Source Q
P. Gourevitch. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998).
In the province of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, in the swamp and pastureland near the Tanzanian border, there's a rocky hill called Nyarubuye with a church where many Tutsis were slaughtered in mid-April of 1994. A year after the killing I went to Nyarubuye with two Canadian military officers. We were in a United Nations helicopter, traveling low over the hills in the morning mists, with the banana trees like green starbursts dense over the slopes. The uncut grass blew back as we dropped into the centre of the parish schoolyard. A lone soldier materialized with his Kalashnikov, and shook our hands with stiff, shy formality. The Canadians presented the paperwork for our visit, and I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom. At least fty mostly decomposed cadavers covered the oor, wadded in clothing, their belongings strewn about and smashed. Macheted skulls had rolled here and there. The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They did not buzz with ies. They had been killed thirteen months earlier, and they hadn't been moved. I had never been among the dead before. What to do? Look? Yes. I wanted to see them, I suppose; I had come to see them (the dead had been left unburied at Nyarubuye for memorial purposes) and there they were, so intimately exposed. I didn't need to see them. I already knew, and believed, what had happened in Rwanda. … at Nyarubuye, and at thousands of other sites in this tiny country, on the same days of a few months in 1994, hundreds of thousands of Hutus had worked as killers in regular shifts. There was always the next victim, and the next. What sustained them, beyond the frenzy of the first attack, through the plain physical exhaustion and mess of it? … The killers were killed all day at Nyarubuye. At night they cut the Achilles tendons of survivors and went off to feast behind the church, roasting cattle looted from their victims in big res, and drinking beer. (Bottled beer, banana beer … Rwandans may not drink more beer than other Africans, but they drink prodigious quantities of it around the clock.) And, in the morning, still drunk after whatever sleep they could and beneath the cries of their prey, the killers at Nyarubuye went back and killed again. Day after day, minute to minute, Tutsi by Tutsi: all across Rwanda, they worked like that.
Source R
Photograph of the corpses of Tutsi that litter the floor of a classroom at Nyarabuyu church, Rwanda, 1994.
Source S
"Heart of Rwanda's Darkness: Slaughter at a rural church", an article by Donatella Lorch, published in The New York Times on 3 June 1994.
The banner across the entrance to the red brick church here announces the celebration of a festival. A poster of Pope John Paul II is tacked on the main door and above it is a large white statue of Jesus, his arms beckoning. Inside are the remains of victims of a mass slaughter carried out by Government-trained militiamen in mid-April. In what they had hoped would be a refuge from the deadly irrationality of tribal and political violence, more than 500 members of the Tutsi tribe found their way to the church compound only to be shot or hacked to death by Hutu soldiers in classrooms, bathrooms and courtyards, and then left to rot. It appears that they were methodically hunted down,first in the church, then in the school and nally in the workshops near the soccer field. Residents say that probably 1,000 more were killed and buried in mass graves in the town, which is just inside the border with Tanzania. A frenzy of killing was evident at the rear of the compound. There, eight rooms are led with hundreds of corpses, shoulder to shoulder, and piled onto one another. One hundred more killed in a courtyard are now half skeletons, their esh in shreds. There are so many that it is impossible to walk through without treading on them. More corpses are hidden in the tall grass. "It took them two days to kill everyone in the church," said Consolata Mukatwagirimana, 27, a Tutsi whose family was killed at home and who like the rest of the townspeople has been led to a camp 50 miles away. She accompanied reporters to the church. This village, now under control of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the rebel group led by the minority Tutsi tribe, appears typical of many devastated by regular Army troops or militiamen of the majority Hutu tribe in the early days of the two-month old civil war. The buildings are empty, the livestock is gone. Only corpses and the sound of the wind remain.
Source T
Flora Mukampore, a survivor from the massacre at Nyarubuye recalls what happened to her. She knew one of the killers personally.
Gitera was there. Imagine someone leaving their home and knowing their victim, knowing their names and the names of their 88 1 children. They all went there and killed their neighbours, their wives and their children. All the people they were cutting fell on me because I was near the door. My hair was all washed with blood. My body was drenched in blood and it was starting to dry on me, so the killers thought I'd been cut all over, they thought I was dead. I lay down on one side with only one eye open. I could hear a man come towards me and I guess he saw me breathe. He hit me on my head saying: "Is this thing still alive?" Immediately I heard my entire body say "whaaagh". Something in my head changed forever. Everything stopped. When the wind blew and the cold passed through my body I woke up and went into the building but I didn't realise that there were bodies around me. I didn't remember what had happened. I just thought they were normal people and so I just slept among them like we had slept together before the killers came. Can you imagine living with the dead. At some point god helped me and made me unconscious because if I hadn't been, I think I would have killed myself. But I was unconscious, and anyway killing yourself needs energy.
