COLUMN: Lessons Learned in Rwanda

I'm in Kigali now, the capital city of Rwanda. It's quite possibly the cleanest city in East Africa, and certainly the safest. I am still trying to get over the fact that the gutters are swept out almost every day, that vehicles yield for pedestrians, and that the public transport system is fairly reliable. It feels like an oasis of modernity compared to Kampala. This is all surface-level, though. There is a lot about Rwanda beneath the exterior of general peace and optimism. Today we went on a field trip to the Gisozi genocide memorial. Rwanda has many memorial sites for the atrocity of 1994. Almost 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were brutally slaughtered by their friends and neighbors within the span of a hundred days. This particular memorial serves as a mass burial ground for the bodies of the victims found in Kigali. It is also an educational site, a way to commemorate the victims, and a research center for genocide experts from around the world.

Rwandans don't talk about the genocide easily. Sixteen years later there are still horrible repercussions: orphans, women who were systematically raped by HIV positive men, perpetrators who have not yet been tried, and millions who need to forgive in order to move on with life. Victims are living side-by-side with the men who killed their families. No one in the entire country is untouched by the events of the genocide.

Vestine, our Rwandan friend, walked with us through the memorial. She softly explained parts of it to me as we looked at the displays. "Imagine, they [the Hutus] would look at your physique and determine whether or not to kill you. They would measure your nose to see how long it was. If you were tall and slender they said you were a Tutsi, and they killed you. They killed many of their own that way."

We stopped in front of a small plaque that talked about how violence continued to reoccur through 1997. "People were afraid that another genocide would happen. They were afraid of attacks from across the border in Congo," said Vestine.

"Did more attacks actually occur?" I asked.

"Yes, they did. They killed my brother." She moved on to another station, but I stood there wondering what in the world to say to that. How must Vestine feel, walking through this memorial and seeing the rooms full of skulls, photographs, footage, and stories? How must any Rwandan feel?

The worst room for me was the one commemorating the children. It contained large pictures of a few of the children who had been killed, a few words about them, and then how they died. For example, Name: Celestine. Age: four. Favorite food: passion fruit. Character trait: talkative. Method of death: hacked by a machete.

That was always the last, the method of death. Shot in mother's arms. Burned alive in a church. Bludgeoned to death with a club. Stabbed in the head and the eyes.

One kid looked so much like my 13-year-old cousin that I immediately began to think about what if it had been him. It could have been my family that was decimated in front of my eyes, my life that had been blown apart in the space of a few days.

The question I was left with was: how? How can governments plot large-scale massacres against ethnic groups, and get people to carry them out? It happened most famously in Germany, but it also occurred in places like Cambodia, Armenia, Bosnia, and Darfur. It is hard, if not impossible, to come to grips with the deepest and darkest part of mankind.