Genocide

I'll just skip all order now and write this piece straight from the heart. Today in Kigali we visited the Rwanda Genocide Memorial. I write  this now while the feeling of utter horror and disgust is still present and I'm still swallowing the un-cried tears. Oh and not all of them were un-cried. But now is the right time to publish this, before memory smoothes a few corners and edges and thus minces my words. [edit: unfortunately I didn't manage to finish it in one go, but left earlier parts as they were written.]

We all learned about genocides in school. As a European the most prominent role is of course held by the holocaust by the Nazis. We learned about the statistics, the terrible injustice of persecuting a group of society, the cruel methods as well as some prominent singular fates, for example the one of Anne Frank.

We read books, watched documentaries and movies like Schindler's List about it. But none of these activities can replicate that haunting feeling when you enter an actual site of genocide.

[WARNING: This post contains elements of graphic violence.]

Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge

My first real visit to a site of genocide was at the Killing Fields near Phnom Penh, Cambodia in July 2009.

Background info:

In the years from 1975 to 1979 the Khmer Rouge lead by brother number 1 Pol Pot established an ultra-Maoist agrarian socialist regime. They emptied all cities, drove the whole population to the country-side where they were forced to labor on the fields. Education and intellect was against the regime's stone age communist policies, so everybody who was suspected to be educated, e.g. by wearing glasses, was brought to death camps, tortured and killed. I am still baffled by the utter stupidity and pointlessness of this policy! Killing everybody who actually knew how to do shit – doctors, engineers and all!

Of course the regime also persecuted everybody they suspected of being political opponents which could really be anybody. Oh and they killed ethnic Vietnamese who lived in Cambodia, because why not, since they are foreigners they surely could be traitors!

During their almost four years in power the Khmer Rouge are estimated to have killed 1,5 to 2 million people, about 25% of Cambodia's population back then. Mostly by hacking their heads off with machetes (gotta save the bullets since nobody is around anymore who knew how to produce them), many by starvation and some tortured and hanged in prisons.

The regime ended in 1979 with the same show of madness as it began: Cambodia's ill-equipped military invaded a region of neighboring Vietnam because of some border issues. Vietnam's military was armed to their teeth and highly capable at the time, having just defeated colonial France and the US Army in 28 years of war. Following this provocation, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ended the rule of the Khmer Rouge regime within two weeks.

But back to the visit of the Killing Fields. There were two key moments that drove my breath away: small children were separated from their parents and held in a kind of henhouse after arrival. Adults were imprisoned in more solid shacks and prepared for their execution by machete or other farming tools. Children had a different fate. In the center of the camp there is a large tree with a prominent root that surfaces. The children were brought in groups in front of that tree and then, one by one, their heads were smashed in on that root. Now imagine the feeling of standing in front of that tree, seeing the root which in some areas lost all bark, because tens of thousands of children's heads were smashed in on it over the years.

Looks pretty harmless, doesn't it?

Still today, every time I see a tree with an exposed root, this moment briefly crosses my mind.

Now to the second moment that disgusted me: at the end of the visit of the Killing Fields the local guides offered us the opportunity to try out machetes, fire Kalashnikovs and throw hand grenades for a few bucks. And even worse: some tourists of our group agreed to do that.

Is there any hope for humanity?

Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp of the Nazis in Poland

My second experience was at Auschwitz Birkenau in September 2018.

Background info:

I guess the history of the holocaust is well-known and it would anyways be impossible to cover that topic in any detail, so I will stick to a few broad remarks. Immediately with the Nazi's rise to power in 1933, Jews and other "undesired" people (Roma, Sinti, LGBTQ, people with mental disabilities, political opponents and later "Slavs" – sorry if I left any group out) were immediately severely disadvantaged and subject to abuse by public authorities. Over the years the oppressions became ever more severe, leading from prohibition to work over destruction of property to forced resettlement to Ghettos and Concentration Camps with forced labor and subjection to torture.

The final decision to exterminate the victims at an industrial scale was taken at the Wannsee-conference in January 1942.

