The view from a court room and a mass grave

Kigali is transforming before my eyes... a beautiful country is turning out to have a lot of hidden hurt and secrets underneath its surface. The beggers without hands or feet, the people with huge scars on their backs or face are no longer unfortunate events, but they are the result of a Genocide....

Yesterday we visited the Guchacha courts. It was an odd experience to be a few feet away from someone convicted of murdering. The court was a lot different then the courts in America. We came in and sat on two benches. Every time the panel of judges came in, we would stand to show respect to them. We also stood for a minute to respect all the deaths from the Genocide. There was a panel of judges that all wore sashes with the Rwandan flag colors on them. The first man that was accused was accused by a lady of killing her husband. Everything was hear say, it was her word against his. The witnesses would say things like “I have seen him carrying a spear, so he must be guilty”, or “I heard from a lot of people that he killed that man”. The man would then respond with things like “I was in my house with my wife, and I heard the shots out side, but I did not kill him”. It was one persons word against another, and it seemed like nothing could be solved from the evidence given, because nothing held up, new evidence kept coming into the story, people would lie and then their lie would be discovered. It was hard to know what to think about this man. The second case was accusing a man of sending people to the road blocks. It was the same thing though, one persons word against another. It was a weird experience being there. I am reading a book from the perspective of the killers of the genocide, and it was weird to read these stories, and then be in the same room of people convicted of these crimes. The criminals wore pink of they were accused but did not admit to the crime, and orange if they did admit to the crimes. There was a man in orange in the room, and it was a very odd experience to be in the same room as these men. I did not know weather to be mad at them, feel sorry for them, or pray for them.

This experience was also very frustrating. I was frustrated by the way the hearing was going. I was mad that it was all people saying what they thought, or heard. It was one person’s word against another, and I didn’t think that there was enough evidence to be putting people in jail, or to be sentencing people for something that they really don’t have enough to judge on. I also we amazed by the fact that it is fourteen years after the Genocide, and these people are just now getting a trial. I know that there are so many people accused of crimes, and that if they all went as long as they went yesterday there is no way that it could have been done in less time, but I think of the one man who was tried. He had already spent 12 years in jail, and he was pleading innocent. All evidence was what people said, or thought, nothing concrete. What if this man was innocent and 14 years later he had his trial, and with no evidence they set him free. 12 years of his life were wasted in jail because of what people said. Also, how concrete can evidence be after 14 years? These courts are good, and it is a good way to try to obtain justice, and I know that one court can’t do all the trials, but it seems almost ineffective. How can you know what people did 14 years ago by people differing stories? Do these people really want justice? Or do they just want to feel like the crime paid on their loved ones has been rectified. It was very interesting though, and neat to see the way the courts work here.

So then today we went to the Nyamata Memorial site. It was a very hard thing to see. I am reading a book right now called “A Time for Machetes”, which is about the killers of this area. A man goes and interviews them about the genocide, and talk about killing in this church, so going to this church where I heave been reading about what these men did was a little difficult. We walked up to this church, and they are doing a lot of re building and beautifying (i.e. planting flowers, making a path, etc) this building, which was a little nuts. It has already been 14 years, and they are just starting now to beatify this building. We walked into this church, the door way was blown in, and the man told us that that was how they got into the church by blowing out the door. There were tons of holes in the ceiling as well from the effects of the bomb. There was over 10,000 people hiding in this church, a place where they thought they could find refuge. It was a church, it was supposed to be a safe place, but even the house of God meant nothing to the killers of the genocide. Out of the 10,000 people, two children survived. There was gun holes all over the church, doors looked like they had been ripped open very harshly. When we walked in, to the left was a broken door, and inside was all the cloths of the people that died. I felt a little ever whelmed looking at this room full of cloths; it was almost from the ceiling to the floor, piles and piles of cloths. We then walked down stairs where there was a case of bones and skulls, as well as a grave at the bottom. The man told us, the woman in the grave was a woman who fell in a well, and because she fell in the well, it is the only in tact body that was not completely mutilated by a machete. He then took us outside to the mass graves. We were allowed to go into these graves. The first one was just coffins with many bones in each. The second one was bones. There was hundreds and hundreds of skulls, thousands of bones. From the ceiling to the floor on every wall there were bones. You could see the way these people died, holes in the skulls, faces completely missing, huge crushed places where the machete had blown. You could smell the death in that room. You could see the thousands of people who had died. There were just so many skulls, with no race, gender, age, just a human skull with teeth, skulls that were once humans hiding in a church thinking that they might be saved. I have seen skulls before, in science, or in a book, but always for learning purposes, bones given after the death for the sake of learning and research. These skulls in this mass grave were not given after the fact for the sake of learning. They were lives forcibly taken for no good reason and rest in a mass grave because there were too many deaths, and people were in too many pieces to have their own graves. This memorial was a little hard for me. It was more then just reading, and hearing people’s stories. I was in the church these people died in; I was in the grave these people will spend the rest of their existence in. So many lives were taken during the genocide. I still cannot understand how people could hate one another so much.