Consider This from NPR - Learning To Live As Neighbors In The Shadow Of A Brutal, Violent History

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

Many of us don't have the opportunity to handpick our neighbors. We buy or rent a place in a neighborhood with good schools or an easy commute. Some of us become friends with those who live nearby, others of us never talk to our neighbors at all. For most though, we co-exist. In the midst of a brutal civil war, neighbors killed their neighbors simply because of who they were. Thirty years ago this month, that wasn't the case in Rwanda.We visit a Rwandan village where how neighbors live alongside one another is deliberate, and complicated. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Many of us don't have the opportunity to handpick our neighbors. We buy or rent a place in a neighborhood with good schools or an easy commute. Some of us become friends with those who live nearby. Others of us, well, we never talk to our neighbors at all. For most, though, we coexist. Thirty years ago this month, that was not the case in Rwanda. In the midst of a brutal civil war, neighbor was killing neighbor simply because of who they were. Consider this. Here in Rwanda, we visit one village where the idea of who your neighbors are and how people live alongside each other is far more deliberate and complicated. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.

It's Consider This from NPR. At the top of a long dirt road, there is a Pentecostal church. The pews are full. Down the road in a small courtyard, a woman tosses corn over and over again in this big woven basket. We were visiting a reconciliation village where people who survived the Rwandan genocide 30 years ago and the perpetrators who killed now live side by side. We reach a house and step through a curtain door to meet a woman named Rochelle Mukantabana. She is now 45 years old, but in 1994, as the genocide began, I was 15 years old and I knew exactly what was happening.

Even a child of five knew what was about to happen. She tells me her family's story and how she survived, and a warning. This story contains graphic descriptions of violence. Two days after the genocide began, she and her family, a group of 11, fled their homes. They tried to hide in a church, then a school. Ultimately, they ended up hiding in a big swamp. They didn't think anyone could reach them there in the water. But near the end of April, hundreds of soldiers and militia members came. They surrounded the whole swamp and killed people until the evening.

Then they got tired and went back home. The next day, they came back, even more soldiers and militia members than the day before. And that day, she was captured. She had just seen her younger sister killed with a spear. She begged them not to kill her. They were checking my legs and said, your legs look like a tootsie's. She tells me how they beat her legs with a hammer. It was hard to walk.

Even so, she was able to get away, to get back into the swamp. She and others hid in that swamp for weeks. A brutal pattern played out day after day. The way we knew the killing had stopped was they'd shoot one bullet in the air, once. That meant the killing was over for the day. They would be back tomorrow. At night, they left the swamp and searched the bush for something to eat. In May, a group of rebel soldiers led them out of the swamp. Rochelle says she lost her mother, four siblings, and more than 50 members of her extended family. Stories like Rochelle's echo across the country, in homes, schools, hospitals, places like the low orange brick

church in the town of Karambamba, where you can feel the weight of the violent history that happened here. We've just walked inside the church, and I have to say, it's beautiful. There's so much light that is streaming in through the stained glass windows. And we know that 30 years ago, many people came to this church. They were seeking refuge and safety, and ultimately thousands were killed. And this is a place that reporter Michael Scholar visited reporting for NPR in the days following. When he was here, he described this unbearable stench and said that he saw dozens of bodies that were piled up outside the church. There are maybe two or three dozen bodies in the heat here in Rwanda. Many of the bodies are already almost fully decomposed. You can see some skulls. The Associated Press report from the time called Karambamba a flesh and bone junkyard

of human wreckage. In one of the church offices in the back, the bodies are piled, one on top of the other, crowded into a room. Karambamba was not unique. There were some 40,000 bodies littering the land. Across the country, neighbors brutally attacked their neighbors

with machetes, sticks, and clubs. The violence was intimate and vicious. When he turned his head, you could see a long slice had been taken from the back of his neck by a machete. As many as a quarter million Rwandan civilians participated in the killings beginning in April 1994. Upheaval in the African state of Rwanda. The mass killings, which grew out of a civil war, started after the Rwandan president's plane was shot down. Within hours, Hutu militias called Interhomwe began targeting Tutsis. The Interhomwe broke down the doors of

