a disabled genocide
I spent part of this week going through transcripts, trying to create a factual summary of the case against the accused in the trial I am working on. Creating a factual summary is a time consuming task, often thankless in terms of time and energy, for any small interruption can mean having to start all over, so you can allow yourself to "get back into it." “Getting into it” is not something that makes me want to get out of bed in the morning. Even for a minimum of $10,000! Sorry Naomi! Attempting to understand how Rwanda came to find itself at this juncture in its short life as an independent state is. However spending 10 hours a day attempting to "get into it" is taxing my soul and by Friday evening, my nerves are racked. Totally understandable why this Tribunal would make the perfect place for the AA and NA to combine forces and set up their headquarters. I am sure they would a USAID grant! Hee hee hee!
Something struck me this week. Actually a lot of issues, but this one came first! Why is it that considering the massacres, considering the weapon of choice, I have not seen a single physically disabled witness of this genocide since I got here? Seems bizarre that in view of the manner in which the Hutus sought to exterminate, none of the witnesses bear these physical scars! Well at least not that I have seen give evidence.
This 100 day massacre took the lives of hundreds of thousands a day! Imagine that. We have all seen the pictures of the fields of bodies, displays of human skulls lined up and piled high, shining, as if for sale in Nakumatt (Kenyan upmarket supermarket), rivers bursting with limbs and decaying bodies. Left to their own devises, the country would have annihilated all Tutsi and their so called “sympathisers” in a matter of months! This is a country where those left behind bear the scars: physically, mentally, emotionally, and not least, spiritually.
This blog is about those physically disabled. I know the other scars, the internal invisible damage exist. I see it everyday and this is post is in no way meant to belittle what those not physically marked have been through. That is the subject of another post.
We know that survivors exist. We see them on a daily basis. Millions still live in Rwanda. But the plight of those physically disabled by this 100 day genocide remain, to me, invisible to the public eye. The treatment of the disabled in Rwanda displayed the “highest degree of human bestially, brutality and intolerance” suffered, possibly more than any other group of persons. Thousands were massacred early on as they were easy targets. Although very few disabled persons survived during the genocide, we cannot forget that they were not all hacked to death. If not blessed with the peace of death, their disability was magnified. Hundreds were simply abandoned. This number was exponentially increased by the thousands that were maimed and left for dead, those who will always carry their missing limbs as a permanent reminder of the genocide. Women who had their arms hacked off and left for dead. Others will display the stumps, from the mutilation of fingers, toes, ears, cut off as punishment of being Tutsi or a "sympathiser."
At one point the media, NGOs, foreign governments took tonnes of pictures of these people, to publicise their fate. We all saw those pictures as the horror of the genocide was given celebrity celluloid status, as the Oxfams and Christian Aids of our global village competed for our pennies and cents to bring apparently assist those physically disabled for life by this war, as western governments attempted to appease their conscience and sickened voters by paying for certain individuals to act as the public relations stunt and be filmed receiving a new prosthetic limb. You would be hard pushed to find any of those pictures now. In addition, the same groups that documented the atrocities in Rwanda, the human rights groups, marginalised them. Tell me, of all the hundreds of reports, in how many did you read about the plight of the disabled?
As I sit here and read my designated transcripts and regurgitate evidence into a palatable form for the public to read in an indecipherable judgement – sometimes even to those who work in this area of law - a year, 2 years from now, I wonder: would the sight of a young man, his face unrecognisable due to machete scars, a woman gesticulating with an arm, she feels yet no longer exists, be something this or any tribunal cannot handle? Maybe these are things we need to see. To remember it is not only the fit and healthy that were killed. AND that the victims of this genocide take on all shapes and guises. Young and old disabled Rwandese litter the streets of Kigali. Forgotten, by the world and this tribunal, it seems. Only the seemingly healthy get flown in to tell "their story." Is it because we cannot look upon such victims, when we sit in judgment of ALL the atrocities those accused men and women are charged with having committed?
This is not the last genocide that we shall witness in Africa. I have to accept that, albeit reluctantly. You only need to look from Sudan to Ivory Coast, from Liberia to Sierra Leone, from Northern Uganda to DRC to Somalia. From religious conflicts in Nigeria to tribal and politically motivated clashes that dominate the African scene, those disabled tend to be forgotten. And yet each conflict creates more, be it at the hand of a machete, a shotgun, or a land mine. The creation of a new and identifiable class of the marginalised in Africa! I digress. That is possibly a topic for another day.
