Last month in Rwanda was a life changer. It has been a month of realization, learning about forgiveness, and joy. This country is filled with broken hearts, people who have been through the unspeakable, but they still smile, they still laugh, and they still love.
For some, they have learned how to forgive people who inflicted upon them and unspeakable evil, and evil that you would hope a human was never capable of. And for others, they have learned how to forgive themselves for the evil they inflicted on people. This place and the people of Rwanda have challenged my outlook on forgiveness and looking past what people have done too others or to myself.
This event that occurred in Rwanda that has caused so much redemption was the Rwanda Genocide of 1994. This happened only 25 years ago, in most of our life times, and many of us have no idea it even happened.
The Rwandan Genocide was a directed, pre-meditated attempt to eliminate and entire people group. An estimated 1,000,000 people were brutally murdered, many of the bodies still have not been found. This resulted in an estimated 300,000 orphans who had last either both of their parents or one parent. And hundreds of thousands of young girls and women brutally raped, left to live the event over and over again in their minds. Many of those women were raped by known carriers of HIV and AIDS so that they would suffer a slow death.
For 100 days people were tortured, raped, and murdered daily starting on April 7, 1994.
This Genocide was one against the Tutsi people group. In Rwanda there are two people groups, Tutsi and Hutu. In history Tutsi were known to be the people who tended livestock and Hutu being those who worked the farms. Most Rwandans were Hutu and overtime these differences formed into ethnic designations. Hatred was engrained into their lives at a young age.
From 1990 to 1993 there was a war with the Ugandan – based Tutsi rebels, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). By 1994, many Hutus, including government officials, had come to the conclusion that the real problem was the Tutsi people group. They began to organize armed paramilitary gangs and training them to prepare to wipe out Tutsi civilians.
On April 7th, the killing began. Hutu militias, a.k.a. Interahamwe, went city-to-city and village-to-village, slaughtering Tutsis with guns and machetes. The militias were horrifyingly efficient, using a radio station to coordinate the beginnings of the campaign around the country and to tell people where “the graves were not quiet yet full”. They were killing at a pace of about 8,000 Tutsis per day.
Being a “government led” genocide that had full access to a list of Tutsi, where they lived, how many were in their family, they knew exactly who to kill and how many. Their goal was complete extermination of a people group.
Approximately one hundred days later, the RPF (Tutsi rebel group) defeated the government forces. Men, Women, and children were saved but for many it was to late.
But what were they being left with?
Many were the only one left surviving in their family, and not just their immediate family, their entire family. People were forced to watch their loved ones be tortured and murdered, and their daughters and wives raped. They were left with injuries that would impact them for their entire lives, women and children infected with HIV and AIDS to die a slow death. They were left with memories that will never go away. Nightmares that will return to them every night when they go to sleep.
The people that were killing their families, raping their loved ones, they were their neighbors and when it was all said and done they were still their neighbors. For some it took years for them to be imprisoned, for some they fled the country and live free still today. There are stories of people seeing their rapist, the killers of their husbands, wives, children walking down the street years later. Stories where people are still neighbors with them. Some still have hearts filled with hatred and may never find understanding in what happened to them and how someone could be so filled with evil to do what they did.
But many have found redemption. They have found it in their hearts, with the help of God, to forgive the unspeakable. The have found the ability to live their lives in freedom and not feeling trapped in a hell that will never go away. Releasing memories that would haunt someone forever.
This month I heard and read many different testimonies of how men and women have sought reconciliation with those who wronged them. How they chose to love their neighbor who may have done the unspeakable to them really makes you think of forgiveness in a different way and the depths and lengths God calls us to, to forgive one another for any wrong doing.