the church buildings with axes. They shot and speared, hacked and clubbed those inside for hours. There were roadblocks set up across the country. Hutus began to seek out Tutsis to kill. Propaganda radio broadcasts using dehumanizing language fueled the violence. In broadcasts that today, they are also orchestrated by the government. The government has even changed the way people talk about their identities. The official view is that the ethnic divisions of Hutu and Tutsi, they no longer exist. At the Reconciliation Village, we tell Rochelle that we plan to meet with genocide perpetrators, including a man she knows who lives not far from her. I ask Rochelle, what question does she think we should ask someone like that? What I would ask them is, when they were killing people inside themselves, did they feel human or like animals?

That is a question I put directly to Didas Kayinamura. When you were committing those crimes, did you feel human? Did you feel animalistic? How would you answer that? I'm asking me the same question. I don't understand how someone can kill his own children because the mom is a Tutsi. He's asking me always the same question. How come people went up to become like animals?

I think that we lost humanity at that period. We meet Didas Kainamura in a house he's renting. He insists that we come in quickly rather than linger outside. And speaking through an interpreter, he tells us the story of when he decided to participate in the violence in Rwanda. He tells me he was coerced by a killing group. They threatened his life. They took him to a man, a Tutsi man.

And they gave him a stick, a very strong stick. And they said, you have to kill him with this stick. I tried to kill him twice, but I was not able to kill him. And someone came, took the stick from me, and killed him. So this is the first day I went into genocide. He says despite pressure, he never participated in the violence again. He says, one guy, that's it. I stopped. I killed once. First-person narratives about genocide are complex.

Experts say there can be a tendency among perpetrators to minimize their role, sometimes in the hope of a shorter sentence, sometimes because the trauma of the genocide alters a perpetrator's memory. And I'm not saying I'm not a killer. I'm not saying I didn't participate in a genocide. I did. I did and I committed genocide. Why? Because when this group of people went to kill this gentleman, I went with them. Which means to go with them becomes already a genocidaire.

A genocidaire, a term for someone who perpetrated a genocide. Perpetrators like Kainamara were tried in community-based courts that sprung up quickly. The accused were judged by their neighbors. The proceedings relied on eyewitness narratives of fast-moving violent incidents. These gachacha courts tried criminals, but also promoted interpersonal forgiveness and reconciliation. And the first thing they said in the Gachacha court, it was to say, if someone agrees, if someone says yes, and asks for forgiveness, and they say what he's done, he will get out of the prison.

This is why I said I agree. I want to know how you see yourself today. When you think about your identity, when you look in the mirror, do you see yourself as a genocidaire? Do you see yourself as a killer? I consider myself as someone who committed genocide. So I don't consider myself as a genocide survivor.

I don't consider myself as a Tutsi. I consider myself as a genocidier. And this is my big challenge. My identity is a genocidaire. Rochelle has a different identity, mother. She's raising five children and sees a clear future for herself. The fact that I have children gives me the confidence to rebuild my life. How can I put it?

My children have allowed me to start over. And that new life includes learning how to live in a community with people who, 30 years ago, could have wanted her dead. I ask her if she feels comfortable living here, and she gestures just outside the door. The man walking outside, she says, is a Hutu, and she doesn't feel afraid. Thirty years after genocide, things are pretty good. People live together peacefully. There's no more Hutu, no more Tutsi. We are all Rwandan. They are all Rwandan, all now living under the shadow of a brutal, violent history that pitted neighbor against neighbor.

The people who served the longest sentences for their roles in the genocide are just returning home. And the work of learning to live side by side continues. This episode was produced by Matt Ozog and Brianna Scott. It was edited by Tenbeat Arameas and Courtney Dourning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.