Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

A period of civil unrest followed our visit, but all seems to have calmed down again politically. A decade after its nomination, the Marovo Lagoon is still under consideration for designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While this matter was tied up in endless bureaucracy, the Solomon Islands were ravaged by earthquakes and consequent tsunamis in 2007, 2013, 2014, and 2015. Like Greenland, this area is feeling the effects of global warming: coastal erosion, inundation, and saltwater intrusion are all on the rise. One province relocated its capital, Choiseul, because of rising tides—the first township in the Pacific to take such measures. The new site was constructed before residents were moved there in phases. The World Bank sent $9.1 million to the Community Resilience to Climate Change and Disaster Risk in Solomon Islands Project (CRISP) as part of a relief package for warming-induced problems. Some recent research indicates that these areas may face an additional challenge: shifting tectonic plates may be pulling the islands down at the same time that rising seas lap higher on their shores.

RWANDA

Children of Bad Memories

Far from the Tree, 2012

On the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, I visited the new memorial in Kigali, built by the Aegis Trust, a British company that specializes in genocide commemoratives. Unlike most other buildings in Rwanda, the structure was air-conditioned; its stagey displays felt as though they had been put together by someone previously engaged in dressing shop windows. The wall texts were stirring and the photos horrifying, but the glitzy aesthetic reflected the national urge to dissociate from events of the too-recent past. The exhibits presented the numbers of casualties in keeping with President Paul Kagame’s Tutsi-centric estimates, which differ widely from those of international observers.

The purpose of my trip was to talk to women who had been raped in the genocide. The memorial treated the events of 1994 as coolly historical, but these women were still living them ten years on. It was as though no time had elapsed at all.

The Rwandan genocide drew on a long history of ethnic strife in the country. The Tutsi arrived in Rwanda at some disputed date, apparently after the Hutu were settled there, and established themselves as feudal overlords. The colonizing Belgians preferred the tall, slender Tutsi herders to the short, dark, wide-nosed Hutu farmers and declared the Tutsi, who made up only 15 percent of the population, the natural aristocracy, granting them privileges denied to the Hutu. These policies engendered fierce hatred. Toward the end of the colonial period, the Belgians fell out with the Tutsi monarch and transferred power to the Hutu. After independence in 1962, the Hutu ruled, periodically attacking the Tutsi. Ethnic battles throughout the following quarter century sent many Tutsi into exile in Uganda and Congo. They then asked to return.

When the Hutu government wouldn’t allow them to come home, they organized an army—the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), under the leadership of Paul Kagame—that engaged in border skirmishes. In 1993, the UN brokered a peace accord between the Hutu government and Tutsi rebels; hard-line Hutu, however, did not welcome the idea of power sharing. In late 1993 and early 1994, the visionaries of the Hutu Power movement began organizing the mechanisms for genocide. They assembled mobs of impoverished and disaffected youth, building up a force called the Interahamwe, which means “those who fight together,” and taught the gospel that the Tutsi were an inhuman enemy—“cockroaches” in their parlance. They established Rwanda’s first private radio station, Radio Mille Collines, to preach messages of hatred. They stockpiled arms: some guns, but mostly machetes and knives. They systematically edged moderates out of government.

The genocide in Rwanda began on April 6, 1994, after the plane of President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down. In the one hundred days that followed, eight hundred thousand Tutsi were killed. Unlike the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust, where the killings were clinical, systematic, and remote, the Rwandan mass butchery was hands-on. The killings were committed by the Interahamwe and farmers, mainly with farm implements. But killing was hardly the total of that time’s violence. A Rwandan proverb says, “A woman who is not yet battered is not a real woman.” The culture’s underlying misogyny was easily stoked by ethnic propaganda; rape was an explicit tool of the génocidaires. Tutsi women, according to the announcements on Radio Mille Collines, wanted to seduce the Hutu men away so that they could end the Hutu race. Many Hutu perceived the slender, regal Tutsi women as haughty and were determined to teach them a lesson.