My Anniversary and Murambi

When I woke up this morning there was a Happy Anniversary message from my husband, and I was thrilled to receive it.  I knew we would be having a fairly stressful day with our trip to Murambi later in the morning, and I wanted to connect with Dave before I went.  That was a nice surprise.

Murambi is a peculiar place, even among Rwandan genocide memorials.   At most memorials here, there are piles of stacked clothes (now getting ready to be cleaned, preserved and stored) and displays of thousands of skulls and other bones of victims, also getting ready to be cleaned and preserved.

Murambi is a genocide site in southern Rwanda.  At this location, as with others in this genocide, the victims all went to their local church in Murambi in search of sanctuary.  It was a large church, so people came from all around.  This time, the priest at the church would not allow large numbers of refugees to come to the church and sent them further up the hill to the newly built technical school in the neighbourhood, right at the top of a hill.  The Tutsis were gathered at the top of hill and had no food or water.  A Catholic aid worker came to find out how many people needed food, and she counted fifty thousand adults plus children.   The Hutus in the area were told to leave so that they could not pass on info to the Tutsis.  

The people at Murambi were killed in one night, and only about a dozen people survived.  Some were shot, some were hacked to death,  but when it was all over, about 52,000 people were dead.

Two things make Murambi unique: one is the shameful actions of the French Army that was in the area doing their Operation Turquoise genocide cover-up, and the other were the actions of a survivor, Emmanuel.   The French came and dug mass graves and put the dead into them to hid evidence of the genocide.  They even set up a volley ball court on top of one of the mass graves to make it look like nothing was amiss there.  

 Emmanuel, enraged by the actions of the French, and looking for his wife who had not survived the massacre, started to dig up all of the bodies.  He managed to dig up about a thousand people, and he covered them with lime powder to preserve them, and he put them in the individual classrooms at the technical school, where they remain to this day, twenty years after their murders.  The only thing that has been added to Emmanuel's work is that slatted tables have been added, and the bodies are resting on them.   The bodies have been rearranged since we were here in 2010.  There are now a rooms of men, and rooms of women, rooms of children.   The rooms stink, and badly, but I think this is the smell of the lime, not the smell of the bodies. After twenty years, there isn't much left of a body to stink.  

Our guide Martin showed us a new laboratory that has been erected at Murambi.  The ambitious plan is to X-ray the bodies to determine the exact cause of death (it's hard to tell with these twenty-year dessicated bodies, unless their head is clearly smashed in), clean them and treat them with a preservative, and put them in air-tight coffins for perpetuity.  We saw the first shipment of of these airtight coffins - they are very high-tech.

Back at our hotel, I could still smell Murambi on my skin.