bury the dead, not the truth

'Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was coming up from the Peiraeus, close to the outer side of the north wall, when he saw some dead bodies lying near the executioner, and he felt a desire to look at them, and at the same time felt disgust at the thought, and tried to turn aside. For some time he fought with himself and put his hand over his eyes, but in the end the desire got the better of him, and opening his eyes wide with his fingers he ran forward to the bodies, saying, "There you are, curse you, have your fill of the lovely spectacle." '
- PLATO, The Republic, taken from a forward of We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families - Stories from Rwanda, by Philip Gourevitch

i will admit that 'Hotel Rwanda' made me think about what happened in that small african country in a way i had never done before. i was still in high school when nearly one million tutsis were murdered over the course of about 100 days and my limited consciousness of the events at that time make me feel ashamed today. i wanted to know why it happened and although i know its part of mans inhumanity to man, i needed to know how a neighbor could be convinced to pick up a machete and kill someone they considered friend. could it happen here?

the book, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families - Stories from Rwanda, by Philip Gourevitch, is so heartbreaking in its descriptions of the genocide, that i often have to take a break from reading it, for fear i will not be able to sleep. but what's a little lost sleep compared to those who were hacked to death only because they carried a tutsi id card, and were a little taller, with lighter skin and straighter hair? a popular method of torturing the tutsis before they were killed was to cut off their hands and feet, a way of "cutting them down to size", since they were taller than most hutus. hutu power reminded those killing to take special care when dealing with pregnant women by ripping the fetus from the body; the intent was that no tutsi would survive, even children would not be allowed to grow up. doctors killed patients, patients killed doctors, teachers and students killed each other. the roads were littered with bodies and lake victoria had 50,000 corpses clogging its waterways.

even after the genocide, the killing continued. most of the agents of the genocide fled into neighboring countries like zaire, and there congregated in camps holding thousands of other hutus that were either forced into the killing in rwanda or were willing participants. these camps were sent financial aid and supplies from around the world, despite the fact that raids were instigated from those camps back into rwanda to kill any survivors of the genocide and that killings were taking place even among the refugees, though they were nearly everyone of them hutu.

so, i sigh and turn the page, waiting for the paragraph or sentence that tells of a healing for those people in rwanda. it has not come, even yet.