Soon afterwards, construction of the death camp of Treblinka outside Warsaw began on April 10 and the first victims destined to extermination arrived by June the same year. In the meantime all camp barracks had to be set up, the gas chambers were constructed, engines were delivered and installed (they just burned diesel fuel to create CO gas) and the crematoria were built. Now that's the proverbial German efficiency that everybody admires! Nowadays, if you listen to chancellor Scholz, German industry goes into crisis mode when they have to build and deliver a handfull of self-propelled guns that replace the ones sent to Ukraine within a year. Maybe preventing a genocide is not as motivating as causing one. (Sorry German friends.)

All in all, the Nazis murdered an estimated 6 million Jews and in the widest sense there are another 11 million victims of the holocaust when counting systematic killings of Polish and Soviet citizens. But definitions and these numbers are tricky, therefore take it with a grain of salt.

Now back to Auschwitz. Again I won't describe the processes of the death camp but concentrate on some details that moved me. The very well-made exhibition contains room-fulls of clothes, shoes and hair of the victims that were found when the camp war liberated. Seeing these gives a feeling of the scale of the mass-murder. These pics we probably all saw in history class, but it's still different when you are standing in the room next to heaps of the stuff. But the worst for me was the following, because I haven't known that before: among the many documents meticulously describing processes and logistical movements there were train tickets on display that the Jewish victims had to buy (!) for their "relocation to a new designated area". 

...

Super Capslock: THEY MADE THEM PAY FOR THE TRAIN TO THE DEATH CAMP!!

...

Additionally to that, they got a printed instruction for how all items and valuables in their baggage had to be grouped and accounted for in order to make "customs processes" more efficient. Later on, while these victims were already marching to the gas chambers, this pre-sorting saved a lot of time for the "Working Jews" who had to sort the loot taken from their fellow-victims which was then sent back to the "SS Business Division" in Germany for monetisation. I knew beforehand that they were looting the stuff, but that they even thought of making the victims sort it themselves. This evil perfidy to the last detail is just mind-boggling.

Lastly a poster caught my eye. It was made after they captured two inmates of the camp that managed to flee and put up around the camp before their torturous public execution:

It says "HURRA, wir sind wieder da!" -> "HURRAY, we're back again!"

I've nothing to add to this one.

Rwanda Genocide Memorial in Kigali

I visited the Genocide Memorial on August 12th 2022.

For this one I go into more detail, since it's the reason for the post and the details are probably less well-known. The whole thing is also not really understandable without the historical background:

Before colonial times, the area of today's Rwanda was inhabited by Hutu (84%), Tutsi (15%) and Twa (1%) – these percentages were estimated by the Belgian colonisers. Today it is established, that the terms Hutu and Tutsi were most likely just different societal classes, the Tutsi being the rich leadership which over centuries due to better nutrition became on average taller than the Hutu. However a Hutu acquiring enough wealth could become a Tutsi.

Rwanda was assigned to the German Empire as a colony in the year 1884 and only ten years later, in 1894 the first German explorer entered the area. Gotta love colonialism: the Europeans decided among themselves who would own the area, neither having been there and nor knowing what was actually going on. And it took them 10 years until they bothered to actually go find out. This fact alone should serve as an explanation why things are today as they are.

During WWI in 1916 Belgium took control of Rwanda. Both the Germans and the Belgians promoted Tutsi supremacy, the Belgians cemented this further by introducing ID cards displaying the "race" in 1935. This made earlier class mobility impossible and further pitted the two population groups against each other. Another example that in those years the Germans weren't the only ones with "great" ideas.

After independence in 1962 the pro Hutu majority took over the government and it came to frequent clashes between the government's armed forces and Tutsis that formed rebel armies abroad resulting in a cycle of violence. In 1990 the Rwandan Civil War erupted between the armies of the Rwandan (Hutu) government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF – Tutsi) which were based in neighboring Uganda. Here it is important to state that the Tutsi that still lived in Rwanda at the time did not fight in these wars but were nevertheless object of repressions growing anti-Tutsi propaganda. Since the war lead to no results, peace negotiations between the parties started in 1993.

On the 6th of April 1994 the airplane of the Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana containing foreign dignitaries was shot down with two surface to air missiles when approaching Kigali airport. This was the Franz-Ferdinand-Sarajevo equivalent of this conflict – just that everything happened so much faster than in 1914. Today it is still not proven who actually shot down the plane. The peace negotiations were very unpopular with the extreme-right Hutu Power movement as well as with some factions within the RPF.