But I cannot help but question, how many cases involving this group of persons have been/are being handled by the traditional court systems in Rwanda or even by this Tribunal on Rwandan genocide. Surely disabled persons deserve justice, fairness and an unambiguous assurance that what they went through would be a thing of the past as do all Rwandese? What support does the international community give Rwanda in re-intergrating those who were previously disabled as well as those who find themselves disabled as a result of the genocide? As one of the greatest victims of the genocide, how and to what extent are persons with disabilities involved in the peace and reconciliation processes and efforts going in Rwanda? Shouldn’t they also represented on the Rwandan Peace and Reconciliation Commission? Questions I am finding it difficult to get satisfying answers to.
Something struck me this week. Actually a lot of issues, but this one came first! Why is it that considering the massacres, considering the weapon of choice, I have not seen a single physically disabled witness of this genocide since I got here? Seems bizarre that in view of the manner in which the Hutus sought to exterminate, none of the witnesses bear these physical scars! Well at least not that I have seen give evidence.
This 100 day massacre took the lives of hundreds of thousands a day! Imagine that. We have all seen the pictures of the fields of bodies, displays of human skulls lined up and piled high, shining, as if for sale in Nakumatt (Kenyan upmarket supermarket), rivers bursting with limbs and decaying bodies. Left to their own devises, the country would have annihilated all Tutsi and their so called “sympathisers” in a matter of months! This is a country where those left behind bear the scars: physically, mentally, emotionally, and not least, spiritually.
This blog is about those physically disabled. I know the other scars, the internal invisible damage exist. I see it everyday and this is post is in no way meant to belittle what those not physically marked have been through. That is the subject of another post.
We know that survivors exist. We see them on a daily basis. Millions still live in Rwanda. But the plight of those physically disabled by this 100 day genocide remain, to me, invisible to the public eye. The treatment of the disabled in Rwanda displayed the “highest degree of human bestially, brutality and intolerance” suffered, possibly more than any other group of persons. Thousands were massacred early on as they were easy targets. Although very few disabled persons survived during the genocide, we cannot forget that they were not all hacked to death. If not blessed with the peace of death, their disability was magnified. Hundreds were simply abandoned. This number was exponentially increased by the thousands that were maimed and left for dead, those who will always carry their missing limbs as a permanent reminder of the genocide. Women who had their arms hacked off and left for dead. Others will display the stumps, from the mutilation of fingers, toes, ears, cut off as punishment of being Tutsi or a "sympathiser."
At one point the media, NGOs, foreign governments took tonnes of pictures of these people, to publicise their fate. We all saw those pictures as the horror of the genocide was given celebrity celluloid status, as the Oxfams and Christian Aids of our global village competed for our pennies and cents to bring apparently assist those physically disabled for life by this war, as western governments attempted to appease their conscience and sickened voters by paying for certain individuals to act as the public relations stunt and be filmed receiving a new prosthetic limb. You would be hard pushed to find any of those pictures now. In addition, the same groups that documented the atrocities in Rwanda, the human rights groups, marginalised them. Tell me, of all the hundreds of reports, in how many did you read about the plight of the disabled?
As I sit here and read my designated transcripts and regurgitate evidence into a palatable form for the public to read in an indecipherable judgement – sometimes even to those who work in this area of law - a year, 2 years from now, I wonder: would the sight of a young man, his face unrecognisable due to machete scars, a woman gesticulating with an arm, she feels yet no longer exists, be something this or any tribunal cannot handle? Maybe these are things we need to see. To remember it is not only the fit and healthy that were killed. AND that the victims of this genocide take on all shapes and guises. Young and old disabled Rwandese litter the streets of Kigali. Forgotten, by the world and this tribunal, it seems. Only the seemingly healthy get flown in to tell "their story." Is it because we cannot look upon such victims, when we sit in judgment of ALL the atrocities those accused men and women are charged with having committed?
This is not the last genocide that we shall witness in Africa. I have to accept that, albeit reluctantly. You only need to look from Sudan to Ivory Coast, from Liberia to Sierra Leone, from Northern Uganda to DRC to Somalia. From religious conflicts in Nigeria to tribal and politically motivated clashes that dominate the African scene, those disabled tend to be forgotten. And yet each conflict creates more, be it at the hand of a machete, a shotgun, or a land mine. The creation of a new and identifiable class of the marginalised in Africa! I digress. That is possibly a topic for another day.
But I cannot help but question, how many cases involving this group of persons have been/are being handled by the traditional court systems in Rwanda or even by this Tribunal on Rwandan genocide. Surely disabled persons deserve justice, fairness and an unambiguous assurance that what they went through would be a thing of the past as do all Rwandese? What support does the international community give Rwanda in re-intergrating those who were previously disabled as well as those who find themselves disabled as a result of the genocide? As one of the greatest victims of the genocide, how and to what extent are persons with disabilities involved in the peace and reconciliation processes and efforts going in Rwanda? Shouldn’t they also represented on the Rwandan Peace and Reconciliation Commission? Questions I am finding it difficult to get satisfying answers to.
posted by Snapshots of ... at 12:06 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home