Indelible's blog

I don't know when i began to clearly see the evidence of another crime besides murder among the bodies in the ditches and the mass graves. I know that for a long time i sealed away from my mind all the signs of this crime, instructing myself not to recognize what was there in front of me. The crime was rape, on a scale that deeply affected me.

We saw many faces of death during the genocide, from the innocence of babies to the bewilderment of the elderly, from the defiance of fighters to the resigned stares of nuns. I saw so many faces and try now to remember each one. Early on I seemed to develop a screen between me and the sights and sounds to allow me to stay focused on the work to be done. For a long time I completely wiped the death masks of raped and sexually mutilated girls and women from my mind as if what had been done to them was the last thing that would send me over the edge.

But if you looked, you could see the evidence, even in the whitened skeletons. The legs bent apart. Abroken bottle, a rough branch, even a knife between them. Where the bodies were fresh, we saw what must have been semen pooled on and near the dear women and girls. There was always a lot of blood. Some male corpses had their genitals cut off, but many women and young girls had their breasts chopped off and their genitals crudely cut apart. They died in a position of total vulnerability, flat on their backs, with their legs bentand knees apart. It was the expressions on their dead faces that assaulted me the most, a frieze of shock, pain and humiliation. For many years after I came home, I banished the memories of those faces from my mind, but they have to come back, all too clearly.



We were in newly conquered RPF territory, which wsa deserted except for the corpses and rebel soldiers. The RPF guide who was taking us to Kagame moved along at a fair clip, seemingly oblivious to the impact on his vehicle of the cratered and scarred dirt trail. The RPF had mechanics and spare parts, but I had neither. My four-by-four had to see me through the war and I deliberately slowed the pace.

When we reached the river, across which Kagame had made yet another temporary headquarters in his advance, the opaque earth-coloured water was high and fast. The RPF engineers had constructed a pontoon-type bridge that light pickup trucks could cross gingerly. Getting out of my vehicle, I noticed a number of soldiers with long poles upstream, pulling bloated bodies up on the bank. To me this was now such a commonplace sight it did not penetrate my protective screen.

I did not want to risk our vehicles on the bridge. As we made our way across on foot, I noticed that clothes were cought between the struts of the floating base and I stopped to look over the side. Staring up at me were the faces of half-nude corpses , stuck under the bridge. There were a lot of them. In some places, they had accumulated to the point that we were actually walking on a bridge of dead bodies. On the far bank, soldiers were trying to pry them loosefor fear that their weight would pull the bridge apart. The screen shattered, my stomach heaved and I struggled for composure. I couldn't bear the movement of the bridge, up and down on the slaughtered hundreds.