MIRACLE IN KIGALI The Rwandan Genocide– a survivor’s journey

Introduction Paul Dickson Thirteen years ago Rwanda’s Hutu ‘Power’ extremists attempted to wipe their Tutsi compatriots from the face of the earth. Any moderate Hutus who stood in their way were also engulfed in this holocaust.

Friend murdered friend, slashing and cutting with machetes and spears.

‘Lucky’ victims paid for a quicker despatch, courtesy of a bullet to the head. In little more than three months, from April 6 to July 4, 1994, some 800,000 people were murdered. The killing rate was faster than the Nazis achieved in their industrial gas chambers. The army and Interahamwe (meaning ‘those who work together’) militia recruited entire local communities to their cause, tracking down every last Tutsi. To refuse resulted in an immediate death sentence.

One of Africa’s most beautiful and fertile countries, Le Pays des Mille Collines – land of a thousand hills – descended into unimaginable savagery.

Western nations stood on the sidelines as Rwanda crumbled. The tiny United Nations force in Kigali, led by General Romeo Dallaire, was impotent. Despite Dallaire’s urgent protests, his soldiers were not allowed to intervene.

The media reported tales of death and destruction. But this was Africa; they were always killing each other on the ‘Dark Continent’. Readers turned the page and checked their share prices or the latest cricket scores.

But despite Western ambivalence, the ‘Hutu Power’ objective was thwarted.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded from Uganda. This Tutsi-led exile army eventually stopped the mass slaughter, but sparked a Hutu exodus. Some two million Hutu fled to Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) – and to disease and death on the plains of Goma. Spurred on by the Interahamwe, who told lurid stories of alleged RPF atrocities, whole villages abandoned their homes and farms.

It was only then that the West finally woke up to the tragedy of Rwanda. Too late for Tutsi women and children lost in the Genocide. Too late for Hutu women and children dying from cholera in the squalor of a Congolese refugee camp.

But against all the odds, some innocent bystanders did survive. Swept along by the horrors of the Genocide and then spat out alive at its conclusion, how could 5