http://www.guardian.co.uk...apr/08/rwanda-experience
[h1]A Rwandan genocide survivor speaks out: 'Now, I must be the narrator'[/h1]
Fifteen years ago, Révérien Rurangwa was left for dead after all 43 members of his family were slaughtered in Rwanda. Even now, he fears for his life. Ros Wynne-Jones meets him
• In pictures: Rwanda genocide 15th anniversary
Révérien Rurangwa, who was maimed by Hutu attackers, still bears the scars. The stump of his left arm gives him pain every day. Photograph: Adrian L/Edition Presse de la Renaissance, 2006
Some nights, when he can't sleep, Révérien Rurangwa finds himself watching a clip of French news footage filmed 15 years ago, in April 1994. Broadcast three weeks after the start of the Rwandan genocide, it shows bodies laid out at Kabgayi hospital. The camera focuses on a child seated in front of a dead woman. He is shockingly injured, even under his bandages. He is missing an arm and his forehead is badly disfigured by swelling. His mouth is an agonised O. A dressing covers the place where his left eye should be, but what fixates Révérien when he watches the footage is the other eye, "a large, black marble petrified by disbelief".
What shocks him every time is the realisation that he is watching himself. He is 15 years old in the footage, but looks like a child, a tiny scrap of a person seated quietly at the edge of what any human being can bear.
A decade and a half later, that person still cannot believe that his family's Hutu neighbour, the owner of a local bar they sometimes visited, one day took his machete and calmly cut to death all 43 members of Révérien's extended family.
Days before, on 7 April, he had watched the blue berets of the UN collect the 30 white nuns and two Spanish priests living among the community around his home town, Mugina. "They left everyone else to die because they were Tutsis," says Révérien, his face still a mask of disbelief. "I saw them leave with their pots of flowers and their dogs. Couldn't they at least have taken a Tutsi baby with them?"
On 20 April, his family were slaughtered one by one inside the goat shed they had hidden in for a fortnight, but Révérien survived despite horrific wounds. "I just couldn't seem to die," he says. "And when I asked them to kill me, they laughed and taunted me. They said, 'Look at the cockroach crawling.' They said, 'Hey, dead-on-legs, can't you go any faster?' They took bets on how long I would live."
Three weeks later, when the Red Cross came, he was still alive despite his wounds, hunger and dehydration, sitting among the burned bodies of his parents, sisters and other family members. "The killers had set fire to everything that was left," Révérien says quietly. "So, I sat among their teeth, the only thing that was left of my family."
This week marks the 15th anniversary of the start of the 100 days when a million mainly Tutsi Rwandans were killed in a systematic strategy that turned neighbours into killers. "Radio Death, we called it," says Révérien. "We heard the transmissions on the radio: that the cockroaches must be exterminated."
His scars have grown no less livid with time, and the efficiency with which he operates his right arm cannot fully compensate for the lack of the left. His face is a mask of stitched-together flesh. There is a sharp line across the bridge of his Tutsi nose where it was reattached after being sliced by a machete "to look like a Hutu's flattened nose". There is a scar that starts at his ear, and then another that curls across his forehead - his "kiss-curl", or question mark as he likes to think of it. The scar that asks, "Why?"
Révérien wears his scars not with pride, but without apology either. They are his equivalent, he says, of the Jews' yellow star or an Auschwitz tattoo; they mark him out as a witness and a survivor. They also have caused him to be beaten up in the street on several occasions by Rwandans who recognised him as "that Tutsi witness". When we meet at a Swiss railway station in the country that gave him shelter after the genocide, people look at him guardedly.
Révérien has had offers of plastic surgery from fine surgeons, but turned them all down, even though he says he sometimes feels like the Elephant Man with a face a woman may never love. He feels he cannot excise the history that is engraved on his flesh, a living testimony to genocide. He believes he owes his dead family that much, at least.
"My family would not ask me to take revenge, but they would ask me to tell the story," he says. "Now, I must be the narrator."
Révérien tells me about "the last day I was happy". His face twists into a tight little smile when he remembers a fishing trip with his schoolfriend, a carefree day in Rwanda - a beautiful land of mountains and early morning mist - moments before the country was disfigured. The next day, his neighbours were sharpening their blades and advancing up the grassy knoll in Mugina where thousands of Tutsi men, women and children stood huddled against their genocidal intent. The laborious murder of 25,000 people on that hillside took 14 days, by which time Révérien's family were among the last alive, hidden inside the goat shed with only a rusty lock for protection.
