During

W

e’ve described the importance of words in creating hate. Hate that, if left unchallenged, can build into genocide. In this chapter we are going to try to describe something that words cannot fully describe: what happens during a genocide. The personal and unique stories about Bea, Eric, Alma and Debay will be far more powerful that our narrative here. If you can take the words about them an imagine those kinds of stories being spoken by millions of people at the same time then you may get somewhere close to imagining the impact of genocide. Nevertheless, we really need to outline what happened. If everyone knows about what happens during genocide then there is more of a chance that they will be prevented in the future. Millions of words have been written about what happens during a genocide. We don’t have space here to detail everything but we hope that the outline below will encourage everyone to read more. Genocide happens in many different ways, in many places. Each one is unique…but, as we have seen before in our book, there are certain similarities that we can pick out. Intent to destroy. Killing. The stories and images of the murder of innocent men, women and children are the outcome of genocide, the intention of the perpetrators. Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of genocide also included the destruction of culture. He thought that one way that the perpetrators would seek to wipe a group off the face of the earth would be to obliterate everything that the ‘other’ valued in their lives. His prediction came true: during the Holocaust the Nazis destroyed Jewish synagogues and the genocide in Bosnia also saw the destruction of hundreds of mosques by the perpetrators. It was a deliberate attempt to make it seem that Jews and Muslims never existed and could never be remembered. Similarly, in the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur the killers also sought to wipe out any trace of the humanity of their victims. Homes were burned, photographs smashed, memories destroyed. Nevertheless, we think that we should focus more on the lives of the victims rather than their deaths and not describe, in detail, the circumstances of how they perished.

Jews were killed in ditches in Poland, on a garage forecourt in Lithuania, in a river in Budapest, in vans in Yugoslavia, a ravine in Ukraine, in the gas chambers of Treblinka, in rivers and forests and towns and cities... And in thousands of other places and more.

Tutsi men, women and children were murdered in their homes, at roadblocks, in churches and schools. And in thousands of other places and more.

Bosniaks were executed in concentration camps like Omarska, in their houses in Zvornik, in farm buildings and on football pitches close to Srebrenica. And in thousands of other places and more.

Husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, son and daughters from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa were massacred in their villages in places like Karnoi, Abu Gamra and in thousands of other places and more.

That is what happens during genocide.

There were others too who took a role in the events that happened during the Holocaust and the genocides that occurred more recently. They weren’t perpetrators and they weren’t necessarily those who were targeted.

Rescuers

On the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem there is a garden. The trees that grow in the Garden of the Righteous of the Nations each remembers a non-Jewish person who risked their life to save Jewish people from extermination by the Nazis. There are thousands of trees in the garden…and thousands of people who have been recognised as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’. We’d like to tell you about one of them who you may not have heard of…and who was actually British. June Ravenhall was an ordinary lady from Kenilworth in Warwickshire. She moved to Holland with her husband, who had a business importing British motorcycles, and was living there when the Nazis invaded in 1940. Soon the invaders had confiscated the Ravenhall’s house and business and June’s husband, Ron, had been sent to a prison camp in Poland. Despite all these hardships June took it upon herself to hide a young Jewish boy, Louis Velleman, from the Nazis. The consequences for June if she had been discovered harbouring a Jew would have been unthinkable but she did so from 1942 until Holland was liberated. 33

Rescuers are present in every genocide. It involved a decision, a decision to step out from the crowd to save someone’s life. It’ll probably be someone that the rescuer has never met before…and it’ll be a decision that puts the life of the rescuer in danger. Many people saved lives during the horrendous hundred days of killing during the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. One such person was Zura Karuhimbi. A traditional healer, Zura was around seventy years old and a widow at the time of the genocide. She saved close to a hundred Tutsis – hiding them in her house and in her fields –from the Hutu killers. Ingeniously, Zura, pretended to be a witch and possessed with evil spirits. She threatened the Interahamwe with this ‘witchcraft’ whenever they came to attack those hiding in her house. The frightened killers stayed away. One of the United Nations officers, Mbaye Diagne - a Senegalese soldier, became a legend for roaring around Kigali in his jeep, rescuing Tutsi who were to be killed and them bluffing his way through roadblocks set up by the killers. Tragically, during one of his rescue missions, Diagne was killed when a mortar bomb hit his vehicle. In Bosnia, seemingly unremarkable people did remarkable things to save the lives of others. Fadila KapicMehmedbašić, who lived in Stolac, decided that she should save her Serb neighbours. So, she sheltered fourteen women and children in her basement as Croat soldiers roamed the streets of the town looking for Serbs to take away and execute. Fadila sat in her hall, waiting for the soldiers to come and determined not to let any of the people she was hiding die. They all survived.34