Fact is, that in the ensuing chaos after the downing of the plane the extreme right took over the government and leadership of the security forces in Rwanda. The far-right radio station "Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines" which was widely listened to mainly by young Hutus called them to assemble and form battle groups armed with machetes and other farming tools in order to kill the resident "cockroaches" and moderate Hutus that weren't politically reliable and participating in the genocide. So any Hutus not taking part in the genocide could become victims themselves (as it often happened). Oh and the few resident UN troops that were supposed to monitor the peace process were also on the killing list.

The genocide ended in July 1994 when the RPF conquered Rwanda and installed a new government. The same party still rules Rwanda today as an authoritarian regime with Paul Kagame who then was the RPF army commander as president.

It is estimated that in those three months about 800.000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed.

The international community was absent or not at all helpful during the genocide. The UN Commander on the ground pleaded desperately for 5.000 troops right in the beginning of it and still claims today that with that amount they would have been able to stop the atrocities. Major powers in the UN Security Council refused to act. A dark day for the UN, indeed.

Now back to my visit. The memorial in Kigali is a museum that consists of five major parts:

1. In the beginning they show a short movie where survivors of the genocide tell their personal experience. How it all happened when they lost their loved ones. How they are coping with it today. Most of the interviewed people were children back then and are in their thirties today. One elderly woman told how they had tea with their (Hutu) neighbors a day before the genocide started since their families were long-time friends. A few days after it started the same neighbors stormed their house and hacked everybody of her family to death, she alone managed to flee. There were many similar stories in that movie. I still don't understand how this can happen? One day you are friendly, literally the next day you slaughter those friends? Ok maybe a mob arrives at your house and puts you to the choice – either participating or dying yourself? And after the first killing you are an accomplice and there is nothing else left besides continuing? Anyways these stories and they way they were told was really heart-breaking. I cannot put that properly into words.
2. The next part was the exhibition were they presented the historical background, the propaganda (Tutsi = cockroaches with depictions that were curiously similar to the one's of the Jews in Nazi propaganda), how the genocide started and ended. This was mainly facts, quite a few pictures of mutilated bodies, decapitated children – nothing for the most sensitive, but for me these things was easier to stomach then the emotional craziness told by survivors.
3. The children room. Well that one was truly horrible. They picked 10-12-15 (I've no idea how many) kids and made profiles containing a picture, a short description about them like in a yearbook. The descriptions contained the birthday, age, hobbies, favorite food and then the date and method of their execution. At the end there were then walls with pics of thousands of them. After the first five I had to leave – after the whole experience this was just too much!
4. Then there was an exhibition about facts of other genocides: the Nazis, Cambodia and Bosnia during the Yugoslavia wars. Very informative, but again, not the same as being on the ground there.
5. The end was a walk in the park (literally, not all figuratively) – at the memorial site 250.000 victims are buried in mass-graves.

Lessons to be learned

Extremist ideologies like fascism made these genocides possible – worst among all evils they caused. The only way to prevent repeating these things, means stepping up to protect our democracies at all costs! For too long we took our rights and way of living for granted. Then the hassle of daily working live drains the necessary energy for everybody to care about these societal issues of existential importance. It's a slippery slope – first impossibly offensive things are repeated on live TV by populist politicians (e.g. comparing migrants to cockroaches like we heard from many far-right movements in Europe), then these things shape the public discourse and years later leadership changes and you find yourself under a government that wants "to once and for all take care of that 'cockroach' problem". So, sorry to say we're already half-way in the shits. And we cannot say we haven't seen before what the next steps are gonna look like.

Right now we live in dangerous times – a new world order is being defined. Under the West's democratic leadership most of the world was exploited and became a pawn in the Cold War earlier. But things won't turn much shinier for everybody if fascist states like China (I know China is run by the CCP but their methods are decidedly out the fascist playbook) or Russia dictate the new order. The Russian and Chinese governments actively support anti-democratic and fascist forces in Europe since many years. If we want to maintain the freedom we have and make the world a fairer place for everybody, it's our job to care and make our governments fight for it (not literally, as in starting a war). It won't be easy and it will cost us dearly. But it's the only way forward.

PS: Just to make one thing unequivocally clear: I don't mean any harm to the Russian or Chinese people, many of whom I've the privilege to call friends. I think that their fascist government ideology is a grave danger to world peace and human development.

[Disclaimer: I am neither a historian, nor a political scientist. Just comment if I got some facts wrongly.]