The days that followed are chronicled in his book, Genocide, an extraordinarily visceral narrative far from the palatable version of films such as Hotel Rwanda. A story that, like Révérien's scarred, quizzical face, challenges you to not look away.
With devastating detail, his book tells how his mother and other family members were killed not cleanly but by a thousand cuts, robbed of their clothes and left to die lingering deaths. How the Hutu women helped and the children followed behind, collecting jewellery. How the machete blows sounded like a blade slicing cabbage. How the wounded begged for a bullet. "I was my mother's first son, and her last left alive," Révérien says.
Drocilla Nyiramatama and her husband Boniface Muzigura's other children were Sylvélie, 13, Olive, 11, Pierre Célestin, nine, Marie, seven and Claudette, five. Révérien was the eldest child, and it is the screams of little Claudette that he hears most in his sleep. "She survived the machetes," he says. "She could have lived." Instead he watched her die of dehydration, powerless to help. The water had run out three days before his family were discovered in their hideout. His mother's last cries, as she bled to death, had been for water, and a wish that Révérien settle a small debt with a neighbour. "She owed 300 francs to one of those Hutus sharpening their blades as we fled our home," says Révérien. "My mother wanted to die without debt and definitely without debt to a Hutu."
Révérien undoes his shirt quickly with one hand, revealing the wounds across his chest and torso, lifting out the shattered shoulder that was battered with a studded club, and below it the stump that still aches every day.
The official line in Rwanda is that the nation must forgive and forget, that it is time to move on. Yet there has been no justice for Révérien or many hundreds of thousands of other Rwandans, dead and alive. His family's killer is still alive, still running the same bar where Révérien sometimes went to celebrate some small good fortune with his parents.
In 1995, Révérien left Switzerland and took himself back to Mugina, where he walked into his attacker's bar and stared him squarely in the face. "It was you who did this," he told him. Then he went and reported him to the authorities, but after a brief spell in prison, the neighbour was set free. It was Révérien who had to go into hiding. Men twice came to kill him, and he was eventually smuggled out, via a convent, and returned to Switzerland. Such reprisals are not uncommon in Rwanda, where many Tutsi witnesses still live in fear. Staggeringly, there are over 700,000 men and women still accused of genocide, who even now are facing village courts under the Gacaca justice scheme. The aim is to promote local reconciliation, yet organisations including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have reported that the trials have also led to vicious attacks against survivors, witnesses and judges.
"They want to kill the witnesses," says Révérien. "They wish the witnesses did not exist. A survivor disturbs the peace."
Even in Switzerland, Révérien does not feel safe. "From day to day I fear being deported; the police can come round and send me to Rwanda without warning. My status today is that I have only a provisional 'F' permit. That means Switzerland reserves the right to deport me at any time. I have no right to work or study or register a car or a mobile phone. I cannot travel. So my struggle is not over. I am still living in fear."
Révérien was due in London last week for the launch of the English translation of his book, but an application to travel failed. So we are in Geneva, the home of the UN that once betrayed Révérien's country so badly. Now, he feels Switzerland is betraying him again.
"I came to this country to be healed and to have my wounds taken care of," says Révérien. "Half my lifetime has been spent here. Now they say, 'He needs to go back to his country.'" He fought through the courts for formal asylum in Switzerland, but his case was refused.
The past repeats itself over and over inside his head, in one long loop of horror. "I cannot go back to Rwanda because the person who damaged and maimed me is there. He wants to finish off what he started. It is very easy to find me and identify me with all these scars. They say, 'There is that Tutsi from the television. The one who wrote the book.'"
We spend a day in Geneva talking. When we take a taxi together, the woman driver spins round in her seat, visibly shocked at Révérien's appearance. When we take a tram, a man is aggressively rude when Révérien asks if it is going to the central station.
But, on the whole, Révérien says, Swiss people have been kind. He lives up in the mountains near Neuchatel, and for years would travel to college by hitchhiking. "You think of a one-eyed black man with scars, sticking out his only arm on a lonely hillside in snowy, white, pristine Switzerland, and you'd surely say, 'He's mad, that will never work,'" he says. "But you'd be wrong. Each morning it worked like clockwork." In fact, hitchhiking has helped restore his faith in human nature, and an irreverent sense of humour. He smokes furiously, and laughs at his cigarette packet where it says: "Smoking kills".