Resisters

Some people might believe that the victims of genocide go to their deaths without a struggle. This is not true. Every genocide has seen brave resistance against the perpetrators. Resistance came in a variety of ways, though. Maybe the most obvious resistance came in the brave uprisings in the camps and ghettos in the Holocaust to the equally courageous struggle in the hills of Bisesero in Rwanda. Nevertheless, there was also brave resistance in just trying to survive and therefore defeating the aim of the perpetrators. Historians have written entire books on the huge numbers of people who resisted. We’d like to tell you about a few of those in the next couple of pages of our book. Between July 22 and September 12, 1942, the German authorities deported around 300,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. During these deportation operations alone, more than 10,000 were murdered. However, at least 55,00060,000 Jews remained in the Warsaw ghetto, either having been granted permission by the authorities or, like more than 20,000, remaining in hiding. In response to the deportations, several Jewish underground organisations created an armed self-defence unit, which they eventually linked to the Polish underground military movement called the Home Army. When, the ‘liquidation’ (a word that the Nazis used to hide the horrific action of getting rid of a ghetto and all of its inmates) of the Warsaw ghetto and mass deportations of the residents resumed in January 1943, the resisters acted. A group of Jewish fighters managed to hide themselves amongst a group of people being deported to their deaths, - they suddenly launched an attack on their German escorts. Because of this, the Nazis suspended further deportations and the Jewish residents, encouraged by this, began to construct underground bunkers and shelters in preparation for an uprising.

The intended date for the final operation to ‘liquidate’ the ghetto was April 19, 1943. Upon entering the ghetto that morning, the SS and the police found the streets deserted: nearly all of the residents of the ghetto had gone into hiding, waiting for the uprising to be signalled. After Jewish resistance commander Mordecai Anielewicz gave the order, the Jewish fighters attacked, pushing back the Germans. Remarkably, the fighters held out for another month, making sporadic raids as the buildings around them were razed to the ground by the Nazis in order to force the remaining Jews out of hiding. In his final letter, towards the end of April 1943, Anielewicz revealed the extent of the heroism of the resisters: ‘It is impossible to put into words what we have been through. One thing is clear, what happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans ran twice from the ghetto’.35 It is thought that Mordecai Anielewicz was murdered by the Nazis on May 8, 1943. There is a huge number of unrecorded instances of Tutsi resistance during the Genocide against the Tutsi.36 Despite this, many of them will have shared common elements: Tutsi (and in some cases mixed groups of Tutsi and Hutu) repelled the initial attack; the aggressors called for reinforcements from the army and police; the aggressors attacked repeatedly until they overcame the resistance. At some sites, those besieged formulated strategies for resistance using a tactic called ‘merging’, where they lay down until the assailants moved among the intended victims before rising up to face them in close combat. This tactic decreased the likelihood that assailants would shoot because they would fear being caught in fire from their own side. The best-known case of resistance took place in Bisesero, a mountainous ridge in Kibuye where Tutsi bravely resisted their assailants from April 8 until July 1, 1994. Tutsi had fled there due to its height and numerous hiding places in the woods and subsisted first on their supplies and then any food that they could forage for. However, the military pressures gradually reduced the number of resisters, with a survivor estimating that, of the thousands of Tutsi hidden in the woods on top of the Bisesero hills, fewer than 1,500 survived.

As the murderous Bosnian Serb soldiers under Ratko Mladic’s command swept into Srebrenica on July 11 1995 many of the men and women trapped in the town decided on a different form of resistance. With no chance of mounting a defence against the heavy weaponry of the Serb army escape and survival would be the best way to resist the genocidal intent that was engulfing them. Thousands of the men of Srebrenica joined the ‘column’ on the evening of July 11 – an attempt to break through Serb lines and get to friendly territory. The men believed that, even though the odds were stacked against them, they would have a better chance of survival than if they fell into the hands of the Serbs. Bravely the men marched and marched. They were ambushed along the way, very many were killed but some made it.37 The older people, women, children and those unable to run or who chose not to also resisted in their efforts to survive. They suffered terribly at the hands of the Serbs and many perished or were harmed horrifically. Many of the same human instincts were seen during the same in the genocide in Darfur. The desire to defy the perpetrators by simply staying alive and continuing the way of life of the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit was a very real form of resistance against the Janjaweed and the soldiers from the Sudanese government. Besides that, physical, violent resistance was offered by two main Darfuri groups: the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Movement / Army (SLM/A). Both of these groups were formed to counter the marginalisation of Darfur and to improve conditions in the region.

