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Rwanda genocide survivor moves audience to tears
St John’s University graduation
Rwanda genocide survivor and author, Immaculée Ilibagiza, recounted to an audience at St. John’s University how she survived the slaughter of thousands of the her Tutsi tribe in 1994 by hiding for 91 harrowing days in a bathroom cramped with seven other women.
Immaculée Ilibagiza
In a speech that occasionally moved her audience to tears, Ilibagiza spoke of the slaughter of her entire family and several of her friends, and how her faith in God helped her to prevail.
Ms. Ilibagiza was one of the 2009 Commencement speakers at St. John’s University this year during Graduation Weekend, which two Saturdays ago.
“I had just gone home for the Easter holidays when the genocide started…They put a radio outside so we could hear what was going on,” she told her audience.
“The government leaders were the ones calling for the killing of everyone of my tribe. They had killed (almost) everyone who had stayed behind. They were telling people to go by homes and see if anyone hiding.”
At the time, Immaculée was studying electronic and mechanical engineering at the National University. She was just 22 years old.
To escape the slaughter, Immaculee and seven other women of her tribe secreted themselves in a bathroom of a local pastor’s home for three months. They were on the brink of starvation.
She was 115 pounds when she entered the hiding place, but was ‘a skeleton’ when she and the other survivors emerged 91 days later.
“The first night I came out I was 65 pounds. I was a skeleton.”
But she was one of the lucky ones.
“I found out that everyone I left behind was killed; my mother, my father, my two brothers, my friends, my schoolmates.
“Of the 2,005 students they had killed 900.”
Traumatised by her ordeal, Immaculee said that for several weeks she called for the strength to overcome.
It is estimated at least 500,000 Tutsis were butchered by members of the rival Hutu tribe between April 6 through mid-July, 1994.
Some estimates put the figure at between 800,000 and one million.
Four years after the Rwanda genocide, Ms. Ilibagiza emigrated to the United States and began working at the United Nations in New York City.
She has appeared on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes” and wrote a best-selling autobiography, Left to Tell, which chronicles her life-altering experience, and explains how Ilibagiza, a devout Roman Catholic, learned to forgive the perpetrators and release her anger.
. She is now a full-time public speaker and writer.
In 2007 she established the Left to Tell Charitable Fund, which helps support Rwandan orphans.
In addition, Immaculée holds honorary doctoral degrees from The University of Notre Dame and Saint John’s University, and was awarded The Mahatma Gandhi International Award for Reconciliation and Peace 2007.
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