Rwanda's genocide still has power to haunt lives
Posted on Tue, Sep. 19, 2006
By Laurie Goering
Chicago Tribune
(MCT)
KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to save her six children, she fled to a hill above her home in Butare. The killers found her anyway.
First, they put a bullet in the head of her 15-year-old daughter, ending a dispute among the armed men over who should rape her first. Then they slaughtered the girl's terrified young brothers with clubs and machetes as their mother struggled to respond to their screams.
Finally, they gathered Uwimana and a few other women and girls who had taken refuge on the hill and took them to a nearby militia roadblock. There, for two weeks, the pretty 32-year-old was raped on the roadside by nearly every militiaman who passed. When her back broke, she was thrown in the bushes and left for dead.
"I became lifeless and they threw me aside," she remembers quietly. When soldiers from an invading Tutsi liberation army found her three days later, "I was practically dead," she said.
Flown to South Africa for emergency surgery, Uwimana and her baby survived. But the genocide, which left 800,000 dead more than a decade ago, has never eased its grip on her life, or the lives of hundreds of thousands of widows, rape victims and bereaved mothers who, like Uwimana, struggle to carry on their lives in Rwanda.
"Every day I experience a consequence of the genocide," she said, perched on a faded chair in her small concrete home on the fringes of Kigali, in a settlement built for genocide widows. The armed men "stole my life," she said. "I'm living half a life now."
With its genocide now a dozen years in the past, Rwanda is struggling to move on. Its government urges reconciliation among victims and perpetrators. International trials for the architects of the genocide are nearing an end in neighboring Tanzania, and hundreds of thousands of other genocide perpetrators have been released from Rwanda's prisons to face community judgment at home.
But for many - particularly rape victims, orphans and mothers raising children of rape - the genocide remains a daily part of life, impossible to escape.
"In my heart I will never forget or forgive," said Uwimana, now 44, who lost her husband to the killings as well. "I can try because it's government policy to forgive. But in my heart I cannot manage it."
Like an estimated 300,000 other genocide rape victims, Uwimana, a slight, elegant woman, is HIV positive. When she found out, she had a mental breakdown.
"I knew only prostitutes got that. It broke my heart," she said. "I saw myself as a prostitute. I was trying to heal, and when they gave me that news, I collapsed."
Now taking last-line anti-retroviral drugs - she proved allergic to the first three varieties - she has stalled the advance of AIDS and managed to keep weight on her slight frame. But a deep, nagging cough betrays ongoing health problems, and lingering injuries keep her mainly bedridden.
Mentally and physically incapacitated in the months after the attacks, Uwimana at first rejected her new infant daughter as a product of the brutal rapes.
"After all that, I was thinking the girl might have been theirs," she acknowledged. But as she regained strength and sanity, she eventually reclaimed her daughter, who she has since raised. Jeane, now in 5th grade, is her joy - and also her great worry. Though she has never had her tested, Uwimana fears her daughter may also have contracted HIV as a consequence of the rapes.
"I haven't been able to take her for testing. I can't bear that she might be affected. It would be my death," she said. So far, Uwimana says, she has not told her daughter about her illness, though her medication bottles sit by the sagging bed the pair share each night.
To her surprise and delight, Jeane is not her only surviving child. Four years after the killings, Uwimana began hearing rumors that her 9-year-old son had survived the slaughter on the hill that day by throwing himself into the pile of bodies and hiding there silently. Rushing back to Butare, she spotted Manuel's protruding ears - a family trait - and persuaded the army family that had adopted him to return him to her.
"I was more than overjoyed," she said. But the deep trauma the boy experienced has left him with lingering psychological problems. Unable to concentrate at school, he kept rushing home to make sure his mother was safe. Eventually he dropped out altogether. Now 21, he is unable to hold a job and wanders, his face vacant, through his mother's tiny living room.
When she's well enough to sit up, Uwimana spends her days stringing cheap plastic beads onto thread to make necklaces and bracelets to sell to passersby. Neighbors and community workers help out when they can with food and medicine.
She knows her time is limited. It's her children she worries about.
"My main concern now is to find some way to sustain my children, to leave them in a situation where they can help themselves," she said. "I don't wish to stay long in this world. I've had enough of it."
San Luis Obispo Tribune, CA - 22 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
International News Service, Australia - 20 hours agoKIGALI, Rwanda _ Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to save her six children ...
Kentucky.com, KY - 21 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
Duluth News Tribune, MN - 21 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
Macon Telegraph, GA - 21 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
Kansas.com, KS - 21 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
Centre Daily Times, PA - 21 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
The State, SC - 21 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
Kansas City Star, MO - 21 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
Contra Costa Times, CA - 21 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
Charlotte Observer, NC - 21 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
Bradenton Herald, United States - 21 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, GA - 21 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
Myrtle Beach Sun News, SC - 22 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
Monterey County Herald, CA - 21 hours agoBy Laurie Goering. KIGALI, Rwanda - Jeanette Uwimana was eight months pregnant when Rwanda's genocide began in 1994. Desperate to ...
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