A Past at Rest in Rwanda

KIGALI, Rwanda -- It happened just 14 years ago -- the slaughter of roughly a million people here in only 100 days. "More people had been killed more quickly than in any other mass killing in recorded history," writes Martin Meredith in his book "The Fate of Africa."

And yet today there are few visible traces of the genocide that began in April 1994. It's not that Rwandans have forgotten, but that they seem to have willed themselves to live in the present. That makes this place feel different from other post-conflict states I know, such as Iraq and Lebanon, where the past and present are congealed in a wound that never heals.

During a week spent traveling the country, I found that Rwandans rarely brought up the events of the past. They almost never named the ethnic groups involved in the 1994 genocide -- the Hutu perpetrators and the Tutsi victims. Expatriates would speak a kind of code, referring to "H's" and "T's."

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For Rwego, it was not a question of forgetting but of continuing: "Why had I remained alive? So that I should do something for others." He got top grades in school, earned a medical degree and now is a doctor with Rwanda's national AIDS research organization. He is a reserved, stoical man, like most Rwandans I met, but as he told this story, he brushed a tear from one eye.

If you visit the Kigali Memorial Center here, you will look into the very heart of this tragedy. The story is meticulously told: from the Belgian colonialists' decision in the 1930s to assign Hutu and Tutsi racial identities to people who had lived together for centuries; to the rise of "Hutu Power" as a racist ideology to sustain a corrupt Rwandan elite; to the planning for genocidal killings during the early 1990s, which the West knew about but did nothing to stop; to the final result, the slaughter of men, women and children, as recorded in the tableaux of the Children's Memorial:

"Francine Murengezi Ingabire. Age: 12. Favorite sport: Swimming. Favorite food: Eggs and chips. Favorite drink: Milk and Fanta Tropical. Best friend: Her elder sister Claudette. Cause of death: Hacked by machete."