Murambi

In the southern prefecture of Gikongoro lies the Murambi memorial, a technical school under construction at the time of the genocide. Major attacks on Tutsi occurred during the 1960s and 1970s in Gikongoro, but the area made it through the early days of the civil war with only a few scattered attacks against Tutsi.[1] Several powerful Hutu elites, including the sub-prefect Damien Binega and retired Lt. Colonel Aloys Simba, played a large role in using their wealth and influence to plan, coordinate, and distribute weapons for the massacres.[2] Officials from neighboring communes promised Tutsi safety at Murambi. However, officials pushed Tutsis to go there mainly because the hill’s isolation and visibility made it vulnerable to attack. The militia cut off the water supply to the not yet finished school, and Tutsi refugees had little food. For close to two weeks they held out before the re-armed militia led an assault in the early morning of April 21, 1994.[3]Somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 Tutsi died that day. Only a handful of people survived.

The memorial tour begins with a short exhibition designed by Aegis Trust. It includes a short history of Rwanda that follows the linear path towards genocide. The exhibition pays specific attention to France, criticizing Opération Turquoise for refusing to arrest government officials and militia and allowing them to escape into the Congo. Afterwards, the visitor walks through the unfinished classrooms where bodies preserved with lime rest on tables. Shortly after the genocide, survivors and family members of the victims unearthed the mass graves to find the bodies reasonably discernable. They then dosed the bodies in lime in order to preserve them as evidence. Of the 50,000 to 60,000 Tutsi who died at Murambi, the survivors preserved 848 bodies in this manner. The lime gives off a strong smell that parches the nostrils. But at the same time the preservation method is not permanent. The viewer also smells the decomposition of the bodies, slowed by the lime. This preservation method allows the visitor to see the final moments of the dead. The lime preserves the dead’s facial features in their final moments, often their mouths agape in horror. Many bodies hold their arms up to their face, shielding themselves from machete blows. As I passed through the later rooms, I noticed more and more mothers and children. Often the remains of a mother still cradled the body of a child. One room I walked into held only the bodies of babies and young children. Nearly all of them contained machete wounds on their head.

The discernible features of these bodies make Murambi a slightly different experience than Nyamata, Ntarama, and Nyarubuye. Unlike skulls on a shelf or in a crypt, the dead feel present at Murambi. The dead’s last traumatic moments become frozen in place in these rooms, which emotionally connects with the visitor in a manner that a museum exhibition or cinematic representation cannot. The memorial allows the visitor to walk up to an individual body and look closely at the dead’s individual features. At the same time, the sheer enormity and anonymity of the amount of bodies makes the memorial overwhelming. The smell stays with the visitor long after leaving the memorial as well. Etched in the nostrils, it creates a sensory experience that even Nyamata and Ntarama cannot provide. When walking through these rooms, the genocide feels less an historical event than a scene from an everlasting hell.

But shortly after walking through the rooms filled with preserved bodies, the tour takes the visitor straight to three marked sites with highly political meanings. The first site marks the place where the French flag stood during the Operation Turquoise encampment at Murambi. A sign written in English, French, and Kinywarwanda marks this spot. Next, the tour arrives at another sign that marks where French soldiers played volleyball in the months after the massacre. Other signs marking mass graves stand next to the former volleyball court. The tour pushes the connection between the French soldiers relationship with the perpetrators and the mass graves. The memorial argues that the French expressed complicity and indifference when camped out on the same hill where 50,000 Tutsi died only two months removed from the massacre. Instead of treating the hill as a sacred ground, they played volleyball near the visible mass graves.

This presentation of Opération Turquoise illustrates the current Rwandan government’s anger at the French. The French held a close diplomatic relationship with the Hutu regime, incorporating the French-speaking Habyarimana regime into its greater France-Afrique network for several decades. French financial aid to Rwanda tripled during the civil war, and French weapons sales to Rwanda also increased between 1990 and 1994.[5] There exists much evidence of French involvement in actually fighting the RPF during the civil war. A French Special Forces command tailored specifically for Rwanda formed in June 1992. France maintained that the deployment of soldiers in Rwanda had only the sole objective of protecting French citizens. However, French soldiers reportedly took part in engaging with the RPF in combat, operating checkpoints in Kigali, and participating in activity directed against the RPF.[6] During Opération Turquoise, Hutu draped French flags on street corners, and people chanted “Vive la France!” in the streets, embracing the French arrival as a liberation from the RPF.[7] The interahamwe and the regime in particular embraced their arrival.[8] While the RPF and French did not clash militarily, the RPF abhorred the intervention for it provided a relatively safe passage for the Hutu militants to Zaire. While France did save, rescue, and protect many Tutsi (especially with the cameras nearby), they also committed their fair share of controversies. Tutsi resisting the militias in the hills of Bisesero came out from their hiding spots upon the arrival of French soldiers. Instead of protecting them, the French left them only to return three days later. The Hutu killers murdered nearly a thousand of them after the French departed.[9] After the genocide, France allegedly helped fund and train Hutu militias seeking refuge in Zaire.  As opposed to disarming the génocidaire militias, the French re-armed and continued to maintain contact with alleged génocidaire leaders in October and November of 1994.[10] France evacuated Akazu members such as Agathe Habyarimana to France immediately after the genocide commenced, and many key Akazu members continue to walk freely in Paris.[11]