Rwanda might not be everyone's idea of a family trip, but it's one of
my favorite places in the world and, after visiting last year to
highlight the 1994 genocide and promote anti-genocide legislation during
my run for Congress, I wanted my children and some notable Jewish
personalities to experience it with me. Much has happened in that year,
including Rwanda occupying the Africa seat on the United Nations
Security Council and announcing that they will be opening an embassy in
Israel imminently. I now and try and come every year to Rwanda,
especially in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the genocide, and
this year the billionaire Jewish philanthropists, Dr. Miriam and Sheldon
Adelson, made the trip possible to promote the brotherhood of the
Jewish and Rwandan people, both of whom have been subjected to
unspeakable horrors but are committed to healing and hope.
The visit was sufficiently important to me that I came with my family
despite the State Department shutting down the American Embassy in
Kigali - along with 20 others around the world - due to security alerts.
Why am I here? Because no country on earth today reminds us moderns
of the responsibility of man to his fellow man and no country has
bounced back from a genocide with such determination, forgiveness, and
resilience. And I wanted my kids - as I visited more of the atrocity
sites and met with government officials - to experience the country with
me.
In the Jewish community the word survivor evokes men and women in
their eighties whose families were wiped out by the Germans. In Rwanda,
those same survivors are in their twenties and thirties, like our guide
today, Gaspard, whose ten siblings were macheted to death and his father
shot before his very eyes when he was a boy of nine.
The first thing you notice as you drive through the streets of
Kigali, the capital, from the airport, is the cleanliness. It is no
exaggeration to say that Rwanda is probably the cleanest country on
earth and any visitor would notice the same. At the airport you have to
throw away any plastic bags you've brought. What's referred to as the
'flower of Africa' are not allowed into the country. I actually took a
picture of a cup strewn on the side of a highway because I had rarely
seen even one litter Kigali before.
Next, the rolling curves of a landscape known as 'the land of a
thousand hills' immediately makes its mark. The closest thing we
Americans have similar to Rwanda's topography is West Virginia, and
Rwanda has an excellent road system that takes you up and down the hills
to where you need to go.
The gentility of the people is evident everywhere. English is
abundant and it's spoken with a softness and delicacy that makes it
pleasant to hear.
The country is as green as anything I have ever seen in Africa and
agriculture surrounds you from every stop. Women and men are heaving
hoes, planting and harvesting wherever you look. It's an incredible
site.
But it's tragic history is ever-present. Memorials are strewn
throughout the country as well as mass graves housing the nearly one
million who were hacked to death in a racial genocide of Hutu on Tutsi
that was the fastest in the history of the world, claiming the lives of
300 people every hour for the three months of April to June 1994.
The last time I was here I visited a Church outside the capital
where, not being ready for the gruesome skeletal remains of five
thousand innocent people who were butchered, I gagged, threw up, and
could not breathe.
Today it was much worse. We traveled south for two hours to the
Murambe Genocide Memorial where on April 21st, 1994, more than fifty
thousand people were shot, bludgeoned, and hacked to death in the middle
of the night in just a matter of hours. One thousand of their
lime-covered bodies are displayed on wooden tables in a scene so macabre
that it constitutes the single most disturbing site I have ever
witnessed in my life. Rwanda, like the Jewish people before them, faces a
cottage industry of genocide deniers and they are intent on displaying
the full gore of the tragedy so that it can never be denied. While we
Jews contend with the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who deny the
holocaust so as delegitimize Israel and its security needs, the Rwandans
face a similar onslaught by those seeking to cripple its government.
There was an incongruence in the air as our older children, who
joined us in the memorial, gasped for breath as they saw the bodies
while a few hundred yards away our young children played in a park,
laughing and frolicking. The surrounding hills were as silent and serene
as the dead, and I was reminded of the quiet and stillness of Auschwitz
where all is mute as you walk through the gas chamber ruins.
I first became interested in visiting Rwanda through Michael
Jackson's children's nanny, a woman named Grace, who would return every
summer to her native country to see her family. I finally made the
decision to visit after my daughter, serving as a foreign military
liaison in the Israel Defense Forces, met General Charles Kayonga,
Rwanda's chief of staff, who invited me. I have since become a firm
admirer of this stalwart people and especially its president, Paul
Kagame, who ended the genocide in 1994. That Kagame could bring the
world's most failed state back to a position of progress and prosperity
less than two decades after the fastest genocide in world history is a
miracle. That he is a staunch friend and admirer of the Jewish people
and the State of Israel is of great consequence, especially on the
African continent.
Kagame himself faces significant criticism today over allegations of
foreign involvement in Eastern Congo and for not allowing sufficient
democratic freedoms in his country. Experts greater than me are
currently debating the veracity of such claims. Some believe the
allegations have merit while others are more understanding of a leader
who has sworn to protect his people from genocidal forces - the children
and ideological heirs of the original Hutu butchers - that still amass
on his border. But one cannot help but admire a man who witnessed his
people being exterminated while the world watched in silence, rustled up
his troops to stop the killing, conquered the entire country with great
alacrity, and when he took power did not retaliate against the Hutu
majority who had turned Rwanda into an ocean of blood.
Others might even argue that Rwanda has been too forgiving of some of
the killers. While driving through the countryside I inquired as to the
identity of the many middle-aged men in orange jumpsuits who were
working the fields. I was told they were inmates in prisons. "What is
their crime," I asked our guide. "Genocide," he said. "These are the men
who did the killing. Their punishment is to work the fields and grow
produce."
Grow produce. A punishment somewhat different to what was meted out at Nuremberg.
Shmuley Boteach, "America's Rabbi," is founder of This World: The
Jewish Values Network. He has just published "The Fed-Up Man of Faith:
Challenging God in the Face of Tragedy and Suffering." Follow his live
Twitter feed of his visit to Rwanda @RabbiShmuley.
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