When, back in 1994, he was flown to Switzerland by the charity Sentinelle for medical treatment, he found himself in a country that was like Rwanda in negative - cold, white, clean, efficient, organised. "When I first arrived in Geneva, I spent many years in hospital," Révérien says. "What hurt me most was the visiting hours, when all the families came to visit the other people, and nobody came to visit me. I had no one in the world."
He misses his family immensely. "I don't know if my mother would be proud of me," he says. "I think she would see that I try to represent her every day I am alive."
On the day she died, she had been wearing a beautiful red cotton dress with white piping on the pockets that Révérien had saved up to buy for her birthday from the market. "I hope one day to give her grandchildren. Normally when I decide to do something, I just do it. But it's not like the book. I can't do it by myself."
Inside the cafeteria is an exhibition of photos of refugees from the current crisis in the Congo - many of them Hutus. Révérien peruses them dispassionately. He has no forgiveness to offer the man who killed his family. He is not interested in convenient western constructs such as closure.
"How could one pardon someone who has never asked to be pardoned?" he says. "It's not up to me to propose this to them; people who killed night and day for three months. People who were tired from killing. People who still want to kill me today. People who don't have any regret. How can one pardon these people?"
Nor has he found any peace or salvation in the Catholicism he was born into. "My mother died praying to God. Where was He? Why didn't He do anything?" He laughs, a dry sound in his throat. "When you see the local priests coming with the machete and killing ... When you see a church where 25 Tutsis died is cleaned up, and that the ones who pray in that church are the ones who killed ... I am finished with God."
He stands at the plate-glass window, looking at snow-capped mountains and the flat grey-green emptiness of the lake. "This UN did not protect us," he says, gesturing around him. "But they did help the Hutus who fled from their killing when they were in the refugee camps. Now, the genocide is over, but they are still not protecting us, the people who really dare ask for justice."
Révérien smiles, unexpectedly. "Many Swiss women have offered to marry me to end my problems," he says. "But if I marry, I won't do it for papers. I will only do it for love."
And that is the most remarkable thing about Révérien Rurangwa: that despite everything that has happened to him, he still believes in love.
• Révérien Rurangwa's book Genocide is published this week by Reportage Press, translated by Anna Brown at £8.99. To order a copy for £8.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846
[h1]A Rwandan genocide survivor speaks out: 'Now, I must be the narrator'[/h1]
Fifteen years ago, Révérien Rurangwa was left for dead after all 43 members of his family were slaughtered in Rwanda. Even now, he fears for his life. Ros Wynne-Jones meets him
• In pictures: Rwanda genocide 15th anniversary
- Ros Wynne-Jones
- The Guardian, Wednesday 8 April 2009
- Article history
Révérien Rurangwa, who was maimed by Hutu attackers, still bears the scars. The stump of his left arm gives him pain every day. Photograph: Adrian L/Edition Presse de la Renaissance, 2006 Some nights, when he can't sleep, Révérien Rurangwa finds himself watching a clip of French news footage filmed 15 years ago, in April 1994. Broadcast three weeks after the start of the Rwandan genocide, it shows bodies laid out at Kabgayi hospital. The camera focuses on a child seated in front of a dead woman. He is shockingly injured, even under his bandages. He is missing an arm and his forehead is badly disfigured by swelling. His mouth is an agonised O. A dressing covers the place where his left eye should be, but what fixates Révérien when he watches the footage is the other eye, "a large, black marble petrified by disbelief".
What shocks him every time is the realisation that he is watching himself. He is 15 years old in the footage, but looks like a child, a tiny scrap of a person seated quietly at the edge of what any human being can bear.
A decade and a half later, that person still cannot believe that his family's Hutu neighbour, the owner of a local bar they sometimes visited, one day took his machete and calmly cut to death all 43 members of Révérien's extended family.
Days before, on 7 April, he had watched the blue berets of the UN collect the 30 white nuns and two Spanish priests living among the community around his home town, Mugina. "They left everyone else to die because they were Tutsis," says Révérien, his face still a mask of disbelief. "I saw them leave with their pots of flowers and their dogs. Couldn't they at least have taken a Tutsi baby with them?"
On 20 April, his family were slaughtered one by one inside the goat shed they had hidden in for a fortnight, but Révérien survived despite horrific wounds. "I just couldn't seem to die," he says. "And when I asked them to kill me, they laughed and taunted me. They said, 'Look at the cockroach crawling.' They said, 'Hey, dead-on-legs, can't you go any faster?' They took bets on how long I would live."
