Nigerian women: From Rwanda with love (2) A must read

Culled from the Punch

I passed out soon after the shoot-out only to be awakened some hours afterwards by my little brother crying for me to wake up. He was pulling my arm, crying and saying “Please wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Please don’t leave me alone! Please wake up!”

I managed to drag myself out of the laundry basket. What I saw was appalling, awful and unbearable. My mum and my sisters were all dead. After raping them, they slit their throats and mutilated their bodies. They didn’t spare their breasts and vaginas. It was a horrible sight to behold! There was blood all over the carpet.There was blood on the bed.  There was blood on the walls. There was blood everywhere in that master bedroom. It was shocking and repulsive! I couldn’t even cry!My brother whimpered and was shell shocked! He too couldn’t cry. We tried not to look again as we quickly stepped over their half-naked mutilated bodies and ran to the corridor.

My father and my big brothers’ dead bodies were in the corridor not too far from my parents’ room. They had multiple gunshot wounds. Their bodies also had been mutilated with machete and nail-studded clubs known as masu.I grabbed my little brother’s hand and ran outside the house and compound as fast as we could. When we got outside, we saw more dead bodies on the roadside. We ran to the family house and met with more dead bodies of our relatives. Nobody in the family house survived the attack. I guess because my father was a well-known businessman in Rwanda, his house and his extended family’s house had been targeted in the attacks on our village.

I knew that we had to get out of our village as fast as possible. But where do we go. Confused and bewildered, we walked to three villages nearby. It was the same story – dead mutilated bodies scattered all over the deserted villages. In the fourth village we got to, we saw the panic- stricken faces of the villagers. They had heard the news about our village and other surrounding villages. Many of them were packing basic essentialsand were heading for any safe place they could find (in most cases, safe places were schools or churches). My brother and I joined them in the long walk to safety not knowing where we were going or if we would make it out of all this alive.

We walked for days and begged for food to eat and water to drink. Our numbers grew as more people abandoned their villages for fear of being attacked by the militia.

We finally got to Kabuye Hill which we were told was a safe sanctuary. We arrived in Kabuye Hill in the early hours of the morning. However, later on that day in the evening, just as we were settling down to sleep for the night, we were attacked again by a team of militia (men and women) known as Interahamwe (meaning “those who fight/work/attack together) they were led by “believe or not” a pregnant Hutu woman. She was shouting orders to her team while shooting into the crowd of villagers and throwing grenades at us refugees. She and her team of killers were throwing the grenades as if they were throwing corn seeds to feed chickens. We were now refugees in our own country under attack by fellow Rwandan citizens.

On this Kabuye Hill, the  so-called safe spot, over 40,000 men, women and children were killed! 40,000 Tutsis were killed! 40,000Rwandan citizens were  killed! On that hill, 40,000 human beings lost their lives to ethnic cleansing!

We had fled here in the hope of safety and here we were being slaughtered and hacked to death by machete-wielding militia. How grotesque does life get?

The killings went on for several days. In the evening of each day, the killers would go home to eat and sleep. And by daybreak of the following morning, they would be back to continue the madness and massacre of fellow Rwandans. To make sure the wounded were immobilised and couldn’t escape at night, the militia would often cut the victim’s Achilles tendon trapping them like a rat in a rat trap. Sometimes, the wounded were left for days to die a slow painful death and some others were thrown into a mass grave with the dead and ended up suffocating to death.

Somehow we survived the first evening of the attack. That night, I smeared myself with blood and told my brother to do the same. We hid amongst the corpses pretending to be dead. We were too scared to move, to breathe or to cry. We laid there under the corpses for days. I don’t know how many days it was. It seemed more like years to me.

My little brother ended up dying. He had been hit by a bullet but we didn’t know and he bled to death while we were hiding under the corpses.

I lost every member of my family in the genocide.

I escaped from this massacre with a Hutu woman who had also lost her family in the attacks that took place in her Tutsi husband’s village. The truth of the matter (regardless of which ethnic group you may come from) is that women and children always end up being the worst affected victims of genocides and wars. We end up paying a high price for these conflicts that we did not cause! We end up being offered as the sacrifice for the fighting amongst our people. We end up becoming collateral damage in the hostilities.

This Hutu woman I call “My angel”adopted me and raised me as her own child. She sent me to secondary school and university. Today, I am one of the youngest serving members of parliament. And I am playing an active part in our 20th anniversary activities. And that is why I have written this letter to tell Nigerian women my story.

I am really upset with Nigerian women. I can see that your country Nigeria seems to be heading in the same direction my country was 20 years ago. You can see from my story that you just cannot afford to allow that to happen! You just cannot afford to let your country  continue to slide down that slippery slope of disaster. Please do whatever you can to stop the downhill ride to tragedy, ruin and catastrophe! Please do something now to stop it! And do it with a great sense of urgency!

A great human rights advocate, Alison Des Forges, once wrote this about the Rwandan genocide, “This genocide was not an uncontrollable outburst of rage by a people consumed by ‘ancient tribal hatred’.  Nor was it the preordained result of the impersonal forces of poverty and over-population.  This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power.”

In the years leading up to the genocide, Rwandans were been conditioned into a climate of ethnic hatred, terror, fear, and impunity which was created by extremists in government, politicians and the intelligentsia. Doesn’t that sound quite similar to what is happening today in your country, Nigeria?

In Rwanda, a climate of impunity was deliberately fostered on Rwandans by the Hutu power drunk politicians and elite. In the early 90s, Tutsis were blamed for all kinds of problems and evils in the country. Brutal and violent attacks against the Tutsi people and their property went unpunished. The Tutsis ended up becoming public enemy number one and they were made easy targets for violent attacks by fellow citizens. They even gave Tutsis a derogatory name “inyenzi” meaning cockroaches and they also called Tutsis snakes, filth, cannibals etc.

Nigerian women, read the handwriting is on the Nigerian wall.  I just heard that 59 Nigerian children were murdered in their sleep in their hostels. You have to stop the madness NOW! You have time to stop the madness going on in your country. Now is the time to stop it!

We Rwandan women also had time to stop the madness but we didn’t do enough and we paid the price! A very high price as you can see from my personal story! We had over two years of warning signs before the genocide took place. Almost a million of our people were massacred in the genocide before we (Rwandan women) realised that we had to get involved. Nigerian women, please don’t make the same mistakes we made; learn from our mistakes. Rwanda now has a law that states that 30% of the decision makers must be women. Today, 56% of our decision makers are women and that is the highest in the world.

I will end with what humanitarian, Carl Wilkens, said about Rwanda’s recovery. He said, “One of the things you can point to in the recovery is women”. He added, “A lot of people ask, How do you get accountability? How do you fight corruption? And I say ‘Women.’”

As the world celebrated the International Women’s day on the 8th of March, as Rwanda lines up activities for the 20th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide and as Nigeria also celebrated 100 years as a nation, I know that Rwandan women will play their part. And I am sure as Nigerian women read this letter, they will be emboldened  to also play their part in building the GREAT NEW NIGERIA Africa deserves!

I am counting on you Nigerian women!

Rwandan women are counting on you Nigerian women!

African women too are counting on you, Nigerian women!

God bless Rwanda!

God bless Nigeria! And God bless Africa!!!

•From a concerned Rwandan woman