Monsters Unlocked

Healed machete marks are like thick, curved ropes, almost not skin, as if some light-colored rope has been laid on top of what is darker brown beneath. But it is skin, traumatized, brutalized skin and tissue and the most visible yet the least devastating remnant of horror. It is also a sign of the lucky ones. A healed scar means someone survived though they did not escape torture.

What really torments survivors of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 are the dead who live within them, those who failed to live, whose machete scars did not heal but turned them into dust. The survivors must also live with the sense of betrayal from friends and trusted ones, from the world community. They are held hostage to the memories that never depart. Some, survivors of the rape camps, face the ongoing legacy of death by AIDS while they mother children whose fathers are unknown.

As I watched, the movie, Hotel Rwanda I was not sure if the acting itself was any good. Or was it that the subject matter was so compelling, so horrific that even mediocre actors could convey the terror, the bewilderment, the loss felt by the real people who had lived the story.

In 1994, after ethnic tensions were stoked to a boiling point by hate radio and national rhetoric, Rwandans wreaked on other Rwandans an unimaginable massacre while the rest of the world stood by and covered its eyes or simply looked away.

Rwanda had been a Belgian colony as Rwanda-Urundi in 1923 not even forty years after The Berlin Conference met to divide Africa between the European nations. As part of the colonist agenda of divide and rule, Belgium created artificial divisions where none existed.

Rwandans who were taller, with slimmer builds and noses were arbitrarily picked to be Tutsis, judged to be more elegant and, therefore, more European. They were favored over the majority who were called Hutus. To make the division complete and lasting and making the country easier to administer they were issued identity cards with either Hutu or Tutsi stamped on them. This classification appeared on virtually all documents. In 1962 when Belgium left Rwanda power was given to the minority, the Tutsis.

Hatred and resentment that had simmered for decades boiled over periodically. In fact, their colonial masters had already set the stage for the 1994 massacres from which they averted their eyes. In 1959 Belgian Colonel Logiest with Belgian commandos organized Hutus to massacre thousands of Tutsis and send others into exile. This was after the formation of an anti-Tutsi Hutu party under the guidance of the Catholic Church. This was followed by the 1963 killings of Tutsis who were already being called ‘cockroaches.’

This pejorative term for Tutsis would be used in the exhortations to cleanse Rwanda of them in the 24-hour hate radio that fed the Hutu hatred in the 1994. As 800,000 Tutsis were killed in a few weeks, one of the only safe havens in the country was the swanky Hotel Mille Coline where Paul Rusesabagina (played by the phenomenal Don Cheadle) the Hutu manager with a Tutsi wife, saved over 1200 Tutsis and moderate Hutus from the killers. He did this using his wits, using bribery, flattering, deal making and intelligence to keep those in his charge alive.

In the movie this oasis of humanity was the emotional core. Outside the walls of the hotel, however, the killing continued unabated. Hutu husbands abandoned their Tutsi ‘cockroach’ wives and half-breed children. Neighbors killed neighbors, mothers with babies on their backs killed mothers with babies on their backs, priests helped to massacre their flocks and teachers murdered their students. Victims were easily identified by their official papers and identity cards.

What makes people kill? Not impersonally, firing a pistol from a few feet away, but up close and personal. What makes one person get close enough to feel the breath or another, to smell their fear, to know their face and slash at them with a machete? To feel the warm splash of their blood and watch their lives drain away? What makes another person cut a child’s limbs off one by one before killing the parents? What makes someone, whose arm is tired of killing, cut the Achilles tendon of an intended victim, immobilizing him, so that he could come back later and finish the job? What makes a mob kill all the members of a woman’s family before capturing her alive to be raped and abused repeatedly, ‘killing her with sadness’?

The countryside was littered with the dead, rivers choked, roads carpeted with bodies making driving difficult. Women’s bodies were found, legs broken apart, with foreign objects, like tree branches, bottles and knives inserted into them. Blood spatters marked the insides of churches and mass graves mingled the remains of those who had died in terror and agony.

They were not monsters these people. They were ordinary, god-fearing, nationalistic people for whom killing became a patriotic duty. They were ridding their country of vermin. They were building their nation. They were self-righteous, unrepentant and filled with the glow that comes from a job well done. What made them do it?

Monster is the word human beings use to absolve themselves of culpability. If monsters are doing the killing, humans can pretend they are somehow superior. Rwanda was not isolated. This deep hatred, this burning anger is being seen in Darfur in front a blind world. It was seen in Nazi Germany and more recently in Bosnia. It exists in every place where dividing walls are too high to be scaled. It is seen in every riot in the subcontinent and was certainly seen during the partition.

In the case of India and other countries the enmity spanned centuries. Rwanda showed us that it just takes a few decades, some flawed policies and lot of simmering resentment stoked by hate speech to create genocidal rage.
Only human beings can kill like this: the ultimate predator, cunning, hunting in groups, with weapons and without remorse. And we all have this machete killer lurking within us. It only awaits some fuel to burst forth and destroy others and us along with it.

If we say only monsters can kill like this we do something else. We close the way for rapprochement which is harder in some ways than feeding the fire and unleashing the hatred. For, in most cases, both victims and transgressors need to examine the roots of their hatred, the sources of their resentments and openly come to solutions. They need to own the issue, shoulder their own responsibility, revisit the past before they can move forward.

As I write this I know this is never going to happen. Colonists will never fully take their share of the blame even as neo-colonialism grips the world. Those on either side of the divide, killer and victim, are too blinded by hate and fear to reach out and meet in a neutral middle.

If human beings can do monstrous deeds, however, they can also do heroic ones. Paul Rusesabagina showed that in his own way. As do other people when madness grips the world. These are oases of peace and the world continues on because they act when others don’t, they set hate aside and they refuse to unlock the door for the killer that lives within us all.