“As we forgive”

Mar 10, 2019 News

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Prelude

“As we forgive” is the title of a 264-page work by Catherine Claire Larson on the Rwandan genocide. It is a narrative of seven interrelated stories of unparalleled horror and unmatched terror at the hands of former neighbours and friends and countrymen mutated into killing machines; and of 800,000 murdered in 100 days, while a world ignored or denied this African holocaust.
It is also the great heartwarming story of mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation following in the dark blood-drenched shadow of death.
This 7-part feature is part book commentary, part exploratory, part prayer, and part hope that other troubled nations could-and would-learn from what happened in Rwanda.
The Greek tragedies were painted in profound searing masterpieces by Sophocles and Aeschylus; in way less limited prose, this series and essayist struggles to emphasize and project the fear and hope, the agony and mercy; the forgiving and reliving; and that in some way other unsettled nations can avoid a similar fate, and become sanctuaries of healing and reconciling.

Part I – Rwanda: context and crisis, history and hate

Rwanda is a land, an earthly garden, of magical beauty and haunting agony; of unimaginable pain and unbearable sorrow. It was also a nation of some six million Hutus and Tutsis in 1994.
Where to start? From 800,000 dead victims? From many more numbed, broken, maddened survivors? How to select one or a thousand to tell this tale? From the perpetrators: whether jailed or freed or escaped or restored?
In which ones can there be found redeeming features and the power to forgive them for doing what they did know could only be wrong?
And yet, as indescribably poignant as this tragedy was, as Ms. Larson’s book highlights, and this puny media series tries to convey, from those rivers of blood, there still remains that invincible, indefatigable human spirit that conquers all. It is of mending: patching one tear at a time; stitching one tendril of hope at a time so that there can be enough to overwhelm what is left of a shattered lifetime, a desecrated spirit, and hearts that beat, but matters not.
A country is reborn, a society renewed, a people rescued. May Rwanda never be repeated or relived anywhere. Anywhere on the face of this God’s green earth.
The author, Ms. Larson quoted Steve Matthews from the “Companions of the Pilgrimage:” through the memorable exhortation: “to listen a person’s soul into existence.”
The first story is about Rosaria. The older, best forgotten story is that of the colonial powers: Germans first, but mainly Belgians, who came later, and their bloodstained hands and soiled souls that form an integral part of the Rwandan genocide history. Introduced in 1926, ethnic identity cards became mandatory in 1933.
The distinction between Hutu and Tutsi: one taller, more educated, more favoured. More powerful, too. Like the biblical Cain and Abel: one a herder, the other a farmer. Thus, the stage was set. The machetes came later; fifty thousand in one batch imported from Tanzania in premeditated readying for the slaughter that awaited. That is a whole lot of machetes; there was a whole world of killing in mind.
The resentments built and raged providing the foundations for the hatreds and evils that hungered for a spark, any spark. Sections of the media stoked the ethnic furnace; the men and women of the cloth did not work hard enough to cool the passions, to preach and practice love of neighbour in even a vain effort to dilute the volcanic rage building and building. And still building towards broadening towering crests.
Remember Rosaria? Time to hear her faint lonely echo in the keening scream of a nation in pain; lost, and not knowing how to find itself. A nation so enfeebled, as to be unable to lift itself out of the gore and stench of death; yet willing to try.
Rosaria lost everything: her sick son was killed; her three other children perished violently; her husband, too. So did her sister and her children. Cockroaches all to be hunted down, crushed, hacked, exterminated. Using machetes mainly, and systematic, manual, labour-intensive brutality, the Rwandan Hutus killed more Tutsis in 100 days in 1994 than the Germans did utilizing their mechanized, superbly engineered gas chambers. The Nazi Germans were exceeded five times over.
Any Hutu friend, relation, or neighbour who sought to either conceal or protect or not engage in the killing sprees were considered traitors and earmarked for a similar gruesome death at the hands of a now bloodthirsty, crazed human swarm. There was no such thing as neutrality. Intermarriage relationships meant nothing; massacre or be massacred. Them and us trapped in a bloodcurdling orgy of death and more death.
Amidst her massive inhuman and unbearable losses, there were two things that Rosaria did not lose during her ordeals. Somehow, she did not lose her mind; or all of it in the tsunamis of violence that immersed her, and the impenetrable shroud of grief that enveloped her. That by itself was a divine miracle.
But there was a still greater miracle for this wounded wretched woman of Rwanda: she did not lose the blessed child she was carrying in her womb; a fetus that survived flights, ambushes, mass murders, left for dead, and more. In the crucible of the dark valley of overwhelming death, of the dying and dead, there came the mystery and miracle of life. Life came in the silhouette of a baby, a girl named Cadeaux; against the odds, in defiance of the devil and circumstances and all that is wrong and wicked about man, and of man against man; that immortal, immoral conflict of brother against brother. Cain killing Abel. Bloodlust unleashed and repeatedly. Life extinguished; the harrowing accompanied by the dehumanizing. Nothing else left. Rwanda reeled and retched blood in 1994.
After two incredible miracles, there followed still one more to lift the Stygian gloom of the stricken Rosaria. This one takes the breath away: it is of Saveri, a different breed of survivor. He was a perpetrator, now no longer a faceless mass murderer. Who said there is no God?

Next week: Part II: Saveri and Rosaria: two tortured souls; one transcendent word: forgiving….

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