Three weeks later, when the Red Cross came, he was still alive despite his wounds, hunger and dehydration, sitting among the burned bodies of his parents, sisters and other family members. "The killers had set fire to everything that was left," Révérien says quietly. "So, I sat among their teeth, the only thing that was left of my family."
This week marks the 15th anniversary of the start of the 100 days when a million mainly Tutsi Rwandans were killed in a systematic strategy that turned neighbours into killers. "Radio Death, we called it," says Révérien. "We heard the transmissions on the radio: that the cockroaches must be exterminated."
His scars have grown no less livid with time, and the efficiency with which he operates his right arm cannot fully compensate for the lack of the left. His face is a mask of stitched-together flesh. There is a sharp line across the bridge of his Tutsi nose where it was reattached after being sliced by a machete "to look like a Hutu's flattened nose". There is a scar that starts at his ear, and then another that curls across his forehead - his "kiss-curl", or question mark as he likes to think of it. The scar that asks, "Why?"
Révérien wears his scars not with pride, but without apology either. They are his equivalent, he says, of the Jews' yellow star or an Auschwitz tattoo; they mark him out as a witness and a survivor. They also have caused him to be beaten up in the street on several occasions by Rwandans who recognised him as "that Tutsi witness". When we meet at a Swiss railway station in the country that gave him shelter after the genocide, people look at him guardedly.
Révérien has had offers of plastic surgery from fine surgeons, but turned them all down, even though he says he sometimes feels like the Elephant Man with a face a woman may never love. He feels he cannot excise the history that is engraved on his flesh, a living testimony to genocide. He believes he owes his dead family that much, at least.
"My family would not ask me to take revenge, but they would ask me to tell the story," he says. "Now, I must be the narrator."
Révérien tells me about "the last day I was happy". His face twists into a tight little smile when he remembers a fishing trip with his schoolfriend, a carefree day in Rwanda - a beautiful land of mountains and early morning mist - moments before the country was disfigured. The next day, his neighbours were sharpening their blades and advancing up the grassy knoll in Mugina where thousands of Tutsi men, women and children stood huddled against their genocidal intent. The laborious murder of 25,000 people on that hillside took 14 days, by which time Révérien's family were among the last alive, hidden inside the goat shed with only a rusty lock for protection.
The days that followed are chronicled in his book, Genocide, an extraordinarily visceral narrative far from the palatable version of films such as Hotel Rwanda. A story that, like Révérien's scarred, quizzical face, challenges you to not look away.
With devastating detail, his book tells how his mother and other family members were killed not cleanly but by a thousand cuts, robbed of their clothes and left to die lingering deaths. How the Hutu women helped and the children followed behind, collecting jewellery. How the machete blows sounded like a blade slicing cabbage. How the wounded begged for a bullet. "I was my mother's first son, and her last left alive," Révérien says.
Drocilla Nyiramatama and her husband Boniface Muzigura's other children were Sylvélie, 13, Olive, 11, Pierre Célestin, nine, Marie, seven and Claudette, five. Révérien was the eldest child, and it is the screams of little Claudette that he hears most in his sleep. "She survived the machetes," he says. "She could have lived." Instead he watched her die of dehydration, powerless to help. The water had run out three days before his family were discovered in their hideout. His mother's last cries, as she bled to death, had been for water, and a wish that Révérien settle a small debt with a neighbour. "She owed 300 francs to one of those Hutus sharpening their blades as we fled our home," says Révérien. "My mother wanted to die without debt and definitely without debt to a Hutu."
Révérien undoes his shirt quickly with one hand, revealing the wounds across his chest and torso, lifting out the shattered shoulder that was battered with a studded club, and below it the stump that still aches every day.
The official line in Rwanda is that the nation must forgive and forget, that it is time to move on. Yet there has been no justice for Révérien or many hundreds of thousands of other Rwandans, dead and alive. His family's killer is still alive, still running the same bar where Révérien sometimes went to celebrate some small good fortune with his parents.
In 1995, Révérien left Switzerland and took himself back to Mugina, where he walked into his attacker's bar and stared him squarely in the face. "It was you who did this," he told him. Then he went and reported him to the authorities, but after a brief spell in prison, the neighbour was set free. It was Révérien who had to go into hiding. Men twice came to kill him, and he was eventually smuggled out, via a convent, and returned to Switzerland. Such reprisals are not uncommon in Rwanda, where many Tutsi witnesses still live in fear. Staggeringly, there are over 700,000 men and women still accused of genocide, who even now are facing village courts under the Gacaca justice scheme. The aim is to promote local reconciliation, yet organisations including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have reported that the trials have also led to vicious attacks against survivors, witnesses and judges.
