...culled from Haaretz - Rwanda
In April 1994, the Rwandan genocide left an estimated 800,000 dead, most of them ethnic Tutsis. Haaretz hears the remarkable stories of three couples who have reconciled themselves with past horrors and found love and some form of redemption.
Twenty
years ago, in the small, landlocked, east-central African country of Rwanda,
members of the Hutu ethnic group turned on their neighbors, friends and family
of the ethnic Tutsi group and began slaughtering them. Starting in early April
of 1994, and during the course of the next 100 rainy days, an estimated 800,000
Tutsis and their moderate Hutu sympathizers were murdered.
But these
are not stories recounting that genocide. These are love stories – tales of men
and women, like men and women the world over, who find someone with whom to
share a first kiss. These are couples with dreams and disappointments, good
moments and bad.
That
said, these couples, forced to live out their relationships in a time of
unimaginable horror, do end up telling a story about the genocide after all.
It's a story we don't often hear – one of resilience and redemption. One about
picking up the pieces, forgetting, if only a little, and forgiving themselves
and each other, as much as might be possible, and moving on.
1. AGUTSINE AND CHRISTINE
Agutsine
Nkurikiyinka was a broken man when he was released from jail. His wife had died
of malaria. His two daughters, after a decade apart from their father, barely
knew him. He had lost his job and home, and been reduced, so he felt, to
nothing less than a perpetrator of genocide.
As many
as two million people, practically all from the Hutu ethnic group, are believed
to have participated in one way or another in the genocide that occurred in
Rwanda in the rainy spring season of 1994, leaving 800,000 of their neighbors,
friends and family – the vast majority of them Tutsi – dead.
Just
before the genocide began, Agutsine – a mild-mannered son of Hutu farmers in
Kimironko – had found a new job he was excited about: Working for the
agriculture ministry, as a guard on a forest conservation project. On April 7,
1994, the day after President Juvénal Habyarimana’s airplane was shot down on
its descent into the capital, Kigali, he set out to erect a roadblock.
A woman on the run
A thin
woman with cropped hair, Christine Bamurange grew up working in her parents’
beer and soft drinks kiosk. The last of eight children, she was the one pulled
from school when her parents’ business started doing badly, so she never
learned how to read or write. She was married off young – to her neighbor
Sylvester, a fellow Tutsi, who, after producing three children with her, left
for the Ugandan border to fight with the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
