Unthinkable Healing
Talk about it, you'll feel better. Don't keep the anguish of your dreadful experiences locked away inside yourself to fester and drive you to distraction. Air it, speak of it to others, ask for understanding, require people to listen, to devote their attention to your unspeakable agony. Divulging your pain will help you to live with it. The excruciating resentment will be alleviated.That's quite the recipe for revival of the human spirit. Venting the pain would give comfort to others who had themselves suffered similar humanitarian outrages. Together they could commiserate with one another, solemnize the past, and look with hope to the future. Misery does love company, and sometimes shared misery helps the dissolve the immediacy of individual pain. But what is resolved?
And how useful can it be when the victims understand the reality that the fomentors of their agony will never face justice? That they may, at any time, just happen to come across that very person who forced agonizing pain upon them, walking freely on the street? That their need for justice will never be met? Truth and reconciliation commissions sound like some otherworldly device to reconcile people to lay the past to rest.
And that's just what they are; idealistically unrealistic at best, cruel at their very worst. For nowhere does it approach anyone's ideal of justice to see that those who committed horrendous acts of violence against others can simply resume their lives as though nothing untoward occurred, while their victims live out their anguished lives without the closure of justice seen to be done.
Canada has taken the highly unusual step - needfully so, as a country which brought forward an initiative in the United Nations of the need to intercede, to protect the vulnerable population of a country that preyed on their own - of trying in a Canadian court under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, a failed refugee claimant from Rwanda, for his alleged role in the Rwandan genocide.
Rwanda is currently undergoing a series of annual genocide mourning remembrances, where those who suffered dreadful atrocities throughout the Rwandan genocide can recount their stories to those who will mourn with them. The country's judicial system officiated throughout countless trials, where victims were encouraged to step boldly forward and recount the deathly misery that was inflicted on them and theirs.
Trouble was, how bold could those assertions of truth be, with the knowledge lurking in the heads of victims that they could be victimized all over again. For the country, although expending vast amounts of money, time, legal and social expertise and patience in the exercise of judgement, took no steps to protect those who had the courage to step forward and testify. They would testify, and then they were on their own self-reliance.
One United Nations report gave an estimate of the extent of the rape of Rwandan women as being between a quarter- and a half-million women and girls, between April and July of 1994. Militias kidnapped women as forced wives, repeatedly raping them. Other women and girls were attacked at random as Hutu militias roamed about in their hunt for Tutsis.
"There are people who raped us, people who aligned whole families to slaughter them" said Rose Burlzihiza, president of ABASA, an organization of Rwandan female genocide widows and rape victims. "We have experienced hell. My message to the world is that our killers have fled the country to other countries all over the world. We need other countries to arrest them and judge them, as Canada is doing, because they are criminals", according to one victim.
Desire Munyaneza, on trial in Canada, stands accused of committing rape and murder, alongside additional charges. But in Rwanda victims of genocide aren't too certain they will continue to give testimony. They believe, on the record, that their attackers will be released from prison, all too soon.
There are tens of thousands of Hutus imprisoned, accused of genocidal crimes, who have been released simply because of prison overcrowding. Thousands of genocide cases are yet to be heard. And the community of Tutsis live with their experience where militiamen hunted them with machetes, hacking an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus to death. And despite that many who took part in killings and rapes are still at large, Rwanda last year abolished the death penalty.
Considering the horrendous savagery that took place in Rwanda, where its society turned itself inside out to prey on one half of its population considered to be inferior to the other who felt no human compunction, no compassion, and lent themselves to turning their country into a killing field, women bereft of their families, themselves victims of countless rapes, will accept no justice other than the punishment of death.
For many of these women and girls who were forced to witness the unmerciful killing of their families, and then to undergo mass rape, their lives have been bereft of meaning. Many of the women were left with another legacy; HIV-positive, they are now slowly experiencing another agony; their impending deaths. Many of them have children born of their rape experience, and their children will be left orphans, without their care.
One such woman, brooding on the thought of additional suffering through that slow death said: "Sometimes I wish I was killed. I think that I would feel better if they had killed me, not left me suffering for a long time." This woman sees groups of prisoners from a jail nearby where she lives working in fields under guard, and she recognizes among them some of her attackers. "I think there is no one I can forgive. No piece of forgiveness is left in me."
There are others who tried to find shelter where they would not be found by marauding militia, but their hiding places were found time and again. One woman explained: "Each time they found me hiding, they used to lay me down hastily, extend my arms and legs, climb over me and rape me as brutally as they could." When the national calamity had concluded and she made her way out of the bush, she crawled out, no longer able to walk.
One woman talked of how she coped, praying to God: "I changed my prayer to 'God give me the courage to speak out about what I have seen, and tell the whole world of the badness of my experience." She was raped in front of her husband before her rapist murdered him. The rapist then tossed her two infant sons to dogs, to be eaten. She was held captive as a sex slave, forced to witness other friends and family members murdered.
The danger these women face, fourteen long years after the Rwandan genocide, has not entirely passed. They fully understand their vulnerability as many Hutu, having served out their sentences, return to society. They know they cannot be protected, after testifying. There are some who say they will be killed for speaking of their experiences, but that it would represent a better death than dying during the genocide.
"My sons and my friends will bury my body, instead of throwing it to dogs as my rapist and his team of killers would have dome some 14 years ago."
Labels: Realities, Societal Failures, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, April 29, 2008
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