Bystanders

So, what did the world do when these horrendous things were happening. Surely, when people found out they stood up and acted to stop the killing from happening. Right? Wrong. It is often thought that people in Britain didn’t know about the Holocaust until nearly the end of the war. That isn’t true. Reports about the terrible things that the Nazis were doing to Jewish people well before 1945. By 1941 the British government knew about Auschwitz and in August of the same year the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, referred to the atrocities that the Germans were committing when he said that ‘we are in the presence of a crime without a name’. However, at the Bermuda Conference, when British and American officials discussed the plight of the Jews in 1943, the only decision made was that the war against the Nazis needed to be won. Requests for Auschwitz be bombed were rejected by both American and British politicians. After the Holocaust it might have been expected that the world would not allow genocide to happen to again…and if it did then surely the powerful countries would step in and take action as quickly as possible. Sadly, this has not been the case.

In Rwanda the United Nations actually had soldiers in the capital city, Kigali, and elsewhere around the country. The commander, a Canadian General named Romeo Dallaire, was able to find out that something dreadful was planned. An informant told him that plans were being made to kill Tutsi…and Dallaire thought that he could take action by seizing some of the weapons that the killers were planning on using.

So, Dallaire sent a message to his bosses at the United Nations asking them for permission to mount a raid and capture the arms. The reply from the UN headquarters was shocking: do nothing. Elsewhere, world powers did not show the bravery or resolve that Dallaire, Diagne and their fellow UN soldiers in Rwanda did. After ten Belgian soldiers, who were protecting the moderate Rwandan Prime Minister were captured and killed by extremists, the Belgian government decided to pull all their soldiers out of Rwanda. In one dreadful incident Belgium troops who had been protecting around 2,000 Tutsi men, women and children at the ETO School in Kigali were told to leave. The people they left behind were murdered soon afterwards by the waiting Interahamwe. In the USA documents made public afterwards show that the government was desperate not to get involved in the situation. An internal assessment stressed the importance of not using the word ‘genocide’ in press conferences, just in case people began to expect that the USA would actually need to ‘do something’ to stop the killing.38 Similarly, the big powers in the United Nations actually decided to reduce the number of soldiers that they had in Rwanda. If the response of the world to the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda was woeful there may not be a word to describe what happened in the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia. Here the United Nations had promised that the Bosnian Muslims who had taken refuge in the settlement from the advancing and murderous Bosnian Serb forces would be protected – the UN had, on April 16 1993, declared that Srebrenica was a ‘safe area’. Tragically, this promise was not kept. The attack on Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serb Army commanded by General Ratko Mladic started on 6 July 1995. The Dutch peacekeepers guarding the ‘safe area’ were forced to retreat towards the town. Their commander asked for support from NATO aircraft. Not a single bomb was dropped by these aircraft on the approaching Bosnian Serb forces. As the perpetrators advanced so the desperate people of Srebrenica crowded towards the United Nations base a little way from the town in a place called Potocari. No help came from the United Nations as Mladic’s men began their murderous, genocidal, rampage. Unfortunately, the story was not much different in Darfur. Whilst the United Nations (and the rest of the world) knew about the atrocities that were being committed in 2003 it took a long time for a UN soldiers to reach Darfur. Troops from the African Union and the UN only arrived in any great numbers in 2007. Hampered by a lack of resources, transport and money the soldiers were not able to stop the killing (most of which had happened in the years before they arrived in any case). At the height of the mission to Darfur there were around 25,000 troops to cover an area of about 190,000 square miles. So, every soldier has to watch over roughly seven square miles. It is perhaps not surprising that the help that the outside world gave in Darfur was too little and too late.

The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi

Gisenyi By midday April 7 the killing had spread from Kigali. The Interahamwe trapped Tutsi in churches, where they had fled for protection, and murdered them. This process went on for weeks. In late April, Tutsi gathered at a school in Murambi, were promised protection by French troops. However, the soldiers disappeared and, after a brave defence, the Interahamwe slaughtered the thousands of Tutsi men, women and children.

Between May –June Tutsi fought for their lives on the hills of Bisesero. They repeatedly pushed the attackers back but suffered hugely for their defiance.

RTLM radio broadcast encouragement to people to kill Tutsi after April 6. It told people to put up barriers to stop Tutsi escaping, named people to be killed and districts to be attacked.

RWANDA

In Kaduha ordinary people, including secondary school students gathered to kill. Afterwards they would meet at Bar Mugema to drink and talk about their ‘work’. Kigali 6 April 1994 President Habyarimana is assassinated. This is the spark for the genocide to begin. The moderate Prime Minister is murdered and the killing starts. The killers use lists to target their victims

This map can only show a fraction of the important places and events that occurred during the Genocide against the Tutsi. For much more in-depth coverage please visit: https://kgm.rw/

Credit: HMDT