Rwanda: A Time to Remember

We began this blog a year ago to mark the anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide. Since then, we’ve gone from Rwanda to Sudan and Somalia, to Burundi and the Congo, Mozambique and Angola, Zimbabwe and scores of other destinations. We’ve taken a look at the Iraq war as it started five years ago and also the claim Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. We plan to explore the US war on terror in Africa in the coming weeks, along with an African nuclear reactor security issue. But today, in memory of the victims of the Rwandan genocide on the 14th anniversary of the killings, we return to where we started and the visit I made to a massacre site soon after the bloodshed erupted. I post no photo. The images generated by these words are as vivid to me today as then. This is the transcript of what I saw and dictated live-to-tape in 1994:

We've just driven several kilometers along a dirt road north from the Rwandan town of Rusumo and we've arrived in a small town called Nyarubuye. And right here on the ground in front of me is the decomposed corpse of a child -- its skull bleached white, its dress still lying on what's left of the body. In the tall grass, another body. Here even more. This body has been flatted, its skull crushed...

These bodies are lying in front of a church. Just in the courtyard here in front of the church I can count ten bodies. Assorted bodyparts. There's a decapitated child. We're now about to go into the church itself and right at the steps is a body.

And inside the church are several more bodies, again badly decomposed. There are none on the altar but in the sacristy behind the altar it's clear the building was ransacked, looted, priests' vestments cast about.

Obviously people fled here to take shelter and obviously they didn't find it.

In the gardens outside the church are spectacular flowers, amaryllis, marigold, daisies, a huge explosion of color and just down the steps from those plants more bodies. A mother and her child. The child appears to have been decapitated.

The entire complex appears to have been ransacked, looted, papers with the church's symbol on it scattered about, drawers emptied, cloth material just ripped apart and again more corpses. And flies. And here what seem to be shotgun shells, cartridges from shotgun shells which raises, of course, the question of whether some of these people were blasted.

In this small room, there are some wooden crucifixes on the floor and what is left of the body of a small baby.

Our guides have told us that in the direction we're heading now outside the church complex there is a place where there are many bodies and they're right. In front of me I can see a dozen corpses in one group. They appear to be mainly women, some children.

The stench is really overwhelming and I've put a mask on so that may muffle my voice. But in this courtyard there are easily a hundred bodies, all of them very badly decomposed, many with obvious hack marks.

And here is a room of horror, dozens upon dozens of bodies, piled on one another. I think it's fair to say there are hundreds of dead here. Well there's three rooms that must contain about 250 bodies. That's not counting the 100 in this courtyard and there are still rooms we have not seen. And everywhere, flies.

This village we are told by a woman who lives here -- and still lives here -- was a predominantly Tutsi village and that this massacre was carried out by predominantly Hutu Interahamwe, the dreaded militia whose name is so associated with the unspeakable atrocities of this war...

For a place of such idyllic beauty, it will certainly be remembered for one of the most unspeakable horrors of this war."