were piled up from wall to wall. Disintegrating clothes draped bones. Plastic wash tubs and a red-rimmed dinner plate sat among the carnage.
People had brought whatever they needed to survive in the shelter of the church, Nyirabazungu explained. Then, on April 15, 1994, four busloads of soldiers came to do the killing. The stench of rot has likely lessened with time, but has not yet left the church.
She pointed to swamps not visible in the distance. Many others were killed there as they tried to escape the slaughter. Their bones will remain there because the treacherous terrain makes recovery too difficult.
We walked with her around the other small buildings in the compound, including a Sunday school and church offices. In each one there was spattered blood and decay. Startled bats flapped out of one room when we inadvertently disturbed their slumber.
Nyirabazungu is raising five children on a nearby plot of land. Even though the government is sometimes late with her salary, she has a powerful reason to do this job.
Her husband's remains are somewhere in the church.
She has grieved, Nyirabazungu said. If you keep thinking about it, you can't work or even be on this Earth, she said. So that's over, she's not crying anymore. Her main concern is the children. Everyone is praying that such genocide will never happen again.
To help achieve that goal, Nyirabazungu shows people the church and the murders committed inside.
I'm here to explain it to everybody, she said. But she also has another reason why she works there.
She's trying to figure out why it all happened.
Expatriates we met in Rwanda asked about our trip to the memorials. One told me that he didn't want to visit them until he could identify his motivation for doing so. I don't want to be a voyeur, he said. Another friend told me she won't look because that won't help her understand any better.
I went in part because my job took me there. I went also because I have so little to offer other than a recognition of the wrongs done and their magnitude.
And as much as I wanted to forget what I saw during the nights when I felt irrationally unsafe and was unable to sleep, I realized in the light of day that all those ghosts had something important to tell us.
Remember.
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About 2,500 people were massacred in this church at Nyamata. The church and other sites are intended to stand as reminders of the 1994 genocide. As one visitor to the church wrote in French: Pas des mots. There are no words. Click to Photo Journal. 
A crucifix has been placed among the remains of genocide victims at Ntarama Church, outside the Rwandan capital of Kigali. An estimated 5,000 people were killed here in April 1994. Many people sought safety within churches across Rwanda, only to be slaughtered en masse when they were discovered by the soldiers and militia of a hate-professing government. Click to Photo Journal