“As we forgive…”Rwanda: Part II: Saveri and Rosaria: two tortured souls; one transcendent word: forgiving

Mar 17, 2019 Features / Columnists, News

Saveri is all Hutu. There is the enormity of the ugly messages and unrelenting visions that infested and controlled his mind; that powered every beat of his hostile heart; and that coursed through his being, and extended in the arcing expressions of his rising and descending machete-ready arm. Such is the savagery of long pent-up passions and animosities when they flare into murderous crimson floods. Saveri was one of the thousands (perhaps tens and hundreds of thousands) of Horsemen of the Apocalypse that roamed the Armageddon that was the Rwandan communities and countryside, and all killing fields, in 1994. Only he would know with any degree of precision the totality of limbs and lives that crumbled under the slashing sweeping strokes in his individual storm of machetes. And even that would be subject to debate, in view of the frenzies of maniacal bloodletting.
Can such a man-no longer a human being, but a mindless mechanical killing machine-be forgiven? Who would? How could any survivor on the receiving end of that hellish onslaught find it (anything) in themselves to even think, and then venture tentatively, nervously, fearfully to that sacred sanctuary called forgiveness?
How? It is just not humanly possible. But there are some timeless words of wisdom written long ago by inspired men, who had seen the glory, that postulated the unbelievable: nothing is impossible for the divine. For believers. For those who surrender blindly and willingly to the mysterious guiding pathways smoothed by His will.
For some time during that 100 days of hunting and herding (man, woman, and child), isolating and identifying (victims that looked and were different, and those others belonging to the rampaging marauders’ clan who sheltered them), and then slaughtering (one and all: old and young, male and female, sick and sturdy), Saveri was right there. There and at many of the other roads and neighbourhoods that were transformed into checkpoints of interdiction and tollgates, whose single currency was blood.
Death came in delirious droves, one hacking machete stroke at a time; an unending blur of cold hard steel powered by colder harder hearts and minds poisoned beyond rescuing. Only in flesh was there found yielding; only in the floods of blood (and more blood) did there come a strange sick satiation. The Tutsis fell and rotted; they filled crocodiles; or were buried in mass graves and burnt like so many despised worms. Saveri was there.
Now Saveri is here. Right here in the Kinyinya holding pen, after four years in the Rilima Penitentiary. Rosaria is there, too; but in the spirit with the accumulated weights and yokes of her memories and griefs and hurts. Saveri is one of the thousands of Hutu killers identified, imprisoned, and now released in one grand unheard of, and incomprehensible, amnesty.
The fragile hope that ripped-apart and bloodied helpless and hopeless Rwanda could somehow, some day make some start to think the unthinkable, and understand that which is beyond human understanding.
Ms. Larsen’s recording of the Tutsi reaction presents the simplest, yet most eloquent, most piercing articulation of what was in hearts and minds of anguished survivors, and now gushed forth in uncontrolled shock and disbelief: “If you were told that a murderer was to be released into your neighbourhood, how would you feel? But what if wasn’t only one, but thousands?” Flashbacks? Blankness? Alarm and anger? Sweeping black depression to an unknown degree and of an irretrievable, incurable kind?
From an individual and collective Tutsi perspective, it had to be all of this and so much more that can neither be captured nor ventilated. Just too much; too fathomless, too inexpressible.
But there they are: Saveri: a Hutu killer and prisoner now freed; and Rosaria: a Tutsi victim and survivor and sufferer now backed against and into an immovable snare that leaves no room, not one centimetre for escape. There is no physical distance between them; only the blood and loss and harsh recollections of a hundred days from hell best…. Best what? Forgotten? Revenged and punished? And then what waits next in the cycle of almost a century of internal and external cataclysms?
Take away the savagery that was actually unleashed just a short two and a half decades ago in that mesmerizingly lush African paradise, and those emotions and fears, and hatreds and antagonisms relay the unsaid (to some extent), the unlived (to any comparable degree), and the unimagined (to the unthinking and unwise, perhaps uncaring) to other troubled lands with ethnic issues
They should to any such country, regardless of their political, racial, emotional, and psychological affiliations or obsessions. For there are major components (and many such components) of the Rwandan disaster and tragedy that warn and should fill with apprehension each and every human being, who care to appreciate the potential for a social and national catastrophe of some kind and some strain when irreconcilable differences appear to exist.
But what of the other side of this desolate human drama? Of Saveri? What is his story? What can it be? Is it worth a listening? If there was going to be that first step, any step of any kind, it has to be heard, too.
From any objective perspective, sure to be overwhelmed with negatives, Saveri and the Saveris of Rwanda (of whatever ethnicity or wherever else they exist) are unpardonable, unfit for life. The premeditations, the physical planning and psychological preparations, and the personal pilgrimages deep into self-created purgatories for the purged (and inevitably perpetrators, too) demand that ultimate solution: death.
Then, there would have to be 100,000 such judgments from chambers and 100,000 such state-implemented executions to follow. At a minimum. There would still be Rosaria with her interminably wrenching nightmares, and the many like her; as well as the numerous and unaccounted for Saveris to be ushered to that final irreversible fate. An eye for an eye; as the good book did command: a life for a life. Another killing apparatus waiting for approval and cathartic release.
After each of the first three sessions of group talking and listening by both highly troubled ethnic groups, the same question came from Saveri to Rosaria: Can you forgive me? And three times, the same answer poured forth from the mentally maimed and wretched Rosaria in one solitary encyclopedic drop: Why? And why ME?
On the fourth approach, Saveri’s answer came tumbling forth, “I am the one who murdered your….I am begging for you to forgive me.” Through her own pain, sorrow, anger, and hate, somehow Rosaria got there and did forgive somehow. There is that one transcendent word: forgiveness. It can be steadying; also crippling, and ultimately knitting: at its most complete, forgiveness incorporates and projects the suffering of the sufferer(s). From those first excruciating droplets of mercy came the redemptive powers of reconciling and healing. Blessed heavenly peace came to both survivor and perpetrator. It is a sweet terrible peace.
Can other unsettled societies get to a place of true peace before it reaches the point of no return? Amidst the contemplations and meditations (the sacrifices, too) is there the willingness to face conscience and environment, as they are, and make a turn? And do they have what is required to avoid that which is being hurtled to with such wanton abandon at this unnerving time?