"They want to kill the witnesses," says Révérien. "They wish the witnesses did not exist. A survivor disturbs the peace."
Even in Switzerland, Révérien does not feel safe. "From day to day I fear being deported; the police can come round and send me to Rwanda without warning. My status today is that I have only a provisional 'F' permit. That means Switzerland reserves the right to deport me at any time. I have no right to work or study or register a car or a mobile phone. I cannot travel. So my struggle is not over. I am still living in fear."
Révérien was due in London last week for the launch of the English translation of his book, but an application to travel failed. So we are in Geneva, the home of the UN that once betrayed Révérien's country so badly. Now, he feels Switzerland is betraying him again.
"I came to this country to be healed and to have my wounds taken care of," says Révérien. "Half my lifetime has been spent here. Now they say, 'He needs to go back to his country.'" He fought through the courts for formal asylum in Switzerland, but his case was refused.
The past repeats itself over and over inside his head, in one long loop of horror. "I cannot go back to Rwanda because the person who damaged and maimed me is there. He wants to finish off what he started. It is very easy to find me and identify me with all these scars. They say, 'There is that Tutsi from the television. The one who wrote the book.'"
We spend a day in Geneva talking. When we take a taxi together, the woman driver spins round in her seat, visibly shocked at Révérien's appearance. When we take a tram, a man is aggressively rude when Révérien asks if it is going to the central station.
But, on the whole, Révérien says, Swiss people have been kind. He lives up in the mountains near Neuchatel, and for years would travel to college by hitchhiking. "You think of a one-eyed black man with scars, sticking out his only arm on a lonely hillside in snowy, white, pristine Switzerland, and you'd surely say, 'He's mad, that will never work,'" he says. "But you'd be wrong. Each morning it worked like clockwork." In fact, hitchhiking has helped restore his faith in human nature, and an irreverent sense of humour. He smokes furiously, and laughs at his cigarette packet where it says: "Smoking kills".
When, back in 1994, he was flown to Switzerland by the charity Sentinelle for medical treatment, he found himself in a country that was like Rwanda in negative - cold, white, clean, efficient, organised. "When I first arrived in Geneva, I spent many years in hospital," Révérien says. "What hurt me most was the visiting hours, when all the families came to visit the other people, and nobody came to visit me. I had no one in the world."
He misses his family immensely. "I don't know if my mother would be proud of me," he says. "I think she would see that I try to represent her every day I am alive."
On the day she died, she had been wearing a beautiful red cotton dress with white piping on the pockets that Révérien had saved up to buy for her birthday from the market. "I hope one day to give her grandchildren. Normally when I decide to do something, I just do it. But it's not like the book. I can't do it by myself."
Inside the cafeteria is an exhibition of photos of refugees from the current crisis in the Congo - many of them Hutus. Révérien peruses them dispassionately. He has no forgiveness to offer the man who killed his family. He is not interested in convenient western constructs such as closure.
"How could one pardon someone who has never asked to be pardoned?" he says. "It's not up to me to propose this to them; people who killed night and day for three months. People who were tired from killing. People who still want to kill me today. People who don't have any regret. How can one pardon these people?"
Nor has he found any peace or salvation in the Catholicism he was born into. "My mother died praying to God. Where was He? Why didn't He do anything?" He laughs, a dry sound in his throat. "When you see the local priests coming with the machete and killing ... When you see a church where 25 Tutsis died is cleaned up, and that the ones who pray in that church are the ones who killed ... I am finished with God."
He stands at the plate-glass window, looking at snow-capped mountains and the flat grey-green emptiness of the lake. "This UN did not protect us," he says, gesturing around him. "But they did help the Hutus who fled from their killing when they were in the refugee camps. Now, the genocide is over, but they are still not protecting us, the people who really dare ask for justice."
Révérien smiles, unexpectedly. "Many Swiss women have offered to marry me to end my problems," he says. "But if I marry, I won't do it for papers. I will only do it for love."
And that is the most remarkable thing about Révérien Rurangwa: that despite everything that has happened to him, he still believes in love.
• Révérien Rurangwa's book Genocide is published this week by Reportage Press, translated by Anna Brown at £8.99. To order a copy for £8.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846
