Remember the Blood Frenzy of Rwanda
BOSTON — When Hutu began murdering Tutsi in Rwanda 10 years ago this week, many Rwandans had to decide whether to desert their loved ones. At a church in the town of Kibuye, two Hutu sisters, each married to a Tutsi man, faced such a choice. One of the women decided to die with her husband. The other, hoping to save her 11 children, chose to leave. Because her husband was Tutsi, her children had been categorized as Tutsi and thus were technically forbidden to live. But the machete-wielding Hutu attackers had assured the woman that the children would be permitted to depart safely if she joined them.
When the woman stepped outside the church, however, the assailants butchered eight of her 11 children as she watched in horror. The youngest, a 3-year-old boy who saw his brothers and sisters slain, pleaded for his life. "Please don't kill me," he said. "I'll never be Tutsi again." The killers, unmoved, struck him down.
In three short, cruel months, between April and July 1994, Rwanda experienced a genocide more efficient than that carried out by the Nazis in World War II. The killers were a varied bunch: drunk extremists chanting "Hutu power, Hutu power"; uniformed soldiers and militia men intent on wiping out the Tutsi inyenzi, or "cockroaches"; ordinary villagers who had never themselves contemplated killing before but who decided to join the frenzy.
The murderers, and their ebullient abettors, were turned into ghastly marionettes, consumed by a manic wrath. Men and women, young and old, religious and agnostic, became killers. They killed with machetes in one hand and radios broadcasting instructions in the other. They killed in churches, at traffic lights, in supermarkets and in homes. They killed after taunting, after savagely beating and, often, after raping.
The Clinton administration's response was best captured by a State Department press conference two days into the slaughter. Prudence Bushnell, the midlevel official who had been put in charge of managing the evacuation of Americans -- and only Americans -- from Rwanda, spoke with journalists about the Rwandan horrors. After she left the podium, State Department spokesman Michael McCurry took her place and seamlessly turned to the next item on the day's agenda: U.S. criticism of foreign governments that were preventing the screening of the Steven Spielberg film "Schindler's List."
